First on my docket for operational games on the Korean War is the original, Jim Dunnigan’s design from 1971. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly beloved title these days, based on BGG ratings and anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered on social media, but as the first game on the topic (as far as I’m aware) and one that was published within twenty years of the war’s end, I couldn’t help but want to try it. I can’t say that my experience was comprehensive, I played the opening scenario and just dabbled with the system, but I have some initial thoughts just from pushing counters around for a few hours.
I’ll just note here as well that I’m not very familiar with wargames from this era – they’re long before my time – so it is possible that some of my observations are just aspects of design that were incredibly normal at the time and not at all unique to this game. That said, I’ve tried to focus on what I think are probably distinct to Korea, and elements of the design that relate to the history of the Korean war.
While my familiarity with this era of wargame design is limited, even to me it feels like Korea is building on the foundation of existing designs. Simple single d6 CRTs with combat ratios and no DRMs is not something you see very often these days, for example. My (uninformed) guess would be that Dunnigan took the same kind of core wargame you might have seen in Avalon Hill’s D-Day, for example, and modified it for Korea. Not that this is a criticism, it’s a perfectly sensible thing to do, but playing Korea evoked a similar feeling to what I get when I play a game in an existing series. I could feel the legacy of other designs in its mechanisms, but of course it was not part of any series (I’m not even sure if series were a thing yet when it was published).
In terms of gameplay, the counters have a strength and movement factor but not much else. There are NATO symbols for the different units, but really all the rules are covered by different strength and movement factors. Stacking is just two units per hex, but there are rules for merging and splitting units that can effectively allow for larger stacks in terms of strength value if not physical counters. The terrain rules are simple, and combat is quick to resolve (and deadly). There are rules for supply and naval movement, including amphibious landings, as well as a bit of chrome for one airborne division that the UN can drop anywhere they want on the map. There is a nice asymmetry in the game, for example there are differences in how supply works between the Communists and the UN, the Chinese are more limited in how they divide up their units, and the UN can inflict double casualties on Communist attacks.
The initial set up for the first scenario which covers the North Korean invasion in 1950.
One thing I really liked was the decision to have three different CRTs. When combat is initiated, the defender gets to choose what kind of combat this will be. Pursuit combat is harder on the attacker, but the defender must retreat. Meeting engagements are more violent and higher risk, while the final CRT is only available when defending a strong position (usually via entrenchment, but sometimes with special rules) and offers the best option for the defender but is of course more situational for when you can use it. While I have mixed feelings about the CRTs as a whole, the single d6 with no DRMs honestly doesn’t offer a lot of variety and it made combat feel very swingy, this choice really intrigued me. I like when games do interesting things with their CRTs, it can be a great way to introduce strategic complexity while keeping rules overhead low. While I don’t think Korea necessarily delivers on this, the idea that players will want to pick different CRTs situationally has the potential to add a lot of strategic depth to the combat but doesn’t require pages of combat rules. I’d love to see some examples of more modern takes on this kind of combat.
Things are not going well for the South Koreans after the first few turns.
Overall, the game didn’t feel very much like Korea. There are supply rules which are simple but offer some potentially interesting decision space. Supply is asymmetric, the Communists have to expend supply to attack but the UN doesn’t. However, UN supply units are slower especially when moving off road. Establishing a supply link is pretty simple, but it can be severed by an enemy zone of control, so cutting supply is also relatively easy. Units without supply fight at reduced strength, so this encourages the Chinese strategy of encircling an enemy position - although arguably for the wrong historical reason. I’m not sure the rest of the game does enough to support them, although that may be the first scenario speaking because it has pretty lenient exceptions that make achieving supply easier. It felt like there was a lot of interesting potential in the supply rules, but I didn’t necessarily seem to be using them all that much.
The limited air power rules just let the UN supply a fixed number of units via air drop, there are no rules for bombing. On the one hand it’s disappointing to not have that aspect of the war in the game, but on the other hand in a game that is this simple maybe it makes more sense to handle it this way. Yes the UN had superior bombing capability, but also the Koreans and Chinese were largely able to completely negate that strength due to their tactics. The game could choose to include layers of rules for UN bombing and for Communist night attacks, but it achieves almost the same final result by just not having bombing in it in the first place.
The only reason I noticed the lack of air power is that the Communists in my game ended up moving primarily along the roads, which they didn’t do historically precisely because that would have exposed them to bombing by UN airpower. The UN and Communists fought very similarly in my limited time playing Korea. Maybe if I got better at the game, I would move off road some more, but in the opening scenario where I’m trying to race to Pusan from the north it always felt like the right choice to move along roads and ignore the rough terrain. This made the game feel more like World War II and less like Korea.
UN reinforcements finally arrive, but they have to push out from Pusan to try and set up the perimeter rather than having fallen back to it successfully. With the CRT being as swingy as it is, breaking back out will be a real challenge.
The aspect that felt the most Korean was the aesthetic. While very simple and undeniably old school I really liked the look of this game. The map in particular really endeared me to the game. The counters are classic NATO symbols that I usually don’t like, but at least in Korea they feel appropriate - NATO at least existed at the time of the war. I do like the subtle color distinctions between the two Korean armies and the UN/Chinese – just about the only distinction between the multiple factions in play. Arguably more could have been done to distinguish the Chinese from the North Koreans in play, but this was also designed in the middle of the Cold War so maybe that would be asking too much.
Korea: The Mobile War unsurprisingly doesn’t have any political layer or mechanisms to try and replicate divisions within command for either side. It only covers the first year of the war and in play feels like the hyper mobile war with how fast it moves along, but there are mechanisms for entrenching your soldiers and so in theory it could eventually produce something like the static combat lines of the later war.
Overall, I had an interesting time playing Korea, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a great time. A lot of my enjoyment derived from the fact that I’ve played very few games from this era, so there was a greater novelty to the old school design for me that people who grew up with these games would not experience. I expect this game will very rarely grace my table, but it remains an item of historic interest and for that reason if no other I expect I will set it up again in the future to try more scenarios and maybe even explore some weird strategies to see what happens.