WW3: Team Yankee - An Introduction - Setting and Rules

Hi all, its Neil here and welcome back to my WW3 Team Yankee series.  Today I though that I'd share a bit about the game itself for those who are unfamiliar with it as it is not so widely known, particularly compared to something like 40k.  The WW3 Team Yankee game is created by Battlefront who do both the rulebooks and miniatures for it.  To give a bit of context to other WW3 posts here are some  basics for both the background and playing the game from a newer player of the game.

The Background

The game is set in the mid 80s with the the story taking real history up to a point and changing it leaded to a shooting war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  The change is the hardliner Brezhnev died being replaced by another hardliner instead of the reformer Gorbachev (who took over in the real world).  This leads to a build up of military forces in Germany on both sides of the Iron Curtain and eventually the Warsaw pact invading West German to secure the resources of western Europe to prop up the economy of the USSR.

The spark that lights the fire came in the Persian Gulf. A Warsaw Pact Cruiser and a US destroyer collide and both are damaged, which triggers a quick build up of forces in Europe.  The Soviet attack comes shortly into West Germany and Austria, with the push to drive the NATO forces off continental Europe.  NATO is outnumbered in Europe but it is fighting to blunt the Soviet attack while waiting for reinforcements from the US to arrive so their strategy revolves around trading ground for taking out Soviet tanks to sap their momentum.

The two sides in the war are NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  NATO is an alliance of countries (that exists still today) which work together with the general premise of an attack against one is an attack against all.  NATO is made up of the US, UK, West Germany, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands with France, Sweden and Austria not technically being formally part of NATO but are aligned with them.  The Warsaw Pact are headed by the USSR and are a set of satellite states supplied by the USSR with military equipment and answer to Soviet military command.  The members of the Pact include the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania.

The main focus of the game is the push by the Soviets through Germany into the low countries and Denmark followed by the beginning of the NATO counter attack when the initial attacks stall.

Europe is not the only battleground where the cold war gone hot is being fought, the middle east has also gone to war with Iran (backed by the USSR) invading Iraq (who at the time were backed by the US at least in the game) as well as Israel fighting Syria again backed by the USSR.

These are the two currently covered hot spots for WW3, Germany and the Middle East but there is always the possibility of more such as Southern Europe on the borders with the Warsaw Pact as well as Africa and Asia.

The Rules

Rules wise the game is an offshoot of Flames of War, but it has differences to bring in things like helicopters and give a feel of 40ish years of tech advancement.  The basics are that its a game with player turns so I do all my stuff then you do all your stuff, with turns consisting of moving, shooting and assaulting.  Comparing it to 40k, it has the same "I-go-you-go" system and uses a d6 but there are differences such as when shooting you use your target's To Hit value rather than the shooter's BS as in 40k.

Movement is reasonably familiar to those who play other games with each unit having a value in both cm and inches (you pick which you're using for the whole game at the beginning).  The units have a few different values for movement split roughly into two sets, a tactical movement value for when you want to move and still shoot and a set of movement values for dashing when you just want to gun the engines giving up later shooting to move even further.  The dash movement used depends on type of terrain being moved over.

Shooting is the main damage causing part of the game. Shooting works by rolling to hit against the targets to hit value with modifiers to the roll from terrain, smoke and long range being the most common.  If a target is hit it rolls a save which either is a flat value for unarmoured units like infantry or by adding a d6 roll to its armour and comparing the the incoming weapons armour penetration to see if the round bounces off the armour or cuts through it.  If the save is failed then the firing weapon checks if its firepower is enough to destroy the target.  This simple flow makes up the backbone of the shooting phase.

You also get artillery which is slightly different to firing a normally, instead of each model shooting individually you fire the whole unit together to drop a template.  These are great at hitting larger units and are useful to dig out infantry from their foxholes.  The major difference is that before you shoot the artillery must range in using skill tests.  You can also repeat bombardments where you use the same ranging in spot as last time and get a bonus as your artillery are already ranged in properly.

Assaulting has your units charge in while the enemy fires at you in defense. In assault you roll to hit using your assault skill but it then mostly follows the same procedure as shooting, except that unarmoured teams don't get their save if hit.  When one side has gone the other side can counter attack by rolling their counterattack value, then this goes back and forth until one side is wiped out of assault range, one side fails their counterattack roll or chooses to fail.

For morale, it comes in two levels being unit level and formation level.  For unit level, each unit types needs a number of models on the table to be okay/"In Good Spirits" but if they have less they must test their courage each turn to see if they retreat (removed from the table).  For the formation level morale, these are in good spirits if they have at least two units on the table and if they don't then it automatically retreats when checked.

The game uses missions with objectives to determine a winner, though you can also win by forcing the opponent's army to retreat by destroying all their formations.  Objectives are held when there are no enemy units close by and holding an objective at the start of your turn wins you the game so you opponent always get a chance to try and stop the win, which can make for some tense situations trying to get the enemy away from the objective.

The Armies

When gathering your army ready to game, you have two main types of pick; formations and support units.  The picture below shows the force organisation chart for the British with the various formations and support choices displayed as boxes, each box represents a choice that can be taken once.

The first is the formations, which have slightly different names for each faction such as teams, squadrons, companies etc.  Your army must include at least one formation, which contain a small number of compulsory units and a selection of optional units.  The formations are the backbone of your force and if you have all your formations either retreated or destroyed then you loose the game.  The compulsory units are generally a commander, who is usually a single model but can have up to two sometimes, and two units such as a tank unit or a infantry platoon with transports.  The option units include extras of the compulsory units plus things like artillery, scouts, tank destroyers, artillery etc.

The support units aren't part of any formation so don't count morale wise for loosing the game but bring valuable and often powerful options.  These options generally include the most powerful artillery, anti-tank helicopters, AA vehicles and strike aircraft.  Something that is currently being introduced is the option to bring a single copy of a compulsory unit from a formation that you haven't used so you can easily add in that cool new tank unit to your existing force without needing to use a full formation.

There is one other option you have when army building; Allied formations.  You can bring a single formation from any other faction with the same NATO/Warsaw Pact allegiance as your main force. These work like normal formations and allow the covering of weaknesses in that play style BUT there is a draw back. Allied formations don't count when working out whether you've got formations on the table to keep playing.  Use carefully!

This an intro into the background and playing the game, hopefully its been helpful to give some context to the Team Yankee posts on the blog.  If you want to learn more about the game then books by Battlefront are the place to go!  For me personally I really enjoy the setting especially as the vehicles are iconic like the M1 and the Challenger and living near Cambridge I can go an see real version of these (and lots of other vehicles and planes) at the IWM Duxford.  Game-wise the main draw is that it gives you control a full combined arms force on the table so I can have my tanks spearheading an assault, my infantry clearing buildings, artillery dropping fire down and aircraft flying across the battlefield for that "movie" feel in my head (though I haven't played a full sized game yet 😞  ).

If you got this far, well done it was a long read but hopefully you learnt something about the Team Yankee game that I enjoy!  Any questions or things you want to discuss please post in the comments as it would be great to hear what you like about the game or things you'd like to know.  

See you around for more Team Yankee content and if you want to check out what I’m painting head over to Instagram.