A brief but effective guide to SCW wargaming. Lots of lists for the different factions in the war, sensible new rules, and some scenarios to get started. I would have liked a bibliogrophy or guide to books on the war, but it's hard to complain about a supplement this densly packed. Well worth it if you're interested in this period.

I'm impressed with this title. The core system is elegant and easy to understand but flexible and open to tweaking by the players which is nice. A lot of current rule systems are aimed at tournament gaming and it is nice to have a game I can play casually with my friends but is still tactically deep. The author has included a lot of bonus material as well: common house rules for the game, althernate turn sequences, and random tables to help with pickup games. It is a good tool box game that reminds me of a lot of classic games from the 80s and early nineties. I can see using this for some personal projects.

There are some negatives. The book seems to be a libreoffice writer file saved as a PDF. Functional, but people who want lots of artwork and well laid out pages will be disappoined. Worse, the author has elected to put many of the alternate ways the game can be played in line with the base rules. So the section describing the activation system discusses multiple activation systems before moving on to the movement section. I would have ranther seen the alternate ways to play the game in their own section later in the book. It took me a few re-reads to get the base system down because I kept pulling in elements of the alternate systems without realizing it.

Those are minor complaints and the game is so good I'm still giving it five stars. I hope this game represents a larger movement in the industry to return to creative and fun games over needlessly complex games that are better at selling miniatures then they are fun to play.