Flames of War review

[Anatoli]

Meant to write this review as soon as I got my rulebook a couple of month ago, but figured it would be best if I got a few games under my belt to really be able to pick out certain things.

Since the rulebook is quite massive this review is not  going into microscopic detail, I try instead to describe how the most important things work and highlight a few game mechanics.

I plan to follow up this review with a bit of "Flames of War for newbies" where I work my way through the questions I myself had as a fledgling FoW gamer - such as picking source books, army building, basing units etc etc.

All this stuff is of course primarily aimed at a "new" audience that has yet to hear about/see/play this game. But don't let this notion stop any veteran gamers to chime in with a comment or two if you think I've missed something you really think should be mentioned as well :-)

http://anatolisgameroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/flames-of-war-review.html

[answer_is_42]

Interesting review.
Something I would add is the layout of the book; it's pretty bad. Rules are very rarely where you expect them to be (cavalry rules, for example, are scattered throughout, whereas you really just want them all in one place, like in the 40k book). Of particular note is the index, which is just awful. Indexing 'Defensive Fire' under 'S' for 'Shooting' may seem logical, but it really isn’t when you're looking for it under 'D'. We must have spent hours during games searching for things like that.

EDIT: Actually, now I've gone and looked at the book, defensive fire is under both 'D' and 'S', but only lists the basic rules. Defensive fire for artillery is under 'A', on a totally different page from any other defensive fire rule. This is not logical.

[Anatoli]

Yes there certainly are a few split up rules which are hard to keep track off and the index in some cases being plain weird in classing the subject, though I find the summary at the end of each rule chapter along with the chart at the very back of the book kind of helping to balance that problem up a bit.

To be fair, none of the games I play have perfect rulebooks, they always seem to split basic and advanced rules even if they share the same subject (shooting/moving) etc. The confusion and splitting of rules pretty much comes from this.

The FoW rules have lots of small explanatory notes throughout the book though which do help clarify most things. It is not a rulebook you can read once and know all the rules - that's for sure. I've been flipping in mine as often as I have a bit of spare time since I bought it a couple of months ago and I still don't know all the rules in and out the way I know the rules of Secrets of the Third Reich to name one game I play.

Thanks for the input!