Sicily calls us again

Mike and I returned to the table these last few weeks with GMT's latest release, Fast Action Battles: Sicily.

I'd played the first FAB game, The Bulge, a couple times soon after it was released, and felt it to be a very solid, if not quite spectacular, game. It certainly brought some new life to the block game genre with fresh concepts like asset chits and a move away from the buckets of dice, A/B/C combat resolution you get in most block games.

I do remember a ton of hype surrounding FAB:Bulge right after it came out, which eventually settled in, and the game's rating on BGG stabilized (it's now the #84 ranked wargame). While not the greatest thing since sliced bread (That is DAK2), it's a quite accessible and quick Bulge game, and I've certainly been looking forward to Sicily coming to market.

As long-time readers on here are aware, Mike and I played the OCS: Sicily game to completion a couple years ago. I hadn't played any other game that tackles Operation Husky, so I was definitely eager to see how a higher-level, and simpler, game would handle the largest amphibious invasion of WWII.

And so, the game hit the table last month. We took one session playing the tournament scenario to get the feel for how things went, then switched sides and played the campaign games over a couple evenings.

So how does the game play?

At the beginning of each turn, both sides draw a number of asset chits from a cup. The Allied quantity never changes throughout play, but the Axis steadily draws fewer and fewer assets. These assets cover pretty much everything that isn't a full combat unit: air and naval support, engineering, artillery, detachments, replacements, “special” actions that could be a number of activities, etc. These assets are either used or eliminated, depending on what happens to them during the turn. If used, they're put back into the cup at the end of the turn, possibly to be drawn again. If eliminated, they're probably done for the game.

Many times, the detachments we drew filled the role of ablative armor as losing full units costs you a VP and losing assets doesn't. (Directly, at least. Diminishing support over time has its own drawbacks, of course.) Engineers are handy for blowing bridges, and there's a couple places on the map where that's almost a required tactic. (It's not as prevalent as in the Bulge, but close.)

After assets are drawn, the phasing player has an admin phase to do various actions that don't involve moving or combat. Then the non-phasing player has a go. Finally, movement, reserve movement, combat, breakouts, and supply. After all that, you draw chits again (though about half the number) and the Axis player has his turn, reversing the roles of phasing and non-phasing player. After that's done, you do a VP check and continue on to the next turn if needed.

How were our sessions?

When we played the tournament scenario, Mike took the Allies, and had a relatively easy go of things, though he only won by one VP. (VP ranges in this game seem to run +/- 8). The campaign game is the first five turns of the nine-turn full campaign, and covers the initial breakout after the landings.

Turns out we'd played a particular rule wrong (though I can't for the life of me remember what it was) which made things a little easier on the Allies. Given the tourney scenario took us less than 3 hours to play, we figured the campaign would be easily played over a couple evening sessions, and we were right. So, the next week we swapped sides (by random choice) and played the campaign.

The starting situation has the Axis with 8 VP. VPs are scored through control of certain areas, and elimination of large units (anything with three or more steps.) Some areas score points for either side controlling them, some only score for one side or the other. So taking some areas provides a two-point swing, others only one. That part of things is a tad confusing, but if you use the control markers properly, they should be pretty easy to count up. The Allied goal is to drop the VP counter below zero, and back up onto the Allied side – the more VPs you have, the more significant your victory.

During our campaign, I probably wasn't quite as aggressive as I could have been as the Allies, but I was still making decent progress. Around turn 6 (of 9) I had the VP counter down to 1, and things were looking pretty good. However, I stalled out big time up until the last turn, and going into turn 9, we were sitting at a flat 0 score. I had two or three opportunities to pick up a point, and the first two failed miserably. The final assault up the east coast was going to decide the game. I had eight dice that would hit on a 50/50 chance, and I needed five hits to force a victory. Anything less would be a draw. I ended up with a good final roll providing six hits, which actually gained me another 3 VP through unit death and taking a critical area. So, while I scored a major victory, it was literally that close to a draw.

Thoughts?

The game plays remarkably similar to FAB: Bulge. There were very few core rule changes, but the game-specific changes make the game. Rules are in place to enforce the animosity between the US and British/Canadian forces that existed in the actual operation. There are areas of the map that are forbidden to one side or the other, and other areas that have to be explicitly opened up before units can move in there. This does a much better job of simulating the operational restrictions the two forces were under than approached by anything in the OCS title. The difficulty of taking difficult terrain (particularly behind blown bridges) was quite clear. Overall, I felt it gave an excellent feel to how this campaign actually panned out.

After you've given the introductory and tournament scenarios a go, expect the campaign game to take you four to six hours. Probably closer to four after more plays.

