Tango Down: Man to Man Urban Combat

[E] This is a fun, light man-to-man combat game in the modern era, focusing on fighting within a building. The components are good for what they are (small map, large counters, a relatively small number of cards), and I appreciate the large font in the rule book (simple pleasures)! A couple of the rules could have been stated more clearly (I'm looking at you, grenades rule), but it all smooths out as you play the game.

Overall, I found the game appropriately atmospheric. It really gave me the sense of a team trying to clear a building (or escape the building). While remaining simple and fast-moving, the game modeled key elements of this type of combat (at least, as they seem to someone who has not seen combat IRL) - the importance of supporting fire, the need to move quickly from room to room to seek cover, the danger of those long hallways, the importance of smoke and the usefulness of grenades, etc.

The game relies on a simple combat resolution mechanism involving range, obstructions, skill ratings, and the like that modify the number you need to roll above to deliver a wound. In keeping with efforts to maintain simplicity, there are no different weapon types, which works for me.

The game uses cards to give soldiers extra actions and other benefits, including grenades, smoke, and concussion grenades. While I enjoyed the cards, I felt that using cards for essential like the above (grenades etc.) was unrealistic. There's no way a combat team would try to sweep a building without a ready supply of those munitions! Waiting to draw a "grenade" or "smoke" card just took me out of the moment.

That said, I enjoyed my back-to-back plays. Good game!

This is my favourite of the "Tiny Battle Publishing" microgames that I have tried so far. It simulates a SWAT team or similar outfit raiding a building, usually facing heavily armed entrenched opposition. (The rulebook acknowledges that real SWAT teams would not enter a situation like this without overwhelming force, but then the game wouldn't be fun.) There are some interesting and innovative rules (at least, I don't recall seeing anything similar before) around how movement, opportunity fire, pop-up fire, and body armor are handled, that make the game feel a lot more tense and tactical than other similar shootout simulations. I genuinely feel pinned down by enemy fire, and the tactical positioning of my men along a corridor, and how I advance up that corridor, feels like it makes a huge difference. I have a few minor gripes. The grenade rules are a bit fiddly and just 'feel' off somehow. I'm also not in love with the random event cards, which allow for some cinematic moments but can also be quite swingy (and if one player keeps drawing all the 'flesh wound' cards, it can lead to some silliness with seemingly immortal units.) Still, on the whole this is exactly the kind of clever, haven't-seen-that-done-quite-that-way-before experimental design that keeps me coming back to microgames again and gain.

Hey, I designed it, of course I like it.

Fair/OK, just misses being good/ great due to the fiddliness of the combat resolution, which really slows down the narrative impact.