One of the things that surprised me when I first cracked into Fields of Fire was that, in addition to whatever else was going on it was one, big box o’ wargame.

My God, it's full of ... counters

Yeah, yeah. So I didn’t pay attention to the hype and the shills — or even the list of components before I bought it. I probably glanced at the ‘in the box’ list without paying any attention to it. Which would explain my reaction of “Wow. Five sheets of counters” when I opened it up for the first time.

Obviously, I’m not somebody who buys his wargames by the pound. When I’m mapping out my plans for game purchasing (which I do with a lot more care than I did, say, five or six years ago) I’m on the lookout for possible Red Flags of Weirdness in the component lists, but otherwise I’m not digging out a calculator to figure out which games yield the best paper-to-price ratio.

So. Basically there are two thoughts running through my head right now. First: This is one wild-assed counter mix. Seriously. I have been playing wargames for a long (long) time now, and this is the first game I’ve owned (at least that I remember) that includes markers for smoke grenades with different colors of smoke. Different colors and types of flares, too.

I-S-Y-N: Lots of smokey colors

Smoke and the other pyrotechnics are mainly used for signalling. Remember – there is no automatic or instant communications in this game. If you want a squad or a platoon to do something, you have to communicate the order from your HQ unit. Sometimes they’ll be on the same terrain card and will have direct commo. Sometimes you’ll have radio comms. But sometimes you have to do it the old fashioned way – either send a runner with orders or use visual signalling.

Of course, the orders assigned to each pyrotechnic signal have to be assigned before the mission on the company roster. Red smoke means advance to phase line such-and-such, purple smoke means assault objective one, yellow smoke means stop and take a leak – that sort of thing.

The second thought running around my mental attic is that a big counter mix means I’m in for a lot counter trimming. Nowadays I use the almost-world-famous Counter Culture Corner Cutter to trim my counters, so the work goes a bit faster than it did back in the days of snip-snip-snip with the nail clippers. But it’s still a bunch of counters.

So I’ll forgive you if you think this post is a bit BFD-ery that I’m using as a stall tactic while I trim out the Field of Fire counters. Right you are. As I mentioned to a friend earlier today: If counter nubs were rocket fuel, right now I could blast my ass all the way to Pluto and back.

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