Brandon Fraley

The Wargame Library Speaker Series continues with Brandon Fraley, author of Hail of Fire. To learn more about the game and follow the latest updates, visit Retro Boom Games.

What originally inspired you to start working on Hail of Fire?

It was originally an exercise to try and condense Flames of War into 3 pages. I was a big Flames of War tournament player. Not a good one by any measure, mind you, but a regular nonetheless. However I also really wanted to play the game with my non-gamer friends and there was obviously zero chance of them even looking at a game with 50+ pages of rules. So I tried to figure out how to pare down Flames into the purest essentials. I don’t think I was successful in that endeavor, but I ended up with 3-5 pages of rules that kept evolving and developing their own flavor, clearly more distinct.

By the time the Received Fire Points mechanism was implemented, it was clearly a different game with its own goals and identity. The mechanic for Received Fire Points is quite unique.

How did you come up with this concept and when did you realize you had something special?

It started with Ivan Sorensen's FiveCore Company Command. The shooting mechanism is wonderfully intuitive: your modifiers set how many “shock” and “kill” dice you roll, only looking for 1s and 6s. The four potential effects range from pushed back to dead. The result I loved most left the die sitting beside the model, its fate unresolved. On a later turn you re-roll it, and the effect might lift (rolling a “miss”), or it might change wounded to dead. That second result is what really hooked me. Plenty of games offer a chance to remove a pin or suppression, but Fivecore said the roll could “reveal” that things were worse than you realized. FiveCore is built to be small, convenient (small table, a handful of models, under an hour), which Hail of Fire never was, so I set out to carry that uncertainty into a bigger frame and lean into it harder.

Working on it also made me notice how many games provide players with what should be unknowable information – the “god's eye view” of the battlefield. Particularly the instant confirmation of shooting. My guys fire at a house and I know immediately who was hit, who was killed, and how the survivors are holding up. That suddenly felt deeply inauthentic. So Hail of Fire changed course and it became a game just as much about fog of war as one about simple, accessible systems.

Where does the concept of Hero Points come from and what do you think they represent in the game?

Uncertainty! It's the core of the whole game. Hero Points keep you guessing at the number and kind of actions your opponent can take, and a little anxiety comes with every one you spend (you never know whether more will come before the game ends). The form they take in the rules is simple to explain, yet it strongly reinforces the entire aesthetic the game is reaching for.

You avoided a points system entirely. Why?

Honestly, it's less about points systems than about how they're usually used.

Most games go with the standard setup: both sides bring the same points total and call it balanced. But no number can assign a fixed value to a unit whose worth swings with the terrain, the scenario, and what it's facing, so that balance is mostly an illusion. Chasing it turns setup into homework, with players at home grinding through drafts of force lists, making sure no budget goes to waste. And it stubbornly insists both forces be evenly matched, which is a strange thing to ask in a hobby built on recreating history, where the battles were almost never balanced.

So I’ve been developing ways to nudge the victory conditions to reflect imbalances rather than demand symmetrical forces. I want you to play with what you want: a historical formation or the models you’ve just been wanting to get on the table. You shouldn't need a calculator and three list revisions to earn what the rules call a "good game."

What behaviors emerge naturally from the rules that make players act historically?

Players naturally fall into historical tactics. Find, fix, flank, finish. Fire and movement. Suppressing a position before assaulting it. Scouting ahead before committing. Keeping infantry close to the tanks. Nobody tells them to do any of it. They can perceive the consequences immediately. And I feel like it happens because the game is simple. Very few special rules, exceptions, or modifiers, so the core truths underneath are easy to see. An example: you fire to suppress, not to kill. Something like 40,000 rounds went downrange for every man killed in that war, so why did armies keep using such "ineffective" weapons? Because shooting is what lets you maneuver. Players feel that immediately, and their decisions follow.

Finding the simplest way to get those truths across is what drives every part of the game. Random movement instead of an overwatch system still leaves troops caught in the open and killed when making risky moves. Running vehicles through the same RFP system as infantry means a hit tank that didn't explode just sits there, neither player knowing yet whether the crew is dead or just rattled, both left to decide what to do from there. No damage chart needed. Each little rule does the heavy lifting instead of requiring a pile of extra chrome. The historical feel comes from those simple rules matching how it really worked, not from piling on extra ones.

What mechanic changed the most during playtesting?

Really, the game hasn’t changed that much in years. The RFP system, for example, has been nearly identical as it was after its few couple tweaks. The system that has changed the most is likely the assault rules. The task of creating and implementing rules that are simple to explain, short of the page, and cover all the necessary edge cases in a satisfactory way is a struggle. They’ve probably seen 3 or 4 significant revisions over the years, and I’ve been satisfied with them for quite a while. That said, the game has always evolved alongside my curiosity of what's possible to better simulate through simpler mechanisms, so I won’t be surprised if and when a realization comes that forces me to tinker again.

If someone already owns Crossfire, Fireball Forward, Flames of War, or another company-level system, why should they try Hail of Fire?

I play all of those games. I’m a fan of each of them, so I’m not here to suggest that Hail Of Fire is superior. What Hail of Fire offers is a different feeling at the table, and it comes from how little is in the way. It's a tiny ruleset (only 10 pages of actual rules, large font, lots of space, with some pictures thrown in). It’s designed for players to get much more out of it than it demands they put in. The other half is fog of war. You fire and don't know what you hit. You watch a tank stop and don't know if it's dead. An ambush threatens every corner. Hail of Fire builds the whole game around it.

Best of all, it costs you nothing to find out. The game's free, the rules are a few pages, and you can teach it in twenty minutes. Give it an afternoon. Worst case, you've spent a couple of hours; best case, you've found the way you want to play