I have recently been reading my past issues of PA, and your review of The Korean War caught my interest. I had not played this game for many years, but remembered it as very good. So I decided to have a game of this, and was pleasantly surprised to find my memories are intact, the game is very good. As you stated whilst the rules are not short they are very easily understood, and do reiterate themselves on important points. As a note I do not find anything more annoying than half remembering a rule and then not remembering where it is relocated. I played as the North the first time, but unfortunately beat my opponent in the fourth turn so we had to start another game. This time I was the South Koreans and their American benefactors. This game went the full twelve turns and resulted in a very narrow North Korean win. This was despite me occupying half of North Korean and well on my way to crossing the Yalu, and after surviving both partial and full Chinese interventions. I was beaten by my political masters, honest! To be truthful I was a bit disappointed as I had totally defeated the enemy and only the points lost for Global tension beat me. From my limited experience the game seems hard for the SK/USA to win, I would appreciate any views on this. I think that the idea of World Tension is excellent though, and will attempt to include the idea in my Napoleonic campaign rules to some extent. I also noticed that there was a complaint about the possible variations of casualties that could be caused by combat. The point made was that at 4:1 there was a chance that the attack could be defeated, this was said as a weak point but I find it wonderful. Unfortunately I play with an opponent who has to look at the CRT tables before he makes any attacks, thus slowing the game down immensely, I myself belong to the "throw the dice-then look" school, and so play quickly and lose even quicker. This CRT deeply upsets him as he sees a chance to lose, and so does not attack. Brilliant! Attacks are risky attacks in real life and should not be anything else in games. If big odds always win what happened at Rorke's Drift, the first days of Thermopylai and The Alamo to name but few. Despite my praise I admit that I do have problem areas , namely initiative and defeated defenders in battle. The initiative is an excellent idea at times, but totally rubbish at others. Let me attempt to clear this statement up. First of all I must state that the game is a game of very few units. One throws for initiative based on how may supply points you spent. So for example if your depots spend 2 supply points you may have from 1 to 3 operations to perform before your opponents gets his chance, this alternates until all have moved or both players pass. So after this why is the idea both good and bad? Good: It allows you to attack the enemy in strength. All units attacked if adjacent, but only one unit initiates the attack. So for example you have three South Koreans and spy a North Korean unit six hexes away. If you gain three operations you can move two units adjacent and then attack with the third and so hopefully stack the odds and win. This is when initiative is very useful. Bad: Unfortunately units that have moved are turned over and cannot be active again that turn, although they can still help in combat as above. The problem is that units in such a position are greatly weaker, for example an American division of 20-6-11 (attack-anti tank-defence) becomes 10-4-7 after use. A spanner is added in that if you do gain, for example, three operations you only have to use one and do not count as passing. So what happens is that after the initial use of initiative to gain advantages both players start a game of chess where they only move one unit at a time so as not to have to turn them over and so become a weaker target. Once a player has passed he may not move again that turn, and so he leaves a clear field to his opponent who his free to do what he wants. To solve this gamesmanship I will probably force all players to use the full operations each time. But this may not work, but I will have to see. My other problem is linked to the above. I find it very odd that a defender who is defeated and forced to retreat and/or forced to take losses, does not automatically becomes fatigued and so turned over. This is a simple rule to change and I will do this next time. Back to Perfidious Albion #95 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com