Mike commented when we were done that he couldn't see what he could have done differently as the Axis defender. When I pointed out that we nearly had a draw, he realized he wouldn't need to do much more. More play will naturally start fleshing out any balance issues that might result. And given it's only a 4-5 hour game, it will probably see more play than most. It is a tad disappointing that the campaign game does not last the full historical length of Operation Husky – you never get to the point where the Axis started withdrawing units into Italy. It would be cool if GMT released an expansion that let you play it all the way through, but the game still stands well as is.

Recommended.

Eagles striking

My choice again, and for this week I proposed the recent Academy Games release, Strike of the Eagle. This covers the struggle between the Polish and the Soviets in 1920, although strictly speaking the term 'Soviet' didn't come into existence until 1922. I had played this recently with another gaming friend, and I thought that Eric would enjoy it.

SotE is, at heart, a block game in the Columbia tradition, played over a very good looking point-to-point mounted map, split into two fronts, north and south. The strengths (from 1-4 Strength Points - SPs) and types (Infantry, Cavalry or Leader) of the blocks are hidden, and they are rotated to reflect losses and/or additions. Unlike most block games, however, combat losses are not dictated by dice, but on a flat table, which dictates the losses inflicted for a particular attacking strength. All well and good, and pretty standard so far, but SotE adds 2 mechanisms.

The first is the orders mechanism used in A Game of Thrones. Each player has a number of order tokens that are used to command the armies, placing two orders per front. These include orders to move, defend, recover (steps), use rail, etc., and they are placed face-down, which provides an additional level to the fog-of-war aspect. You can see that orders have been placed on a group of blocks, but you have no idea whether they have been ordered to advance, defend, or fall back. Orders are revealed in a specific sequence, with the player with initiative deciding who plays first when revealing orders of a each type.

The second mechanism is the addition of cards, and it's a card supported game, rather than a card driven game (CDG). Each card has several potential uses, and as in most CDGs, can only be used for one of them. They can be used to increase the number of orders that can be placed on a front, in battle resolution as a combat modifier, to gain reinforcement points, or for the text on the card. This last can be either a historical event, a battle event, or a reaction card, which can be played at the times specified on the card for the defined effects (e.g. place additional orders, switching orders, prevent execution of enemy orders, etc.). Of course, the best cards are strong in all three options.

Each game turn has a card draw phase (draw 6, discard down to a maximum of 7), 5 Operations Phases (where the meat of the game is played), then a Reinforcement Phase. The Operations Phase is:

• Initial Card Play: each player may play a card on each front, starting with the non-initiative player for the northern front, initiative player north, then the same for the southern front; in the same sequence any played cards are revealed and the player states how they are being used, either for the Historical Event (after which the card is removed), to increase the number of orders for that front; or for reinforcement cubes, to add SPs at the end of the turn
• Order Placement: starting with the northern front again, the player with initiative declares who will place the first order, then they alternate until the full complement of order tokens determined from the previous step have been placed; then the same is done with the southern front
• Order Execution: Order tokens are resolved in the following sequence, with the northern front again being done first, then the southern front:
  • Forced March: initiative player decides who goes first; blocks move one extra space, but fight at half strength (round down); orders are either 'To' or 'Out'; the former is placed on the target are, and any blocks within range may move to that area; the latter is placed on the area with the blocks to be moved, and they may be moved to different areas
  • Recon: initiative player decides who goes first; if this is placed on an enemy-occupied area then the blocks have to be shown
  • Move: initiative player decides who goes first; blocks move 1 space for infantry, or two spaces for cavalry; once again, there are 'To' and 'Out' orders
  • Withdraw: initiative player decides who goes first; units in a battle area may move out of the battle area, but lose 1SP; cavalry may ignore the loss if only attacked by infantry
  • Battles: battles are executed from smallest to largest, treating both fronts together; starting with the attacker each player may play a battle event card, then chooses whether to play a combat modifier card from hand, for a +1 value, or to draw from the deck; blocks and cards are revealed, each side calculates total strength and compares this to the loss chart to determine the number of SP losses caused; steps are lost, step by step from the strongest block at that moment, the loser determined, and retreats and advances performed; adjustments to the initiative and VP tracks are then made, and you continue to the next battle
  • Reorganize: initiative player decides who goes first; one block in the area marked with this order may gain 1SP
  • Rail Transport: initiative player decides who goes first; up to 4 blocks in the area may move up to 8 areas following rail lines; blocks may be moved to different areas
• Supply: Blocks in areas that cannot trace a supply line to a Key City now lose 1SP per block; units that lose their last SP are removed, and 1VP is awarded to the opposing player; OoS blocks can only use Move Out, Withdraw, or Defend orders
• Victory Points: the VP track is adjusted for changes of ownership of Key Cities

OK, I've glossed over a few bits of chrome, e.g. Fortifications and Garrisons, but that's about all you need to know to get started. SotE is that simple it's brilliant. A wonderful amalgam of mechanisms that leave you with deliciously angst-filled decisions to make. Fog-of-war on top of fog-of-war. What are those blocks in that area? A couple of weak brigades or are they full strength divisions? What order has been placed on them? Are they defending or planning to advance? What if they're cavalry and Force March, how far can they reach, especially knowing that there's a Reaction Event card that allows cavalry to move through enemy blocks? Should I use this card for the powerful Historical Event, or keep it for more orders? Or for the high combat modifier? Delicious, delicious, delicious. Eric and I played through the first 2 scenarios in one evening, then for our upcoming full day of gaming chose to play the full campaign, it excited us that much.

