Newb Review of Forgotten War: Two-Toned Counters Blow

boylermaker

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I should kick this off by saying very clearly: I am not the target audience for this module. I don't have any particular interest in Korea, and I only started playing a few years ago, so I'm not one of these old guys too jaded to enjoy the Eastern Front any more. Of course, I bought the module anyway, on the principle of get-stuff-while-its-in-print-just-in-case. It also occurred to me that someday I might gain an interest in Korea, or lose an interest in playing Yet Another German Attack In Italy Wait A Minute Weren't The Allies On The Offensive Why Are The Germans The Attacker In Every One Of These Scenarios.

But having looked at the module, I don't intend on playing it any time soon. I'm not against it: if an opponent wants to play some Korea, I'm willing to wade into all the various extra rules, but I won't suggest it myself. For my taste, the chrome:content ratio is too high. The cognitive load required to learn about 1000 fiddly small-effect rules, and a handful of large-effect rules, just isn't worth it for me.

Now, I should reiterate: I'm not the intended audience. I barely have a handle on the Japanese, have never done an amphibious assault, and Valor of the Guards is the only campaign game under my belt. Someday, I hope, all the rules of ASL will be second nature to me, and learning the Korea rules won't seem like such a daunting task. But until then, Korea just won't capture my attention.

To be fair, the chrome:content ratio is high for two reasons:

1) As I've said already, there is a ludicrous amount of chrome. Imagine if the Germans or the British had been given this treatment: ASL would be completely unplayable, with a 300-page tome devoted to the Commonwealth alone (Co.12.3: Kenyan forces from 1939-1940; Co.12.4: Kenyan forces from 1941-1945; Co.12.41: Lend-lease armed Kenyan forces from 1941-1945; C.12.411: Lend-lease armed Kenyan forces from 1941-1945 in Burma; Co.12.5: Rhodesian forces, 1939-1943; and so on ad infinitum).

2) There is not a ton of content. There are 16 scenarios. Which is a good number for a core module, but remember that these have to be divided amongst the 37 different combatants in Korea. So, for instance, the offense-against-God-and-man-Blue-on-Green counters are used in only a single scenario!

Now, the intent of the designers, it seems, was not to try to cover the whole war, or take advantage of all the chrome they had constructed, but instead to kick off a sort of Golden Age of Korea Scenario Design. If this materializes, and all of a sudden I've got 50 Korea scenarios to play, then the chrome:content ratio will fall, and I'll be much more interested in learning the Korea rules. But to me, the value of this module really depends on that. I can definitely imagine that a slew of Korea content comes out, and this becomes an absolutely irreplaceable module. But currently it's down there with Hakkaa Paalle: get it if you have the money and are a completionist, or have a particular interest in Finland, but otherwise you can probably skip it, and you won't be losing out on too much. Until more Korea content comes out, this module is the same way.

I should also say that this module has a few things to annoy anyone with anal-retentive tendencies. Fortunately, there are none of those people among ASLers. However, just for the record:

1) TWO TONE COUNTERS ARE AN ABOMINATION THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SMOTHERED IN THEIR CRADLE AND WE ARE PAYING FOR IT NOW.
What is the problem with two-tone counters?
a) Aesthetically, they look like a ****ing dog's breakfast. I couldn't come up with nastier looking counters if I hired H.R. Giger.
b) They make the die cutting process into a high-stakes game of chance. If the die cutter is half a millimeter off from the counter design on a monotone counter, I would have literally no way of knowing, unless I took my counters and compared them with the identical counters from somebody else's kit. On the other hand, with two-tone counters, it screams at you, because now the left border is 3X thicker than the right border. And two of my counter sheets were substantially offset, so you can expect that some of yours will be too.

I know what you're already writing in the reply box: "Listen, IDIOT, the two-toned counters SERVE A PURPOSE!!!!1! They allow the ROK and OUNC-OUNC-OUNC to use US equipment without it being visible under concealment counters. Ditto for the Chinese and Russian equipment. SO SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE, JACK."

I have considered this. However, I have also looked through the FW scenarios, and I do not find any evidence for it. The closest I have come is that in two scenarios, the included counterset does not have enough two-toned counters to play the scenario. If you supplemented the two-tone counters with monotone counters, then you would have enough Russian LMGs, or whatever, to play using physical kit.

But since every kind of counter you need to play the scenarios is provided in two-tone form, this undercuts the idea that I'm going to spend a lot of time digging out American counters to supplement ROK forces, which in turn undermines the only reasonable argument I have encountered for two-tones counters.

