WWPD has posted a preview of the contents of the new Afrika Korps book for FOW V4. To be honest, my feeling when reading the article was one of disappointment, and my initial reaction was a thought that I should cancel my pre-order of the new mid-war books. After further reflection, I'm still buying the books, but the disappointment remains.
I have played Flames of War since stumbling upon the public beta in 2001, and the Western Desert Campaign has always been my primary interest. I have seen the mid-war lists progress from the barebones versions in the 1st edition rulebook, through the Desert Rats/Desert Fox/Avanti Savoia supplements, to the Afrika compilation. I skipped over the release of North Africa until it was converted to V3 and re-released on FOW Digital last year. With each iteration the lists have increased in depth, flavour and historicity. In my opinion the lists in North Africa are very good: the splitting of the period into separate theatres guides themed list-building, and they give you a range of options for representing the unique units of the setting.
Based on the preview, it appears that Afrika Korps dispenses with all of that development. It very much feels like the first Team Yankee lists: cut back to bare basics, with precious few opportunities for variation, for players to take different paths to achieve the same outcome, likely leading to all armies created from it being almost entirely in common with one another. Gone are the odd units that made the theatre distinctive: the Dianas, the Bisons, the ex-Soviet 7.62cm guns, the reuse of captured British equipment. There are no FJ, no Pioniere, no Aufklärungen. And to cap it all off the book includes Tigers, completely dashing my hopes that the new books would give 1942 its moment in the spotlight.
I presume the reasoning behind sending screenshots of an upcoming book to a blog is to generate discussion and "hype" for the new product. Unfortunately for the moment the spoiler is out without any design notes being posted by Battlefront, without any information about the opposing Desert Rats book to provide a point of reference, and without any understanding of the roadmap to how additional lists are going to be released in future. This prevents the book from being seen in any kind of context, and results in the book being judged against customers' expectations rather than the scope and purpose that Battlefront had established for it. Those expectations have been established by the late-war books, and Battlefront shouldn't be surprised that this lack of a broader context has resulted in customers becoming upset about the mid-war lists being stripped back.
If I were to guess at the path that mid-war will take from here, additional lists will be released to cover the options missing from Afrika Korps, very much in the pattern of the Afgantsy and Panzertruppen expansions for Team Yankee. This staged release is a let-down from the comprehensive V3 books that the community has become used to, especially so given that the NZ$18 price tag for a single one those TY lists is half the price of a LW compilation of two dozen lists. Looking further into the future, once a number of books and digital briefings have been out in the wild for a year or two, the familiar pattern from earlier editions will repeat as the lists are once again revised and combined into a larger compilation. This is unfortunate given that many veteran players will have purchased the same MW lists five times over, with Afrika Korps/Desert Rats being iteration number six, all in the 14 years since FOW was first published.
So, what does it mean for me? I'm definitely going to give it a chance, but based on my first impressions of a spoiler of the first two books of an as-yet unreleased new edition, my dream that V4 would bring about a local FOW renaissance lies in tatters.
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