Lowering his head, the Commander slumps back into the gulley – this battle is lost. He has failed to take the high ground, and worse – the Germans have a commanding view of the field of battle, and are moving up additional tanks and infantry to secure their lines.

“Get ready to fall back, we need to get out of here!” He shouts to his crew. They grab the wounded driver and slowly and carefully make their way back to some better cover. Tanks are retreating, the battle is lost. Soon they leave their cover and continue their way back to the rear as darkness falls. Tired, bruised and demoralized, they stumble along until finally reaching a first aid station. The driver is conscious but needs blood; the rest of the crew is essentially uninjured.

The Commander leaves his men and makes his way back to HQ to debrief the General. How to tell him that he lost the battle? He will be lucky to survive this meeting… 

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Round 10:

I drew the Game Over card during the Draw phase at the start of Round 10, the game is done! Robata gets +10 points for being the sole owner of Hills, and wins easily 76 to 33.

My thoughts on this game:

This was a fun game, even though in the end I lost handily. The game was within reach until the last two rounds, where I failed to penetrate and kill the German tanks while Robata had accurate and deadly fire. I felt I had a chance to win up until the draw of the last shuffle card – after that I knew that I had to get very lucky to win but I still had a chance until the Game End card was drawn. Tactically I made some mistakes early on and should have tried to kill the Panther with flanking moves earlier, though it was fun in an odd way to see the Panther absorb damage and shrug off shots, even from the massive cannon in the SU-100. I’ve read stories about that happening, and the game recreated it. The Panther pretty much won the game for Robata.

The scenario itself is pretty straightforward and captures a basic need to capture the high ground on the battlefield. The player needs to determine when to try and capture the hill, and try to stay alive as you become quite the target once on a hill. The hill provides a small benefit that really showed in this game – a slight change in penetration values, which saved the Panther from being penetrated on at least one occasion. The VPs for capturing the hill are important, though killing tanks and crews provide more VPs faster so the player needs a balance of the two to have a chance to win. Robata definitely had a good balance in terms of priorities, as the final score shows.

I’ll end this with saying that I enjoyed play testing Tank Duel, and I enjoy playing against Robata.  I hope you have found this series informative and that I provided a glimpse into how the game and Robata play.

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