Bruce Quarries AiW rules at COW 2023

I have all the various ‘Tank Battles in Miniature’ books, and one of the more intriguing ones has always been the Arab-Israeli Wars one, which is notable for a distinct lack of any rules in it at all, although my own 6mm IDF units are all painted according to Quarrie, with sand yellow Centurians and sand grey everything else. ‘Based on the information available’.

Russell has painstakingly gone through the book and made a brave attempt to construct a playable set of rules out of the ideas presented therein. What it ends up as is two sides of A4 with various charts and numbers, and an awful lot of percentages.

 

A general view of the battlefield from the Israeli side.

For the game we had two small forces, the IDF with four M48s, two M51 Shermans and a couple of infantry sections in M3 halftracks with some randomly arriving Mysteres for air support. The Syrians had a platoon each of 3xT62, 3xT34/85 and 3xPanzer IVs (!) as well as a BRDM recce section and a JS-III.

The Israeli forces. I'm commanding those two M48s in the middle, although hilariously one of them broke down on the first turn. 

Russell explains his approach to producing an actual set of rules from the vague suggestions contained in the book. 

Both sides clashed and it became apparent very quickly that the game was extremely lethal. The Israeli gunnery was better, but what was critical was firing first, as tanks had a high rate of fire, and the chance of hitting increased dramatically with each extra shot. As we’d cleverly moved our guys into range first, we took disproportionate losses, compounded by the issue that the smaller enemy tanks were harder to see than our larger western vehicles.

We find out the hard way that even ancient T34s are very, very dangerous.

When we did eventually spot something though, it blew up very satisfactorily, and then it became apparent that the Syrian morale was awful, and half the enemy just ran away. At least we ended up something like honours even, but should have just sat on the baseline and shot the baddies as they rolled into range (as Matt suggested).

That was actually really interesting as the rules reflected some of the concerns of the time, the lower Russian vehicles were harder to spot, but any hits at all were invariably lethal, with fairly minimal saving rolls even for heavy armour. High rates of fire made combat very dangerous indeed, but the air rules were bizarrely confusing (why do bombs hit on 4-7 on a D10?). One real oddity was having to roll for breakdowns every single time a vehicle moved, at very low odds (5%), which was all a bit Squad Leader, although both sides suffered a number of breakdowns in the game which did add some flavour.


You could pick all sorts of holes in the rules from a more modern perspective, but hats off to Russell for producing an entertaining game, and it was a good trip back to the 1970s.