Author Archives: Mark Fastoso

Hi All, Sorry for the long hiatus from posting. Good news tho’…the playtest kit is about 90% ready to be sprung on the world! Just needs some more editing. The rules are being built as ‘programmed’ rules meaning you read a certain amount and are then ready to play a specific scenario. Read a little more and you can play the next scenario. Eventually you will have worked your way through the entire rules set and can do anything. This is how the original Squad Leader rules were created and laid out. As a 13 year old I was able … Continue reading →

Last night the lead elements of the Ichiki Detachment clashed with a combat patrol from the 1st Marines west of Henderson Field. The Marines, led by Captain Charles Brush (played by Doug Austin), had a report that a Japanese patrol was headed his way and set his command of two under-strengthed rifle platoon and a machine gun section in a cordon defense to prevent Japanese infiltrators from reaching the airfield. The north part of his line covered two trails that led through a coconut grove while one platoon covered the jungle to the south. The Marines hunkered down and waited … Continue reading →

Fall In will be at the Lancaster Host Resort next weekend (Oct 30) and there will be eight Fireball Forward games being run by a variety of people. Curt Daniels will be running three Russia ’41 games that feature man vs tank actions from one of the Skirmish Campaigns books, Joe Seliga will do a Sicily ’43 game featuring US paras and the Herman Goering Division, Sean Barnett will be running two Normandy games…including Michael Whittman’s famous assault on the 7th Armoured Division at Villers Bocage and I will run a Normandy game featuring 10 Panthers and a Sicily game … Continue reading →

Well the armor rules are finally set! It took alot of back and forth, testing, experimenting and input from alot of great people…but we are there! The rules are first of all…fun. Everyone seems to agree that what we came up with is fun to play giving the game a nice level of excitement. On top of that the results basically match the results you would get from Squad Leader, so we know we should not get any funky outcomes. The mechanics are fairly simple: a shooting tank rolls 1d6 and two range dice. The range dice depend on the … Continue reading →

Jerry Frazee and his band of gamers in Charlotte, NC have been having fun playtesting Fireball Normandy scenarios from the Panzer Lehr book. Their observations and comments on the evolving rules have been invaluable! Jerry’s figs are fantastic and his games always look nice. Here are a few pics that he shared with me. They show the dogfaces of the 30th and 9th divisions fighting off the Panthers of Panzer Lehr. Ben Gazzara would be proud!

Recently, we have begun to play some early war Russian Front scenarios. (Converting scenarios from the Skirmish Campaigns Ukraine book.) The big reason we have jumped into this was to test out the new armor rules with early war tanks. We are tinkering with the ‘low end’ guns, ie. 37mm AT guns vs. heavy tanks like the Char-B and the T-34. But it has turned out that we actually found this to be a great opportunity to work on modeling the command and control structure of the early Red Army. The German Army and Red Army were quite different and … Continue reading →

Historicon 2010 proved to be a great testing ground for Fireball Forward. Overall, eight games were run over the course of the weekend; seven Normandy scenarios and one Hue City. Everyone seemed to have fun, the games were close and some rules got hashed out in the process. I am really pleased as the goal of creating a game that is fast paced and fun seemed to play out. Most people had not played before but were able to learn the rules fairly quickly…and several of them returned to play multiple games. There were two rules that got worked out … Continue reading →

If you’re headed to Historicon this year there will be plenty of ‘official’ and ‘un-official’ Fireball games being run. I am running all three scenarios covering the 2nd SS Engineer’s counterattack on July 9 and Jerry Frazee is running a couple of the Panther Battalion’s counterattack. All of very fun and exciting games. I will also be running a scenario of the American final assault on the ridge at Haut Vent using Tom Ballou’s custom built terrain board…should be a nice piece of eye-candy. This game is not listed in the program and I am not sure when we will … Continue reading →

Well…as difficult as it has been to nail down the armor combat rules, which it looks like we finally did, the artillery rules have come together very quickly. We tried them out in two playtests of the second scenario in the Hurtgen Forest: Kall Trail scenario book. Basically, there are a few types of artillery missions: interdiction, on-call fire, registration and prep fire. Except for interdiction they are all more or less played the same way with slight variations. Interdiction represents artillery fire being used behind the enemy’s front lines to impede his progress, resupply, hinder reinforcements, etc. This is … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago Jonathan ran a Hue City game using FIreball Forward. Actually, the game was first developed for his Hue City scenarios.The game was a blast and his terrain was a usual outstanding. One of his original ideas was if the game looks great it only enhances the experience of the players…and he is right. The only rules change we tried was ranged infantry fire. Basically Squads/teams have an effective range of 12-inches and a long range of 24-inches. MGs have 24 and 48 respectively. Fire at short range is a normal and at long range the ‘white’ … Continue reading →