This is a story from 20+ years ago, from a game system that is no longer in print and is, so far to me, impossible to find again. It was a 6mm scale WW2 game, played freeform (as opposed to hexes or squares on the board), and importantly for the story it had detailed rules for vehicles including relative weights of vehicles if they tried to push each other for a given reason. There were also concealment rules, where defending concealed units would be covered in cotton balls or moss, and then for each unit two additional fake cotton or moss balls would be put on the field, removed when the unit acted or the area was cleared by the enemy.

This was my very first time playing this game, and I was put in charge of a group of isolated American troops shortly after D-Day, holed up in a farmhouse in France as a pocket of mechanized German troops counter-attacked. The scenario was a kind of “supposed to lose” one where my troops were meant to put up the best fight possible, and victory relied on surviving a certain number of turns, where reinforcements would theoretically show up to save me, and then I’d be scored on how many of my troops survived. My forces consisted of a single Sherman tank, a platoon of infantry, a few bazooka teams, and a mortar team.

The Germans had a mechanized force consisting of armored scout cars, half-tracks full of a platoon of troops, and 3 tanks of various models (I don’t remember the details of the enemy tank forces, but they were sizable and would clearly overwhelm my single Sherman in a head to head fight).

The map looked roughly like the below picture. Americans deploying in and around the farmhouse, Germans coming in from off the board onto the main road.

As the Americans, I was given the first turn. Traditionally this is when the Americans in this scenario would order overwatch for fields of fire, and otherwise prepare to receive the first wave of German scout cars and halftracks. Having looked over the field and the rules, I took note of the rarely used rules regarding vehicle weight interactions.

I rushed my Sherman tank down the main road, opted not to fire any guns and instead spent all of the action on movement in order to Tokyo Drift it sideways.

The German player scoffing at my apparently reckless newbie aggression deployed his first scout car and tank behind it. He was able to angle the two vehicles so that the tank had a line of sight to the Sherman. It fired, instantly destroying it.

As I had planned. He went to move forward with the scout car and I reminded him of the relative weight rules. A tank would be capable of, slowly, pushing the hulk of the Sherman out of the way, but a scout car simply was not. The German tank behind the scout car didn’t have enough room on the road to maneuver around. The entire mechanized column was was stuck in place on turn 1. All of the tanks and scout cars rendered useless.

From then on, he brought in halftracks to the small amount of available deployment area, unloaded the infantry, and was forced to move them forward with no vehicle support against prepared American defensive positions. All the while my mortar team hammered the traffic jam, and eventually bazooka teams moved up to take potshots at the trapped vehicles.

My opponent was supremely frustrated and declared I was “not playing within the spirit of the rules” and that “realistically this would never happen!”