First, a not-so-quick point of order. As I slowly make my way into this game, it occurs to me that my initial question slightly missed the mark. Fields of Fire isn’t so much concerned with infantry leadership at the platoon level as it is with infantry command at the company level. So the appropriate Army field manual to consult would be FM 7-10 The Infantry Rifle Company.

Crap didn't work 30 years ago, either. (FM 7-7, circa 1977)

Or, at least it would have been back when I was a boy. It’s come to my attention that at some point in the last 30 years, the Army has had the audacity to re-number many of its field manuals. Probably just to throw off bald old farts like me. The venerable “7 Series” of field manuals has now been tossed into the documentation salad along with a bunch of other crunchy bits and assigned new designations. So in these modern times, it’s FM 3-21.8 The Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad and FM 3-21.10 The Infantry Rifle Company.

Damn complicated if you ask me.

And now a few more nuggets about the game itself that I’ll toss around to cover my blogging butt while I demotivate myself through the counter-clipping process.

For those of you who have missed it up to now: This game has no map. Or at least no map in the old-school style of “a hexagonal grid has been superimposed on the playing surface in order to regulate movement and combat”.

The map in Fields of Fire is created from a deck of terrain cards. Typically, cards are drawn randomly from a terrain deck and laid down in a grid of rows and columns. A small action, for example, might be played out on a map 4 columns wide by 3 rows deep. As you might imagine, the ‘map scale’ is a bit abstract.

Map, shmap. I got me cards.

There are three terrain decks in the box – one for each historical campaign covered: Normandy, Korea and Vietnam (lowlands). The cards themselves are fairly information-packed, including cover/concealment ratings, line-of-sight indicators for both sides and corners and a bunch of other stuff I’m sure I’ll get into later.

All of the card-based info aside, that’s still considered only a broad-brush picture of the terrain in play. During the course of the game your individual combat units find and utilize tactical ‘micro terrain’ that provides cover benefits on each card.

It looks like an interesting little process. At the beginning of a mission you’ll probably know where a ‘Village’ card is located. But what you don’t know is the exact nature of the cover your units will discover once they get there. Cover markers ‘discovered’ on each card provide a defensive benefit (duh) and persist throughout the mission.

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