Just returned home from my friend Thomas a little while ago, expect another Flames of War battle report tomorrow with lots of pictures as usual.
As we played today, Thomas friend Patrik came over and joined us from pretty early on into the scenario. Really nice guy. His presence as our "rule guru", him having played FoW a lot and me and Thomas having played FoW very little highlighted a few interesting things.
Me and Thomas, I would say we grasp the basics of the game. Movement, shooting, most of the assault stuff, artillery, smoke etc. We manage. And if ever something comes up that makes us hesitate we just have the "Does this feel reasonable? If so let's play it that way" approach to rule obstacles.
Now with Patrik by our side we were pretty much introduced to the full range of micro management and special rules for every situation. Just to name a few (and this may make veteran FoW players smirk) "closest easiest target" when shooting at a unit in mixed terrain, assault step technicalities with Recon vehicles etc.
One part of me thought, "well that makes sense", another part of me went "this seems ridiculously complicated when taking the entire game in regard". Because, with Patrik by our side we played 100% correctly in every situation, on the other hand things felt overly complicated. The basic rules and approach me and Thomas had played had worked out and been pretty smooth - without necessarily feeling "dumbed down" to be honest. There was still lots of tactics with pinning stuff down, keeping track of morale, assault approaches, smoke bombardments etc. Add to that stuff like bogged down checks, special rules for vehicles, for units, for shooting, hit modifiers etc. It had felt extremely fleshed out at the level we have played it.
Then adding everything Patrik said we should do, I started thinking if this game actually benefits from every single rule written into it. And a part of me really thinks the Flames of War rules are overwritten. There seem to be a rule for absolutely everything and more.
That does lend a great deal of detail, but at this point when we get to play FoW every now and again I'm pretty sure I will never be able to learn more than 75% of the stuff. And with the stuff Patrik pointed out for us, most of it just felt as "more rules for the sake of having more rules".
I'm usually a player who likes detailed rules. I hate simplified stuff that just feel like Yahtzee. But I also like to know every single aspect of the game and have it memorized after a couple of games. At this point there are two games in my collection where I really don't know them through and through. Malifaux, with the hundreds of individual unit profiles which I will never bother to learn, and Flames of War.
Me and Thomas have discussed the Flames of War rulebook at length recently, and I should add that we like the game. But it does feel a bit bloated. Many of the paragraphs describing rules are really long and don't have the best wording. Sometimes you can have the description of what a rules is supposed to represent mixed in with the actual rule text which makes it longer and harder to grasp quickly.
I don't know if I'm alone thinking about this when everyone is busy nagging about "tank parking lots" and "overpowered army lists". There are rumors of a 3rd edition being on its way. If so, I hope that Battlefront shrinks the rules a little. They don't have to dumb it down, but just remove the stuff that causes confusion, the overwritten paragraphs and rewrite the wording on some rules. I also understand the idea behind the layout of the rules as they are, but I think the book would benefit by having everything involving certain aspects of the game in one single place rather than spread out 30 pages apart.
The most valuable pages, and often the only ones you need to play the game are the summary page at the end of each "chapter" and the crib sheet at the back.
This is not meant as a rant, I just want to share some observations that have been accumulating over the course of my brief Flames of War experience.
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