(PS: even if I'm wrong about this, or if future scenarios require you to bust out your Russian OB, let's just remember that there are 40 counters devoted to duplicating Russian SMC, just with Korean surnames. I dig this, by the way, but let's also not pretend that counter space was at a premium in this module. So if MMP had made the ROK purple, or whatever, they could have also just printed off a few more purple duplicates of US SW).

I suppose there is another reasonable sounding argument for two-toners, which is that there aren't enough colors. Perhaps this was true for the KMT Chinese. But it simply isn't the case here: just reuse colors! Why can't the OUNC-OUNC-OUNC be Allied Minor Green? Is there really that much demand for hypothetical scenarios between the Turkish Korean Expeditionary Force and the 1940-era Norwegians? If they'll never fight each other, there is no reason not to reuse colors.

So should ASL do any further expansion, into the Arab-Israeli Wars or whatever, I beg you MMP, dispense with the two-tone counters. They serve no purpose and are aesthetically awful.

2) At the top of my counter sheets, the die cutting is a bit ragged. Those of you who like to slice your counters off the sprues with a razor blade will probably want to give these counters a bit of extra love.

3) Something is strange about the numbers on the counters. I'm not quite sure what it is, but the best I can describe it is that instead of using Helvetica (or whatever the previous font was), somebody made a raster-art copy of Helvetica numbers. You probably already have non-matching fonts in your counter collection, and so are inured to the annoyance, of course.
 

Gwinnell

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Um....

I think I disagree with just about all your issues but hey.

I was not ecstatic about FW either but now I have it it has piqued my interest and filled in a big gap in my knowledge. I am playing the first scenario at the moment and it is interesting.

I have no problem with two tone counters.
I do not think the new rules are too onerous.
I think the counters look fine.
Mine are not ragged.
More scenarios would have been nice but we have been spoiled by BFP's excellent products with more than we can play in a year.

I hope you grow to like it.

Gavin
 

boylermaker

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... now I have it it has piqued my interest and filled in a big gap in my knowledge....

I hope you grow to like it.
I hope so too! And I agree that it has motivated me to learn more about the Korean War. Of course, I haven't done that yet, and maybe when I do I'll be much more excited.
 

Roy

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I think you have made good arguments. I actually cancelled my preorder before going ahead and getting it.

As long as our hobby's fantastic designers produce for this module, I am all good.
I must admit, I have hit rules overload. I think it's time to scale back on the new rules in EVERYTHING. JMO of course.

H.R. Giger would have made fantastic counters. Blasphemer!

Roy
 

Paul M. Weir

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In Defence Of Two Tone or The Musings Of A Jaded ASLer.

A tract in four paragraphs.

You alluded to "not enough colours" and this indeed I see as a factor. These days colour matching is a lot better than when ASL came out, but is not fool proof. I have Soviets that go through Milk Chocolate Brown, Squittery Turd Brown, Almost Orange Brown to light-medium Brown and British that look like they are in solidarity with the Soviets, Solid Tan or Nearly Pink. Some of my early Allied Minors nearly look like illegal immigrants to the US. You need a good separation in hue, saturation and lightness to accommodate the limitations of counter printing.

Another factor seems to be whether two nations used the same weapons interchangeably. The OUNC as far as I know mainly used US weapons, mainly to reduce supply diversity. The ROK/KMC did have some Japanese SW but otherwise used US weapons. Having Two Tone means that a ROK/OUNC can use a US weapon or visa versa as per W.2C without leaving edge 'hints' as to unusual identity in an otherwise unexaminable enemy stack. Sooner or later someone will come up with a scenario/CG that will exhaust some SW limitation, this is ASL and it will happen. I believe that was the reasoning behind the original Two Tone (GMD/NRA) scheme.

While MMP might have got away with only providing US coloured SW, they likely realised that the OCD amongst us would certainly have thrown a fashion fit if we could not at least try to match our uniforms with our SW.

The downside is as you mention, less leeway in counter cutting. The OUNC scheme is ... garish ... at first sight, but I suspect that after a short time I won't notice it that much, I'll just see French.
 

Gunner Scott

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Whats really funny is from 1949 to 1951 all south korean SW (see W3.11) have a repair roll of "1" but on the counters themselves are the normal repair numbers. After 1951 the mobile nature of this war is reduced to trench warfare on mountainous terrain, which too me does not see like alot of fun to play out. The Chinese are way more complicated to play then the Japanese with the Chinese clocking in at 5 pages of nationality specific rules vs the IJA's 4 pages of nationality rules. The nice thing about the Japanese though is that most of their respective rules are not full of fiddly bits as is the Chinese. The Restricted fire and IPM seem like a very painful way to play the game. I would say for scenario designers, just make W7.4 NA. You will still get a nice battle out of the Chinese but without the "Mad Scientist" rule set.