Now, if I could stop there, this would win game of the year, decade, and century, and could be my first '10' on BGG, it's that good. However, I can't because the rules are just plain goddamn awful. Atrocious. Ridiculously bad. More holes than a holey thing. SotE suffers from, to paraphrase Mr. Ballmer, "Development, Development, Development". Or, rather, the lack of it. This game is 2-3 months short in it's development, suffering from an obvious lack of play-testing, editing, and even rudimentary proof reading.

When I first looked at SotE, I got as far as the first actual rule, discounting the component descriptions, setup, and overviews, before I found that the example of play contradicted the actual rule. That gave me cause for concern, and it got worse. Confusing terminology; terms used to mean different things in different places; examples that don't agree with rules; play-aids that don't agree with rules; game situations that aren't covered. Not just in the rules, but in the cards as well. When I first played SotE we spent about half our afternoon wrangling over possible meanings of the rules, and what to do in situations that weren't covered. When I played Eric we found even more situations that had us scratching our heads. At least by this time a lot of questions had been answered on BGG and in the FAQ/Errata. However, on one BGG thread the Academy representative admitted that he hadn't decided what the rule should be yet. WTF? You've published the game and you still don't know what the rule should be?

Eric opined that the problem is that the rules were written to fit in the available 8 pages, but I'm not sure that I agree. In my view the biggest problem is that the verbiage is just plain bad, and a good editor would solve most of the issues by being consistent in term usage and clearer in the prose, and still fit within the 8 pages. The second big issue is that more (and better) play testing was required, especially blind play-testing, to find those areas that weren't covered adequately. (Heck, even I could see major rules omissions just from reading them, without even having to play it.) Again, judicious word choice and phrasing would have addressed the issues identified, without taking up copious amounts of extra space.

So, after SotE, and the preceding Conflict of Heroes farce (where the game rules had a major makeover from the first game to the second, substantially changing the game play), I now would not buy another game from Academy Games that hadn't hit at least a second edition. I'm done with buying games where I have to throw the rule book out and print a set of rules that could, and should, have been done right the first time. Chad Jensen, with his exemplary Combat Commander ruleset, has shown it can be done. It takes a commitment to doing it right, and not just pushing the product out the door.

The big question is whether these are the worst rules ever? We've excoriated Prussia's Defiant Stand from Worthington Games, Fury in the East from MMP, and The Devil's Cauldron, also from MMP, in the past, but in my view, SotE takes the prize. Mostly, however, that's because I really, really, like this game (just in case it wasn't clear by now), and it's frustrating as all get out to see it substantially reduced by a shoddy job in the final stretch to publication.

Overall verdict: go play this game; just don't buy it until the second edition hits the streets.

Oh, and in our game Eric's Poles resigned when it was clear after 4 turns that the Soviets were going to win an automatic win. But that's not important right now.

Block battle in Poland. Film at 11.

The last two times Mike and I have gotten together, it's been to go over the new block game from Academy Games, Strike of the Eagle (SotE). This game covers the Russian/Polish war that occurred just after World War 1.

Mike had been raving about this one, and he felt it would hit my sweet spot. So, bring it on.

Overview

SotE is a block game that incorporates mechanisms from a number of other games. It has the standard fog-of-war mechanisms you'd expect in a block game: rotating blocks for strength, and hidden unit information. The map is point-to-point instead of area, but that's a graphics detail. As with the Columbia family of block games you have a hand of cards refreshed at the beginning of each turn and optionally play one at the beginning of each round. The cards in SotE differ in that they can be used in multiple ways: Extra orders (more on that in a bit), an event, or for replacements. Cards also have events on them that can be used at other times.

Combat in SotE has far less wristage than in most block games. Instead of one die per strength point, multiple rounds, etc. you total your strength points, take into account any battle cards and tactical modifiers, play a card (in lieu of rolling a die), and consult a chart. It's still got some randomness, but there's a much smaller range of results. Also, combat is simultaneous. You then compare the amount of damage inflicted by either side to determine the combat winner. A much cleaner system than most block games.

The other primary part of the games is the order system. The map is separated onto two fronts, Northern and Southern. Each of these fronts gets, by default, two orders per round from the following set: (Force March To, Force March Out), (Recon), (Move To, Move Out), (Withdraw), Defend, (Reorganize), (Rail Transport). At the beginning of the round, you have the option to play a card on each front to trigger an event or add to the number of orders you can place. Of the two orders per front, one must be a Recon order. So, if you don't play a card on a front, you can only take one effective action. Given that you get either 6 (one front scenarios) or 12 (two front scenarios) cards on a turn for five rounds, and these cards can be used in many other ways, you're constantly making tough decisions on how to use your resources. You can never do everything you need to do, let alone want to do.

