Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

In Ogre, you put your Heavy Tanks out front and your Missile Tanks and Infantry form the second line of defense.  But if you’re playing the 1983 Challenger: Ultra Modern miniatures rules double blind, this is not a good idea.  In this game you should have a line of infanty on the first line in order to alert you to the enemy’s approach.  You should concentrate your mobile units in a second line– preferably somewhere that your opponent is unlikely to shoot with artillery fire.  Finally, you should have a reserve just in case your opponent if feinting.

Here’s my infantry and APC’s whooping it up after taking out some Ruskie scout cars:

My boys quit laughing right about the time the rest of the party showed up.  The APC’s were quickly destroyed and the infantry remained dug into their fox holes.  I annoyed the Ruskies with artillery fire and accidently hit some of my men once, too:

I had to do something about my men!  I sent my tanks to respond and split them up a bit in order to avoid having them disabled all together by enemy artillery.  I moved at full speed to get there ASAP, but couldn’t fire as a result of that.  (I was still learning the rules!)  Then… because of the lack of a full first-line infantry screen… we unexpectedly ran into the main Russian element!  The smoking hulks in the picture below are all that remained of my platoon of tanks:

Now the Ruskies were free to roll on through and cover Bergkohn with as much fire as they liked.  The rest of my forced were ill-placed to respond… and heavily outnumbered. 

A fog of war can have a huge impact on tactics….  Panic is bad news– and playing a game with another game’s tactics is, obviously, not a winning strategy.