But, if you do like East front, I think you will enjoy the North Korean battles, surprisingly the mad scientists did not overload the NKPA with a million rules.


Scott
 

boylermaker

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These days colour matching is a lot better than when ASL came out, but is not fool proof.
This is a good point--even my Russians have a wide variation in color, and my kit only includes stuff that's been in print in the last 5-6 years or so. So we might not be able to do fine gradations in color; and even if we have the technical ability to do so, we might want to forgo it to keep backwards-compatibility with ASL kits from a less color-proof era.

Still, I think that we could reuse existing colors without running into this problem.

Having Two Tone means that a ROK/OUNC can use a US weapon or visa versa as per W.2C without leaving edge 'hints' as to unusual identity in an otherwise unexaminable enemy stack.
Yes, but as far as I can tell, the scenario designers didn't take advantage of this capability. Future scenario designers might, but how many different US/Russian counters are going to make it into OUNC/ROK/Chinese OBs in the coming years? If the answer is less than "120", then I can guarantee you that I would much rather just have an eighth countersheet with those 120 counters on it. I would happily pay the extra $15 or whatever.
 

stuh42asl

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The only complaint I have is that with all the nations present, that Canada was not mentioned once. I realize that there can only be so many scenarios but we contributed as well as the Australians, New Zealanders etc. But I hope that those scenario and campaign gurus out there expand on the scenarios available. Otherwise the module is a fantastic effort.
 

Justiciar

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The only complaint I have is that with all the nations present, that Canada was not mentioned once. I realize that there can only be so many scenarios but we contributed as well as the Australians, New Zealanders etc. But I hope that those scenario and campaign gurus out there expand on the scenarios available. Otherwise the module is a fantastic effort.
W4.3. and Footnote 24, which then goes on to speak about the Canadians at some length, in fact might have the 3rd/4th longest note. There are also various references to them in the Vehicles Notes for example..Brit note 34. But, I think you meant scenario...though you said "was not mentioned once." Which is incorrect.

There was no cabal to not have a Canadian scenario, there is no Turkish scenario either, and they rotated through 3 Brigades during the war.

The module was never intended nor designed to have "an example of each." That would have taken up even more time. It was designed and intended to be able to create "examples of whatever." I am sure your fellow countrymen will be designing away to do just that.
 

Kenneth P. Katz

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Now, the intent of the designers, it seems, was not to try to cover the whole war, or take advantage of all the chrome they had constructed, but instead to kick off a sort of Golden Age of Korea Scenario Design. If this materializes, and all of a sudden I've got 50 Korea scenarios to play, then the chrome:content ratio will fall, and I'll be much more interested in learning the Korea rules.

That was exactly our intent. The value of the module will greatly increase when the many excellent designers in the community explore the Korea War in more depth.

By the way, I don't agree with your criticisms (obviously, I would designed the module differently if I agreed with you), but it's a great review, with thoughtful arguments based on facts.
 

JRKrejsa

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And you have to have different NKPA SMC.

Look at the Free French- they aren’t British, but those are supposed to be the SMC one uses. Which throws off the whole vibe of an FF scenario.

I’m very glad they introduced different SMC for the N Koreans and Chinese Communists.
 

Michael Dorosh

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The only complaint I have is that with all the nations present, that Canada was not mentioned once. I realize that there can only be so many scenarios but we contributed as well as the Australians, New Zealanders etc. But I hope that those scenario and campaign gurus out there expand on the scenarios available. Otherwise the module is a fantastic effort.
Only one battle honour was awarded to Canadians for Korea - for Kapyong. That action was already covered in the module's scenario mix by a treatment of other Commonwealth forces there (Royal Australian Regiment also got the Presidential Unit Citation, along with the Gloucestershires and 2 PPCLI). The Canadian involvement was not especially decent scenario fodder, no matter how heroic the troops behaved. Basically the Canadians were outnumbered something like 8 to 1, and called artillery into their perimeter while they stayed in their trenches. A little reminiscent of Hedgehog of Piepsk, perhaps, but the other parts of the action were probably seen as more interesting.

The rest of the war was mostly spent in comparatively smaller actions. FWIW I submitted an article on the Canadian brigade to MMP for consideration for the Journal and am hoping to put a scenario together to accompany it. I seem to recall there were one or two Canadian scenarios in the playtest but wasn't privy to their eventual fate. Perhaps we'll also see them in the Journal in future.

