Stripped Down for Parts: Stalingrad Roads

 

 

I’ve written here before about building a wargame collection, but something I don’t think I mentioned is the value of being a little bit obsessive. There is a Sydney game store from which I’ve bought a few games over the years. It’s more of a general interest or Family game store, offering only a smattering of wargames, and those from the usual suspects, like GMT and Compass Games. The store has always provided very good service, but the thing that keeps me checking in every so often is they’ll do extravagantly low prices when they get down to the last couple of a title in stock. This was how I manages to score a copy of Stalingrad Roads: Battle on the Edge of the abyss (Nuts Publishing, 2024) for about half the regular retail price.

I’m a fan of Nuts! Publishing’s games; they tend to be well presented and well executed, and all-in-all, good value for money. Being a French company, you used to have to go looking a little harder for them, but Nuts! seems now to be a part of the Ares Games distribution channel, so we’re seeing the likes of Stalingrad Roads and Italia 1917-1918: A Farewell to Arms (Nuts! Publishing, 2024) appearing in Australian stores.

Stalingrad Roads is the third in a series of games, preceded by Liberty Roads (Hexasim, 2009), and Victory Roads: From Bagration to the Fall of Berlin 1944-1945 (Hexasim, 2015), which cover Normandy to the Rhine and the Russian offensive respectively.. The earlier games are generally well-regarded, but have been out of print for a while now, which is a shame, because after seeing Stalingrad Roads up close, I'd be keen to try the system on a grander scale. 

The Stalingrad Roads box cover is striking, using an iconic photograph taken during the battle (the same photograph used (though slightly altered) on the cover of the first edition Old School Tactical: Volume 1 – Fighting on the Eastern Front 1941/42 (Flying Pig Games, 2016)), but using a saturated red filter on the original black and white image. The title font is also reminiscent of soviet propaganda posters (and film advertisements form the thirties). The overall effect doesn’t leave you in any doubt about the subject of the game (if the title in itself wasn’t quite enough).

The back of the box.

The box back is split roughly into two halves, with the top half showing off the map and pieces mid-offensive (with the two hexes of Stalingrad tucked into a bottom corner), and the bottom half offering a written description of the game’s parameters. The details at the very bottom of the box-back let us know (in keeping with EU rules that I believe kicked in just last year) that the whole box is recyclable (perish the thought), that the game is intended to be played by two people, that the recommended age for play is fourteen, and that – depending on the scenario – the duration of the game is likely to run between one and five hours.

The text does let the reader into one of the things that makes Stalingrad Roads special. The two sides require different approaches to play. The Soviet player is restricted in how he can attack, being allowed only to allocate one major offensive a couple of minor offensives per turn. They won’t be able to attack everywhere they would like, and must marshal their resources where they are likely to be most effective in bringing pain to the Axis forces. This will inevitably be easier said than done.

The Axis player has a different set of problems. Their primary concerns will be to keep their forces in supply, and to keep in the Fuhrer’s good books. The Axis can’t mark their own offensives, they can only respond to the Soviet threat when it comes. Heady stuff.

Rulebook. 

The Stalingrad Roads rulebook is slim for what promises t be a pretty deep game, running to just 28 pages. Of that count, the full-page cover and reproduction of the Combat Resolution and Weather tables features on the general Player’s Aid Cards reduce the actual content to 26 pages, of which 21 cover the actual rules; four pages are devoted to the scenarios, and he last internal page, a Table of Contents (this seems a little fully-loaded cart before the horse, to me, but at least the booklet gets a ToC when it seems many that should, don’t).

Rules sample pages with examples of play

The rulebook is printed on a nice high-sheen paper, set in what looks like a clean Garamond laid out in two columns with a separating bar, clear titles and an indexed numbering system for rules and sub-clauses (with play examples in a sans-serif font, three columns, and a lighter colour ink to differentiate them from the rules proper). The rules-in-play examples are prudently and functionally illustrated. All in all, the production is very nice, and quite easy to read. I’m working through the rules at time of writing, and considering these have no doubt been translated from French to English, the stitching doesn’t show at all; the rules – thus far, at least – are clear, concise and readily understandable.

Stalingrad Roads comes with two sheets of die-cut counters, printed on a good weight of grey-core card-stock. These are all half-inch counters with centre-nubs. They punch out cleanly (the more obsessive ay want to take the worst of the nub off with an emery board or a couple of wipes of a very fine-grade sandpaper, but I don’t think most folks will have an issue with them). In spite of their diminutive size, the units counters are quite readable. The registration overall is very good, and this is helped by the counters not being overloaded by information.

