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.

Instant Thunder AiW

 I missed the last game of this, but Simon put on another scenario, this time featuring an encounter in 1970 between the Israeli Airforce and 'Syrian' aka, Russian pilots, in the Middle East. Instant Thunder is a fairly abstract air combat game, with the key mechanism being the relative positions of the aircraft, and jockeying for those positions. It reminded of the initiative based combat sequence in Nicks WW2 air combat game..

Russell and I took the forces of progressive socialism, while Tim and John took the reactionary capitalist lackeys. We had eight MiG 21s each armed with cannon and a pair each of heat seeking and radar homing missiles. The enemy had four Mirage III and two Phantoms, also with a mix missiles and guns. Our MiGs were faster than the Mirages but the Phantoms were much better at climbing and far more sturdy. The enemy missiles were also apparently much better than ours, and their radar as well... 

The planes are positioned on this abstract grid on each combat round. King of Hearts is the 'top' and Ace of Spades the 'bottom'. Planes manouvre from the bottom to the top, but fight from the top to the bottom, so the idea if disadvantaged is to manouvre to a position of advantage, while if starting with an advantage, to keep it!

This scenario represents a historical ambush where the IDF sent out some Mirages as bait and hoped to trap and shoot down a number of MiGs. So our guys trundle along in a tight formation of two flights of four in the middle, while the IDF has their Mirages up top and the mighty Phantoms waiting to leap up from below (there is a radar lock advantage firing from below).

Positioning is relative, so when manouvering you can try and move 'along' the rows, or hit the afterburner and jump (or dive) a whole level, or both, depending how good your planes and pilots are. The initial IDF surprise attack failed to score any hits, and suddenly the sky was full of planes scattered across it. For cannon engagements it is good to be on an enemies tail, while missiles have a minimum engagement range. The clouds and sun provide various defensive benefits.

To keep track of who had moved and who had fired, Pete manipulated the counters vertically and horizontally (the whole thing was run on Powerpoint over Zoom).

One of my MiGs (Red 3 I think) got a lock on the Phantom to the right with a heat seeker. The Phantom failed to evade, and suffered devastating damage. The first successful missile attack of the game (the others all had various hilarious failures, failure to lock, failure to hit and even a dud which failed on launch).

The kills were racking up now (the plane counters in the top right). At this point iirc it is two MiGs down to one Mirage and one Phantom. We've got a lot more MiGs though.

Things progressed in much the same vein (I won't bore you with loads more screenshots). We found fairly quickly that the MiGs best bet was to outmanouvre the enemy and get stuck in with their cannon as our missiles were so unreliable. The heat seekers were OK as they were modified by speed and manouverability, and we had an edge over the Mirages, so the remaining MiGs went around trying to pick off the Mirages.

Over the next few rounds (the game limit is eight) we lost a couple more MiGs but also shot down two more Mirages, so the IDF were only left with two planes and decided to call it a day.

That was a very interesting game and I'd certainly like to try it again. Despite the very abstract game board, it did actually feel like you were trying to out manouvre the enemy and the designer had done his best to capture the differences between aircraft and weaponry. There were perhaps a few to many numbers for me, but that is the nature of modern air warfare, and compared to SPIs 'Air War' it was a breeze.