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Greetings,

I was thinking (a dangerous business) about the TANKS! game by Galeforce 9(?). You know, the one where you take WWII or Modern tanks and have a quick duel or skirmish with just the armor. Ridiculous as all get out but good quick fun. It uses a similar format to X-wing with some important tweaks. A similar game is Two Fat Lardies "What a Tanker" game.

Anyway, has anyone modded these rules to use with their 40K tank forces? Just a random thought.

Kinda sorta am still hoping GW will do this some day, as I quite liked their Stormcloud Attack format of boxed sets / minigames (two flyers, dice and a rule manual), but would've loved it more if it was about tanks.

Preferably something with more depth to it than Tanks! had. It was far too shallow for a proper game, which led to it lasting all of a week at my local store.

A detailed tank game with IG vs Orks would be fun!

Slow, tough and ponderous vs speedy buggies made of garbage, I'd be into it.

Tanks! is a fine game, but it's something that you'd play with massed 1/285th scale micro armor on a 6'x4' table. BIG armor battles that would bog with more complex rules.

If you're using it for a sub-handful of 28mm 40k models, that's not right.

Who said anything about a sub handful?

OP suggested Tanks! for 28mm 40k play, which tends to be not large number of vehicles.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Tanks! is a fine game, but it's something that you'd play with massed 1/285th scale micro armor on a 6'x4' table. BIG armor battles that would bog with more complex rules.

If you're using it for a sub-handful of 28mm 40k models, that's not right.

Its shallow and has no bearing on actual armoured combat. If you want a good tank focused game I suggest Firefly. Tanks has literally no bearing on actual armoured combat, its rules are too shallow for any depth of strategy and it was so bad that it barely lasted two weeks at my FLGS before being dropped by even the most casual of players. Its honestly not one worth bothering with save for the models, which can be used in other games to great effect.

I wouldn't use it for small skirmish of a half-dozen 1/100 or larger models - that should have greater detail.

However, if I wanted to play Armored division combat at the individual tank skirmish scale, Tanks! Is not the worst game engine to process things.

You know...saying you want a game with more detail in TANKS! Completely misses the point in TANKS!...it's supposed to be a quick 30 minutes to any hour pick up and play game that is literally a beer and pretzel game.
Not a tactical simulation of armoured warfare.


But saying that while it could be done I'd have to wonder does it need to? The 40k rules are even shallower than TANKS! and even further simplified to a ridiculous level.
So really mass tank games in 40k with just the basics should be even simpler and quicker than even TANKS! was capable of.

The only thing you'd miss is the initiative system. But honestly you could just use the bolt action activation system and you're pretty much done.

A simple measure of armour rating and penetration capability would not be too much to ask for. Penalties for firing on the move, at targets in cover, etc. Movement penalties for bad terrain. In fact why not just use Bolt Action? There you have a quick and easy ruleset that already does all of this.

porting the FoW (V3) rules to a 40k setting, and doing it pretty much wholesale would work out ok.

even just for armoured games

different front/rear/top armour, and an easy way to work it out, turret facing mattering, face what you shoot at, different movement speeds, modifiers for range, the targets skill setting how hard the shot is, cover rules that sort of work etc.

probably wouldn't be too hard, just pick roughly appropriate chassis for the profiles and go - say a Land Raider gets the Tiger II chassis, the laser cannon perhaps 17pdr gun profile, Predator a Panzer IV or V maybe, Leman russ the Churchill and so on and try it.

once you have the idea that weapons have two profiles, one v armoured and one v unarmoured targets the game gets interesting, a bit like V1 space marine in fact which had this sort of detail level in some ways (like fire arcs for weapons)

TANKS! is frankly rubbish, its aimed at attracting X-Wing players (as is the 0-100 point value system they use for FoW V4 which is much the worse for it)

if you want tank v tank as a game there is a better version, , from GHQ aimed at their 6mm Micronaughts range, and a free download from their website

http://www.ghqmodels.com/pdf/WWII%20tank%20game.pdf

have a look, could be played with 28mm models easily enough, you start here with a company for the both players (10 tanks) then the side with better vehicles is reduced until they sides are roughly matched, the player with the weaker vehicles getting the rounding bonus on that. but could easily start with a smaller number