Fire in the Lake

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘f&ck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene!” That line wonderfully captures the atmosphere of Fire in the Lake: violence, absurdity, and the constant feeling that everything can spiral out of control. The first time I played it, I was badly put off; it was the first serious crack in the nearly invulnerable image I had of COIN games up to then. Then Liberty or Death came along and sealed my distrust. But after seeing how persistently people praise it in the GMT group, and now owning the upgraded edition, I decided to give it another chance.

At its core, the game is a COIN full of simultaneous pressures and interdependent sides. We played the mid-war scenario, where the situation shifts violently from the very first Major Op: there is a lot of fighting, forces get tangled up with one another, and nothing stays quiet for long. It is not simply a matter of making your own move; you have to watch how your actions move the ground beneath everyone else’s feet.

The best part was the conflict within the alliances themselves. The American emerged as the winner almost out of nowhere, literally snatching victory from ARVN’s teeth. That entanglement is what finally sold me on the game: the sides fight, cooperate when it suits them, and can ruin one another’s plans at exactly the wrong moment. And somewhere in there, every airstrike against the red onslaught makes you want to say, with the appropriate degree of excess, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

I am completely revising my opinion: the differences in scenario setup and in certain cards make an enormous difference, to the point that it felt like a different game to me. Even so, Fire in the Lake remains perhaps the most complex modern COIN in terms of how many things are happening. If you do not already have experience with Cuba Libre, Andean Abyss, or A Distant Plain, I would not choose it as your first COIN. But for those ready for this chaos, a second chance may be worth far more than the first.