Some of the morale, motivation and similar rules were expansions to and, I thought, superior to DS's. The C2 rule was a particular favorite. A leader, when activated, got 2 actions. If he was a squad leader, he moved & shot his squad. If he were a higher leader, he could use the actions to activate subordinates, who might also use them to activate subordinates. Thus, a company CO could roll to activate 2 platoon leaders, who could in turn roll to activate two squads, all to move and/or shoot on the same activation. Sounds like a proper function of a higher CO to me!

Gee, that's getting a bit extreme isn't it? :green_fir

Not if you don't want the opposing player to get the satisfaction of killing your unit ;)

I can't remember the name of the game, but it was one of SPI's old WWIII mega-games. Under the rule for "Use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons," it said,

"To simulate the use of tactical nuclear weapons, soak the map in gasoline and light it on fire."

Ha! I went out and found the Red Storm Rising boardgame I bought years ago at some yard sale. Have never played it...

Played the first scenario from Last Battle against my 11 year old daughter Friday night. A good thing she's not a tactician or it might have turned out other than me with a pyrrhic victory! (Just can't win with nothing but pistols and the odd shotgun against assault rifles!)
The best part of it was her desire to play again right away. :p

Playing these types of games with kids can be hilarious fun.

I played a simple d20 RPG with my 10yr and 13yr old cousins. I told them they were spies and they had to infiltrate this missile base. Twenty minutes later, one was distracting the guards with a robotic monkey while the other snuck in and disabled the base commander by sending laughing gas through the air vents!

Who would've though of that? :D

After reading through the rules, I thought that playing the game would be a great way to run a campaign set during the Twilight War. Assign the PCs to one of the units (Armored or Infantry) in the board game, and play the game through that unit's eyes. Every session would be the consequences of one "board-game turn". Like if they got damaged, there would be an overwhelming Warsaw attack, but if they moved ahead and stomped a Warsaw unit in the board game, the "in-game" consequence would be them establishing a breakthrough. If/When the "board-game" unit is destroyed, that'll be the PCs finding themselves in a "you're on your own" scenario, opening things up. But you can still wage the "board-game war" to help establish what is going on around them!

Even better, have two of the PCs playing each side, but give the Warsaw Player a good reason to want to crush himself "in-game"!

Granted, with this method the Twilight War won't evolve as it did "in canon", but it'd be a great way to establish your own custom timeline.

*In Red Storm Rising, there are rules for chemical weapons, but not nukes, so that has to be tossed around a bit. Probably just say that one nuke 'wipes out' any units on a particular spot, leading to a chaotic break-up "in game".*

I'd just like to throw in my support for Air Superiority / Air Strike. Totally badass games, imo. They're just at that perfect line between complexity and playability.

Birds of Prey by Ad Astra Games is also great if you like your Air-to-Air super-complex and super-satisfying.

I like the Desert Falcons supplement that allowed you to roleplay a squadron.

I was always a GDW homer myself

Third World War series, Assault series and Combined Arms miniatures rules.

I'm also a shill for the computer game The Operational Art of War III.

It covers WWI to Modern Period. Most of the scenarios are for WWII but there are a fair amount of WWIII scenarios. A lot of user created scenarios as well, someone made a good approximation of the GDW Third World War series for The Operational Art of War III.

Poking the war with a stick
 

My Weds. night wargame group is shifting the GDW's Third World War series, after a successful and long run at Scorched Earth. We've started Persian Gulf last night, and we will move on to the European 3some after that. It's separated both for table space, and to use it as a training-wheels game (I'm the only one who's actually played it).

We got thru 8 turns of the diplomacy and into the intervention, so most of the pieces are on the board now. Turn 9, the cards were laid down for General Mobilization, so that will be Turn 0 of the big game. I expect we'll play 3-4 turns more of PG next week before tearing it down to set up Europe after that.

I also dug out my copy of "Red Storm Rising" for some appropriate inspirational reading. That hardback was a Christmas present in '86, wow.

Does anyone know of a war game, table-top or computer, simulating a second Korean War? Something with late Cold War era technology?

The last campaign of Wargame: Red Dragon is a Second Korean War in 1992, but I've never played it. Other than that, I can't think of any.

GMT has "Next war: Korea" which is somewhat contemporary.

Consimworld for this series shows that a Dave Clark posted a Korean expansion for the TWW series, but the website is down. I've never played or seen it, myself. EDIT: Ah, it's here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...lI4Yl8td2NOdjA

I am a huge fan of the TWW series and would really like to try out the Korean Expansion. One thing that you can really see from the map is the compressed front. I think the German front is 25-30 hexes and the Korean one at some points is only 4. That is going to be some mean, close in, knife fighting right there.

So, not unlike Norway, maybe more so? There are several 1 & 2-hex bottlenecks there.

Oh, and I had just as much trouble putting down "Red storm rising" as I probably did in 1987. I finished it today.

There is also this computer wargame:

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ProSIM/RT/RT_page.html

Yeah but the entire front is about 6 hexes wide and there are about 15 times as many units as in Norway. That type of forced unit density will make nuclear weapons really effective.

I don't think things bode well for the Korean Peninsula.

Progress report: we wrapped up PG, and are setting up the 3 European games. The Soviet players realized that there's a lot of Iran, and not a lot of units. I was able to use the Americans' mobility and airpower to isolate and wipe out the 2 strongest Soviet divisions on the map, and they ran away from eastern Iran, leaving the Americans and their local allies (Iraq, Saudi, Jordan) to close in on the more populous west.

We're going to switch sides as players, mostly since I am the most (only) experienced player, and IMO, in Germany, the Pact needs to push hard and fast to have any hope of winning. The game there, I think, is balanced towards NATO in the long run.