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The recent World at War – Eisenbach Gap, by known publisher Lock’n Load Games, is a wargame made mostly for those of us who love the “what if…” scenarios pertaining to the Late XX th – Early XXI st centuries possible conflicts, in this case specifically the NATO vs Warsaw Pact showdown. And, in my humble opinion, it delivers what it promises, and that is a fast, simple (not simplistic) and elegant game system topped by gorgeous counter art and map, but let us go step by step.
PRESENTATION
You get a big gamebox (some would say too big but more on that later on), with a very nice and elegant presentation, although the back should be more informative and visually appealing.
Inside you’ll find some very nice material consisting of: 136 counters (American forces at company strength and Soviet forces at battalion strength, also some informative counters), a very nicely drawn map in strong cardboard, 1 rules and scenarios booklet (6 scenarios), 2 player aids and 4 dice. Overall not much for such a big box but all of it very high quality (the art on the counters is some of the best I’ve seen and an improvement even when compared to the Band of Heroes game and supplements), but why such a big box? Apparently this is just the first module of the series and you get to store the next ones inside this gamebox. The second module – The Death of the 1st Panzer (you guessed it, the Bundeswehr is coming! with some Leopard 1s and 2s, Marders, Guepards and such) is scheduled to be available in January 2008 in ziplock format, and I’ve also heard some French players talking about another one (Paris is burning) but I can’t be sure about that.
So, summing up, it is a very nice product if you fancy the theme and want to collect some/all of its expansions, but is it really worth the effort and money?
THE COUNTERS
In a word FANTASTIC! These are some of the best I’ve seen, and pack all the information you need to play the game, by a clever system of underlined factors and other visual aids (colours, circles, etc) all a unit can or cannot do is clearly shown in each counter, but I won’t spoil you the fun of the discovery, do check them out.
THE GAME ENGINE
Mind you, this review is written after only a light read of the rules and a couple of scenario plays, but I think my opinion is pretty much made up; the game system is simple to learn (which is nice if you want to introduce new players to the genre or if you’re one of those players who doesn’t like to spend a week reading complex rules and then go through gameplay checking and rechecking several stacks of charts and tables), all you need is basically on the counters themselves and this system doesn’t possess any CRTs (for those not of the milieu that’s Combat Results Table) or any suchlike, instead it is a bit like a miniatures game since you get to roll a number of dice equal to the applicable characteristic (AP firepower, HE firepower or assault capability) and score hits if equal or better than the to hit number.
The defender tries to shake off those hits by rolling the number of dice indicated in its armour factor and scoring saves in the same way as above but he also gets to add the save dice afforded by the cover in the terrain hex (this being the only save afforded to soft vehicles and infantry), each save cancels one hit, each hit disrupts or inflicts a loss on a unit.
The game system has a very nice, although far from original, way of dealing with the player turn, at the beginning of the scenarios you are told how many unit activation counters and end turn counters you must put in a opaque mug (or similar), and each turn players take turns drawing counters from the mug and activating the unit belonging to the counter (units may activate more than once a turn if they have more than 1 activation counter), if 2 end of turn counters are drawn before all units have been activated then the turn ends premature and suddenly (which is good for suspense).
There’s also a pretty elegant mechanism regarding Infantry Support Weapons (Dragons, Stingers, Saggers and such) in which you don’t say what squads are equipped with those weapons until you fire them, but each time you lose an infantry counter there’s a growing chance you’ll lose one of the support weapons (simple and effective).
There are also rules for tank overruns and assault firefights (simple but also very effective and realistic – by the way NEVER tank assault a city hex held by enemy infantry if you don’t have yourself some “ground pounder” support unless you’re extremely lucky at the dice).
The command and morale system is also very good, you get some command vehicle counters which confer bonuses to moral or even to assault rolls (boosting up one of your units) but each time a loss is produced in an hex with a command vehicle you roll to see if the command vehicle was lost, in which case you can still try to replace it with another command vehicle, but if you stay out of command range or loose the command vehicle be prepared because your unit will basically be FUBAR.
Besides Infantry, APCs and Armour what else do you get? Well, in a nutshell, choppers (Hinds and Cobras, no sign of Apaches yet), with nice LOS and flight modes (moving, hovering) rules, artillery (both normal, FASCAM, Gas attacks – soviet baddies only!), recon units (very good for indirect fire), mortars, ITVs and TOW equipped Mutts, Soviet Paras, Lions, Tigers, Bears, Oh! My!
BOTTOM LINE
I definitely like this game, it’s all it’s supposed to be: fast, furious, realistic yet simple and fun to learn with a very mild learning curve. Although not exactly a bargain, a definite must have for the fans of the period (although I don’t really know if the fans of the novels by Harold Coyle will like it, I haven’t read any of them).
Enjoy!
Rating: 8.0
Reviewed by:
kanwulf
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