Meanwhile... Up Front rerelease finally just over the horizon?

A family visit in the heart of rural England left me offline on Monday, and so unable to start your week dear readers. I'll do better next time. I'll take a camera too. The countryside down there is beautiful and I'm going to show it off. Meanwhile, here's the story which had already been pushed down the schedule by my last-straw rant at the steam-driven OS that is Windows. This one will run and run I can promise you!

Browsing the forums over at Fortress: Ameritrash, I found this post about the long awaited rerelease of the legendary Up Front. Sure enough, one of the staff at MultiManPublishing posted details at CSW, including the suggestion that UF might reach preorder in July. Given the infamous history of delays of the so-called 'Up Front 2000' project gamers are justified in taking this with a pinch of salt until something concrete is seen, although I would imagine that the requisite pre-orders will be filled very rapidly once MMP add UF to the pre-order list.

Regular readers will know that UF is one of my favourite games of all time. All the same this news leaves me with mixed feelings for reasons which have little to do with the caveats above. Part of this might be due to my newfound fondness for Combat Commander, and I'm certainly not keen on the increased cost the packaging of the new edition will bear, but I think it's mostly due to some of what I've read about the new edition in recent years.

In that respect though this is a good announcement from Perry Cocke at MMP. Talk of replacing all of UF's counters has been dropped. And the touted gameboard turns out to be just a learning tool rather than a necessary feature of play. So the last major discussed change which has been bugging me is the idea that the Relative Range values will be reversed in the new edition. I won't go into details of what this entails, but this struck me as an unnecessary fix of a key feature of UF which isn't really broken IMO.

Ah well, this might be a trivial revision given that we've been reassured that the core design will remain unchanged, and of course, it's not my money that's at stake in this project. MMP are going to have to do something really stupid to spoil my interest in the long-awaited new edition of this classic game. I'll be watching this one all the way. ;)