FUBAR Sci-Fi With My 15mm Toys

So, I bought Tomorrow's War a while back and I've played one trial game with it. While it has a lot of neat ideas, I don't see myself playing it with the kids. Maybe with some other adult gamers after a couple demos or practice game, maybe solo, but not with the kids. Not yet at least.

Fast forward to this past weekend. A friend of mine with a penchant for using frogs as his online persona asked me to review a VSF supplement he was doing for FUBAR. Now, on and off he had been recommending FUBAR to me for use with my sci-fi collection as I had been becoming upset about CAV and looking for a replacement. I read the base rules over it didn't grab me.  For some reason though when I was looking at it this weekend from a troubleshooting point of view I started to see lots of potential here, especially for my 15mm stuff since TW seemed a bit dense. So I figured what the heck on Sunday night and threw some terrain down and got my Felids and bugs out. First time through I screwed up turn sequencing as I had misread the activation section. That took about 15 minutes with two units per side (the bugs got a chance to respawn, Felids had to survive six turns before being air lifted out). Second game took about 30 minutes with me following the rules. Still not entirely sure that I was handling suppression right, but seems I was after reading through the Forge of War forums. I would post  a pic, but my camera crapped out again before I started.

My overall impression is that it's a very basic system that is quite easy to modify to fit your needs in a game. I think units might come out a bit "samey," but that's ok for the grunts I think. Need to try it with vehicles next time I think and see how they work, but I think I may need to make some alterations of my own before I'm totally happy with it, primarily in further differentiation of weapon types. Most importantly I enjoyed playing it.  It should be easy to teach them the rules, which is another plus in my book. If you're looking for an all encompassing tome of rules +5 this isn't the ruleset you're looking for. Core rules print on one letter-sized page (though apparently there's a looming shift to a two-page format without even adjusting the cost of the rules). Different supplements exist for various settings/genres, though while there is a medieval set I didn't see anything specifically geared towards fantasy. Supplements are generally one or two pages following the same format as the core rules. If you're looking for something that is easy to modify and leaves a lot up to your creative juices regarding how you play with your toys then this is right up your alley. I also get the feeling that this is the game you want to play if you have 30 minutes or an hour and want to get a quick game in.

 My recommendation is that if you haven't looked at FUBAR, go download it, grab those 40k figures you have sitting around and give it a shot. Worst case scenario you hate it and have only printed one or two pages, though I doubt this will be the case.