During a round, you first play a card (or not), then place orders, then execute the orders in the order listed by the parenthetical groups above. Where “Defend” is listed is where the combat phase happens. Combats are resolved from smallest to largest, determined by the number of blocks involved.

The first time Mike and I played SotE, we walked through the two training scenarios. I highly recommend doing this. The first only goes through the bulk of a single turn, while the second takes you through two full turns. Enough to see how the cards play out. We got through both of those in under three hours. I played the Russians in these scenarios. IIRC, they're pretty hard for the Poles. But, they're training scenarios so balance isn't a primary concern here.

As we were both off work, we took a full day over the holiday break to play the full campaign. In the rules, they recommend this as a 4-player game, and after playing it, I can see why. It's difficult to get your head around everything that's going on. The full game is six turns, but after three turns we called it. We were running around 2 hours per turn, and it was very clear Mike was going to win as the Russians by the end of turn 4. There wasn't anything left I could do to stop it. The campaign features very different situations on the two fronts – the Poles need to push hard in the south and survive in the north. And when I say push hard in the south, I mean recklessly hard. Russian reinforcements are coming, and you better get to Kiev before they do.

My reactions

I'm splitting my actions on this one into two categories. Pros and cons.

Pros

• The mechanisms pulled together into this game work really well. The combination of orders and cards provides a great pacing system as well as constantly forcing you into tough decisions.
• The large map provides a much larger scope of play than your typical block game. It feels grand tactical, bordering on strategic.
• The combat system works. There's still some randomness (along with tough decisions – if you play a card as a combat die roll, it gets a +1 bonus. This is big when the cards run from 0 to 4) but it's contained within a small range.
• The order system provides for a fair amount of bluffing. I haven't even gone into the initiative subsystem, but going first or last, having more orders, etc. makes placing orders a game unto itself.

Cons

• The rules. It seems like we harp on this in half the games we play, but the rules writing in SotE is atrociously sloppy. And I'm being kind here. As an example, many times a VP award or some other action is determined by how much damage you “inflict” on an opponent. You would think this means the result you get from referring to the chart as I mentioned in the combat description. But it doesn't. It means the number of actual losses the other side took. If they reduced the damage you did through card play, Defend orders, or simply not being large enough to absorb all the damage, it's the number of losses they took that matters. As “inflict” is an outgoing verb, you wouldn't expect the result that's actually there. I won't even go into the amount of information missing from the retreat rules, or the inconsistent wording on the cards.

  Mike described these rules as the second worst he's ever seen after Prussia's Defiant Stand. I tend to agree. They (and the cards) need a complete once-over specifically looking for consistency and omissions. My belief is they locked in on a page count for the rules, and got over-enthusiastic in cutting down the text to fit. You can be too concise, and these rules prove it.

  Unfortunately a similar, though not as extreme, problem existed in Academy's other main game, Conflict of Heroes. (Let's not go into them completely changing how the game works from one volume of the game to the next.) So, this looks to be a pervasive problem in how Academy writes their rules.

  
  
• The cards. Besides the wording issues I've mentioned, I have the feeling the game is pretty dependent on certain cards being used for events. Given the size of the deck, it's likely many of these events may never be seen during a particular game, and one side's fortunes may be completely drained as a result. Now, I've only played the campaign once, so this is just a gut-feel call, but I've got a feeling they could do more with the deck. Things like “The Poles get card #x in their hand during turn 2” sort of improvements. It's not at all unlikely for critical events to go by as combat card draws, never to be seen again.

Final feelings

This game rocks. Despite the horrendous ruleset, this game plays very well. You constantly feel like you're fighting uphill, even when things are going your way. The various design features mesh well. You're always thinking things could turn at any moment. To me, this is a sign of a good design. What they need to do is spend three months with blind playtesters fishing out all the inconsistencies and omissions, and they'll have a winning design. Bump the rulebook up by four pages to handle the omissions. (Example: it never says what directions you're forbidden to retreat. From the way the rules are written, you can retreat from an area in the same direction the other side entered the area. While this is not the case, you wouldn't know it from the rules.)

Mike toyed with calling this his game of the year for 2011. I don't recall if he finally settled on it or not. While it didn't win that award from me (that goes to Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg, not that I played a whole lot of games in 2011), it warranted consideration. Just expect you're going to be doing a lot of rules research while you play the first few times. At least until they fix the rules.

A few is more than two

On the table this week, at Eric's request, was A Few Acres of Snow (BGG entry), a newish title from Treefrog Games, by Martin Wallace.

