Where do I start with something this big? I have been playing Korea semi-weekly (with a few gaps) since December last year. I’ve played it for at least twenty hours over the past eight months. In addition to my regular two-player game, I’ve dabbled in playing it solitaire. Playing Korea The Forgotten War has probably been my favorite gaming experience of 2025 so far. However, despite spending so much time with this game I still feel like I’ve only begun to dip my toes into its vast sea. In all that time we only played the game’s opening moments. We didn’t even get as far as the UN crossing the border and invading North Korea, let alone the Chinese intervention and the second phase of the Mobile War. For that reason I don’t feel like I am adequately equipped to provide a full review of Korea. I can only describe the glimpse I’ve had of its majesty. Caveats aside, this game is amazing and I love it. It is absolutely worth the time it requires.
I have already described my first dalliance with the Operational Combat Series (OCS), originally designed by Dean Essig and published by The Gamers and Multi-Man Publishing, in my review of Luzon. Sometimes it can be difficult to say new things about a series I have already played before. OCS in particular shines in how it takes its core systems and implements them beautifully across different games, rather than radically changing that core between volumes (not that the latter is necessarily a bad thing, I recently praised Men of Iron for doing just that). Inevitably, there will be some similarities between my review of Luzon and this one, but for the most part I am going to try and avoid repetition. So, if you wonder why I don’t praise some aspect of OCS in this review, maybe visit my previous one and see if I discuss it there!
The initial situation along the border in Korea’s opening moments. The North Koreans begin their attack, but for the moment it looks like we will hold (spoilers, we will not).
Based on the advice given by Matsuura Yutaka, the designer of Luzon, in Operational Matters #2, Alexandre and I opted to start our journey into Korea with the game’s second scenario (5.2: Invasion of South Korea). It begins with the North Korean’s crossing the parallel and the push south to the Pusan Perimeter, and continues on through the Inchon Landing and the push back to the parallel but stops short of when the UN forces decided to invade the north. It is 29 turns in total, a significant jump from the five turns of Luzon, and includes many of Korea’s special rules but leaves out the Chinese intervention so we didn’t have to worry about any China specific rules.
We didn’t end up playing the entire scenario. Instead, we played over half of the turns but Alexandre failed to establish the Pusan Perimeter in time and, even worse, didn’t manage to secure Taejeon, one of the key victory cities. This meant that to win all I had to do was take Seoul and I was about to receive an entire month’s worth of reinforcements in one turn. We decided that it probably wasn’t worth continuing this particular game, and were perfectly satisfied in stopping here and trying again in the future sometime. This does mean that I have yet to tackle a full scale amphibious landing using OCS’ rules, but we did see almost everything else the scenario had to offer.
The initial North Korean push was incredibly successful, resulting in me ultimately abandoning Seoul so I could hold a stronger position south of the Han river. My only consolation was that the attacks further west didn’t go quite so well.
When we started, each turn probably took us about two hours, but as we played we managed to get down to 45-60 minutes per turn without overly exerting ourselves. This increased speed was partly due to our greater familiarity with the system and partly due to the change in situation as the game developed. When the game opens both players have most of their troops lined up along the border and the North Korean player has plenty of attacks to make to cause breaches in the rather weak South Korean line. This meant that we were resolving a lot of big attacks and thinking a lot about how to position our forces for the next wave of attacks. As the North Korean invasion expanded, though, the supply limitations began to kick in and we went from having maybe half a dozen big attacks a turn to just one or two, and the game sped up considerably as a result.
Seoul falls and the South Koreans scramble to find a new defensive line. With a major breach in the middle of the peninsula we have to race backwards to avoid any of our troops becoming isolated.
Sometimes wargames can be opaque in terms of what it is you are supposed to do. They give you this big box of tools and some general objectives and say “well, get to it!” Sure, it wouldn’t be fun if they sat down and told you exactly what the strategy was, but I have in the past struggled to even know how I should be moving the pieces or how to achieve even basic maneuvers (looking at you Musket & Pike).
