The First Taste of Fury

 This week saw MacSver and I start a new ruleset: "Hell hath No Fury" from Two Hour Wargames.
 As the cover above says, it's a Tank on Tank game based on their WWII "Nuts!" ruleset, although the scale advised for the tanks is 15mm instead of 28mm I've played a few of THW games and like their "Reaction" system and was keen to give it a go. One nice aspect is that the tanks are fully crewed, so the main actions of the tank may be with the commander, but you against the gunner for firing, the loader for re-loading the man gun and the driver for driving.

Even with a bit of familiarity, here has always been a lot of leafing back and forward through THW set, as the details change from system to system slightly (although I must admit that some of the ones I have are a version behind). This has been leveled at Ed, the head hombre, for years and it be fair he has made great efforts to help players. We had started looking for a "demonstration sequence", but what Ed has done is done a staggered run through, each sequence being just a couple of pages apart. Once we'd sussed this out and run through a one-on-one effort we felt confident enough to run again with a 3 tank squad each.

The 3 tank squads had us coming up against many more situations. in MacSver's first tank movement his driver lost control on too sharp a turn, lost a track and took half the crew out of the battle in their immobilized tank. Everyone turned a bit more carefully after that lesson. Using the cover of buildings was also made obvious, and after some carnage MacSver's final tank was left scuttling away as his loader had failed to immediately reload after taking out one of my tanks and left him exposed.

We both enjoyed the evening and can easily see the potential of the set. We'll try again next time, but add in extra crew attributes and the "Star" qualities to our own character.

As you may have noticed from the pictures above we are a bit low on German tanks. This has not only prompted a couple of orders each to bring in new armour, but pushed my to put glue to plastic and construct a couple of tanks I'd been given after the FoW lite Tank demo at Targe last November. I'd been putting off their construction as I remembered having a rubbish time construction the tanks from the Open Fire! boxset. The Panzer IV however was excellent. Neat finishes with clever mouldings to ensure you didn't fit similar components (like the tracks) in the wrong way. Very good. The Sherman was the same kit as Open Fire, so was very frustrating and poor in comparison, although in the end I think I manged a better job than the others from the boxset.

It'll be interesting to see how the new kits compare, as they are Panzer IVs from Plastic Soldier.