Recent Articles
 

What’s Changed in the Reprinted Flames of War Rulebook?

What’s Changed in the Reprinted Flames of War Rulebook?

What’s Changed in the Reprinted Flames of War Rulebook?
With Phil Yates

Battlefront have just released a reprint of the Flames of War rulebook to coincide with the launch of the new Late War period. You can tell it from the original printing because it no longer has the dates 1942 - 1943 on the cover.

What’s Changed in the Reprinted Flames of War Rulebook? What’s Changed in the Reprinted Flames of War Rulebook?

We took the opportunity to update a few things in the reprint, but in essence it’s exactly the same (the page numbering is identical — everything is just where it was), so there is no need to rush out and buy a new copy.

I’ll go through the changes next, and at the end of this article there is a link so that you can download the exact text of the changes.

Making It Late War
The reprint has been given a late-war flavour with eight more pages of history covering 1944 and 1945, and some diagrams rephotographed with late-war models instead of the mid-war models in the original printing. The quick start guides, unit cards, and force building section now have a late-war flavour, but the content is identical.

Artillery
The Artillery section has two changes. The first is that we added the Salvo Template rules from the Mid War Eastern Front books into the main part of the artillery rules. The second is that we have made it explicit that tanks don’t get a +1 bonus to their armour for being over 16”/40cm range when hit by an artillery bombardment

Assaults
The Assault section has one change to how defensive fire forces tanks to fall back. Now all armoured tank teams are treated the same, regardless of their Top armour rating, so they need two tanks bailed out or destroyed to force them to fall back.

Missions
The changes to the mission sections bring the variations from the popular More Missions pdf into the core rulebook. We added the optional Battle Plans mission selector into the rulebook, and modified the way you hold objectives to match the More Missions pdf. Instead of checking if you have cleared away the enemy and hold the objective at the start of the turn, you check at the end of the turn, provided that you started the turn on the objective. We also modified Deep Reserves to reflect the differences between periods (echoing the change previously made in the Lessons From the Front FAQ) to reflect differing definitions of a battle tank over time.

To fit the Battle Plans, we removed the design notes from the back of the book, so if anyone who has the reprinted book wants to read them, we’ve put a copy of them here:

Click here to download the Design Notes pdf...

Special Rules
The first printing only had special rules for the British and Germans, with a focus on the Mid War period. We added special rules for the Americans and Soviets in the reprint, as well as rules for the limited availability of German Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons, while removing some of the specifically Mid War examples from the British and German sections. Don’t worry if you plan on playing Mid War, all the rules are in the relevant books and on the back of unit cards anyway!

In Closing
As you can see, the changes are mostly just bringing some key things from the Lessons From the Front FAQ and the More Missions pdf into the core rulebook, along with giving more examples of national special rules.

If you have a first edition book, download the changes here to see them in detail.

Click here to download the Changes pdf...

~Phil