Korea does an amazing job at laying down a clear framework for what the two players want to achieve. The North Koreans want to reach Pusan as fast as possible. While the Sudden Death victory line is probably too much to hope for, the victory conditions are simple and easy to understand. The North needs to take Seoul and Taejeon and then hole the UN and South Korean forces up near Pusan for long enough to hold on to those two cities. The UN and South need to slow down the North Korean advance and, ultimately, retake Taejeon and Seoul (they also need to have Taegu, but the idea that you could secure both Seoul and Taejeon without Taegu seems...unlikely)
Exactly how you achieve these goals is up to you. The Korean peninsula offers several paths through which an invading army can pass. In our game, Alexandre mostly stuck to the main roadways, but when we were discussing the game’s conclusion we agreed that it would have been worth him going off-road more. That would potentially create interesting problems in maintaining his supply lines, but would also have better enabled him to threaten mine and force me to fall back without firing a shot. Instead he relied mostly on carefully coordinated frontal assaults, which could be very effective but were also incredibly costly.
Some lucky initiative rolls let me pull my troops back mostly intact. We still don’t exactly have a great defensive line here, but it’s a lot better than it was. Supply line limitations also prevent the North Koreans from pushing too hard along the eastern edge of the map.
That cost is where a lot of the game lies in Korea, and I mean that in the best possible way. I think the idea of counting supplies and resources while playing a game might sound tedious, but OCS strikes a perfect balance in terms of granularity and abstraction. Supply points represent all the kinds of supply you use: fuel and ammo, as well as another miscellaneous bits that your army might require. There’s no need to count individual supply types, which would get tedious. Instead, you spend supply to move your vehicles, in Korea’s opening turns that’s the handful of Russian tanks the North Koreans have as both armies are mostly on foot, but you also spend them to make attacks and to defend against them. Because the defender in an attack spends a maximum of 2 supply tokens, while the attacker basically spends 1 per attacking unit (it’s a little more complicated than that, but it doesn’t matter right now), it generates an immediate cost difference. The North Korean player will be spending four or more times the amount of supply per turn as the South Korean player just because they’re on the offensive. This is further exacerbated if they want to use their artillery at all. Bombarding an enemy position before attacking it can be incredibly useful, because if you Disorganize the enemy they fight at half strength, but artillery is incredibly expensive. As a result, you are going to pay through the nose to make those big attacks against weakened enemies. That’s fine for the first few turns when there is a huge stockpile of supply, but what happens when that has been burned through?
There’s some wonderful asymmetry in how players get supply in Korea. The North Korean player rolls on a table every turn to see how much supply turns up in Pyongyang, which they can then move to the front via the railways. While there isn’t an enormous variation between the rolls, it is enough that you can’t know exactly how much supply you will have in a future turn. So, when you’re blowing all that supply on big attacks you have to consider whether you will even be able to sustain this assault in future turns. Alexandre ultimately had to abandon his simultaneous two-pronged invasion and focus on just one path per turn because the supply costs were too great to be attacking in both the west and middle of the peninsula.
I finally settled into this defensive position behind rivers, which halve the strength of attacking units and so are ideal for hiding behind. We would spend quite a while in this stalemate as Alexandre had to build up supply to bombard my units before making his attacks.
Meanwhile, the UN player has unlimited supply. Sounds great, except that all the supply is in Japan. You have to bring any supply you actually want to use to Korea first, and you don’t have all that much shipping capacity. You can sail supply on boats into Pusan harbor, but your reinforcements also all arrive in Japan and need to be brought over on those same boats. Do you need more soldiers this turn, or supply? The answer is both, which creates a delicious tension. A few turns in I got some transport aircraft that would let me bring in a few more supply tokens, assuming the weather was favorable (luckily for me, it mostly was), but it only provided a small relief.
There are so many excellent little decisions to be made in a turn of Korea. For example, you need to consider where to position your supply on the map. Supply can only be used if it is near the unit that is spending it (usually via a Headquarters unit that “throws” the supply forward, but that only goes so far and the map is huge). The North Korean player needs to bring all that supply from Pyongyang to the front, which is easy along the major rail line connecting the two capital cities but gets more complicated if you branch out your attack to elsewhere on the peninsula. The South Korean/UN player also has to bring their supply up from Pusan, but needs to be careful about positioning it too far forward. Who knows how far the North Korean player will get in one turn, and if they take your supply that’s a disaster.
Alexandre successfully breached my river position north of Taejeon. I debated abandoning the city, like I had Seoul, but opted instead to try and fight for it. After all, I live there.
