Flames of War Thoughts

Flames of War is a 15mm miniatures set in the war torn future of world war II.... I recently purchased the Starter Set "Open Fire" (seen above). This includes 5 miniature tanks, one miniature rule book, a handful of dice and regular sized quick start guide. First of all Let me say that I really like the rules for this game. The main rules for the game are pretty easy to get a handle on. The rules are pretty clear if not a bit repetitive. Though in practice there are some grey areas that bog things down a bit and get a bit confusing. Such as line of sight being based on a line and not on real line of sight and blocking terrain being defined before the game and usually not exactly what the terrain represents. But these are minor complaints really. The simplicity of the rules is actually really nice, especially if you've ever seen any other WWII games which involve numerous charts and graphs and string theory to determine how your guys moving around.

The miniatures from the company that prints the FoW rules are pretty nice, and pretty expensive. The infantry isn't that bad, giving you the option of getting a whole army of infantry on foot for $80 bucks, but tanks are really out of hand, going for around $14 a tank. Which is steep for something that's smaller than a space marine. Not that the models aren't good. They are just expensive. The good thing is unlike GW and PP's jurisdiction of only using their model in their game, FoW is open to any reasonably similar models. Which there are A TON of online.

I got mine from Plastic Soldier Company, it took a month to get my full plastic sherman tanks but I did get them for a hearty discount of $4 a tank. If you do a little poking around the internet your can find all sorts of minis that are 15mm WWII.

The game's also got a really we developed series of "army books" which each include almost too many options for units for you to field in the game. Almost every nation and era of the war is well represented with multiple army lists for each configuration. It's a lot to take in to say the least, especially since there's like 30 books out that serve as army lists for this game. They have been consolidating this library but ALL the list are still legal as of now. I'm playing Canadian Armor. It's fun and good to yell things aboot hitting people with hockey sticks. I would highly recommend checking out the FoW starter, at only 40 bucks it's a steal and is a good starting point to FoW.