State of Play: French and Indian War (2/6) and a return to Bolt Action

 

 

Our regular Monday game was moved to Tuesday night this week due to T having a work commitment, which was just as well because I approached the game with a clearer head than would have the previous night. Nothing self-inflicted, just recovering from a nasty cold.

This week we returned to the French and Indian War, 1757-1759 (Worthington Publishing, 2020) one of my declared 6x6 games. Once again, I deployed as the French, T as the British, and once again it was a tight match. We ended up playing through the full three years (early winters each, so no bonus turns) All the first year and into the second, T played a very aggressive game, as my settlements in the western interior fell one by one. The only thing that slowed his progress was the arrival of winter (end of 1757).

I have seen the enemy, and he wears French cuffs.

I realised between last week’s and this week’s game that there were a couple of things that we did wrong; In the first game I attacked Halifax from Louisbourg when I shouldn’t have been able to, T holding the control of the Atlantic at the time. The game wasn’t so close that the extra two points would have decided it, but this time I quietly took control of the Atlantic uncontested while T went on his eastern rampage, and held it for the whole game. I took Halifax legitimately at the end of the second year, wintered there (I was unable to place reinforcements there as all hands were needed to shore up the fort defences at the other end of the board), and pushed on to Boston at the beginning of my spring offensive. This blunted T’s anticipated push in the centre somewhat – Boston could not fall to the dirty French – and he diverted troops back along the southern coast and we-took the city two turns later, then pushing on to dive me out of Halifax. But had he not been provoked to defend his western cities, T was set to push through my brittle defence of Forts Carillion and Frontinac, which would have almost certainly cost me the game.

The British march on Le Boeuf in force.

The other thing we had missed in the previous week’s game was winter attrition. At the end of the yearly cycle (the beginning of winter), any troop numbers in excess of the VP value of the settlement in which they are located must take a strength reduction of one point, two if it’s an occupying force in an enemy settlement (the first irregular unit gets a pass on this, since they’re used to the harsh winters). We both took penalties to our troop strengths in the west; T took the bigger hit, but her could afford to. At the end of the second year, with an eye to the turn track, I managed to maintain all of my units at their current strength, while T took reductions to a couple of Militia units (men going home to be with their families, no doubt). 

The Marines take Hampshire unopposed

The third year was a stalling exercise for my side. Scoring rounds occur at the end of each year. VPs are gained on a simple metric of one for each enemy unit taken out of the game (scored immediately) and how many enemy locations you hold – the ones where you actually have troops positioned – at the end of the year (the step before winter attrition). If one side has a clear ten-point superiority over the other, the war ends that year. If it runs to the third year, the onus is on the British to gain that ten-point lead, or victory defaults to the French. I didn’t mind relinquishing Boston and Halifax, because those forcing T to regain them meant two crucial turns, he couldn’t attack anywhere else, as well as tying up a not-insignificant portion of his resources. At the end of 1759, T did have a lead on me, but by the fourth turn of that year, there was no way he could come back to take victory. France prevailed, and the fur trade was maintained (a little longer). But we did manage to trim about forty minutes off the playing time from last week.

The final scores.

Wednesday night saw the group fighting in western France, circa July 1944. I believe B had a scenario set up for Bolt Action (Osprey Games, 2012; three buildings (including a magnificent cathedral with a removable roof-piece, roughly in the centre of the play area, with the two roughly numerically even sides, seasoned SS troops who had been recuperating in France after service on the Eastern Front, and D-Day-bloodied US infantry, converging on the town in the hopes of capturing the key locations. The Germans had a Panther tank in support, and the Americans had two Shermans (known colloquially among the German anti-tank teams as “Tommy-cookers;” true, as it turned out).

"I see the little silhouetto of a tank..." 

Sides were drawn mostly at random – K had a particular desire to play the Germans, while the other spots went to H, D and myself as the Americans, and B taking up the other German units.

Advancing with caution (and armour support).

