With any new, intended series of games, you’re never sure you’ll get past volume 1: it all depends on what the good folks out there think of your first offering. But it didn’t take long for GMT and designer Mike Bertucelli to realize that their fun tank battle opus Tank Duel had legs—or tracks, as it were. Now come two expansions released together, with the promise of several more to come.
NORTH AFRICA
Welcome
to the place any tanker doesn’t want
to be: the scorching heat of North Africa, where sand and sun conspire with the
enemy to smother any and all of your belligerent intentions.
NEW TANKS
You want tanks? We got tanks.
North Africa ships with 16 double-sided tank boards that feature all-new machines, from the Italian M13/40 and Semovente, to the British Valentine and M3 Grant (armed with two guns!). Also thrown into the mix are the open-top German Marder II and the agile eight-wheeled armored car, the 8-rad. That’s a lot of cool, new vehicles to duke it out with.
Two
minor gripes here.
- The aforementioned Marder and Semovente tank
boards are misprinted—the Move and Fire levels are not where they should
be on the left hand track. Not a big deal and you can easily fix that
yourself; one way is to print out the stickers GMT provide on their website.
- The back printing here was done differently from the base game, with new tanks flipping left-right, whereas the old tanks flipped up-down. It’s possibly the ultimate nitpick, but I’m a consistency nerd. Plus it seems I’m always flipping tank boards the wrong way now, no matter what I decide to do.
NEW
RULES
The
new rules take up half of the North
Africa rulebook, with entries covering new terrain card sets (more sand
than you can lose a stick in), new weather conditions (dust everywhere, with
sandstorms that’ll slow down tanks and stop infantry altogether), heat haze and
fatigue (higher cover but lower morale), minefields (clear with a recon vehicle
or enter at your own risk), night combat (bring your flares, or use the enemy’s
muzzle flashes), multiple guns, small guns, and open-top vehicles.
GMT
also overhauled the rules that pertain to anti-tank guns and infantry. Now anti-tank
guns sometimes deploy hidden, can only fire at targets spotted by a friendly
vehicle, and can use a Flank card to indicate they’re shooting into the side
armor of their prey. In the case of infantry, the new rules create an actual
battle between soldiers and metal monsters, whereas infantry acted more like a
die roll modifier in the previous ruleset.
And
yes, Robata rules have been been updated to take all of that new stuff in
stride.
I quite enjoy the new rules, especially the weather conditions, which work well together to create a proper desert feeling for the new scenarios. The new battle cards also dovetail nicely into this—and I don’t mind switching them out as required—but in many cases, I found myself replacing a bunch of cards with exact duplicates, minus the desert theme (the name and illustration of the cover element) and the infantry symbols that represent the forces in action (so you’ll get British instead of Soviet, for instance). If you’re like me, you’ll play a bunch of North Africa scenarios in a row anyway, so you can leave those desert cards in there for the duration. But you like to bounce back and forth between theaters, “cosmetic” card replacement might get a little annoying.
NEW
SCENARIOS
North Africa offers 11 new
battles (three more than the base game!), five of which are proper historical
scenarios, plus one hypothetical, with a set Order of Battle—while the original
box only featured two of those. The other five scenarios use a “create your own
matchup” prompt.
The
new fights offer a nice variety of situations and problems to solve, some with
infantry involvement, others without, and are built to progressively introduce
new game elements. Scenarios 1 and 2 include vehicle dust and heat/haze rules,
scenario 4 throws minefiels into the mix, and so on.
Also,
all of the new scenarios can be played with Robata. Solo wargamers rejoice!
There’s
one element I mentioned in my review of the base game and I’ll stick to my guns
here: the matchup thing doesn’t really work for me, mainly because it’s too
loose and vague for my taste. In fact, North
Africa seems to take a step back: whereas the base game gave us a table of
suggested tank matchups, the expansion just recommends using vehicles “with
similar armor or penetration values, or vehicles from similar years.” It does
go further, suggesting players balance those matchups with different crew
qualities, anti-tank guns and multiple tanks to one side—but without something
like point values attached to those scenario-building elements, the enterprise
feels too much like guesswork to me.
I
want balanced scenarios that task me with digging myself out of a hole (or
maintaining an apparently advantageous position), or else very clear guidelines
to ensure we’re not just building a death trap for one of the players. In
short, I’d really like a scenario generator, or at the very least a sturdy
matchup generator—and the designer has hinted online at exactly that, coming with
the next expansion (Normandy, right?). If I had that, I’d be delighted to roll
the bones and go, “Alright, a pair of KV-85s!”
 |
| Some of the helpful new markers provided in North Africa |
TANK PACK #1
I enjoy
the two different expansion formats: one a full-fledged box full of stuff, the
other a bunch of scenarios and tanks shipped in a ziplock bag.
Tank Pack #1 belongs to
that second category.
NEW
TANKS
Eight new double-sided tank boards await, featuring the Churchill, the KV-1 and the really fast Puma, to name but a few. Together with the base game and the North Africa expansion, that brings the total of tank boards to a whopping 40! They can all fit in one of the game boxes if you want, but you’ll stick nothing else in there. Also, watch out for back pains.
RULES
& NEW SCENARIOS
The
booklet included in this package only features a handful of the rules necessary
to use the new tanks. Interestingly enough, they are numbered according to the
actual rulebooks for ease of cross-reference. (So the rule for small guns, even
though it’s the very first rule in this booklet, bears the number 5.4.)
The rest is all new battles! Six of them to be exact, all of which are historical and sport dedicated Orders of Battle. (Yay!) We’re having great fun fighting our way through them, although scenario 6—Knight’s Cross—seemed like a foregone conclusion as to the victor: barring a couple of lucky shots, we just didn’t see what the Soviets could do.
A
warning about the new scenarios. The front of the booklet states that some of
the scenarios require ownership of the North
Africa expansion, whereas in fact five (out of six) of them do require the
expansion. So if you’re getting just this Tank
Pack and not North Africa, be
aware that you’ll only be able to play one of the six scenarios contained
herein.
(Sure,
you can replace scenario-specific tanks with hardware you already have in your
inventory, but that sort of defeats my above point about set Orders of Battle…)
PARTING
SHOTS
If
you enjoyed Tank Duel, you’ll love North Africa and Tank Pack #1. It’s more of the same action-packed goodness the
original game had to offer, with a great new setting and plenty of new toys to
keep the lead flying.
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