AK47 Republic Reloaded - Review of wargame with fog of war

While the Cold War never escalated into a hot phase in Europe, it did merge with (often bloody) decolonisation in Africa and Asia, and the Western and Eastern blocs engaged in many major and minor wars with supplies of weapons and equipment (and often advisers or volunteers). The iconic weapon of these conflicts was the Soviet Kalashnikov rifle, whose importance is evidenced by the fact that it is incidentally also on the flag of the African nation of Mozambique, after which the AK47 Republic ruleset by Peter Pig is named, who also publishes his own line of 15mm figures for the game.

What defines the conflicts in Africa is the very different quality of equipment and training of the soldiers of the different sides and the fact that super-modern equipment versus old scrap meets on the battlefield. As well as the pervasive chaos and indiscipline, that is, compared to a "regular" Western war. 

But AK47 Republic manages to capture all this well as one of the cornerstones of the game. The rules divide all units into three quality levels: militia, regular soldiers and professionals, which determines how they perform in the game. It's no surprise that the militia are bad shots and like to run away, while the professionals just don't cut it. 

Similarly, there are three categories for equipment, which in turn is divided into old, classic, and modern, allowing players to deploy virtually anything they have in their model collection, and the rules can handle it without the opposing player having to intricately figure out what models to take or what time span to set their collections in. The rules have already sorted that out. So if you're playing a game set in the 1960s or so, the T-55 tank will be a modern vehicle. In a game set in the 80s, it will be a regular tank, and on a 21st century battlefield, it will be old scrap. Although even that didn't stop Russia from taking them out on the Ukrainian battlefield in 2023...

Apart from ordinary infantrymen and tanks, the game has everything that belongs on the battlefield of the second half of the 20th century. So guns, armoured vehicles, heavy machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers, trucks, armoured personnel carriers, but also relatively modern weapons like anti-tank missiles. And of course no "desert conflict" can be complete without a Toyota with an automatic cannon!

There's no such thing as a faction

However, the choice of unit (and quality) is limited by which of the 20 factions (15 for Africa and 5 for the Middle East) you choose. And just as equipment is not bought specifically, but loosely through its type, the factions work identically. So if you want to play Rhodesia or South Africa, they are not in the game as factions, but you can build an armylist by faction for "Colonial Settlers" or "White Colonial Army".

If you want Americans in Mogadishu, then you build your army according to the "Western Intervention Forces", and Cubans in Angola according to the "Eastern Intervention Army", although the real charm of Africa also lies in the unlimited possibilities to build your own little army according to your imagination.

Twenty factions means you can find rules for just about anything you want. There's a faction for dictators, religious cults, western/eastern armed armies, "savage" armies, professional mercenaries, communist revolutionaries, or the aforementioned foreign intervention forces. The choice of faction then determines not only how good you are allowed to buy your troops, but also what weapons your faction will have access to. 

So, for example, the People's Revolutionary Army has a lot of militia but no heavy weapons or heaven forbid air force, while the American interventionist army, on the other hand, has a numerically small but obligatorily mechanized army of pros with total "off the table" material superiority.

Every war is preceded by a prelude

In addition to the units themselves, the faction selection determines one of the important mechanics of AK47 Republic, which is a mini-game/event series called "15 Days to War". In most games, you buy models with points and stack them on the table where the battle ensues. This is not the case in AK47, because first you and your opponent have to go through a series of three weeks (but only 15 days, because after all, you rest and don't fight on the weekend!) where you both simultaneously, but secretly, deal dice on a calendar abstractly symbolizing your resources for a political fight or some minor military skirmish before the main battle.

Each day thereafter, you roll pre-allocated dice and whoever rolls more successes wins political/military superiority that day, which gives the player the opportunity to use the winnings to roll on the faction random event table. Of course, with that comes a "problem" - you roll two dice, but the possibilities are 2 to 18, and needless to say the better stuff is on high numbers that you can't roll on two dice.

There's a calculation or risk involved, where you can say you're saving resources and go fight another day "without reward", since then you're rolling five dice, or possibly seven more if you're lucky enough to win three days in a row. Beware, however, if you lose without rolling for rewards, you lose your accumulated wins and get no reward at all. 

The table varies dramatically by faction, and in some armies the bottom ranks are a table of penalties rather than rewards. But it perfectly reflects the spirit of the specific factions, which makes them play out differently before the actual game begins. So a religious cult can, with a bit of luck, get huge morale bonuses because the divine omens wish it well, but equally an army can half disintegrate before it reaches the battlefield because the omens don't wish it well.

Colonial armies buy modern equipment on the black market. Revolutionary armies get bonuses through government defectors, or lose soldiers through party purges. And how you fare during this prelude to battle determines who will be the attacker and defender in the following classic battle.

The legendary fog of war

A lot of the events in the table work with a "reserve box", which is not just a mechanic name, but is literally a physical box that you have models in reserve that are not put on the table at the start of the game. In "15 Days to War" you can move your units to/from reserves, and so does your opponent. In the game, this mechanic perfectly simulates "fog of war" where you as the player can see all of your and your opponent's units anywhere on the table, but your soldiers would not have this ability to see everything everywhere in a real battle, and so you as the player make decisions that your soldiers would not make in a real situation. For example, you know that there is a tank hidden around the corner or conversely you know that the next street is empty.

This " confusion" in combat is exactly what the reserve box does for us, because here the reserves don't come from the edge of the table (although the game does of course have this basic concept of reinforcements), but instead you roll on the table to decide what (if any) reserves to call on the table, and then simply place them in an existing unit already on the table.