Now, there are a couple of things here that you probably need to be aware of before we go much further. First, I am a Wallace fan boi. Rampant, in fact. His game designs just hit my spot. Age of Steam, Steam, Brass, Age of Industry, Automobile, Gettysburg, Last Train to Wensleydale, Perikles, Prices of the Renaissance, Byzantium, Liberté, Rise Of Empires; some of my favorite games of all time. And yet, his more recent designs have me troubled. A Test of Fire looks lighter than light. I didn't even bother ordering Discworld: Ankh-Morpork after reading the synopsis. Could it be that he's falling out of favor with me? (Collective intake of breath from all those who know me.)

The other thing to be aware of is that I am not fond of deck building games. Well, it's not really just deck building games, but a lot of these more recent card games just leave me cold. Dominion, Race For The Galaxy, 7 Wonders. I can barely tolerate Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer and Thunderstone. I just find them totally tactical, and very prone to luck of the draw, with not really much you can do about it. (I find RftG to be especially prone to draw luck, and find that my card draws are totally opposite to whichever strategy I'm trying to follow at the time, regardless of how I try to roll with the draws.)

So, given a potential waning of interest in Wallace games, and a dislike of the central mechanism, just how did A Few Acres of Snow sit with me?

The physical presentation of the game is good. Mounted board, with good graphics, showing a point-to-point rendering of the game area. There are wooden cubes and discs in the player colors, representing villages and towns, and a neutral color to represent fortifications. There are the standard Warfrog/Treefrog plastic chips for money. The Limited Edition, available to subscribers, replaces the cubes and discs with houses in two sizes, and the plastic money chips with wooden tokens. The cards are of decent quality, and consist of two types: Location cards, representing a named location on the map, its connections, and the method of transport connecting them; and Empire cards, which have various types of benefits, e.g. Traders, Military, Leaders, etc. Both types of cards may have symbols at the bottom that are used in the player actions, e.g. boat, ship, wagon, settler, fur, gold, military. Some Empire cards are only used for their symbol. There are also a few neutral Empire cards (Settlers, Fortification, and Native Americans) that may be bought by either player.

There are many special Empire cards that I'm not going to go into, or we'll be here all day. Players have their own deck of cards, and don't have the same collection of Empire cards in their decks, so the sides have a different feel to them, e.g. the French player doesn't have a Settler card in his Empire deck, so one tactic for the British player is to buy up the neutral settler cards. The Location cards are the same for both players, and are added to the deck as the locations are captured on the board.

There were also lots of mentions of symbols there, and Location cards for the larger locations, e.g. Quebec, Montreal, have lots of symbols on them, but can only be used once before they hit the discard pile. Out of the way locations may have only a single symbol. So choosing how to use your more flexible cards drives a lot of the game.

Generally, you have four types of actions that you perform, and you have two actions per turn. The first type is to improve your empire, by capturing a new location, or improving an existing location. The former is done by playing a Location card, and card that matches the transportation type that connects it and the target location, which may be either a Location card or an Empire card. Some locations also have a settler symbol on the map, so also need a settler symbol card to be played. This allows you to put your village in the location, and add the Location card to your discard pile. Improving a location requires the Location card and either a settler symbol card, to upgrade the village to a town, or a fortification Empire card and 3 gold to add a fortification.

The second type of action is to get more gold. Either play a single Location card for the gold symbol on it to gain that amount, or play combinations of Empire cards that allow gold collection. The French player may also play the Louisberg location for piracy, which steal 2 gold from the British player.

The third type of action is to manage your deck/hand. You may select a card from your available stock of Empire cards, often with a cost in gold; discard from hand; place a card in reserve; take the cards from reserve back into hand (which is a free action); or use special Empire card actions to remove cards from your deck or (for the French player) take a card from your discard pile.

The final type of action is to screw with your opponent. Raids are performed by playing an empire card that allows raids, and you may raid an enemy location adjacent to a location you control. (You can play multiple raid cards to raid further.) Your opponent may play a card that allows a raid to be blocked, but if not you capture the enemy token, and any town is downgraded to a village. You can also ambush, which if not blocked removes an Empire card with the ambush symbol, generally military, from your opponent's hand, and it goes back to the available Empire cards and has to be repurchased. Then there are sieges.

A siege is started by playing a Location card that connects to the target location that you want to siege, the a card with the transportation symbol required, and a card with a military symbol. Each location has an intrinsic strength of 1, and fortifications add two to that. Regular infantry Empire cards have 2 military symbols, others have 1. So if a siege is started by playing, say, a 2-symbol card, the marker is put in the 1 space for the attacker on the siege track. The 0 spot and the 1 spot for the defender are colored grey, meaning the siege is unresolved, otherwise they're in the player colors. If the marker is ever in your color area at the start of your turn, then you've won the siege. If it's in the other player's color, then you need to play card(s) with military symbols to move it at least into the grey area before the end of your turn, otherwise the other player will win at the start of his turn. As an action you may play a single card onto the siege, moving the marker on the track for the number of military symbols on the card. The winner of the siege retains the loser's token, and may place their own village token, while the loser also has to remove one of the cards in the siege back to the available cards deck. Each player may have a single active siege at any one time. Fairly abstract, but pretty simple and effective, as you get a chance to react to the attack or defense, before the other player's turn, but you need to draw the right cards. This is where the Reserve comes in, as you can stack your military cards there, ready for attack or defense.