Units have a unit (formation) designation, a representative symbol (NATO-symbol for infantry, cavalry, mountain infantry, security (Sicherungs) units and HQs, and vehicle illustrations for armoured units), three numbers in a row, representing (left to right) Attack strength, Defence strength and Movement allowance (HQs have a Command Radius value instead of an Attack strength, which makes perfect sense). Some units are adorned with a star, indication their elite status. Soviet units are either Regular or Guards units; Axis units are, in the majority, German Wehrmacht with, some Waffen SS formations, and representation the other Axis powers (Romanian, Hungarian and Italian).

A feature of the game is the Support markers that each side can allocate to their operations as suited. Not all will be available all of the time, and the use of one Support resource may prohibit it's subsequent use at a later stage. AAS I've alluded elsewhere, Stalingrad Roads functions very much in the Operational space of wargames. You will be wrestling scarcity at least as much you'll be battling with your opponent.

The game comes with several Player Aids. the first two are identical, double-sided PACs, each presenting the things you’ll need most often during a game; on the obverse, a reprinting of the last page of the rulebook, offering the Combat Resolution and Weather tables, and the reverse presenting a through Terrain Effects Chart.

Axis Player Aids. Each side has a double-sided support marker directory and an area
to keep track of out of play units, but the priorities of the two sides are so different,
this is where the similarities end. 

The other Axis Player Aids include charts related to the Hitler Approval track, Axis Supply and the Air Bridge supply effects. The Soviet Player Aids feature Areas for marshalling Major and Minor Offensive support markers and a table for the Acquisition of Air Support. Both sides also get spaces for housing Units eliminated or removed from play, and each gets a descriptive chart with a precis of each Support marker available to the given side.

Wintergerwitter scenario card.

Operation: Uranus scenario card.

Each of Stalingrad Roads’ scenarios has set up notes in the rulebook and an accompanying sheet or sheets that let you keep track of your side’s reinforcements and offer handy reminders of any finicky rules at play for the given situation. The shorter scenarios – Wintergerwitter and Uranus – each have just one sheet shared by the players.

The two Backhand Blow scenario cards.

Each side gets their own card for the Backhand Blow scenario.

Star and Gallop scenario cards. Note the shared reinforcement portion.

Star and Gallop has the set-up information and Support allocations for each side on separate cards but space is shared on the Axis card for both sides’ reinforcements.

The Campaign scenario sheets in all their overwhelming glory. The Campaign game is
actually listed as the third of the five scenarios included in the package.

The Campaign game, at seventeen turns the longest of the scenarios, accommodates each side with two cards of their own. Overall there’s a good spread of complexity and

The play area. Try as I might, I couldn't get an adequate photo of the map, so here is a
rendering of the designer, Nicolas Rident, posted on Boardgamegeek.

The map for Stalingrad Roads is slightly different in size to the 22” by 34” poster-sized maps we’re used to seeing from American publishers. Being a European publisher, Nuts! usually does their sheet maps on A1-sized sheets (roughly 23.4” by 33.1”). It’s not that big a difference, and if you’re using a plexi sheet over it, a poster-size (24”by 36”) sheet will still accommodate the whole map, if a little snuggly.

The map incorporates a Turn Track, Fuhrer’s Approval Track, and a general track for other bookkeeping needs. Overall, it's quite a handsome map, visually attractive without being too fussy. The limited colour-palette is easy on the eyes, but still manages to highlight both the natural geographic features and the artificial structures – cities and towns, road and rail – without making any feature feel tacked on or out of place.

The Wintergerwitter scenario mini-map. Small but perfect in every detail,

The recommended starting point for the game is the Wintergerwitter scenario. This is played on a mini (11” by 8 ½”) map provided for the purpose, with the unit placement handily preregistered on the map. The map is printed on the verso of one of the Soviet Player Aid sheets, but given he scenario runs through just two turns, it’s absence shouldn’t be conspicuous.

Overall, the scenario and player aid cards are very well resented and easily navigable. My only criticism is the weight of card they’re printed on. It barely warrants the epithet of card. I’ll be looking at sleeving these in something a little stiffer, which is an unusual step for me. But given the sheer number of the sheets provided – thirteen in total – I can appreciate the decision to go with a lighter stock. It’s not a dealbreaker, but I think the use a slightly heavier stock would have made for a better game experience. But now I'm just nit-picking.

Finally, Stalingrad Roads comes with a stash of baggies for sorting your counters, and two six-sided dice, appropriately in Soviet red and German field grey. The box itself looks on the thin side, but is really quite sturdy.

------

I have a soft spot for French-produced games. I think this is because I have yet to be disappointed by one. On the face of it, Stalingrad Roads seems to be unexceptional to that tradition. I can’t say when I’ll manage to get this game to the table, but I don’t want to leave it too long.

