AK-47 Reloaded
Should I put real money down on AK-47? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself since this past weekend’s test drive.
It took an hour to play the first turn of the game. Part of that is the process of figuring out rules for the first time. Part of that is the Political and Setup Phases of AK-47. We fudged a few numbers to speed things up, so in the final analysis, that’s probably a pretty good indication of what to expect.
On the other hand, the last nine turns of the game took us a little over an hour. That’s a pretty good sign. We’re looking for a fast playing game that we can throw down and pack up in 2-3 hours, so this seems to fit.
On the other other hand, it looks like we’re going to need a lot more figures that I anticipated. The two forces that we fielded featured 30-40 stands each. Not a large number by miniature wargame standards, but that’s still probably more than I can comfortably store in the house. Budget wise, I’m looking at Irregular Miniatures 6mm range and my rough guess is that we’re looking at about a buck a stand. Call it $100 for two matched forces with all the trimmings.
And that’s not including the terrain tiles. If I can’t think of a way to tighten up the storage requirements, I may have to go with another arena-based game. I’m hearing good things about Habet Hoc Habet (Flagship Games) and 5150 (Two Hour Wargames)…
Do it in 3mm, perhaps?
5150 is a great choice, especially New Beginnings. I just picked up half a dozen small folding storage crates from really useful boxs for £1 each that are perfect as buildings, and stack for taller ones. Planning on using thin card behind the "windows", hacking out the handles to use the space as doors, and some basic painting, they should still fold up and store easily. 6 gives me a building in each table quarter, with two of them tall four storey ones.