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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9547670" data-attributes="member: 7044704">The review is wrong about that anyway.  Time dilation during interstellar travel is reflected in the game by varying tech levels for opposing forces - it's quite possible for a garrison that's been sitting on a planet for a few months to be decades behind the cutting edge of technology already.  "Future" tech is better at killing outdated stuff, a gap that widens the more tech levels there are separating two forces.  In compensation, lower tech stuff costs fewer points out of your scenario budget, so you wind up with an advantage in numbers and/or amount of heavy weaponry.  For most of the war there wasn't much in the way of revolutionary technological change, just incremental evolutionary improvements, so the game gets away with using the same counters for most tech levels.  Near the end of the war (and at the final tech level) that weird semi-stasis field appears, at which point the whole game changes to forcing defenders to retreat into their field bubble and then going in after them with primitive melee and ranged weapons - swords, axes, bolas, darts, bows - since standard energy weapons are useless in the field and it's nigh-invulnerable from the outside.I wouldn't have called it a great game even when it was new, but it is surprisingly faithful and accurate when it comes to modelling combat on the hellish iceball "portal planets" in the book, and it has quite a bit of replay value thanks to DYO scenarios and a point system that covers multiple tech levels, letting you experiment with quality versus quantity.  The "field bubble" game is less varied, but there's still enough variety to give it some potential for re-use - and there's something novel about people fighting in super-advanced armored vacuum suits on airless iceworlds under artificially distorted rules of physics while using swordplay and archery to kill the enemy.What is missing is combat anywhere but those iceballs (so no raids on habitable planets) or space combat, but if you read the book those raids incidents were extremely rare (and basically one-sided slaughters) or for space combat, boring as heck to game out since you're mostly just waiting in a gee-compensator tank to see if your automated combat tech is ahead of teh enemy's or not.  I'll forgive a $17 game (which was comparable to AvHill stuff at the time) for not trying to do more than this did, and of the series of "literary adaptation" games Mayfair did this is actually one of the best in terms of replay value and faithfulness.  It's vastly better at getting the feel of Forever War's bloody, pointless attritional combat across than (say) the Hammer's Slammers game sells you on the way high-tech professional mercs massacre backwater low-tech armies, and either of them are much more versatile as games than the company War or Dragonriders of Pern were.That said, if you wanted a game that did the FTL time lag thing as a central mechanic, see if you can find a copy of Nova's old <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7535/timelag" target="_blank">Timelag</a> game.  It's small, ugly in an abstract sort of way, and the component quality is poor, but it does the best job of showing how combat forces will fall out of synch with the cutting-edge tech back home of any game I've seen.  You could also emulate the feel of what little space combat there is in Forever War by using Warp War (which was free online last I looked).  It's very much a game of eggshells with bazookas, and includes tech level rules that are almost savage enough to fit.</blockquote>

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