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A Review of Clash on the Fringe (CotF)
Bottom Line Up Front: Get this game.
This is a highly recommended purchase if you have never played CotF and enjoy up to platoon level sci-fi action, or if you have the original version and enjoy playing it as the improvements to navigation alone improve readability and the overall experience of interacting with the rules of the game.
Inside this product you will find 159 pages of sci-fi goodness in a wonderfully laid out and illustrated package and well bookmarked throughout with rule sections linked and available from the PDF readers bookmark menu or from the PDF’s table of contents. This is a major revision in the packaging and presentation of CotF with some added clarity to the rules themselves. This is not a major revision to the CotF rules.
The core rules for game play are fitted into about 52 pages of the manual. Playable factions are presented in 26 pages of the rules. Factions are top level descriptions like Hulkers, Swift, and Bots - easily fitting your sci-fi miniatures collection into one the fourteen factions presented. If you are familiar with Five Parsecs from Home - these will be mostly familiar to you.
Troop types are infantry, vehicles, and monsters. Troop types are formed into units which may be a squad of infantry or crew served weapons, individual characters like leaders and heroes, vehicles, or individual monsters. All figures in the game are intended to represent individuals with the intent that each player will have 3-8 units fitting CotF into a platoon or platoon reinforced ruleset, a couple of small five man squads with a leader is a great start. A squad can be mixed and may have three riflemen, a leader, and heavy weapon support.
The mechanic. For each figure attempting an action, roll a d10 and score equal to or under figure’s modified characteristic relevant to the action being taken. There are five characteristics for units and all of them are important.
Units act on one of five orders which define movement and firing capabilities during their activation. This is the general stance or attitude of the unit. Leadership is exercised again when a unit leader or an individual leader activates and may issue additional commands to specific figures which may allow additional firing, movement, or rally opportunities. The unit order and leadership mechanics of CotF shines through and offer a player relevant choices that will impact success or failure.
There are no rules forcing cohesion within a squad, cohesion is emergent from the leadership rules which are critical to the game. Squad members too far away from a leader will be able to act, but will be significantly less effective overall and more brittle.
Fire and close combat will produce pins called Heads Down or may result in figure removal as a casualty. Casualties force Morale checks which may result in accumulated Stress hits on the unit. Stress will degrade the overall effectiveness of the unit until eventually they quit the field.
CotF finishes up by offering several additional features including:
1. Force point buy structure allowing the player to fully stat their own factions and units from the ground up for scenario design.
2. A scenario generator containing several d100 tables that quickly establish objectives, participants, and added twists.
3. Mechanics for solo play
4. A section for Campaign play including the earning of points that may be spent to improve forces in linked scenario play.
CotF is easy to learn as the game concepts are not complex and it uses a unified mechanic, it is the interaction of the subsystems that create interesting decisions for the player with the order, leadership, and unit status mechanics being gems. For the rules tinkerer, CotF is easily hackable within the sci-fi genre, or to any era featuring squads, leaders, gun play and vehicles. This ruleset contains a ton of sci-fi wargaming fun.
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