Now, that probably all sounds very confusing, but the rules are very clear (and a lot more verbose than my brief description). There are play aids for each player which covers the basics of each action, as well as the Empire cards available.

All well and good, but how is it to play? Our game had me as the French (randomly picked), and I focused on settling initially, and then fortifying and developing my gains. Eric tried a couple of sieges, but I managed to defend successfully, in the first by having my military in my Reserve before he started, and in the second by having a lucky draw of both my military cards immediately after he started the siege. I was able to raid extensively, sometimes keeping 2 Native American cards in hand to draw out his blocking card, which let me grab a few of his village and town tokens for VPs. Eric had a couple of successful raids, but mostly I kept a blocking card in hand.

The game end is when one player runs out of either village or town tokens, which Eric did first. However, the tokens I'd captured were enough to give me the margin, and I won by 8 points.

I'd actually played this once before, getting stomped as the British player, as my initial thoughts on reading the rules were reinforced by my game experience - deck building, yuck. However, when Eric asked to try it, and I started to read the rules again, I started to see some of the possibilities that I hadn't seen or understood previously. Lots of choice angst as you can't do everything with the cards that you want (or need) to do. I think having that first game gave me a huge advantage over Eric, as translating the rules into game board action takes some understanding and there's no better way than getting the experience while playing.

As the French player, gold is always a limitation, and there never seems to be enough to do what needs to be done. With the British player being stronger in military, keeping a reserve of Regulars Empire cards (which have 2 military symbols), and the cash to use them, seems important. The French player will be raiding a lot, trying to grab the villages and towns that mean VPs, and hasten the end of the game.

So, did this play change my attitude to the game? Yes, it did. Whilst I'm still not overly fond of the deck building mechanism, I now at least understand it a lot more than in my first game, and I can see some of the strategies and options. Whilst I don't think it will ever be my favorite Wallace game, I can see me playing this occasionally, and I can understand why a lot of people are really grooving on it.

Hey, it's a Wallace, did you really expect me to come up with anything different? My Wallace fan boi badge is intact.

Dissing Quebec

Last week, Mike and I got Martin Wallace's newish (and controversial – I'll get to that) euro-wargame A Few Acres of Snow (AFAOS) onto the table. I bought it mostly due to it being a Wallace game (I tend to love his designs) and the fact it won three Golden Geek awards this year: Best 2-player game, Best Wargame, and Best Innovative Game.

That's a rather high bar. Does the game measure up?

First, for those (like me) who really didn't know what the game was about, here's the scoop:

AFAOS is, at its heart, a deck building game, a-la Dominion. It manages to merge that mechanic into a game where you are trying to conquer eastern Canada (or the Eastern Seaboard) during the French and Indian War. Once you start playing, it's the typical Wallace “war-o” where it's really a eurogame in wargaming clothes. Sort of like Wallenstein. There are even elements of Elfenland built in.

To build your deck, you can either conquer cities, thus acquiring the appropriate card, or claim cards. (Some of which may have a cost paid in coins. As opposed to Dominion, your cards generate cash, but don't act as cash.) There's a rather large number of possible actions you can perform on your turn, but you only get to do two of them. (Unless you've got one of the few “free action” cards in your hand.) Discarding is one of those actions, by the way. So every card that comes into your hand has to be involved in an action, somehow.

To conquer an uncontrolled city, you play the card matching an adjacent city, and a card with a transportation symbol matching the way you'd get from point A to point B. (That's the Elfenland link.) If there is a colonist symbol on the city, you also have to play a Settler symbol from a third card. Besieging opponent-owned locations, and upgrading currently owned locations are done in similar fashions, just with a slightly different mix of cards.

Other actions include creating fortifications, adding to a siege (the only way take a city from your opponent), raiding, ambushing, discarding, and spending cards for cash. (There may be one or two more actions, but that's the bulk of your game.)

On your turn, you first check if you've won any existing sieges, perform two actions, then draw your hand back up to five. Over to your opponent. Game ends when New York, Boston, or Quebec changes hands, or one player plays all their village or city counters. In case the latter happens, you count up your score – points are scored for appropriately marked locations on the map, with their value doubled if they've been upgraded to a city.

Mike and I got one session of this game in, and frankly, we were fishing around a lot. (Picture the first time you played Dominion, then add a map to that...) We fumbled as we went, and Mike eked out a small 64-56 victory as the French.