Review: Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683

  

 

Nominee: Best Gunpowder Game, Charles S. Roberts Awards, 2022

Siege games have always been a popular topic for wargames. I haven’t done the research to back this up, but I think it’s likely that siege games were the earliest examples of asymmetric conflicts in board wargames. The earliest siege-themed game I could track down was Asalto (also known as Assault and Citadel, among others), a variation of Fox and Geese dating back to the early nineteenth century. It characterised the asymmetric nature of siege warfare simply and effectively and is still worthy of consideration. 

Fire & Stone: The Siege of Vienna, 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022) is game of deep strategy based on one of the most famous sieges of the Early-Modern era. In 1682, Sultan Mehmed IV broke a twenty-year peace with the neighbouring Habsburg Empire. After some successes, the Ottoman army ventured deep into Habsburg territory to lay siege to the Empire’s capital, Vienna. The siege of Vienna lasted sixty days, from mid-July to Mid-September 1683, and if relief hadn’t arrived in the form of a joint column of troops from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire arrived within a day of the breach of its walls, the city would have almost certainly fallen. A near-run thing, and a worthy subject for a game treatment.

 

Appearance

The first thing to mention is Fire and Stone is a really gorgeous game. Capstone Games is better known as a producer of English-language versions of popular Eurogames like Ark Nova (Feuerland Spiele, 2021), Maracaibo (Game's Up, 2019), and Weimar: The Fight for Democracy (Spielworxx, 2023). There is a strong graphic theme that runs through every single aspect of Fire and Stone, from the constrained colour palette to the modest expediency of the map-board, the component illustrations (the ornate Soldiery of the Troop cards down to the simplicity of the spades on the Mining tokens). The artist on the project was Domhnall Hegarty, an Art Director by trade who also handled the graphics on a several of my favourite boards, including Navajo Wars (GMT Games, 2013) and Versailles 1919 (GMT Games, 2022), so it’s no surprise the game has such a solid and thoughtful presentation. More than simply looking good, every aspect of the visual and tactile design lifts the experience of the game to a higher level.

Set up and ready to play (Ottoman's POV).

Fire and Stone is a siege game. The action is localised, and the board reflects this. At one end is the edge of the Ottoman camp. After surveying Vienna’s fortifications, Ottoman engineers decided the most promising place to breach was the curtain wall between the Löbl and Burg bastions. Before this wall lay strata of outer defences – earthworks, redoubts, and trenches. Between the outer defences and the city walls lay the glacis, a clear field set at a gradient to the wall to slow the progress of an attack and give the defenders a free field of fire to wreak havoc on their assailants.

The board-side components of the game are made of wood, rendered in red for the Ottoman aggressors and yellow for the Viennese defenders. These include simple matchsticks representing improvised protective earthworks, corner-sets for structural fortifications, and more ornate cannon meeples in two styles for the Habsburgs’ defensive cannons and the Ottomans’ siege artillery.

Sample Strategy cards.

The cards are all of excellent quality, printed on a good weight of cardstock, and present in a good, readable font. There are three kinds of cards in play, and the two sides get their own decks of each. The Strategy cards are the most numerous; these are what you will play though for your actions each turn, either spending them to perform an action or triggering the card’s event.

Sample Tactics cards.

The smaller deck is made up of tactics cards, of which there are about a dozen. Each player will only draw five of these for the whole game (another nod to building replayability into the game). These, played at the right moment, can change the fortunes of a particular play, but will be unlikely to win the game outright. Three or for changes of fortune added together will nudge your cause further ahead.

Sample Army cards, Habsburgs (top) and Ottomans.

Finally, there are the Army cards. These represent the forces each side has at their disposal. Ton both sides, the cards are a spread of values between one and three points. Each time you get into a fight, you will pull out three army cards of your choice. Some events may push a card or two back to a second rank (these won’t participate in the fighting for that round), and some troops may not make it through the battle (these are removed from the game altogether). The ones that survive are exhausted for the current turn; these will return to the deck at the start of the next turn, but attrition is a danger to both sides.

On top of a formidably presented game, the publishers have included a twelve-page booklet offering a potted history of the lead-up to the siege and a reckoning of the particular events that unfolded over the months of the conflict, indicating those events reflected in the tactical and strategic cards but their deck prefix and card number. This also includes a brief Designer Notes article to finish off an immersive and informative read.

 

Play

Fire and Stone wears its Euro credentials on its sleeve but in its heart, it is an asymmetric historical conflict game of deep strategy. This is no system dressed up in historical garb. Every mechanical device put into service in Fire and Stone approximates an element of the complex and multifaceted story of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

The game is played out over five turns (or possibly less) – if the Ottomans have not managed to take the city by the end of the fifth turn, a relief army arrives, headed by the famous Winged Hussars (a sixth space marked on the turn track).