Individual combats also ask you to consider how much supply you can afford to commit to this attack, and the CRT plus the potential for Surprise makes it hard to predict exactly what level of commitment is safe. Ideally you want to attack with as much as possible, but can you afford to do that? Maybe you have the supply this turn, but you still need to keep attacking next turn, and the turn after that, and how much supply will you be getting in the meantime? You don’t know! Once you commit to the attack, the Options result on the CRT creates more decisions for both players.
There was never a single turn of Korea that wasn’t interesting. Even turns with just one small attack were exciting because you are thinking about what you’ll do next turn and how you can set up to maximize that opportunity. We were never on auto-pilot, just resolving rules to get to the good bit of the game. The whole experience was the good bit. Even rolling for more supply or reinforcements felt tense, and we never had enough to do what we wanted. The system, the map, the situations all created endless room for planning, and despairing when plans crumbled. It had the satisfying tempo that I’d tasted in Luzon, but it was in the greater scope (both in geography and number of turns) of Korea that I truly came to appreciate it.
I had my troops dig a hedgehog in Taejeon, and put some more soldiers behind them to make it harder to cut off the supply lines to the city. This is also when I realized that my planes were much better at bombing than I had thought, and Alexandre learned the risk of huge stacks of units when it comes to aerial bombardment.
Korea also taught me the importance of the Double Turn. At the start of each turn in OCS players roll 2d6 and the winner decides who goes first this turn. If that player went second last turn, they could potentially get two turns in a row. This is pretty typical in wargames, but in OCS it feels that little bit more impactful. Did your opponent position enough supply near the front to pay to resist two turns worth of attacks? If you manage to punch a hole in their line this turn, and win initiative next turn, you could potentially immediately exploit that gap and cut off some of their units.
The potential benefits of going twice in a row hardly need me to elucidate them, but what I appreciated in Korea was the inevitability of that double turn. In Luzon’s short five turns, it was possible that the same initiative could be kept for the whole game if one player just never manages to win the initiative roll. In the 29 turns we played Korea, and even more so should you play the full campaign, it is inevitable that if you are the second player in a turn you will eventually win initiative and be able to take those back to back turns. But, maybe, your opponent will win initiative and choose to give you the double turn at a time when you’re not set up to capitalize on it, just to remove the threat and set up their own potential back to back punch. It’s a very small tempo thing that doesn’t even use a concept unique to OCS, but when you combine it with everything else it’s such an interesting decision space.
It really is all about the decisions, and in showing you the immediate impact of those decisions. OCS doesn’t bury the lede when it shows you that you made a mistake, and similarly it’s easy to spot when something went perfectly. You rarely have to wait more than a turn to see whether your plans have worked or if it’s back to the drawing board. The immediacy of this feedback can make it quite addictive, creating something a little like the One More Turn experience of a game like Civilization. You get that instant feedback on your plan this turn, but you still don’t know if your mid- to long-term plans are working, so maybe you should just play a little longer.
I previously covered Luzon as my first experience with OCS, and I like it as an entry point, but Korea has often been suggested as another great beginner friendly game in the system. I can see why that is, and it was the perfect next step for both myself and Alexandre. While in its full glory it’s a 3 map game, you can get away with only using two maps (the scenario we played doesn’t use the furthest north map) and, more importantly, the counter density is pretty low. The armies that start on the map are relatively small and it drip feeds you more troops over many hours, so you are never overwhelmed. As the UN player I eventually achieved dramatic air superiority over the North Koreans, but my airplanes took several turns to arrive, which meant that I wasn’t worried about the air rules until I was already comfortable with the situation on the ground. Similarly, my ships started showing up even later, and initially just as platforms for more planes. This means you don’t need full mastery of every system to start playing, and you can stumble blindly a little bit while coming to grips with the game without the game collapsing. Your goals are always clear, so even if you get confused by the margins you can keep ahold of the core.
The North Koreans managed to push across the river in the middle of the map, forcing me to fall back into the hills. Thankfully, the abundance of UN air power let him Disorganize (DG) many of his units, making it hard for him to keep attacking.
