Team Yankee: Homemade Air Power Counters

Afternoon everyone,

Time for (yet another) new project.  I have a habit of starting more things than I finish, but I've decided not to let it worry me unduly.  I not just paint what makes me happy, and if I 'finish' a project, then it's a bonus.

One of those is Team Yankee, the 15mm game from Battlefront Miniatures, much more well-known for their Flames of War series of games.  I'm a recent convert to the scale and time period, being much more interested in 1600 - 1914 and usually in smaller scales.  I was intimidated by the gargantuan size of the FoW rulebook, which brought back painful memories of tedious games of 40K's newer editions, which seemed to consist entirely of looking up obscure situations in rulebooks.

However, I was assured that all that had changed with the Team Yankee rules, which were a forerunner for the new 4th Edition of FoW.  Basically, things had been simplified and players are now provided with a series of snazzy laminated unit cards, which make dice rolling much easier.  I'm currently working on a Polish force - of which more in a future post.

But for today, I wanted to talk about the depiction of air power in games.  Team Yankee, like lots of other games, have players roll a 4+ to bring on air assets.  If they succeed, an expensive model plane is placed on the board, its shooting is resolved, then the model is removed.  Seems a bit pointless.

Motivated by a desire to make my Polish force as cheap as possible, I started toying with the idea of a 'strategic map', where off-table assets like air power (and artillery) can be represented using counters instead of on-table models.

So, with the help of Tumbling Dice's excellent range of Cold War-era aircraft, some 2mm armoured vehicles from Irregular, and an old Soviet map of Hamburg, we did it.

This is the 'board' - a sort of secondary game that's fought alongside the Team Yankee battle.  If ground attack planes can swoop down over whatever grid square the battle is being fought in, it can make an attack run on the board.

Using these as counters means that we can represent whole regiments and divisions in a wider campaign.  We can re-use the same 100pt force to represent any of its component units in a Team Yankee game.

Some Frogfoots face off against the classic English Electric Lightning, just south of Hamburg.

Near Hannover, an unsuspecting mechanised unit is caught in the open by Soviet helicopters.

 

An American A-10 and AH-64 Apache move to support!

Just some teaser pictures for now.  These were great gun to paint, and are part of a long-established tradition of 'tinkering' with perfectly good rules to add our own flair to them.

Ed