Team Yankee, subtitled "A Game of World War III", is a board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1987 that is based on the book of the same name by Harold Coyle.
Team Yankee, subtitled "A Game of World War III", is a board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1987 that is based on the book of the same name by Harold Coyle.
Team Yankee is a two-player tank combat game based in West Germany during a hypothetical World War III. [1]
The bookcase game box contains:
The game comes with eight scenarios, each based on action from the contents of Harold Coyle's book. Each scenario uses a progressive set of rules, so that the players know how to use all the optional rules by the final scenario. There are also instructions on how to design a scenario. [1]
The movement and combat rules are a simplified version of a traditional "I go, You go" system. The basic rules are not complex, and as Ellis Simpson noted, Team Yankee was marketed to new gamers using a "First Battle" label on the box. [1] During each turn, the first player has several phases: [2]
The second player then has the same phases to end the current turn.
In 1987, Presidio Press published Harold Coyne's first novel, Team Yankee, which was based upon a tank battle scene in General Sir John Hackett's political thriller The Third World War: The Untold Story . As a promotional tie-in, GDW published a licensed wargame of the same name, designed by Frank Chadwick and Marc W. Miller, featuring the same cover art as the novel. [3]
In 1990, a video game of the same name was published by Empire Software, but it was based directly on the novel, not on GDW's game. Likewise, starting in 2015, Battlefront Miniatures published a series of miniatures wargames that were based on Coyle's novel, but were also unrelated to GDW's wargame.
Reviewers found the game rules simple and suitable for beginning players, but agreed that the scenarios were seriously unbalanced, always leading to a one-sided battle.
At the 1988 Origins Award, Team Yankee was awarded the Charles S. Roberts Award for "Best Boardgame of 1987 Covering the Period 1947-Modern Day". [4]
Team Yankee is a techno-thriller novel written in 1987 by Harold Coyle, then a major in the United States Army, whose subject is the actions of a company-sized armor unit of the United States Army in the World War III scenario as depicted by General Sir John Hackett in his novel, The Third World War: The Untold Story. General Hackett's scenario takes place in 1985; Coyle never specifies the year, but it is assumed to take place in the late 1980s. While Hackett's book emphasizes strategy and world politics, Coyle's features the experiences of the tank crews and infantrymen fighting on the front lines.
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