Designer: Ben Hull
Series Developers: Andrew Stead & Colin Parsons
Player count: 1
Publisher: GMT Games
When it was first published back in 2008 (17 years ago at the time of this writing!), Fields of Fire was instantly recognized as offering one of the most engrossing solo wargame experiences and one of the most impenetrable rulebooks of all time. To be fair, it's not that the rulebook was bad: it's just that it was designed to be a great rules reference for the system, which is rarely the same thing as an effective learning tool. (And as someone who's tried to learn the ropes on a few occasions, I can tell you this was definitely a case of "not the same thing.")
Various efforts, many of them coming from the player community, surfaced over the years in an attempt to flatten the system's learning curve different ways. Two more Fields of Fire entries saw the light of publication—Volume II in 2019 and The Bulge Campaign in 2022—and it was about when Bulge was hitting the streets that GMT took the bull by the proverbial horns, chained two willing developers to a basement radiator and had them redo the entire thing.
Their mission was not only to rewrite the rules themselves, which were in need of clarity and examples, but also to create learning materials that could take a newbie by the hand and walk them through a set of programmed instructions, the way an increasing number of complex games do it nowadays. (Of which my favorite example might very well be GMT's own Mr. President.)
The result is a massive footlocker replete with more stuff than you've ever imagined you'd get to learn to play Fields of Fire.
Ready to parachute in?
SERIES RULEBOOK
Yes, the new incarnation is longer than its older brother but that's a good thing! It's an even better reference tome, and I love the spiral binding that makes looking up passages—and leaving the book open—a breeze.
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| The original Telephones & Radios section on the left (less than a page), with the same section, fully illustrated, on the right. |
Consider this: The original Fields of Fire rulebook ran 64 pages long, while this 3rd edition rewrite clocks in at ninety-six pages. That's a lot more space for charts, diagrams and examples, and best of all, it finally sports an index. But there's more! The rulebook also features an Index of Examples, of all things. I don't think I've ever seen this in any other game, and now I'll always feel grumpy when I don't see those things everywhere.
Yet the spiffy new rulebook says on its first page that you're not supposed to use it to learn the game. So what then?
STARTER GUIDES
That's right: not just one starter guide, but two.
The first such guide, "Basic Platoon & Company Training," takes you through the game's foundational operations, step by step, providing copious illustrations and truly leaving no stone unturned. Think of this as a 50-page "extended example of play," going first over basic concepts, then taking you through a Platoon Assault Course (with a single platoon to keep things simple), and finally a Company Assault Course that uses almost a full company to build on the teachings of the previous section.
Starting to get the hang of it? Then it's time to move on to the second starter guide, "Advanced Operations." This is where you'll learn about vehicles and how to fight them, along with planning and launching air assaults. Another glorious 48-page document that walks you through carefully crafted examples.
And we're not done yet...
In the past, once you were done digesting the rulebook, you had to pick one of the four campaigns provided with the game (Normandy, two in Korea, and Vietnam) and launch into Mission 1. Fair enough, I guess, but this proved to be a daunting proposition, especially if you were still shaky on the whole understanding-the-rules thing.
In order to help with this crucial first step out of training, this new edition of the game ships with a stand-alone mission that uses some simplified rules to help you get your feet wet on your own before you embark on one of the campaigns. And just in case things were still a bit muddy, the second half of that 24-page booklet proposes yet another long example of play, walking you through the setup and first two turns of the stand-alone mission.
CAMPAIGNS
Back when I was first attempting to learn how to play Fields of Fire, I remember looking in awe at the briefing booklets—the documents that contain all of the data required to setup and run the game's campaigns—and wondering just where to start. All the information was there, but presented in a super compact manner, essentially a printed spreadsheet, without much support. This also has changed with the deluxe edition, with what are now called "mission books" that make everything abundantly clear and don't shy away from illustrating game components and other relevant pieces of information. Which, trust me, comes in very handy when you're just trying to figure out what pieces to take out of the box and spread out on the table.
Let me give you an idea of the scope involved here. The original briefing booklets used to cover two campaigns apiece, roughly 40 pages stuffed with tables that felt at times like ancient stone tablets one had to decipher. So we had one booklet for everything to do with Normandy and Vietnam, and another for the two Korea campaigns.
In this deluxe edition, each campaign gets its own 45-page mission book with all the information you could wish for, starting with a two-page spread that illustrates all of the materials you'll need to jump into that particular piece of the action.
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| No more "What is that piece supposed to look like?" when setting up a mission. |
FURTHER MATERIALS
All of the game's player aids have been rebuilt from scratch, so much so that it's difficult to draw 1-for-1 comparisons with earlier editions. A metric ton of brand new elements have been added to the mix as well, starting with an actual player aid "action menus" folder, which will save you from having to constantly go back to the right page in the rulebook to look up what you'll have your men do next.
Company rosters are much more detailed (but you'll have to print the log sheets yourself—available to download from the GMT Games website—if, like me, you don't want to use the single card-stock logs that come with the game), and the Command Display is miles ahead of its predecessor, with specific layouts depending on the campaign you're playing. And the list goes on.
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| I'll leave figuring out what display belongs to which edition as an exercise for the reader. |
Add to all this the revised counters, extra elevation cards for one of the Korea campaigns plus a huge 3.5-inch box to (hopefully!) store every punched component back in, and GMT has given us the Fields of Fire package most of us were dreaming of but didn't dare hope for. I am in awe of the work that went into this, and I can't wait to jump right back into the action, knowing exactly what I'm doing, perhaps for the first time.
PARTING SHOTS
There is clearly more to come with the Fields of Fire system, and eagle-eyed readers might have noticed this telling example on page 6 of the Field Manual for basic training:
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| In the middle, a reference to British troops -- in the Falklands!? |
In that same Field Manual, the last sentence on the very last page greatly resonated with me, and reminded me why GMT Games is my favorite wargame publisher:
"If a mission provides you with a memorable experience and stories of amazing happenings on the battlefield, you have played a successful game even if you got every rule wrong."
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