World at War: Eisenbach Gap -- can't miss, right?

I've been messing around a little bit over the last few days with Eisenbach Gap from Lock 'n Load Publishing (LOCK 'N LOAD!!!).  World at War is a platoon-level game system covering a (thankfully) fictional invasion of West Germany by the Warsaw Pact in 1985.  Eisenbach Gap is the first game in the system, and focuses exclusively on clashes between US and USSR forces.

WaW:EG is one of those games that I'd wanted for a long time before I actually got around to getting it.  I always figured it would be a "can't miss" buy for me.  I'm a child of the Cold War.  Red Storm Rising is probably my favorite piece of military fiction.  The game itself is very highly regarded and extremely well produced (i.e., pretty!).  Frankly, everything about it points to me loving it.  I want to love it.  The bottom line, though, is that I'm having a very hard time warming up to it.

I'm not up for doing a full-scale review because, for one thing, I'm still getting to grips with it.  Instead, I'm going to do a bullet-pointed snapshot of some of the things that I find aggravating (or at least distracting) at this early point in my experience with the system.

• As I mentioned when I described getting the game, I'm really not crazy about the rule book.  Some of that may be subjective on my part. Maybe the author simply didn't organize and word things the way my brain idiosyncratically wants to see them. (How about a nice table concisely showing me exactly how the different weapon types interact with the different target types?)  Be that as it may, there are some objective problems there as well.  Probably the worst example is Rule 7.0, covering Line of Sight (hello, fundamental wargaming concept!).  It's just a mess -- and I think LoS is actually intended to be quite simple in this game.

• I'm not crazy about this word, but it's a very fiddly game.  Every counter gets an "Ops Complete" counter put on top of it when it finishes its activation, then taken back off when it next activates (or at the beginning of a new turn).  "Disrupted" counters live under an appropriate marker until they rally.  Less commonly, units might be under "Out of Command" and/or (depleted) "Ammo" markers.  And though the stacking limit is two units, some things (like HQs and support weapons, all of which have their own counters) don't count against that limit.  So, it's not hard at all to accumulate a real menagerie of cardboard crammed into one hex.  And, since some of the counters are units and some are markers which apply only to specific units in a stack, you have to be pretty careful about the order you arrange them in.  That's obviously an issue when you have to go digging through the stack -- which you have to do in order to do basically anything.  Now, lots of war games use lots of counters -- I'm certainly not unused to that fact.  It wasn't until I started working on this post that I realized why this issue bothers me particularly with WaW.  The game is supposed to be relatively light, and it plays quite fast.  Combine that with the fact that units' statuses are changing constantly, and that amounts to a lot of counter shuffling.  It's aggravating.

• This one is completely subjective, but there's something about the scale of the game that puts me off a little bit.  The counters represent platoons, rather than individual vehicles.  I guess I just have conceptual difficulties with tactical games (i.e., where things like elevation and terrain effects on LoS are considerations) that don't use individual vehicles as the maneuver elements.  It's an abstraction that I'm simply uncomfortable with.  (All of the tanks in the platoon are behind the hill, or none of the tanks in the platoon are behind the hill.)  Plus, in this specific case, the platoons aren't the same size.  The Soviets organized their tank companies into three vehicle platoons, while (at the time) the US Army used four tank platoons.  (At least I'm about 80% sure it was four.  I'm no expert on the Army's organizational practices, and I believe the mid-'80's was a weird period for them anyway.)  This has zero impact on gameplay, of course, but it does add a tiny bit to the cognitive dissonance I feel every time I move a unit.

Now, on the positive side, none of these things are inherent insoluble problems with the game system itself.  So I'm not planning on putting the thing up for trade just yet.  But I'm not immediately interested in getting any of the other games in the series, either.  I will, however, give this one a little more effort before I give up on it.  I really do want to like it.