At the start of the game each player draws five Strategy cards. These are your currency for taking action (up to five in a turn). At the beginning of the first turn, each player also draws five Tactics cards. These are often powerful adjuncts to actions in the game, usually spent during battles, but they are a finite resource, these five are all you will have for the entire game, and each can only be used once. They can tip the scales in a crucial battle, but the trick is recognising which battles are crucial (spoiler alert: they’re ALL crucial). There is a danger in saving these for later use in the game; like a person found dead from thirst in the desert with half a canteen of water, there is no value in hording them when they can be of use in the moment.

Habsburg and Ottoman cannons face off.

A turn involves each player (starting with the Ottoman player) taking turns to play a Strategy Card from their hand. When playing a Strategy card, the payer may choose to conduct and action or play the card’s Event. The actions each side may conduct vary a little; Ottomans can Bombard Habsburg fortifications, while Habsburgs can Barrage the Ottoman troops, potentially thinning the herd; the Ottomans – as the aggressors – can Assault a Habsburg-controlled hex, leading to a battle, while the Habsburgs can Sortie into an Ottoman-controlled hex adjacent to one of their own. Many of these actions can achieve an increase in your side’s morale, or conversely a drop in the other’s, sometimes both. This is important, because morale, like everything else in the game, is a limited currency, and one more way to defeat your opponent; when a side’s morale drops to zero, the other side claims victory.

Much of the game’s action is abstracted; Troops are represented by a deck of slender cards selected from a pool (deck) by each side for each discrete engagement. When a battle is instigated by either side, each chooses up to three cards from their troop deck. Each player has a selection of troops with values of one through three points. The Ottomans have a selection of twenty cards, the Habsburgs only twelve. These will be the troops deployed for this battle and are placed face-down in a row in front of the owning player (there are circumstances where the Ottoman player can increase the number of troops committed to battle, but for this illustration we’ll keep it simple). Each player may also play a Tactic card, also face-down, thought they are not obligated to do so. Once the cards have all been chosen, both sides reveal their hands and Tactics cards, and the effects of the revealed Tactics cards are applied.

Next, the attacking side must move one of his armies back to a second line for each enemy fortification in the hex where the battle is taking place (two for a structural fortification); the attacking player decides which troops to withdraw. Only front-line troops are tallied for the final resolution of the battle.

The fickle hand of Fate. Every round, you’ll want or need to do two or three things,
and have to respond to whatever the other side just did, which always leads
to challenging decision points in every card-play.

Finally, dice are rolled by each side; the Ottoman rolls one die for each of his cannons either in or adjacent to the attacked hex, while the Habsburg player rolls a die for every cannon still on the board. Each six rolled will eliminate a troop from the front line, and if there are more sixes than troops remaining on the front line, second-line troops are then eliminated. Eliminated troops are removed for the remainder of the game.

Resolution of a battle involves adding the values of any remaining troops on each player’s front line and comparing the results. The highest total wins, while draws go to the defender.

 The progress of the game is a slow creep for the Ottoman forces forward to the outer defences, then the glacis, and finally to the last defensive line. The final aim for the Ottoman player is to gain control of either the curtain wall hex or the two redoubts to either side of the curtain wall, and control is gained through combat, the exchange of lives for a few yards of ground. In this respect, Fire and Stone may well be compared to a World War I Western Front game, that both the actual siege and the action of the game are forgivingly shorter in duration.

 

The top of the Third.

Appraisal

Some will argue that Fire and Stone isn’t really a war game. I’m not going to jump into that particular briar patch; one can’t shift opinions already fully formed. I will posit that Fire and Stone is a deep historical simulation – dressed in the trappings of a Eurogame – the requires from its players particular consideration and careful resource husbandry. Fire and Stone is a conundrum. It’s a challenge whichever side you fight. After more than a dozen plays, I’m no closer to fathoming a clear course to a happy outcome for either side, which is, of course, a part of this game’s charm. Every game has had a similar beginning, but a radically different middle and end. A couple of games have played out to the final round (one to the penultimate card-play) for an eleventh-hour Ottoman win; in three the Habsburgs managed to hold out by the skin of their teeth to the arrival of reinforcements. Two victories to one side and another one to the other came from exhausting the opposition’s morale. Pasha Mustafa was strangled by the the Sultan's executioner for his failure at the Vienna siege and subsequent battle. Of the scores of ways to die in Fire and Stone, the one never mentioned is “old age.”

Habsburg defeat at the bottom of the fourth turn, with the Ottoman player breaching
the Curtain Wall and placing their Control marker.

The game is very well balanced, though it may not feel it at times, whichever side you are playing. The Ottoman player has more men at his disposal – more meat for the grinder – than the Habsburg player. In the beginning, at least, the Habsburg player has more artillery at his disposal, though this number will inevitably reduce with the press of the Ottoman’s advance.

