We’re gearing up for our official launch game when we demonstrate the rules for the first time at Crisis in Antwerp on the 5th of November.  We took a break from our preparation to take a few snaps of how the new Game Tokens work in a snowy scene somewhere on the Russian steppes.
When designing the tokens for IABSM we were very keen that they were simple and intuitive to use.  To make it even easier we thought we’d have a bit of a run through here and show them in action.
Some tokens are a bit too obvious to need an explanation; even Nick can understand them without pictures.  The Low on Ammunition marker and the Aiming Point marker for artillery and mortars just do what they do.  You place them on the table next to the relevant unit or where you want your support units to fire at.  Enough said on them.
More interesting are the Pinned and Suppressed markers.  These are precisely the same, but if a unit is Pinned it will have one marker to show that, if suppressed it will have two.  At the end of each turn one marker will be removed, so a Pinned unit reverts to its normal state and a Suppressed unit becomes Pinned.  In the picture below the unit on the left is Pinned, on the right it is Suppressed.

The AFV damage markers are new to the rules as is the Loss of Action marker.  In the picture below you’ll see a Panzer III firing on a Soviet T34 in the bleak mid-winter.  As you can see, the Soviet tank has two green spanners to indicate some kind of damage that restricts its movement.  When attempting to move any dice rolled lose two pips, so a tank rolling 4 and 6 which would normally move 10” now only moves 6”.

With the new rules we also have a chance of the AFV breaking down.  If the Soviet tank rolled nothing better than 2’s on its movement dice then it would not move at all and would have broken down.
Let’s look at the Panzer III.  You can see that has a red spanner next to it.  This indicates that it has been completely immobilised.  It can’t move for the rest of the game.  What’s more the fact that it has a red marker means that any Shock it takes subsequently is doubled, the crew being far more likely to abandon their vehicle.
Next we can look at the little target markers, again red and green, that affect how well an AFV fires.  Here we can see the same tanks again, but this time the Panzer III has picked up a green target marker indicating some limitation on its accuracy when firing.  It may be that the sighting optics have been damaged, it may just be that the gunner is wounded or simply shocked by the action thus far.  When this tank fires it will do so with a -1 on its roll to hit.  So if this tank rolled 4 and 3 to hit, a total of 7, it would count that as 6.

We can also see that there is a green star with the number “1” on it to the rear of the tank.  This indicates that in the next turn it will have one less Action than normal.  So if it had just two Actions it could possibly fire an aimed shot at any target in its arc of fire and then fire a snap shot.  It couldn’t fire two aimed shots.
So that’s really it.  The simple “traffic light” green and red system should be very simple to use and thereby avoid the need for the rules to be checked for effect.  The tokens are also discrete enough to not clutter up the table with gaming litter.  We place ours either on the rear deck of the AFV or directly behind the tank in order to minimise the visual impact.