This week we tried out Tomorrow's War, which is the now out-of-print science fiction variant of Force on Force by Ambush Alley Games and Osprey. We have played FoF a couple of times before, once using an Iraq scenario, and once a battle of Hue (Vietnam) mission largely of my own concoction. It has been eight years since we last played it, so we needed a bit of a refresher!
I have also played the original iteration of Force on Force, called Ambush Alley, back in 2011, which I thought was very good at simulating modern urban combat. Force on Force has added a lot of extra chrome onto AA's model, which may have made a wonderfully intuitive system overly complex. This post is not an in-depth exploration of the system (read my initial impressions on it in my 2011 post), but I am including a few additional thoughts on it here before going into the game itself.
Tomorrow's War does feel like a modern/near future firefight, certainly more than the Nam, which we also played this month. Both games feel a little bit generic, in that you could use them to play a WW2 platoon level action as easily as one from the 2020s. The basic move and fire unit is a fire team (4-6 men/women), and you can fill an entire evening with a single platoon on each side.
We played the initial tutorial scenario in TW, which does not include a lot of science fiction chrome and even the Fog of War deck of cards we used felt fairly generic - this is drawn from when a player rolls a 1 on their reaction roll. The events again did not feel particularly science fiction - e.g. a nearby hut gets set on fire and can no longer be accessed, or an individual fire team becomes demoralised.
TW does make you think about fire and movement tactics as a platoon leader, which is excellent. We did not make use of the suppressive fire rules, focusing too much on trying to kill the opposition rather than stop them moving, but in retrospect I could have used this to slow the Eldar marines down and force them to fail their mission. I was too busy simply trying to overwhelm them. This may have been my error.
TW is very good at simulating asymmetric battles, where one side has superior training and equipment, while the other is motivated and has numbers on their side. This was what our scenario was mainly about, and TW recreates this extremely well. There was nothing that occurred in the course of the game that felt unrealistic, other than the space aliens of course.
Although I've used this system before, this was the first time where I felt there was too much dice rolling going on. You do end up rolling buckets of dice in this game and I did feel it was slowing things down a little. Plus you need to make sure you are making the right additions / deductions from your dice pool - e.g. for morale, armour, presence of wounded colleagues, etc. There is a lot to keep tabs on.
I like the fact that troops in TW can shoot at any targets on the table (no range limits), and that it accounts for fire teams having to manage their own casualties. The Fog of War deck also provides scope for events in a larger potential battle taking place off-table to overflow into the game - e.g. a stray mortar round, as we had in our game. I honestly do feel you could play a WW2 game with TW as easily as a science fiction one. Thus far I've not played any other rules which are as good as TW or FoF at simulating modern platoon level combat.
Lost & Found
We played the infantry combat tutorial from TW, Lost & Found. In this case we had a small unit of Eldar seeking to retrieve a pilot who had been shot down and crashed in the jungle. A group of human militia has laid a trap for the Eldar marines, seeking to ambush them as they approach to retrieve the pilot. The militia have a medic with them and a small unit of power armour troopers. The Eldar have superior training and a tech level advantage (partly negated in our game as they began to run out of ammo thanks to a fog of war card).
The pilot was hiding in a hut near the centre of the table (see picture above). The Eldar had to cross a river and get him (see below). Playing the hostile militia, I had hoped to wait for them to get into range before hosing them down with bullets from the treeline, but found that they would be out of range of my ambush advantage. This forced me to break cover and try to inflict as much damage on them as I could - and also prevent them from getting to the pilot.
One Eldar fire team crossed the river and got to the hut. The jaws of my trap almost closed on them here, when one of them was fatally wounded. Their nerve almost cracked too, but they managed to retire in good order back across the river, handing over the pilot to another fire team, and leaving the table in time to complete the mission. Points wise, it was 10-4 to the Eldar, but retrieving the pilot successfully meant an outright win.
Overall it was a fun game, which I enjoyed, and I would play this system again. It did not feel specifically 'scifi' per se, but this could be partly because this was a tutorial/refresher scenario meant to just teach the core mechanics of the game and specifically the infantry combat module. While we have refreshed our knowledge of the rules, we probably need to play again in the not too distant future, as there were some aspects overlooked.
TW is sadly out of print but the successor to it is now available online in a development version. Whether Ambush Alley Games moves this to some form of completed final game is an open question. I would like to play another scenario in the near future, either Force on Force or Tomorrow's War, as I do enjoy the system, it would just benefit from being played more frequently.
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