My thoughts?

As with most Wallace “war-o” designs, it's very abstract. At times it reminded me of Racier's First World War design that Phalanx published, though it's FAR better than that. (This is due to the multiple routes across the map - they're nearly as separated as the fronts in FWW.) There's a good amount of meat on the bones, and repeated plays should uncover openings and approaches that will be eventually countered and improved upon. There's a definite asymmetry to the game. The French cannot produce Wagons, for example, which are required to move towards the coast from Fort Duquesne. So their progress is blocked along those lines. Also, the French have very few Settler symbols, limiting their ability to take those locations compared to the British approach.

And, speaking of openings and approaches, here comes the controversy.

Note that I rarely participate in, or read, online boardgaming discussion boards. I used to frequent the BGG and Consimworld forums, but I no longer do. I just found the signal-to-noise ratio WAY too low. I still use BGG as a reference, but I don't go surfing the messages. As a result, I had no idea there's a community out there that considers this game “broken” because of a certain corner-case strategy the British can use that is claimed to be unstoppable. I looked it up after the fact. (Mike had mentioned the owner of Rainy Day Games had told him about it, but didn't say what the strategy actually was. So I got curious.) I prefer to evaluate games based on my own experience, and not a whole lot else.

Basically, the British player maintains an extremely small deck, then takes Halifax, Louisbourg, and Quebec as quickly as possible. Done right, they say, the French can't stop it. Apparently this “broken” strategy has been dubbed the “Halifax Hammer.”

I haven't tried to play out this approach. I see how it might work, but I don't know enough about the game to know if it will work consistently, and if it fails, what sort of position the British will be in to survive a French counter-attack. Even Wallace has yet to be convinced as best I can tell.

That said, if it does turn out to be true, I think there's probably a couple rules or map tweaks that could be put into play that stop it from being a game-breaker. The design is solid enough that one route through it shouldn't destroy the whole thing.

In the end, this is a solid game if you ignore the mutant “broken” strategy. I just don't think it was deserving of three Golden Geek awards. Maybe Best 2-player. Certainly not Best Wargame. (That should have been either No Retreat! or Fighting Formations. I haven't played Labyrinth yet, so I can't comment on that, though I suspect it might be better than AFAOS in both categories.) Most Innovative? Um... the core is taken straight from Dominion (and Wallace's designer notes state exactly that) and much of the rest is a blend of First World War and Elfenland with a few other things tossed in. Good, yes. Innovative? I wouldn't think so. But then, I've only played three of the ten games that were nominated.

Will I play this again? Certainly. There's a lot of depth here. Am I glad I own it? Also certainly. I have the feeling this is one Jack's going to want to pull out in a few years. (He's not even five and a half, and he's already asking to play “army games” with me. We've started with Memoir '44, and will work our way up from there.) Would I recommend someone else buy it? Probably. If you like Wallace's designs, definitely. If you're ambivalent about his games, wait and see how the Halifax Hammer situation gets resolved and make your decision. If you use cheat codes in video games, don't buy this. You'll get obsessed with the “broken” strategy, and you'll miss the game you actually purchased.

Oh, wondering about the title of my post? It's a reference to where Wallace got the name of the game. When Voltaire (yes, THAT Voltaire) was told Quebec had fallen to the British, he said it didn't matter. It was just a few acres of snow. Voltaire is just so quotable... I've got a perennially unfinished set of rules for wargaming the Great Northern War that I call “The Sword Does Not Jest.” Another Voltaire quote.

Our next installment will look at Academy's recent release, Strike of the Eagle.

Resist, you must!

Last week, Mike and I got the new Combat Commander: Resistance! onto the table.

For those who don't know, this expansion presents Partisans as their own force. There's a new deck of cards and a counter set (in yellow), along with a dozen scenarios and six new maps. Some of the scenarios are remakes of existing scenarios that included Partisan forces in earlier releases.

The new Partisan force is very different from any other published so far. First, the deck is only half-sized. Thirty-six cards. This has two interesting implications:

1. The deck will run out faster, appearing to cause more frequent time triggers. However, this is balanced by removing the Time events from the deck. In two playings of this expansion, I haven't noticed time moving any faster than in a typical game. In fact, the time triggers seem to come in a more regular fashion since only one side has Time triggers.

2. A quarter of the board isn't covered by random hex draws. I haven't actually tabulated which hexes aren't represented, but this deck will only reference half the hexes normally covered by an allied force deck. I'm sure Chad Jensen (designer) has balanced this effect against broken weapon recovery/destruction and objective placement: It's the kind of thing he's good at. But, I'll eventually compare the deck to the US deck and see what's missing.

On point two, for those that don't know: A Combat Commander map has 150 hexes, and 144 are covered by random hex draws (72 from the Axis, 72 from the Allies – I believe the missing hexes are the four corners plus the top and bottom of the middle column). This is the primary reason why you can't fight two Allied forces against each other, btw. Random hex draws would be completely skewed.

