This forum already has about five decent gameplay reviews of this mammoth wargaming thoroughbred, explaining why you should think about getting into ASL. They all manage it more succinctly and with more clarity than I with my green noobness could possibly ever muster. However, what the forum lacks is a rundown of the product itslef; that is, the rulebook. This page and these forums stand in for the whole game, if the photo gallery is anything to go by, but nowhere on the Geek is there a review of what you actually get when you purchase the ASL Rulebook.
Time to upgrade?
If you're like me, you've bought the Starter Kits and loved them, and decided for one reason or another to upgrade to the real thing. Maybe you are tired of not being able to put your finger on that rule amd you want a reference. Perhaps you're just precocious and after only toying with SK #1 you want to jump ahead. Maybe you need a brightly-coloured doorstop. Whatever. You're thinking about outlaying the big dollars for the Bible of the boardgamer battlefield.
First up, everything you've heard about this book is true.
-It's gargantuan. 200 pages long sounds like a slim fantasy novel until you realise it's small font, A4-sized pages, and with a couple of exceptions, it's all rules.
-It's complicated. You will get headaches reading this book. After playing SK #1 and #2, it's easy enough to get through the first three pages, but once you start getting into rules you've never heard of - dash movement, bounding fire, human waves... most rules take two or three reads to fully comprehend, and even then they're complex. It reads like a technical manual, and it's not easy to grok.
-It's comprehensive. There is a rule for EVERYTHING. Gliders, paradrops, air support, night time, snow, wind, fires, telephones, interrogation, swimming, you name it, it's in there!
Bang/Buck Ratio
I recall my first experience of ASL. I was a bright young roleplayer, attending my first SAGA - a gaming convention in Sydney that folded about a decade ago. SAGA was half wargaming, half roleplayng, and I was there for the roleplaying. 504
I saw a bunch of old men playing with what looked like an engrossing game, but one they had to cart around in elaborately contrived hardware or tackle containers. Each of them reverently carried a red and yellow brick. A week later I saw this brick in my FLGS, and picked it up. It looked like a complete wargame - heavy, expensive, oblong... but the guy in the shop warned me off, telling me that that was NOT a complete game on its own, and looking at the $130 pricetag, I put it down and walked off. Even ten years later, it's still a big ask - $80 on just the rulebook? What does it come with, gold-plated D6s?
It's expensive, but worth it. And no more pricey than a good AD&D habit. Here's what you get in the basic package:
- Binder
You can buy with or without the binder. The binder is pretty, and branded. Like everything else ASL, it's hopelessly drowned in information. The inside covers explain the basic counters in exhaustive detail.
And it's a three-ring binder. You can't really store the pages as shipped in anything else. Whether it is an inherent flaw with the three-ringed design, or just that my particular binder was banged up in its trip across the Pacific (a common woe with MMP stuff, I'm finding - the same thing happened to my SK Bonus Pack), my binder's top ring doesn't close fully, and is already beginning to tear up the pages. I'm thus pretty ambivalent about this part of the purchase, pretty or not. After my experience with it, I'd suggest getting it without and making your own.
- Rules dividers
It's kind calling these things 'dividers'. They are colour-coded card reference charts that match the colour-coding of the chapter headings, but they aren't really dividers. they have no tabs or labels, so there's no real reference time-saving until you're used to where in the book you need to be, and arguably while a game's on you'll need them for reference anyway, preventing you from using them as dividers. There's also a few that have odd colour-coding and there's no explanation of where they go, so you could easily just whack them at the front or back and forget that they were ever meant to be 'dividers' in the first place. 386