As a child of the late 80’s and early 90’s, who very vividly remembers seeing Hunt for the Red October in theaters, the tanks and aircraft of the Cold War-era will always be in my mind a little bit what military hardware is “supposed” to look like. You can tell me that the F-14s in Top Gun are as old as Spitfires were when Top Gun came out, but in my soul, I don’t believe it.

So when our local club started mulling doing some “Cold War Goes Hot” gaming, I was in.

And then I had to make it complicated.

Now you all get to follow along on a project that combines some homebrew game design with…statistics.

Why Sweden?

I really don’t know – but playing Sweden is a tendency of mine. It could be a little bit pride in my Swedish heritage, but that’s really not a huge chunk of it. I think what appeals to me a lot in Sweden is that it’s a fascinating “What If?” for the balance of power in Europe, so makes good fodder for scenarios. The Swedes in the Thirty Years War are a major contender. Later, they lost that spot…but what if they didn’t? Or, in this case, can we have a faction that is probably on the side of NATO, but not definitely on the side of NATO – a potentially useful “spoiler” army for other peoples forces where they’re a little bit more locked in to who they’re playing.

But a lot of it is honestly that Battlefront just came out with these adorable models of the STRV 103 S-Tank, and with an avowed fondness for fixed gun armor, I just want to play with these weird little guys.

Why Seven Days to the River Rhine?

After all, like the box says – these models are for Team Yankee. Team Yankee is a well supported rule set. There are rules for these tanks in a lovely, hard cover supplement which I own in Team Yankee.

Why can’t this just be easy?

The truth of it is that I don’t play Team Yankee for a reason. I play miniature wargames for the spectacle of them. I grew up playing hex and counter games as a kid, and if I just wanted to play A Strategy Game, they’re easier to set up, don’t involve painting, and many of the downsides of them – that they take a long time to play, you should have dedicated table space for multiple days, etc. are solvable by the fact that I have neither kids nor cats. Near me I have at least three games about this genre, because the golden age of hex and counter games and the “What if Russia attacks” time periods overlap considerably.

But they don’t look as good.

But neither does Team Yankee. Much to my disappointment, my first exposure to Team Yankee was at a Las Vegas Open one year, and it frankly rivaled Warmachine for “This is turning me off of your game”. And that’s an accomplishment.

In brief…Team Yankee has a “parking lot” problem. The battles are simply far too dense for the size of the board they’re on. So you get things like this:

Just wall-to-wall tanks, especially cheaper Soviet tanks, in wildly unrealistic formations.

Thanks, I hate it.

Seven Days to the River Rhine, by Great Escape Games, is at least an attempt to fix this, but keeping the same scale and board size, but dramatically slashing the size of the forces involved.

For example, this in-progress force I have for the Danes is a large force for Seven Days (which I’m going to abbreviate as 7DRR from now on).

It also involves the ahistorical purchase of some Norwegian M113-based tank hunters because they look better than just a dude with a TOW launcher and an open door, but that’s another matter entirely. As I said, this is a pretty sizable force for 7DRR, and for Team Yankee it just isn’t. So we’re going to try it out. Worst case, it doesn’t work, and we’ve got the makings of some Team Yankee forces.

Initial Thoughts

The goal for statting out the S-Tank (and other Swedish units, but the S-Tank is going to be the hard one) is to end up at a reasonable place. I’m not looking for some sort of super-tank that will let me dominate the local club scene. First of all, this is historicals, with your buddies.

Second of all, it doesn’t make any sense. The S-Tank can’t be a super-tank, because we know what replaces it – the Stridsvagn 122, aka the Leopard 2A5. And the Leopard 2 is already in the game.

This is actually really helpful, because it gives us an upper and lower bound. The S-Tank should be strictly inferior to a Leopard 2, and arguably comparable to or slightly superior to later marks of the British Centurion tank, which saw concordant service in the Swedish army as the Stridsvagn 101, 102, and 104 tanks.

Roughly, 7DRR has a few broad categories of tank:

• MBT’s still in modern use: Leopard 2’s, M1 Abrams variants, Challenger, etc. The T80’s occupy the lower end of this range.
• Frontline tanks for “minor” powers, which are usually older versions of the first category. Leopard 1’s, Chieftans, and the T72
• Long-in-the-tooth tanks – The Centurion, the Marine M60’s, and the AMX30 – lesser T72 variants and the T64 live here too.
• The Hopelessly Obsolete – T55 and lesser T62 variants, all the way down to the T34/85, if one feels like fielding some sort of third-tier unit breaking out the old stuff.

Since we don’t really have combat data on the S-Tank, there’s an argument that it belongs in either the top-end of the 3rd category, or the lower end of the 2nd. Out of all the NATO-aligned powers, genuinely only the French don’t have access to at least a 2nd tier tank, and the French are notable for letting their tank development lag so far behind, before the Leclerc showed up. So that’s probably where I’m aiming for here.

Lets see if it works.

Next up? Seeing if 7DRR has a points algorithm at all in any meaningful way.

 

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