Saturday, December 20, 2014

Fire in the Lake tutorial done

Fire in the Lake tutorial. Things are getting heavy outside Hue 1964. A US sweep reveals two underground VC cells and in turn the VC rally next operation to increase their presence in Quan Tri province.

I dont want to say the game is hard to learn. It is pretty pre programmed. However the hard part is the fiddly bits. You have to remember to adjust things EVERYTIME you do something and it puts a lot of pressure on the solo player to not miss out on updating the victory track for fear of screwing the game up. The sequence summary cards are nice but use a lot of shorthand making the rules confusing or leaving some things off.

There are a wealth of options to undertake each turn and that makes the game wide open. It will take a bit to figure out WHAT I want to do to win. I have not approached the programmed AI yet. The flowcharts terrify and haunt my dreams. So at first I think I will simply play each side and try to master the rules.

Still the game captures the ebb and flow of Vietnam in the turbulent war years. I will be setting it up now on Vassal to give it a go solo using that module to avoid kitty cat devastation in case I have to leave the board up.



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