For the Habsburgs, the situation can seem like a waiting game, trying to delay the progress of the Ottomans’ efforts until reinforcements arrive. This is deceptive. If they simply wait for help, the game will be over before the Fifth turn.

Fire and Stone is an immersive experience. What makes the game such a challenge is the sparse resources available to each side. I don’t think it’s possible to pick a plan at the beginning of the game and see it through to a successful end. Each turn of the card is a challenge. For both sides, each turn requires all of your attention to marshal your resources and survive well enough to function in the next turn. Victories in Fire and Stone are piquant, while defeats carry a familiar taste of inevitability. This game demands al your attention, all your resourcefulness and cunning, and may still find you wanting. All this makes for an extraordinary experience.

 

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492

 

 

Charles S. Roberts Award 2021 nominee: Best Early Gunpowder Board Wargame 1453-1793 AD 

I’ve had this nagging feeling for a while that I haven’t shown Compass Games as much love as I should, given the number of their title I own. I don’t know where this comes from; I’ve posted two reviews and seven unboxings of Compass titles – expect maybe that I have probably four or five more games that I haven’t got around to punching yet because I told myself, I really should post an unboxing of that one. One or two of these have been languishing for a year or more (sorry, Barbarians at the Gates (Compass Games, 2022), I’ll get to you soon). Today I’m starting to redress that situation.

Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492 (Compass Games, 2021), a game by noted designer, Jose Rivero, is a game about the Reconquista, the final push by rulers of Catholic Spain to retake the Moorish holdouts along the Iberian peninsula’s south-eastern coast. The game takes some mechanical cues from Sekigahara: the Unification of Japan (GMT Games, 2011), but in spite of the broadly shared theme of cultural homogenisation through conquest, it is definitely its own game.

If this was a movie, Omar Sheriff would be co-starring.

The box art, the work of Iván Cáceres, is reminiscent of nothing do much as an early 1960s epic movie poster. It’s very effective, I’d go so far as to say stirring, and lends a sense of the scale of the game. Basically, the cover on its own was enough to make me curious about the game.

Box back. Love the colour palette.

Turning to the box back, we get a (computer generated) idea of what the action on the board will look like. Personally, I think I’s rather just see a pic of the board and some cards and pieces (we get to see both here as well – the slight wrongness of the perspective with the pieces in relation to the board does my head in a little. But it’s not a deal-breaker.

The box-back information tells us that Granada is a two-player game of Medium complexity (somebody explained to me that it’s usually left to the designer to say how complex and how solitaire-friendly their game is), and Low solitaire suitability, which is fair, given we’re talking about a card-driven game with hidden information.

As is typical for Compass games, the Rulebook sports a facsimile of the cover art. The paper is a nice weight of low-gloss stock, a little shinier than a low-sheen, but not so you’ll be wrangling with serious glare trying to read the pages.

I’m still working through the rulebook, but so far it seems fairly straight forward and understandable. If you haven’t played a game like this before, it may present a slightly steeper learning curve, but the rulebook is full of illustrated examples of play, and while I haven’t looked yet, somebody must have done a play-though on YouTube by now.

Fully loaded: the contents of the box. I neglected to mention in this write-up;
the Christians and Muslims get their own drawstring bags  in which to
keep their blocks (and to randomly draw from for the arrival of reinforcements).

My only gripe with the rules is the size of the font. This isn’t really a valid complaint – I can read the Granada rules just fine if I’m wearing my prescription reading glasses (thanks again, old age), but even though I’ve been wearing the damn things for maybe ten years now, it’s still not yet an automatic thing to reach for my specs when I pick up a book or a magazine. Or, apparently, anything game-related. The font is a little small (about 6 point at an estimate, a similar sizer to the original Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1977) rulebooks), but given the rulebook comes to 28 pages as is, I can understand why the project director didn’t want to push it out to 32 pages to accommodate a larger print. But that just feels like looking for something to complain about.

The game board, incorporating the Turn Track and various holding boxes.

The game board is a map of the southern Iberian Peninsula, stretching from Gibraltar in the West to Cartagena in the east, and up to Ubeda in the North. Across the Mediterranean, Oran on the Barbary Coast makes an appearance. Point to point movement links towns and cities across the land, and the reconquered lands of the Catholic kings is differentiated in pale green from the diminishing extents of the remaining Muslim holdings, the subject of contention in this game.

I really like the map, but I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste – people get pernickety about maps. I think it manages to garner an impression of the maps of the period without slavishly aping the tropes. It’s clear and readable, and the muted colour palette really helps the stark black and white pieces pop on the board – there’s no chance of missing a unit here – and the locations aren’t so bunched up as to be impractical.

