Fields of Fire, solo

I finally finished the extra, extra long Naktong defensive mission in the Korea campaign. I sort of chunked it out over a number of days doing an hour here and there. It was a complete disaster but I still managed to win and hold enough ground to continue the campaign. While it is a night attack, it isn't *that* dark at +2, so you're still going to eat losses. I lost a huge number of units, ending with just three commanders---my first sergeant, 2nd platoon HQ, and my CO HQ. And that was after losing my COHQ. So this mission is a real widowmaker over 12 turns.

It was a pretty harrowing game, I was pretty sure it was all going to collapse and, based on that first picture of how the end of the night looked, it almost did/was in the middle of doing so. It came out pretty close to historical, as this was an all-out final offensive by the NKPA to break the UN lines that won but at too high a cost to continue.

We'll see how the next mission goes, I'm starting with a company that is starting with I think 4 less platoons due to unreplaced losses.

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Fields of Fire Deluxe, solo

I've been working through my retry of mission one of Naktong River (Korean War) slowly, an hour or so at a time here and there. It was rocky but I was making solid progress, occupying the objective... until I pulled a counter attack random event and it all fell apart. Here, you can see my core command staff behind friendly lines but adjacent to an empty spot (whoops) being destroyed with a heavy mortar attack. Most of the line is ruined as well. I'll be lucky to have more than half an intact company available for try three if I survive the attack.

There's an interesting mindset shift you have to go through with non-eurogames, especially wargames. I've been playing a lot more euros and tightly geared together games in the last five years, so I'm a little out of touch with it. Fields is asking you to accept unexpected events that aren't fair and deal with it as best you can, as your real life counterpart might have to. Fields can extra ramp unfair situations up because it's solo, so it's really about the journey. While this ethos leads to dismaying conditions like me dragging myself through the last five turns of this mission with every man who can lift a gun staggering through, it generates tremendously memorable situations. More importantly, it generates drama and hardship to create those memories. It is very difficult---though not impossible---for a thoughtfully balanced euro like Endeavor Deep Sea to generate anything like this sort of highlight tabletop moment because they have to be so scrupulously fair and systemic.

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Fields of Fire Deluxe, Naktong mission 1

I've played a lot of Fields of Fire, especially the first box, but not recently. That made the deluxe version (3rd ed) which is about to come out hit HARD. It is a complete overhaul for clarity and consistency of everything in this huge game. It also includes tons of examples, a tutorial, and a progressively more complex boot camp mission series in the box. Amazing stuff.

They also made a new tabletop simulator mod. With scripting! Since I don't need the tutorial materials since I learned in the bad old days ruleswise, I went right into Naktong which I've played through before.

I couldn't get any firepower to bear, I was rusty. Got my 3rd platoon leader killed and my offensive was stuffed for 4 turns on the left side which was supposed to be my strongest advance. I finally rolled some of them up and captured prisoners but that was the final turn. I'll need to reattempt. It's baked into the mission so I didn't feel too bad, and losing is part of this system.

It's a complex game, so most people just play the first four Normany missions or whatever. They're missing a lot, because there's a lot of range in here. Korea is good fun to play because it gives you some variance in how even linear conventional warfare plays out. The terrain is very bare with long ranges which just doesn't happen in Normandy where everyone is one card away in high cover. Moreover, the North Korean army is not as well equipped as some parts of Normandy invasion era Germans---though they're veterans so equal to them or more in terms of sustaining fire and morale but have slightly worse armed squads with only detached automatic weapons.

If you can take high complexity wargames and like solo games, the deluxe edition is the way to get in. Really interesting game system in its perspective on tactical battle.

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