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I have a new review up for the day!



When Osprey was first entering into the game publishing business, they didn’t try to do it alone. Instead, they struck a deal with Ambush Alley games to publish some of their core rulebooks. The details are inconsequential and since I believe the two have parted ways. What is of note is that a series of rulebooks for Modern warfare and a rulebook for Sci-fi were released. Both were hardback books and Force-on-Force even got a series of campaign specific soft-back books as supplements.

For me personally, these were incredibly important works. I had been starting to move around beyond the usual players in the wargaming world and was looking for something different. I found these two works and immediately realized I had found that something. Around the same time I also found Stargrunt and Dirtside II as well. As you can imagine, finding all of these new realms of sci-fi possibility was very eye-opening to me.

On reflection, I see these games as having a shared philosophy or lineage in design; a lineage that tried to extrapolate the challenges of Modern/post-Korean War to the tabletop. I can’t speak to how accurate they are in that task. They all force you to take a different approach to how you play a game than other popular game approaches.

Tomorrow’s War and Force-on-Force use the same base rules to accomplish their core game play. Therefore, I am combining them into a single review. As needed I will call out differentiation when needed. I have read some people complain about the opacity of these rulesets but I find the way they are built stacks nicely together as you slowly layer on capabilities as you go. Since I mostly use them for Infantry on Infantry actions I had no real issues using them.

More at me ole' blog....

http://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2017/03/review-tomorrows-warforce-on-force.html

I have also set up a sample game using old Micro Machines Stormtroopers vs. Rebels using Tomorrow's War. I will have that in the next few weeks.

TW was also my first foray into the wider world of miniature gaming, in pursuit of a ruleset to play xenomorph versus colonial marine ... still looking! I never got to play TW yet but it certainly opened the door to many new, fun games.

I never played TW myself, but our group did do a few games of FoF and they did a zombie game also. The zombie game was pretty horrible, used the same system but really didn't work.

FoF also didn't really work either. the random event cards were very unbalanced. Chance of the US troops to just get a free tank, compared to the rebels getting a technical was mind blowing. We got that it was all mission based for troops, but really most games need some point system to keep it all in check.

It might be smaller scale, but id be interested in trying Specture Miniatures modern game before I ever do FoF again (and based on your review with my FoF experience, I think I will stay away from TW)

Yeah, if you did not like FoF than you will not like TW as they are almost the same.

Regarding the Fog of War cards, it is funny you mention that. I never use them so forgot to even mention it in my review. You are supposed to customize the deck for the scenario, but honestly they just never did anything for me so I skipped them.

Yeah, the FoW cards were always meant to be tailored to the scenario, and were an easy thing to just not use.

When I ran games at conventions I used them to help 'balance' out a game which was starting to go too far one way. For example, regulars hammering the insurgents who started off with a couple of mistakes? Pull a FoW card giving them a technical or IED...

By the way, I like your review. I'm biased towards the games (I wrote the tactics section in Force on Force and helped a lot with the 'grid' rules in TW, as well as other help on both sets) but definitely understand the reasons why some folks dislike them/parts of them/have trouble 'getting' them. They are not for everybody.

str00dles1 wrote:
FoF also didn't really work either. the random event cards were very unbalanced. Chance of the US troops to just get a free tank, compared to the rebels getting a technical was mind blowing. We got that it was all mission based for troops, but really most games need some point system to keep it all in check.

Yikes, did you play with the entire fog of war deck? I wouldn't say FoF didn't really work, I would say you didn't really play FoF correctly.