Tank Duel: Campaign System

Tank Duel: Enemy in the Crosshairs is a great game. One of the best parts of the game come from the narrative that each game builds. The heroic crew who comes through in spite of the odds. The rush of scoring a hit. The drama of watching your last APCR round bounce off a KV-1’s armor and wondering what to do next. But the narrative from the game leads you to wonder about the bigger story.

What did your crushing victory (or defeat) mean in the larger scheme of things? What did the heroic crew do in the next game? Could you reverse your crushing defeat in the next game? Each game is a blip on an otherwise blank screen. These rules fill in the blank parts of the screen and give a better understanding of what your victory or defeat means within the context of a campaign in the European theater of World War II.

At its heart, the campaign system is a toolkit that generates interesting and balanced games of Tank Duel.

It can be used in many different ways. On the light end of the spectrum, players can use information from the campaigns to play a standard game of Tank Duel using tanks from the time of a campaign with minimal additional rules.

On the other end of the spectrum, each side will design a battle group from the units available at the time of the campaign and lead them against their opponent in a series of Tank Duel games that roughly model the historical situation, that optionally include terrain and weather. The battle group will move between objectives and receive reinforcements at the end of each strategic game turn to replace losses. The results of earlier games will influence later decisions in the campaign and may lead to battlefield promotions (improved tank crew quality).