I just returned from running a big game up in the Illinois-Wisconsin border area for Anderson's Irregulars, a great bunch of gamers honchoed by Mark Anderson and which includes my old pal Duke Seifried. Duke's approach to "adventure games" informs a lot of the encounter rules in the Mars Needs Steam game as well as generally moving it past a simple soldier game, so seeing him have a good time was fun. His Germans were all but destroyed by the French and Americans, but not before gutting both of those contingents so thoroughly that when the Japanese switched sides they were able to forge on to victory.
I'm very happy with how the game plays now, after dozens of playings with who knows how many players -- most of them first-timers. The rewrite I'm working on is just to smooth out any remaining rule ambiguities and add a few more exotic weapons to the design system.