There were some notable actions but also bear in mind the Canadians didn't perform all that well in Korea (certainly not up to the standard set in the First World War). Not to say they weren't brave, but they weren't exactly out in No Man's Land dominating the way they did in the two World Wars. I think the most interesting of the post-Kapyong actions by Canadians might actually have been Chinese victories. In time, I hope we'll see these added to the pantheon, but may take time as designers find new and interesting ways to simulate the majority of fighting - night raids on fortified positions.
 
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bprobst

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1) As I've said already, there is a ludicrous amount of chrome. Imagine if the Germans or the British had been given this treatment: ASL would be completely unplayable, with a 300-page tome devoted to the Commonwealth alone (Co.12.3: Kenyan forces from 1939-1940; Co.12.4: Kenyan forces from 1941-1945; Co.12.41: Lend-lease armed Kenyan forces from 1941-1945; C.12.411: Lend-lease armed Kenyan forces from 1941-1945 in Burma; Co.12.5: Rhodesian forces, 1939-1943; and so on ad infinitum).
Noting that I do not, myself, own a copy of FW yet, and have not seen the rules in question:

I don't think that this is a very fair criticism assuming that there are only one or two paragraphs for each different squad-type and/or nationality. Unless you're playing a very strange scenario, you're not going to be using the 1939 Kenya forces at the same time as you're using the 1944 Rhodesian forces, so even with all those different rules paragraphs, you don't need to read all of them before you can play any scenario. This is why (for instance) the Amphibious Assault rules are not really as daunting as they seem at first glance, because in many scenarios, you can ignore most of them -- they have been organised in a (IMO) very manageable "ignore this if you don't need it" structure. Sure, sometimes you need to read it all, but not every time. If I'm playing a US vs. Chinese scenario, I don't really need to worry about how extensive the rules for Commonwealth forces are, do I?

That being said -- multiple different squad types within a single nationality can get quite tiresome. Unfortunately you have ASL designers who fall into two distinct camps: those who are incapable of imagining a world where there are not different counters for each different type of rifle ever fired by a soldier of a particular nationality, and those who find that 2 or 3 different squad types is sufficient for 99% of scenario situations, with SSRs to cater for the remaining 1%. Personally I prefer the latter approach in most cases. From what I've heard of FW so far, I suspect that they might fall closer to the first camp.
 

boylermaker

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That's fair, Bruce, it does seem to me like each individual scenario has only a small subset of the chrome. Still, there's some cognitive overhead in knowing that chrome exists to go read about it in the first place. It probably isn't that much if you are an old ASL hand, but for a newbie like me it can get overwhelming quite easily.

By the way, I don't agree with your criticisms (obviously, I would designed the module differently if I agreed with you), but it's a great review, with thoughtful arguments based on facts.
Thanks, Kenneth! It's an excellent that people are out there designing (all kinds of stuff) that's not exactly to my precise taste and interests or aimed at someone with my experience level: the hobby would be awfully small otherwise!
 

Kenneth P. Katz

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re: the amount of chrome in Forgotten War
  • The CPVA certainly is pretty heavy on chrome, and there is some controversy with the way that we portray them in the module and the clarity of the rules. I like what we did and I think that the characteristics of the CPVA justify the chrome. I still think that much of the CPVA rules are no big deal for an intermediate-level ASL player. Others may disagree.
  • The Steep Hills rules also add some chrome. In my opinion, this is a terrain type that ASL really needed. Again, I don't think that the rules will be much trouble for an intermediate-level ASL player.
  • The Searchlight rules are not everybody's cup of tea. They are easy to avoid.
  • The new air-related rules should be no big deal for anybody who is competent in Chapter E.
  • The rest of the rules are trivial, by ASL standards.
I should kick this off by saying very clearly: I am not the target audience for this module. I don't have any particular interest in Korea, and For my taste, the chrome:content ratio is too high. The cognitive load required to learn about 1000 fiddly small-effect rules, and a handful of large-effect rules, just isn't worth it for me.
 

Kenneth P. Katz

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I am not a fan of the proliferation of squad types. I think that the variety of squad types in Forgotten War is consistent with traditional ASL practice.

Noting that I do not, myself, own a copy of FW yet, and have not seen the rules in question:
That being said -- multiple different squad types within a single nationality can get quite tiresome. Unfortunately you have ASL designers who fall into two distinct camps: those who are incapable of imagining a world where there are not different counters for each different type of rifle ever fired by a soldier of a particular nationality, and those who find that 2 or 3 different squad types is sufficient for 99% of scenario situations, with SSRs to cater for the remaining 1%. Personally I prefer the latter approach in most cases. From what I've heard of FW so far, I suspect that they might fall closer to the first camp.
 
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