To be perfectly honest, though, I don't want to join a mailing list to understand a set of rules. It's been said that if you join their very active yahoo group then you can post questions and you'll get prompt care, and I believe that. You then go back and read the rules and say, 'oh yeah, that's what he said last weekend, I get what that means now.' But someone who is just looking at the printed word will think, 'huh?' I suspect that lots of the game's fiercest advocates are people who have been through such an experience. I understand from people who play at events and have the THW guys walk them through it that they love the rules and have a great time. I would read through the rules and then follow the example, and rules that were not mentioned in the main rule section would pop up in the example, and vice versa. I've also found that the layout and writing make learning the game very confusing. I'd definitely run through a couple of games before trying to introduce it to other players, since the mechanics are so different from other games. Depending on your group, this may be an advantage or a problem. They are not (necessarily) as 'tourney-proof' as others you may be more familiar with. The focus is on the game, not on the rules. That said, I did find that adjusting to THW games took a bit of a mental reset to get away from some of the rigid rules expectations I had from other games. They are intended for smaller games, but I've found that as I get more games under my belt, they scale up reasonably well.

At the intended game level (roughly a squad per side, plus some reinforcements and support), Nuts is a great game for WW2. With a lot of players, or with a large number of figures, you need to have the rules down to keep things moving. The rules are definitely improving in terms of clarity and flow with recent releases, and THW/Ed have tweaked the rules recently with Chain Reaction 3 to smooth game play.

Two hour wargames forum