AK-47 Test Drive

Before jumping headlong into the AK-47 Republic game, I put together a basic ‘test drive kit’ using plain cardboard marked up with markers.  A few big irregular chunks for terrain, and me and my son were off to the races.

Now that's budget terrain.

The main event featured a People’s Religious Movement (PRM) defending their town from the Superpower backed client state.   During the political phase, the PRM wound up with a fast moving militia unit and an extra technical.  The Client State wound up with an extra tank.

The forces in play.

Here we see one PRF militia unit in the town in the upper left, and one covering the woods and farmhouse in the lower right.  Three technicals patrol the shore of Lake Cheapo, and two truck mounted AA guns are parked on the hill in the upper right.  The client state really wanted that big town bad.

The calm before the storming.

The fight centered on a bloody battle for the town.  The Client State militia wrested it from the PRM, but found themselves assaulted by truck mounted reinforcements.  The dead of both sides piled deep along the town’s boundary.  

Cardboard Stalingrad.

Reinforcements arrived on the same turn for both sides.  The client state bum rushed the third objective - a radio tower.  On the opposite side of the table, the PRM used regular foot troops mounted in pickup trucks to strike back at the town center.  The technicals hid behind the second hill, waiting for the final turn.  At the last moment, the rolled well and made a rush for the objective hill.  The tanks took a couple of pot shots, but couldn't knock them both out.  Daylight ran out with all three objectives very much in dispute.

That chopper didn't do well against the technicals.

After tallying up the victory points, the world’s press declares a victory for the PRM and sells a lot of papers.

Lessons learned:

• Technicals really are useful.  Fast, effective, and only a little fragile, they handled really well.
• We’re going to need a lot of casualty markers.  There must be a better way, though.  We were only using cardboard, and the city fight we would up with casualty markers piled three deep.  Not sure how that will work with actual miniatures.
• Tanks are really hard to knock out.  We didn’t field any RPGs, and it hurt the PRM.  The AA guns barely scratched the tanks, too.  The only thing that saved the foot based army was the fact that the tanks couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with the rest of their army, and they got bogged down holding a hillside objective marker.  If they’d had free rein, they could have done a lot more damage.