Mandarin's Corner

Flames of War

In the US at least this set of Warhammer 40K -esque rules for WW2 seems to be the up and coming thing, no doubt one of the biggest driver behind the 15mm WW2 boom that I mentioned above. I have purchased the rules and read through them some weeks before the con, and I finally got a chance to test drive the system this Saturday.

The demo game involved about six of us handling about 1,000 points of troops (a very small game) on both sides. It involves a local counter attack by the Soviets in the opening months of Barbarossa. All of us Russian commanders are somewhat depressed about our chances of survival, based on nothing more than the term "Russian" and "Barbarossa" in the same sentence. But I guess the point balance scheme are done well enough that we ended up with a close game.

The play is fast (despite the bucket of dice approach to combat) and deadly, with meaningful decision reached in about 3 hours game play among 6 new comers to the rules. The scenario is straight out of the book and is quite fun too: A Russian attack that must reach one of two "objectives" within a time limit in order to win, and a German defender which starts out with the same point value, but 1/2 of the forces starts off board, and must make its reinforcement die roll in order to join the battle. It's a quick and  simple system to generate some tense scenario. The hidden setup system is similar to that of 40K which involves no book keeping.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this