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Monday, January 9, 2012

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.



3 comments:

  1. Seems to me that what a game like this really lives or dies on is clean mount/dismount rules - e.g. for grabbing onto the side of the truck as it goes by, to get round to the flank of the other guys. Looks distinctly interesting...

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  2. OK, my curiousity is piqued: where can I get a copy of those rules?

    Also? Carboard minis is awesome, especially for playtesting. I now regret throwing out several boxes recently. Time to keep an eye out for more cardboard so I can do some playtesting of my own.

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  3. The mount/dismount rules are easy. Your mount/dismount range is 3". In addition to the mount/dismount either the foot troops can move or the vehicle can move, but not both. So you can race to an objective and get out, or you can saddle up and bug out. What's really nice is that on the next turn you can abandon your now empty carrier. That way it doesn't affect the command-control aspects of the unit. (Which is important when only foot can enter heavy terrain areas like forrests.)

    These rules aren't easy to get ahold of. I scored a used set locally. You can order the new updated rules from Peter Pig in the UK: http://www.peterpig.co.uk/rules.htm

    Peter Pig also sells army packs in 15mm specifically for the cold war era African conflicts.

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