This simulates that the unit was around a corner out of sight on a table of fighting soldiers, or waiting somewhere hidden. It's not always entirely realistic, as it can teleport a tank into a previously cleared dead end, but it's an interesting attempt to simulate the messiness of combat and a way to introduce a new tactical element to the game that players must constantly reckon with.

You don't wait for anyone in a fight

The game itself then behaves as we are used to in similar wargaming. Except for two specifics. All movement in the game is random and is generated by rolling two six-sided dice. Which is a large variance from two to twelve inches, which adds even more uncertainty, randomness, and opacity to combat. Of course there are modifiers like fixed +6 inches for vehicles or dice re-rolls for professionals.

But at its core, movement is very much about randomness, which is the kind of thing that can bother some people and feel like complete nonsense. For me, though, it's an interesting way to somehow use game mechanics to get closer to simulating that not everything always has to go according to plan, and it's also a way to generate command friction. Plus, we're talking about African militias in most cases, which just aren't anywhere near the level of NATO armies.

The random movement also goes hand in hand with the relatively short range of the weapons, with the rifles shooting only 10 inches instead of the classic 24 inches as in the vast majority of games. Which isn't the most surprising mechanic for shooting, though. That is the fact that it is simultaneous! It's not rocket science, but it's an interesting way to avoid the shooting of most other games, where units take turns shooting at each other when it's their turn.

In extreme cases, alternating firing can lead to situations where the starting side shoots the opponent before he's even properly able to starts his first turn (we're waving Tau into Warhammer 40K). In AK47 Republic, you open fire on a unit, roll dice, the opponent does the same (albeit with one less die to give the attacker some advantage), add modifiers, and if the difference is at least 5+, the losing unit gets a pin, and dies on 6+. So it could be that a bunch of militiamen run out with an RPG on a modern tank or a group of pros and not only do nothing, but if they're unlucky, die by their own activation.

It's another good mechanic that both simulates the fact that both sides can shoot in a firefight and not wait for their turn, and it also avoids situations where players try their luck and activate units to shoot with little chance of success, thinking "there's no threat and maybe I'll roll that six". In AK47, this risk may not pay off. That said, the mechanics of simultaneous combat are nothing shocking and are included in virtually every wargaming rulebook - they just tend to be exclusive to melee combat.

Roll. Roll! Keep rolling!! Roll again!!!

But let me not speak only in superlatives, the game has its downsides. The first is that AK47 Republic is relatively much about rolling dice. Granted, most of the time you roll one, at most two dice, but you roll all the time. On everything. We'll demonstrate this with an example where you go to activate a unit:

You roll on how many inches it moves. Then you roll for how many soldiers in the unit will shoot. Then you roll on the actual shooting. If you roll the same numbers on two dice at any time, you roll on the random event table to see what happens. One of the events is the arrival of reserves, so you then roll on the reserve table to see what reserves can be called up. It's just... it's still rolling. All the time!

The game has a bunch of modifiers (shooting alone has around 20!), which can annoy a lot of people, because then their army may not give the consistent result they want, because they don't roll everything. And even if those spikes are lost in the amount of rolls, people's minds are more likely to remember "how I rolled all 1s and didn't get the tank out of the mud" or "how Charles rolled two 6s and blew out my pro's like a candle with his militia".

The second criticism relates to the fact that the first edition of the game was released in 1997 and the second edition reviewed by us in 2009. Which brings with it the mischief of the rules as a manual to play and not an engaging book with tons of pretty pictures. The layout isn't as terribly ancient as, say, Crossfire (see review), but it's also far from the beautiful books that Bolt Action or Saga have. The rules are still written in endless blocks of text, but there are some explanatory tables, diagrams and photos of the models for your enjoyment, they're just in retro black and white.

On the other hand, if one learns to read these "instructional" rules, they are very easy to play by and easy to find, because everything is all together in a coherent way and one doesn't have to look for the rules between pictures of models that take up half a page. It just looks like a washing machine manual. But then again, due to its age and design, the PDF version of the rules costs 9 pounds and the printed version is 16 pounds, which is more than folk's money.

Age doesn't matter in war

Despite its age, AK47 Republic is still a popular ruleset that has a vibrant online community and a number of modifications for conflicts other than Africa. This is due to the generic nature of the units designed for widespread use for Africa. This makes it not too much of a problem to use them outside of Africa, and the ruleset has been used for every "Irregular War" in the 20th century from the Russian Civil War to Afghanistan. And lately there have been people trying to play the current war in Ukraine by it as well.

There are fan-made adaptations as well that bring more options and realism to the game. For example, the AK-74 fan modification (with 15 pages no crumb in itself) adds reactive armor rules to the game. Specifically, five types of reactive armor, each of which reacts differently with a different type of weapon. So anyone who finds the game inherently too simple, the community will take care of it! 

The fact that the game is still being played more than 20 years after its release, and people are inventing alternate army sheets for it to play in, for armies and battlefields it wasn't intended for, is in itself a sign of quality.

Verdict:

AK47 Republic is an incredibly fun game. Even after so many years since its release, it still offers an unusual experience that can surprise with the novelty of some of the mechanics. If you're looking for a game about irregular warfare in the 20th century, AK47 is probably the best game to reach for. It offers a great balance between brevity and fun rules, but still offers a relatively realistic gameplay experience. Although the problem with it can be the high level of randomness and the theme, which may not suit everyone. A lot of people may find it insensitive to not only play such a theme, but also to collect models for it, but that's a general problem with modern wargaming.

PS: Need some great looking "Modern African" buildings? Check out this Review of  Patrick Miniatures - 15mm Arab Urban Buildings.

Also, if you find this article helpful, you can buy something from Warlord store with my affiliate link or just buy me coffee. :) 

Originally published in Czech on the ZeStolu portal. Unless otherwise stated, images taken from my Hobby Instagram page @Potan_CZ.