I haven’t checked this, but I suspect the game board is the work of Knut Grünitz, an artist with a long relationship with Compass Games, having contributed amazing work to tiles like Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games, 2015), The Conquistadors (2020), and the upcoming Manassas –Designer Signature Edition (Compass Games, ~2025), to name but a few.

Granada set-up card (in reality, in inner fold of the PAC)- quarter size of the game board..

The game comes not one, but two 11” X 17” set-up maps (inside the bi-fold PACs), which I for one really appreciate. It would be an easy thing to make this a two-page spread at the beginning of the rulebook, but Compass will often go the extra mile which this kind of thing. Thanks, Bill. Having two means if you have a buddy whose already familiar with the Granada set-up, you can each set up your own sides, giving you more time to actually play the game.

Players' Aid - Front and verso pages of the game layout.

Battle Reference Card - like it says on the label, this is a short precis of all the rules
affecting possible combat situations in the game. 

The back and front panels of the set-up charts are the designated Player’s Aids (again, duplicated, so you don’t need to be handing it over between turns). These offer A Yearly Cycle (each year consists of two turns, then a Reinforcement steep), table of Movement costs, Mustering and Land Movement on the front, and rules reminders for Overruns, Naval Movement and Victory conditions, as well as the Boabdil Mixed Army, which I am unfamiliar with but I’m sure we’ll learn all about it in play.

Victory Point Track. for the tracking of VPs, among other things.

The last card is labelled the Victory Point Track. It looks complicated at first glance, but it's actually quite elegant. Each player earns points for various successes (such as taking castles or vanquishing enemy units), but they do so at different rates. The lower part of the track helps to decode this inequity, making it a simpler job to track overall VP, and keep a tally of individual achievements.

Lots of blocks and bit, but don't despair - many don't need labelling.

When you get a copy of Granada, you’re going to be faced with the prospect of stickering up lots of wooden blocks. Don’t panic. It’s not all the blocks, and it’s just a single side. And there are only two sheets of stickers (with some duplicates for spares). I think I stickered mine up in less than ninety minutes, about a quarter of the time it took to sticker up the whole of Commands and Colors Tricorne: Jacobite Rising (Compass Games, 2020).

 

Stickers: Christian forces (top) and Muslim forces (above). I could not get a photo
of the stickers with my inadequate equipment to come out without too much glare
to make it worthwhile, so here are some copies Jose Rivero
posted on BoardgameGeek, just to give you the idea. 

The “blocks” themselves are an unusual mix. In most block games you’ll find just one size, or maybe a couple of sizes like in Commands and Colors games. In Granada you have a standard size of block for the units, then you have shallow discs labelled for tracking victory points, the current turn and such, and marking the presence of two Muslim leaders on the board. Then there are the Pioneer force (for use in sieges) and out-of-supply markers, labelled but in their natural pine colour, small cubes in black and white (haven’t got to these in the rules yet, so apologies), and really neat castle (square based) and watchtower (garrison markers, round base) blocks that stan upright on the board, complete with crenulations for that more authentic castle look. It’s a nice detail to add, and I can’t wait to see them on the board.

The block labels look great. They clear and easy to read. They’re a little on the glossy side for my taste but that’s no kind of legitimate criticism, merely an opinion. I can confirm that they adhere well, and so long as you don’t live in a super-dry environment (or, at the other extreme, a sauna), you shouldn’t have to take any special precautions looking after your stickered blocks.

The card decks, still in their cellophane wrappers; Car backs (top), and fronts (above);
Christian to the left, Muslim to the right.

The two sides come with their own sets of cards. None of the things that will make Granada an interesting game to play is the way combat works. The cards dictate which available forces you can bring to a fight; the others will, for whatever reason, sit it out. When an altercation is proposed, presumably the two sides will have certain forces available to them, but you can only bring to the battle the forces you can activate using the cards in your hand. Sometimes discretion will be the better part of valour. Or, to put it another way, Granada will likely be a game that rewards and punishes bold and reckless plays in equal measure.

The cards are transcendently attractive, illustrated in the style of the time, again by Mr Cáceres, who excels at this kind of work. There are four separate decks of cards in Granada; the Muslim and Christian decks for regular game operations, a naval deck for conflagrations at sea, and a Castle Surrender deck to deal with the results of successful sieges. The cards are printed on good stock, but you’ll probably want to sleeve a least the operational decks as I imagine you’ll probably cycle through these a time or two in a game.

Just one more thing... (Clarifications sheet).

