On the Way!

On the Way! is a solitaire Cold War tactical combat RPG in which players take on the role of a single tank commander belonging to one of four nations and their associated units (East Germany (7th Panzer Division), the Soviet Union (79th Guards Tank Division), the United States (4th Armored Division), or West Germany (5th Panzer Division)), starting within a 200-mile radius of the city of Fulda near the divide between East and West Germany, and set against the backdrop of a hypothesized breakout of WWIII at the tail end of 1968 after months of diplomatic tension and military build-up. Inspired by the legendary Avalon Hill classic, Patton’s Best, On the Way! intends to capture much of the former’s outstanding realism, abstraction, and excellent campaign in its own unique way, making it a fresh and original game. A few select differences and additions from the original Patton’s Best system are: Rules for dawn, dusk, and night combat, as well as night vision devices (infrared, thermal, etc.) and other Cold War gadgets like advanced two-plane stabilizers and auxiliary driver and/or gunner controls; a comprehensive selection of period-appropriate ammunition, including APFSDS (Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot) and ATGM’s (Anti-Tank Guided Missiles); four playable tanks representing the most common types that would be available to each respective nation and unit in late 1968 (the M60A1 (US), Leopard 1 (West Germany), T-55A (East Germany), and T-62 (USSR)); a detailed tank damage system, accounting for non-KO penetrations, hits by kinetic energy and chemical energy projectiles, as well as detailed crew wounds and a brand new bail-out minigame to resolve the abandoning of your tank turn-by-turn; condensed and specific objectives with particular mission end conditions to specifically avoid mental fatigue and cut out tedium; and much, much more! Additionally, the game has been intentionally designed with modularity in mind in order to account for potential expansions set in later decades (i.e. the 1970’s and 1980’s) with the introduction of advanced systems like thermal technology and explosive reactive armor (ERA), as well as support for WWII campaigns. Over a period not exceeding more than a month and a half (when it is assumed that the war will either be halted by ceasefire or escalate into a global nuclear war of heinous “mutually assured destruction”, depending on the actual course of your campaign, which changes with each playthrough), your tank commander and his crew will need to fight tactically and soundly to ensure the survival of both themselves and the tank. While your crew fights engagements as they appear to them through their hatches and periscopes, the rest of the war rages around them (represented as a dynamically changing “victory perception” with weekly campaign events), with your outfit’s successes and/or failures potentially having a small but palpable impact on the result of the campaign, potentially earning your nation an early victory, or perhaps a terrible defeat. Combat missions and their associated objectives, as well as enemy units, weather, the time of day, and so on, are all generated through their respective generation tables. Combat missions are resolved on a week-by-week basis, with up to seven combat missions occurring per week until the end of the campaign. In that time, you and your crew may increase their ratings (an abstraction of veterancy – their skills as combat soldiers), suffer casualties using detailed wound generation tables, gain nation-appropriate decorations and promotions, suffer from fatigue, and more. Ultimately, though, surviving the first dramatic, fast-paced, violent weeks of WWIII’s conventional ground war of maneuver is the main goal of your tank commander; after the war on the ground comes to a halt, the rest is out of your hands. On the Way! includes a comprehensive rulebook and tables (including combat mission, time, and weather generation, combat resolution, friendly and enemy unit actions, to-hit and to-kill tables, random events, detailed bail-out action resolution and wound recovery, and more); a campaign track sheet for recording your tank commander’s and your crew’s ranks, names, ratings, and fatigue, as well as victory points for destroyed friendly and enemy units, tracking ammunition and fuel, captured and lost objectives, and so on; a bail-out mat for resolving the pulse-pounding turn-by-turn escape of your crew from your tank, including pulling severely wounded crewmen from open hatches, escaping from rapidly-building flames inside of the tank, and dodging incoming enemy fire; a strategic movement map to track the movement of your tank and the friendly combined arms task force that it is attached to across a broader, abstracted visualization of Central Europe, complete with rules for time passage, weather changes, and fuel consumption; an abstracted tactical combat mat, representing a radius no larger than 3,500 meters from the center (your tank) in any one direction, where your tank and crew will fight engagements against the specific enemy units that are the most threatening to you that your task force is engaged with; a combat calendar for keeping track of the general course of the war from November 1968 up to January 1969, combat mission types and resistance generation, as well as your faction’s (NATO or the Warsaw Pact) victory perception; 5 large double-sided enemy vehicle unit type cards, 1 large double-sided enemy infantry unit type card, and 2 large double-sided player tank cards; and 2 counter sheets. On the Way! requires two six-sided (d6) dice to play, and may be (but is not required) enhanced by taking notes and keeping a log on a separate sheet of paper, or digitally with any free word-like program, as your tank commander's story develops. —description from the designer