Hedgerow Hell

Hi,

So over this past weekend, I finally got a chance to play Fields of Fire by GMT Games. Fields of Fire is a unique game in a couple of ways. First, it's solitaire. You deal out a grid of terrain cards and that becomes the board you move your pieces over. As you move onto new cards, you trigger potential contacts with the enemy and a second deck of action cards tells you what you find and where it's at. The other unique feature is that the game focuses specifically on the historical battles of the 9th Infantry Division (the Fighting Manchus). The game has a slate of missions set in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam so there's a lot of variety.

Also, the game is hard. It's not Advanced Squad Leader hard, or Starfleet Battles hard, but it is a wargame and there's a lot of fiddly bits. It doesn't help that the rulebook has required an extensive errata file and a number of the counters were mis-marked. Luckily, GMT provides significant on-line help and they sent me free replacement counters -- still for such a novel game, I'm disappointed that the game wasn't better put together (and GMT games are usually pretty high-quality affairs).

That said, the game puts in you in charge of an infantry rifle company in the 9th and it's your job to accomplish whatever mission is laid out before you. I think this is my sweet spot for wargames -- I don't want to track every single man and round fired, but I don't want to point at a tank and go "that's 50 tanks". Platoon or Company level games seem close enough to the action, yet abstracted enough that I can feel like I'm leading troops and not micromanaging every guy. I think it's why Charlie Company really clicked with me (more likely Charlie Company crystallized my interest in these kinds of games).

Anyway, I got everything set up and played out the first mission over the course of a couple days. I want to say it took 3-4 hours total, but it might have been longer. I had to look up a bunch of stuff and I was keeping fairly detailed notes about what went on so I could post a session report. You can check it out here if you're interested (and if you game/have gamed with me, you might be part of the officer staff...shame about Lt. Caprio).

The short version, we were supposed to capture a couple of farms. We got pounded by mortars and later by artillery. When the Germans appeared they were in range of the .50 cal which basically chewed them up. We achieved our objectives and all of our casualties were successfully evacuated before the end of the game (which gives you bonus XP in addition to being a point of pride). All the officers learned valuable lessons and are no longer Green while 1st Platoon (which took the brunt of the incoming) is now a battle-hardened lot.

I liked it. I messed up on a few rules here and there, but I think I grokked how it was supposed to work. It definitely had the right "feel" where I try and execute a simple plan and then have to deal with all the complications. I think I prefer social games over solitaire ones, but this scratches an itch and I can set it up (in a cat-free area) and just play it as I go along.

later
Tom

Hedgerow Hell

Hi,

So over this past weekend, I finally got a chance to play Fields of Fire by GMT Games. Fields of Fire is a unique game in a couple of ways. First, it's solitaire. You deal out a grid of terrain cards and that becomes the board you move your pieces over. As you move onto new cards, you trigger potential contacts with the enemy and a second deck of action cards tells you what you find and where it's at. The other unique feature is that the game focuses specifically on the historical battles of the 9th Infantry Division (the Fighting Manchus). The game has a slate of missions set in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam so there's a lot of variety.

Also, the game is hard. It's not Advanced Squad Leader hard, or Starfleet Battles hard, but it is a wargame and there's a lot of fiddly bits. It doesn't help that the rulebook has required an extensive errata file and a number of the counters were mis-marked. Luckily, GMT provides significant on-line help and they sent me free replacement counters -- still for such a novel game, I'm disappointed that the game wasn't better put together (and GMT games are usually pretty high-quality affairs).

That said, the game puts in you in charge of an infantry rifle company in the 9th and it's your job to accomplish whatever mission is laid out before you. I think this is my sweet spot for wargames -- I don't want to track every single man and round fired, but I don't want to point at a tank and go "that's 50 tanks". Platoon or Company level games seem close enough to the action, yet abstracted enough that I can feel like I'm leading troops and not micromanaging every guy. I think it's why Charlie Company really clicked with me (more likely Charlie Company crystallized my interest in these kinds of games).

Anyway, I got everything set up and played out the first mission over the course of a couple days. I want to say it took 3-4 hours total, but it might have been longer. I had to look up a bunch of stuff and I was keeping fairly detailed notes about what went on so I could post a session report. You can check it out here if you're interested (and if you game/have gamed with me, you might be part of the officer staff...shame about Lt. Caprio).

The short version, we were supposed to capture a couple of farms. We got pounded by mortars and later by artillery. When the Germans appeared they were in range of the .50 cal which basically chewed them up. We achieved our objectives and all of our casualties were successfully evacuated before the end of the game (which gives you bonus XP in addition to being a point of pride). All the officers learned valuable lessons and are no longer Green while 1st Platoon (which took the brunt of the incoming) is now a battle-hardened lot.

I liked it. I messed up on a few rules here and there, but I think I grokked how it was supposed to work. It definitely had the right "feel" where I try and execute a simple plan and then have to deal with all the complications. I think I prefer social games over solitaire ones, but this scratches an itch and I can set it up (in a cat-free area) and just play it as I go along.

later
Tom