Syrian Vehicles for Team Yankee Oil War

A short while ago I did a tutorial video and post regarding a bit of a new Mini Project for Yarkshire Gamer, a mid 1980s Arab Israeli collection mostly using the Team Yankee models available from Battlefront. They are 15mm which is smaller than most of my more recent collections but I did look at 20mm and 28mm but couldn't find a decent range of figures and kits in either of those scales for the time period I was looking at, Yom Kippor and earlier loads of stuff, later nothing.

The photo above shows my first batch of vehicles, sufficient to get some playtesting done, with a few sets of rules to see what we like.

I like the presentation of Team Yankee but watching games on the Utubes it's very Warhammer like with the IGO kill everything and then UGO with what's left activation system. Which isn't what we do, the rules are clearly designed for a small table club game (which is great if that's what you want) where as I want large table weekend rules.

It would be a shame not to use the wonderfully produced and presented unit cards so I will be giving Team Yankee a go but with alternative activation systems. Firstly I will try our current card driven activation and see how that goes before trying an order chit (Johnny Reb style) system and see if that works.

Failure would send me initially to Battlegroup with a back up of Fist Full of TOWs and Modern Spearhead in reserve.

I've done the vehicles in a 3 colour colour scheme common to the pictures of Syrian tanks I can find from the time period. It consists of a sand yellow, a deep green and a mid to light grey, it often looks very worn in some of the real life shots. I did the basics with an airbrush, I will do a video tutorial on the next batch I do.

I've been very impressed by the Team Yankee models, the majority are plastic kits but some, like the Shilka AA are metal and resin. Detail on the models is very good, the plastics especially are easy to put together and most of the kits come with a number of options to make different models of the same vehicle.

The models do come with decals but these BMP are from the Russian collection so have Soviet markers. I have hand painted Arabic numerals on the vehicles, not in any confirmed Syrian Army official manner but so I can recognise most vehicles on the tabletop. I've discovered after painting these that the Fate of a Nation (earlier than oil war) Syrian T54 box set has Syrian decal markings included so at least I have some for the next batch.

I've put together a total of 26 Syrian Vehicles and I'm working on some Infantry after which I will do some playtesting. The tanks include a number of what ifs like these T62 Ms an update that appeared in Russia in 1983 but probably didn't arrive in Syria until much later.

It will be an interesting challenge to balance up the scenarios in the period to make them more playable and not a straight up Israeli walk over. These T62M and some T64s (below)  will hopefully help that balance.

I'm quite happy with how these have turned out, a nice basic fairly straight forward paint job but plenty good enough for what I want.

The main stay of the force will be these basic T62s to which I will add some T54/5.

So there we have it, part 1 of my Syrian forces, more to come in the future. Next up will be the Syrian Infantry and then some more Israeli vehicles so I can get those playtests underway.