FoW: Playing Unfair
Hi folks, DNiR here with a short piece on why playing unfair games of FoW can be the most fun you’ve had with your man-dolls in a long time.
Now, anyone who’s ever thought about it has come to the conclusion that balancing a points-buy system in a miniature game is a lot of work. The only plausible reason anyone would go to all that trouble is to provide a level playing field (an endeavor in which different games have myriad levels of success) for play. Why, then, do the designers of Flames of War explicitly encourage us to frequently throw that level playing field right out the window, starting right in the main rulebook with “The Destruction of Panzerbrigade 106”?
I don’t know the designers personally, but if I had to hazard a guess at the reason, it would be that the Second World War was far from fair itself. The entire point of strategy, from production to grand maneuver to the strategic bombing for which the war would become famous, is to make tactical confrontations as unfair as possible in one’s favor. (Sorry, businessmen and game bloggers; they’re not synonyms). Of course, in the war we saw numerous examples of an army on the strategic defensive winning tactical victories or vice versa – the Soviets were hyperbolized as having “lost their way right to Berlin” – and matches in which the points are uneven allow us to see whether we can perform similar feats to the hundreds of real Hauptmaenner responsible for that quip.
There are plenty of other reasons why having an uneven battle might be fun or useful – suppose your friend wants to use his whole collection in a really large game and you love the sound of that, but just don’t have quite the number of models he does. Never fear!
Obviously, when points-parity changes, our goals must change too. If you played with half the number of points your opponent had, but still expected to run him off the field, that would be thinking very poorly of your opponent as a player! Sometimes our new goal will be outlined by a scenario with relaxed victory conditions – for example, a small force might have to hold only either one of two objectives; other times, the unfair scenario being played is an historical one, with the goal then becoming “do better than your real-life counterpart did”. Of course, your imagination is the only limit when it comes to this sort of thing; I can easily envision a Kursk-themed battle in which the outnumbered Soviets need only eliminate all the Panzergrenadier platoons in a Panzerkompanie to thwart the German attack and claim “victory”, since the tanks would then wait hours for more infantry support before proceeding.
If you’re still not sold on the idea of fighting a losing battle (or at least one you likely won’t win) in FoW anytime soon, allow me to point out that a lot of the game’s scenarios are as fun as they are because this concept is being employed with another name: Reserves. Consider being the defender in the Hold the Line scenario: On turn 1, you have 50% your units on the board; on turn 3 you have 75%, and on turn 5 you should have all of it with a comfortable error buffer. Coupled with going second, this means that in the most critical turns of the game you have between 50% and 75% of your equal-points force on the board. How equal-points is that really after all? (The scenario compensates, of course, with an Ambush, advantageous table orientation, prepared positions, etc.)
Fighting Withdrawal is the same concept in reverse. Turn 1 you (as the defender) have all of your force, Turn 4 you have 75%, Turn 6 you have 50%, and Turn 8 you’ve won. I may just be stating the obvious here, but Flames of War scenarios are so good because they make fair battles unfair pointswise and then compensate you in some way to make the game winnable for both sides, but encourages totally different tactics for each.
You can use this idea (or take it even further) in your own home-cooked scenario battles, and just see if they don’t feel more authentic and dramatic as a result. So do you like unequal point value games? How do you balance them out?