Korea has relatively few game specific special rules and if, like us, you just play specific scenarios you can avoid many of them (like the rules for when China intervenes). This gives you more time to become comfortable with OCS before worrying about special rules or exceptions. The thing is, while OCS is undoubtedly incredibly complicated and has many, many rules, you as a player don’t really need to know literally all of them to enjoy it. For example, in Korea neither Alexandre nor I ever used Strat Mode nor did we use Reserve Mode very much. Was that optimal play? Categorically not, but it didn’t cause the game to fall apart. We could play OCS with sub-par strategy and still have an amazing time. You don’t need to be a master on your first outing, it’s fine to play badly. You will make rules mistakes, that’s just part of wargaming, but no rules error we made broke the game and in general the core logic of OCS provided us with guidance so we never veered too far away from the game’s intent.
With a really complicated game I always ask myself whether it earns being that complicated. To put it another way, is the juice worth the squeeze? In some cases, the answer (for me at least) is decidedly no. For Korea, though, the answer is a resounding yes. For all of its complexity and it’s dense rulebook, OCS remains incredibly fun and, perhaps more importantly, it never lets its systems get in the way of that fun. At no point did I feel like I was resolving a tedious system just so that I could get to the fun part of the game. No individual part took too long or was too confusing, and each part triggered interesting decisions which together created an amazing experience.
Normally, in a review this long I would include a section on how the game portrays its history. I have some thoughts on how Korea represents the Korean War, but I also don’t feel like I have a firm enough grasp of the game to really critique it in this way. For all the words I’m writing now, this is still very much a first impression of Korea, and a deep dive into the history feels like something reserved for a full review.
Korea concerns itself with the purely kinetic warfare, and only with the opening Mobile War phase that marked the first year or so of the Korean War. The first wave of attacks by the North Koreans in our scenario felt like it captured the history reasonably well. There were clear incentives for establishing the Pusan Perimeter and the drip-feed of UN reinforcements gave a clear narrative of an America that was caught off guard when its ally was invaded. Still, there is no political element to the game, no way of representing the civilian cost of the war, and as a player you don’t feel like you’re one particular general. MacArthur’s arrogance, chaos in Washington, and the wider geopolitical situation that resulted in the commitment of UN forces are all absent. I am interested to see if my feelings change with more plays, and as I see how Korea represents other parts of the war. I have seen some people suggest that Korea as basically OCS first and Korean War history second, and I’m not sure I agree with that entirely but I’m also not sure I completely disagree. My opinion is not yet settled.
The final position. Some progress was made in the hills in the middle of the peninsula (the screenshot doesn’t really show the losses South Korean forces suffered there), but ultimately Taejeon has not fallen and the Pusan Perimeter is not in place so there’s no real hope for the North Koreans.
I recently had a chance to dabble very slightly in Reluctant Enemies. Not enough to form a real opinion of the game (we played less than a turn) but it, along with Korea and Luzon, helped me to appreciate how different OCS games can call upon different parts of the system as core to their individual experience. In Luzon the Japanese player made lots of overrun attempts, had plenty of supply, but a limited number of units which were often too valuable to lose in large numbers. Meanwhile, in Korea we did very few overruns, especially after the first turns, as the terrain on the peninsula often made them impossible, supply was constantly tight, and UN air power created an enormous imbalance in bombardment potential. Reluctant Enemies showed me what looked like a far more equal set of forces facing each other in a position that wasn’t one aggressive invader versus a more disorganized defender trying to cling on for just long enough.
Each of these entries into the OCS system, all of which are considered on the simpler side of the series, seemed to emphasize a different aspect of the system. They all used the same core rules, but in some you will be using X rule every turn but rarely every Y rule, while in another those might be completely reversed. This helped me appreciate how the OCS rules can be a toolbox for creating very different experiences based on maps, orders of battle, and just a handful of special rules. I think that’s a testament to the system’s core strength and the work designers have done with it over the years, which in turn makes me excited to try more games in the series.
I’m still no convert to enormous East Front games, though, so rest assured my next game will not be Case Blue. Instead, Alexandre and I are discussing maybe playing Tunisia II. I still have my heart set on playing Burma at some point, and lurking the background I have to say the terrifying scale of DAK has an allure without the counter density of East Front. I don’t know where I will land yet, but I know I’m excited to go there. I am also determined to revisit Korea, because I am far from done with it. This is not a review of the full game, it is an impression of my first taste, and some day I will return for the full meal.
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