Team Yankee – 2S1 Gvozdika Review

Hello All

Battlefront very kindly sent us some Team Yankee samples to review, which also seemed a good point to start my Tale of Four Gamers Soviet Army.

I choose the 2S1 Gvozdika as it seemed a good unit to practice my colour scheme on and I really wanted to try out the new artillery rules for Team Yankee. Now in my rush I forgot to take any photos of the construction phase (bad Ben!), but I don’t think that will affect the review too much.

Whats in the box?:-

You get three models in a box and they come in five parts each, two tracks, a hull, a turret and a gun, The first two things I noticed was the detail on the resin and metal parts is top notch, almost plastic levels or crispness. The second thing was the models seem to be a different type of resin from the normal FOW range and needed to be washed. The resin was sticky and I had to wash it in hot water for a good 30 minutes. Now some people out there will say you should wash the resin anyway (and they might be right) but it’s not something I tend to do unless I need too and it’s worth pointing out as you don’t normally need to do this with FOW models.

Construction:-

The construction time, once the models were dry, was next to nothing as there was little flash or filling needed. The tracks have very clearly labels direction as to which way they need to point. I did need to remove a few bits of resin to get a flush finish between the tracks and the hull but otherwise it was pretty straight forward.

One piece of detail I did think was missing was the lack of crew and the option to have an open hatch. It is very important in Team Yankee to be able to see the command tank as a lot of rules are based around him, having to check the side of the turret for the numbers I have added will be a slightly annoying.

The turret is also designed to have a magnet added to them, the kit did not come with any and I would recommend buying some if you get this kit.

Closing Thoughts:-

Overall this kit does have a few issues, the sticky resin and the lack of a commander hatch did disappoint me a bit. But the detail of the kit is great, the build time was very short and once painted I think they look great on the table.

I also like the fact that the box comes with three Gvozdikas. The platoon option in Team Yankee is either three or six, so no wasted models when you get the box sets.

I do have to point out we got very early production models and they lacked decals, I don’t know if the finished product will come with decals or not. This wasn’t a problem for me as most my WW2 Soviet decals do work for 1980’s era Soviets, but it is something to think about.

Pros

• Great detail.
• Easy construction.
• One or two boxes is all you need.

Cons

• Sticky resin needs washing
• No option to add a commander
• Lack of magnets and decals (although the finished product may have some)

Edit – BF has just let me know the following. The tacky resin on the Carnations – the resins we sent you were pre-production (so not our normal grey resin) as they production teams hadn’t created production moulds at that time, so they used the same master resin (what we used to call “blue resins”. That why they acted and felt a little different.

Thanks for reading and until next time

Ben