Egypt, noble are your children.

Loyal, and guardians of the reins.

Be we at war or peace

We will sacrifice ourselves for you, my homeland.

Bilādī, laki ḥubbī wa fuʾādī (Egyptian National Anthem)

Having played a couple of October War games using Seven Day To The Rhine I came across a blog where Robert Avery had been using Too Fat Lardies’ Vietnam rules, Charlie Don't Surf (CDS), for Arab-Israeli games.

This might seem a bit of a leap but CDS has its heritage in I Ain't Been Shot Mum (IABSM), the Lardies' company level WW2 rules, so I suggested to Andy we might want to see how it played as a large scale tank game which, given Andy's familiarity with IABSM and lack off with CDS (which he bought a couple of days before we played) led to us playing a fun hybrid we called Don't Surf Down The Suez, Mum (I'm sure such a catchy title will prove popular!)

Despite being on the receiving end of such a resounding defeat I actually enjoyed that. Cohen Don't Surf Down The Suez, Mum... gave a good recreation of the tank battles of the October War with the IDF tanks destroying a lot of Egyptian armour when not worrying about Saggers and Commando RPG teams.

The card system with the limited number of Big Men for the Egyptians certainly worked well. My only bone of contention was the stats from the 'briefings' on the Vis Lardica blog we used. The only difference between a T-55's stats and the next generation T-62 is one point - on its Strike (firing) roll, and the Sho't armour stat is 16 compared to the T-62's 10 which seems somewhat disproportionate (you wondered why they blew up so easily?) - oddly a Magach 3 (M48A3) armour is only 12 so I wonder if the Sho't's was typo. The Centurion was a good tank but not that good in 1973!

Steve Blease

Ed.’s Note: The Sho't/Centurian armour value is taken straight from CDS itself, but you're right on the T-62: armour value should be 13. R