Tomorrows War - First Impressions

There have been a rash of wargaming books from Osprey recently. Field of Glory is on sale everywhere, although I don't know anyone who actually plays it.

Now Osprey are entering the SF field with Tomorrow's War.

Physical Production: Not bad at all. You get a hardback 250 page book for £15. The artwork is surprisingly so-so for Osprey. It doesn't compare with GW or even small independents like Warlord.

Back Story: Not very exciting. It isn't tomorrow's war it's today's war. With these rules a player can refight Iraq or Afghanistan dressed up a bit. The backstory is very derivative. It's Stargrunt, only written as an American wet dream rather than a British wet dream. 2300AD is politically identical to 2000AD with America as top nation (although it now has a higher living standard than other first world nations), the UK as Batavians to America's Rome, plucky little allies, and so on. The black hats are Islamacists, North Korean style military dictatorships, and Soviets. It is slightly amusing that American colonies that are more economically powerful still owe allegiance to the mother nation across the light years. That has not been the British experience. :)

The science of 2300 is strangely patchy. Antigravity and FTL spacecraft are commonplace but soldiers still walk around battlefields clutching rifles and driving tanks. The life sciences do not seem to have moved forward at all, which is odd given the rise of molecular biology.

One point did make me smile. The suggestion that hovercraft-tanks can cross water. It reminds me of the old joke about the man who stopped his lorry before a flimsy bridge to bang on the side. When plod enquired what he was up to, he explained that his cargo was live pigeons and that he was banging the lorry panels to make them fly up in alarm -and so lighten the lorry before crossing the bridge.

Still, none of this matters very much. It's just an excuse for us to play toy soldiers, after all.

Rules: Bloody awful. The rules place more emphasis on training/morale than gadgets, which I whole heartedly approve. If technology won wars, Vietnam would have been a pushover and the Afghan war wouldn't have lasted longer than WWI and WWII put together with no end point in sight. But the rules are the most god-awful mess. Everything you might possibly want to play Iraq with gizmos is there but they are scattered incoherently all over the place. There is no attempt to separate core rules from side issues that most players will never use. This is basically a squad-level skirmish game played at one model represents one man.

There is no way into the game.

Worst of all, it has an interesting and complicated action-reaction sequence that I understand is characteristic of games designed by Ambush Alley. BUT NOWHERE IS THE SYSTEM ACTUALLY EXPLAINED. The player is left to make inferences by piecing together clues from all over the place. I have read it over an over again and I am still not sure I have it right. Yet this is the heart of the game.

Frustrated, you betcha, as the fragrant but incoherent Ms Palin might put it.

Finally there is no rules and table summary in one place. Ambush Alley want to get a set of Hail Caesar and learn from the master.

I am not giving up on this. I suspect there is a good game in there but I will never be sure how much I am playing the game as the authors intended and how much I am playing my game based on some of their ideas.