A Compass game wouldn’t be a Compass game without errata, so the old saw goes. Well, that's a cheap shot, and not really fair; nearly every wargame, on release, has some hiccups with the rules. Poking the Bill the bear has become something of a sport with Compass and “errata” – I’ve been guilty of doing it myself – and but in all fairness, Compass has some of the best credentials of any game company in regard to this. If there are counter errors, the firm will mail out replacement counters to everyone who bought the game directly from the publisher, at the company's expense. And if typos slip past the catcher, or there is deemed to be some ambiguity in the rules that are found between the game getting printed and being sent out from the warehouse, Compass will incorporate a sheet of fixes, or in the case of Granada, Clarifications. People complain about this, but I’ve edited my share of public-facing documents in the past, so I know how easy it is for a mistake or two to make it into the release version, no matter how many times it’s proofed and checked. Compass does at lease as good a job at rectifying these as anyone else in the business, and to my mind a much better job than many.

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So, there you have it. My gaming program seems to be filling up for the foreseeable, but I’m very keen to get this to the table sometime sooner rather than later. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a review (or at least some AARs) before the end of the year. As always, thanks for reading this far.

 

 

State of Play: Napoléon 1807 (The War Room Ten Game Challenge #1)

 

 

After missing a game last week due to my brother-in law and regular Monday night gaming partner T visiting overseas for work, we got together this week and tabled Denis Sauvage’s Napoléon 1807: La Campagne de Pologne (Shakos, 2020). We’ve been playing a lot of the Crusades expansion (GMT Games, 2024) for Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019), because I wanted to review it, but that and a few missed weeks due to other commitments on both sides got me to the third week of February without having begun my Ten Game Challenge games list. So, this week I have the first domino a push.

Napoléon 1807 is familiar as a game and a system. It’s the second game in Shakos’ Conquerors series. I posted a review for the first in the series, Napoléon1806: la Campagne de Prusse

(Shakos, 2017) last year, and I’ve been keen to follow up with a review of 1807. We played it several times in 2024, but it’s been a while, so the Ten Game Challenge list seemed like a good excuse to pull it out and refresh my thinking about the game.

Napoléon 1807, like all the Conquerors series games, is an operational-level block game of Napoleon’s Polish campaign of 1807, played out on a point-point map covering Poland and eastern Prussia. The action of the game follows on from Napoléon 1806, and there are instructions for combining the two into a relatively seamless grand campaign. I’m unlikely to ever try this, but it’s nice to know I could.

French corps dispositions at the start of battle. The blue blocks represent infantry
regiments, the yellow, cavalry squadrons.

Dispositions of the Russian corps at start of game. The green and pink blocks
represent infantry and cavalry strength respectively.

So, last night we played the Battle of Eylau scenario, with a forgiving four turns. The game still took us the best part of an our and a half to reach the conclusion, but the play was extremely satisfying, even if the result was less so.

T took the French - I, the Allies (Russians). Like its sister games, Napoléon 1807 is a game of manoeuvre. It’s a block game, and each block represents a corps of troops made up of infantry, cavalry, or a mix of the two. Each block represents a corps and bears the name of the corps’ commander. The blocks are single sided, with a crest on the side facing the opposing player, but the strength of each corps is tracked on a separate board listing the corps commanders in a column with two tracks running off each. The top row marks out the corps strength (one colour for infantry, another for cavalry), while the lower row – empty at the start – tracks the corps’ the accrued fatigue. A corps can be removed from the game in two ways, either having their strength reduced to zero or by letting their fatigue run to the maximum. There are ways to reduce a unit’s fatigue, which I’ll come back to, but it’s not always possible.

Napoléon 1807's Tun Track (top) and Victory Point track, both
incorporated into the board.

Napoléon 1807 is also a card-driven game, but not in the conventional sense. All actions are, to a degree, propelled by each side’s card deck. The cards serve several function, and depending on the phase of the turn, you’ll only consider one element of the information presented on the card. The decks are each comprised of46 cards, so in a longer game you’ll likely cycle through the deck two or three times.

The cards. The title banner exemplifies what kind of card it is (Red title must be played
 for their event in the Draw phase at the beginning of the turn, a single Green banner
card may be played out of the player's hand to gain some concession for the turn in
the Initiative phase, and the blue banners may be used during the Activation phase
(before or during battle of while moving, depending on the nature of the card,
but only one per activation).
During combat, each player will draw a specified number of cards and consult the
symbols in the bottom left hand space for damage inflicted on the enemy. In this
instance, the French player drew poorly. 

Turns run through four steps; Draw, Initiative, Activation, and Recovery. In the Draw phase, players each draw three cards from their deck to their hand (there’s no hand limit, so these can get unwieldy in longer games). These are checked for Red (Event) or Blue (Initiative) title headers, Events are played immediately, and will probably have some kind of detrimental effect on the game for at least the coming turn. In the first turn, I drew Rain, which means for that turn every unit that moves, or even tries to move, in that turn will accrue an extra fatigue point (there’s a Rain box on the board to remind players that it’s, well, raining that turn). Plus, I also drew Cold; when Rain or Snow is already in play, the Cold card adds yet another fatigue point penalty for each activated corps.