After you get over the tiny Force deck, you are introduced to the Partisan units themselves. And they're very different than what you're used to. All other forces have squads of four figures, teams of two, and leaders. The Partisans have Gangs (6 figures), Bands (5), Troops (4), Sections (3), and Crews (2). Each of these units have a firepower (FP) equal to the number of figures, and a movement rate equal to 7 – FP. So, you trade mobility for strength. There are “Muster” orders in the Partisan deck that allow you to increase the size of a unit to the next level up.

The first major rule change to absorb has to do with the leaders. An unbroken Partisan leader has an eye outline around their leadership rating. This means they can activate any Partisan unit within their line of sight. This is a fundamental change that we frankly forgot about a couple times during our session. It completely changes how you organize your force.

The other major rule change for the Partisans is what happens when a broken unit is broken again. In the normal game, the unit dies, and the Axis player scores 2 (1 for a team) VP. Not here. The Partisans draw from a 19-card Force Pool deck. Each of these cards has a top and bottom unit illustrated. If the bottom unit on the card has fewer figures on it than the unit about to die, the dying unit is replaced by the next smaller unit in the exact same state. This simulates desertions while under fire.

Finally, there's Sighting markers, similar to those in CC: Pacific. They function a tad differently here. There's an Infiltration order in the Partisan deck that forces you to give up 0 to 3 VP (depending on the card) in order to mess with hidden units. You have two options when using an Infiltration order: Add a unit to the time track, or put a new sighting marker on the map. To add a unit to the time track, you flip a card from the Force Pool deck, then choose between the two options on the card. You then put your choice anywhere on the time track you'd like. When the Time marker reaches that space, you put the unit in the same hex as a sighting marker, and remove the sighting marker from the game. To place a sighting marker, draw a random hex and place it there.

Between the Muster orders, Infiltration, and the ability for units to sometimes shrink instead of die, you have to get used to your contingent changing a lot during play.

I chose to play the Thunderstorm scenario (#72, on map 50 – one of the new ones in the expansion). This is a meeting engagement: both sides are in Recon posture, and are merely trying to capture objective hexes. (Each are worth 3 points, each side controls the one in their deployment zone only.) Starting score is zero, so it's definitely a race to grab space. As I chose the scenario, I gave Mike the choice of side, and he chose the Partisans (to my surprise, frankly).

Our game had a definite flow. It took Mike a long time to get a Move order, so he was a bit hampered at first, but I didn't have the best results either, so while I was able to claim two of the three open objectives, I wasn't able to hold the middle one for long. The VP counter moved briefly to my side, then Mike had a run and got the score to around 11 in his favor. It was still around 4 or so on his side when we hit Sudden Death. We did the typical initiative card bouncing trying to get the game to end (or not) in our favor, but Mike had the advantage of 7s working in his favor. I got lucky here, though, and the game continued for two more time triggers. By the time the game ended, the score was 1 for me. Yes, One. The narrowest finish I've seen in a CC game yet.

There were two primary features to our session. One was an incredible number of snipers. There should be more snipers than normal when playing the Partisans (they have 5 Sniper triggers in a half-sized deck, while the Germans have 7 and the Russians have 8) but we saw a LOT of snipers. This certainly slowed both of us down at times, and weakened key units at inopportune times.

The other was a beautiful bit of narrative. I got an event that allowed me to draw reinforcements from the German roster. From the options I had (and in 1943, there's a lot of German options) I chose an Infantry Gun and crew. The random hex they appeared in was down in the corner near my side of the board. The gun jammed the first time I tried to fire it, and was eliminated on the next random hex draw. I could just picture it: “Hey guys! We found this old artillery piece in a barn over here! Let's surprise these jerks with it!” They don't fully inspect it due to the heat of battle, and the thing explodes (or misfires, or whatever) the first time they try to fire it, and they abandon it due to lack of time/ammo/resources. Just a perfect sequence of events.

Oh, and we had one Partisan unit that failed every Recovery attempt, and fell back on every Rout roll. I think that unit routed six hexes off the map by the end.

Things I learned playing against (and in a later play against Doug, with) the Partisans: Have a loose plan, but don't put all your eggs in that basket. Circumstances WILL change, and if you don't have a fall-back plan, you're hosed. Partisan units will survive longer than normal, but may have a hard time recovering after they break. What you have is a real big house of cards. It could work really well, but could fall apart in an instant. When playing against the Partisans, watch those sighting markers – the enemy could appear literally anywhere, and quickly. Finally, don't let the randomness get to you – it's random within a set of bounds, and could settle down at any time. Follow your plan, but snatch opportunities as they arrive.

Overall, this is a welcome expansion to the CC system. It radically changes how you think about playing the game, without breaking the structure of the rules. Just realize it could be an even more chaotic experience than the base game gives you.