State of Play: Plains Indian Wars

 

Slow week; T was interstate, so no game on Monday. Well, that’s not strictly true. I did a solo, four-handed run-through of a game I’ve had for probably about a year but hadn’t yet shared it with anyone, in anticipation of brining it to game night on Wednesday.

We were down one of our number for Wednesday game, with D was unavailable due to a work commitment, so that was the perfect time to bring over John Poniske’s Plains Indian Wars (GMT Games, 2022). I’ve been on a bit of a Poniske-jag lately, with playing though Ball’s Bluff (Legion Wargames, 2015), re-reading the Hearts and Minds (Compass Games, 2019) rules in anticipation of getting that to the table soon, and eyeing-off Fire on the Mountain (Legion, 2022)*. I’ve played Plains Indian Wars through four-handed on my own three or four times since it first arrived, and it struck me as a well-balanced game that represents a historically rather unbalanced.

I was in teaching mode on Wednesday and didn't take ay photos, so
here's a shot of my rehearsal game from Monday.

The US players have more going on. Of the seven discs drawn in a round, they control five between them. The Cavalry player also plays the Enemy Indian units. These units represent the native tribes who allied themselves with the US government in the hopes of supressing or wiping out their own traditional enemies.

The Settlers manage the Wagon Trains and the Transcontinental Railroad construction. These are practically automated functions and don’t take too long to manage (The railroad gets built depending on the presence of Settlers at the railheads; the existing Wagon Trains on the board move one space along the marked trails with two new wagon blocks coming on each round), but they do add to the down time for the Plains Indian players.

As the Plains Indians, the players have to reconcile themselves to not being able to defeat the US onslaught, but to curb it and hinder its progress where and as often as they can; there are always more settlers and more cavalry with each round.

In all the games I’ve played, the Railroad remained uncompleted more often than it got finished. Mostly due to the difficulties of crossing the Rocky Mountains. There’s a Settler action card that allows the player to complete the Rocky Mountains stage of the building in a single turn, but in Wednesday’s game that was the very last card drawn from the Settlers deck. Despite this, the US team did manage to complete the railway and bring the game to a conclusion on the cusp of the first exhausted deck.

This isn’t an easy game for wither side to win, but it is probably an easy game to lose. Both sides made beginner’s blunders strategically, but at scoring the clear winners were the Plains Indians, who scored convincing seven points ahead of the US by managing to hold on to much of their territory in the face of an intransigent foe.

*I also own Devil Dogs: Belleau Wood, 1918 (Worthington Publishing, 2019) and have the reprint of Berlin Airlift (Legion Wargames, 2023~) on CPO order with the publisher.