Adding injury to injury: complementary Rain and Cold event cards drawn on
the very first turn (which also left your correspondent with a single card in
his had to his antagonist's three)..

In the Initiative phase, both players draw the next card off the top of their deck. Each card has a number in the top right-hand corner which does double duty as the Initiative number and as Movement Points (MP) in the Activation phase. The player with higher number drawn wins the initiative for that turn, and ties are given to the French player. You can also play an Intuition card from your hand at this time (it’s the only time you can pay these). Depending on the card, this may allow you to size the initiative back, or to add a single infantry block to an under-strength corps, usually some small advantage going into the Activation phase.

A rather crowded centre at turn 1. The flags represent Citadels each worth
a set amount of points.

In the Activation phase, the players take turns trying to activate one or more corps at a time. The phasing player declares which corps are being ordered, then draws a card off the top of their deck and checks the number at the top. This dictates how far the ordered unit can move. If you draw a 1, a single unit can only move one location. If you ordered two corps to move in unison, you lose the first point in coordinating the movement between the two corps, so you’d need a 2 to move one location. Also, if you move more than three locations in a turn, you accrue one point of exhaustion for each movement point spent over the three.

In our first round, with Rain and Cold in effect, nobody was going anywhere with one point of movement, but nonetheless the attempt at activation was made, so the unit is considered to have acted for that turn and takes the fatigue points from the conditions at play. Poland in winter shouldn’t be easy for anyone.

The battle of Ebling: L'Estocq is bloodied but triumphant, while Ney is vanquished.

The movement we did manage in the first round didn’t amount to much, but it gave any unit that tried to move at least a couple of fatigue points. These can accrue very quickly and must be managed (or not, at your peril).

In turn two, the rain stopped, but under the scenario rules, a turn after Rain or Snow gets the Mud condition. This adds an extra fatigue on activation and reduces movement by two. Turn two did see some action; Savary attacked Essen I near Pultusk, making the Russians withdraw a space, and L’Estocq managed to out-manoeuvre Ney and claim the one-VP citadel of Elbing. Ney struck at the now entrenched L’Estocq but was soundly routed. Ney’s corps became the first casualty of the game.

Essen I cuts the bridge across the Vistula and retakes Warsaw. Sacken's corps
will have take the long way around.

Turns in the game are a little abstracted and represent around two to three days of campaign time. The third turn saw Marat make a dash, seizing Königsberg (three VP), pursued by Sacken. The two fought to a stalemate. In a lucky draw, Essen I managed to take Warsaw (and her two VP), demolishing the Vistula bridge behind him to prevent the still battleworthy Savary from crossing to engage. Savary would have to march to the next bridge further south; doable but unlikely to be completed in two turns, even if the fatigue effects could be ignored.

The end-state. Three corps routed, but too many strategic locations lost.

Rain visited the fields of battle again in the final turn. While Elbing and Warsaw remained in Russian possession, in an audacious move, T split his forces, sending Davout and Brassieres against my stymied attack force of Olsufiev and Galitzine – this ended in tragedy for the French, losing two corps, while Napoleon accompanied Soult and Augereau in an attack on Heilsberg, putting rout to the defenders and gaining another VP.

The final dispositions of the Russian (top) and French forces.

Scoring in Napoleon 1807 is on a pendulum, and in the Battle for Eylau scenario the marker starts at 8, The white tokens in the photo on spaces 5-7 equate to a tie (no clear winner). Through the game we traded blows pretty evenly (slightly in my favour) while the clear winner by territory was T, losing only Ebling and Warsaw, while taking Königsberg and Hielsberg (five VP collectively) while maintaining Ostande and Allenstein, and the fortified towns of Danzig and Thörn while maintain the siege of Graudenz. The towns held were already factored into the overall score (their points are there to wither hold on to or lose to the other side). When everything shook out, the point marker had nudged two spaces in favour of the French, placing it smack in the middle of the tie region. This was a hard-fought and well managed battle on both sides, stymied by inclement weather (that cost T at least one corps to fatigue, and would have taken Marat in one more turn). It was, in the worlds of Wellington, a near run thing.

The result after the final tally. On reflection, I think I may have short-changed myself
one point, but this would not have changed the Tied result. All in all, a good game,.

I can’t say enough good things about the Conquerors series. Napoleon 1806 is a fun and challenging game and an excellent place to learn the system, but with eleven scenarios and another two related to Napoléon 1806, this is the clear winner for value for money.