The tone was set for the six-round match by H bringing the first Sherman up on the very first order, only for the Panther to edge froward along a road intersecting the main street of the town and putting it out of action with a single round. The second Sherman came up nearly in line with the smoking hull of the first and fired on the Panther, but failed to penetrate its thick frontal armour. Both sides’ units moved forward in a rush, and with the second round heel would be unleashed…

"Tommy-cookers"

On the Americans; drawing the first activation, K brough his Panther to bear on the second Sherman and dispatched it with ruthless efficiency. Thinking it would be unsporting to concede defeat then and there, the Americans fought on bravely but in vain; we inflicted some losses on the adversary, gave him pause in places, but the will (and canny die rolls) of the Germans carried the day.

I do like the initiative mechanism in Bolt Action; one special Order dice for each unit in a draw cup, and with each dice drawn, that side chooses which unit to activate next, leaving the Order dice face up next to the unit as a reminder of both it’s activation and what it was trying to accomplish.

Fierce house-to-house fighting.

My own gaming time will be reduced for a month while I attend my civic duty. I’ll try to take the opportunity to finish some reviews I’ve begun. Until next time.

 

 

Stripped down for parts: The Barracks Emperors

 

 

The Barracks Emperors (GMT Games, 2023) is a trick-taking card game, played on a grid-pattern board. No dice, few bells and whistles; it’s driven by its own internal mechanisms around card placement rules and the vagaries of the deck shuffle. Nonetheless, it is a very attractive product, and a very intriguing game. It comes from the same designers who brought us Time of Crisis: The Roman Empire in Turmoil, 235-284 AD (GMT Games, 2017) and Sword of Rome (GMT, 2004). These folks know their stuff.

Box back cover.

While “merely” a card game, The Barracks Emperors is steeped in the events, personalities and culture of the period, and the way the game works mimics the byzantine politics and pulling of levers that drove the internal struggles of a failing, flailing empire in its last gasps.

The game is played out on a standard 34” by 22” mounted board with a background map in muted tones of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant familiar to anyone who’s played Time of Crisis. Overlaid is a grid of squares, some marked with wreaths, some with crossed hand-axes, and some blank. These markings are mnemonic devices for the placement of cards for the start of the game.

At the left-hand side of the map are a series of other boxes marked for two of the card decks and for the extracted Pretender emperors. To the right-hand side are spaces for the Influence draw and discard decks and four spaces of ascending value under the heading of FORUM. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The rules are presented on mid-weight (maybe 110-ish gsm) matt paper. The rulebook is sixteen paged long, and one of those is the front cover. The rules are clear and informative, and richly illustrated with explanations of components and examples of play. I had a solid grasp of how the game functioned after a single read-through, which isn’t always a given.

The actual rules run to eight pages, including details for playing two- and three-player games. Four pages are devoted to solo play, including a sample set-up (the solo set-up uses the Roma card (pictured below), which is left out of play in the multi-player games). In keeping with GMT's tradition of long standing, a pdf copy of the rules is available here.

Sample Emperors. Spend your influence wisely.

There are three decks of cards in play in The Barracks Emperors. The Emperor cards are in three suits; Military (red), Senate (blue), and Populace (yellow). This theme will be familiar to anyone who has played Time of Crisis. A selection of Emperor cards is placed in the wreath-marked boxes on the board ahead of play, and again in the subsequent two rounds (I don’t want to turn this into a review or a how-to-play, but a rudimentary understanding of how things interact will be important).

Sample Influence cards.

The Influence cards are also divided into the same three suits, with numerical values running from one to eight. Each card also has a special ability that can affect its interaction with an Emperor or Emperors (depending on its position), or on other already-placed Influence cards. An explanation of each Influence cards’ special abilities is included in the rules.

Easy-punch, pre-rounded counters, big enough to read without glasses.

The special ability of some cards will give a +1 or +2 bonus to a pre-existing influence card of the same suit elsewhere on the board; these bonuses are recorded by placing a token on top of the affected card.

Barbarian card (centre), card back logo (left), and  Roma card on its Fortified side.
The Roma card is used in the solo game only. 

Seeded into the Influence draw deck are Barbarian cards. Each round of the game also begins with four Barbarian cards already placed on the board at the cardinal points. If you choose to play a Barbarian card, you discard that card, and move a Barbarian card already on the table to another free location. This is probably a good point to talk about orientation. Ideally in a four-player game, each player will sit at one side of the board. Each side has a symbol associated with it, representing that player’s faction.

PACs, each with its own faction symbol. These are replicated on
the borders of the Emperor cards.

The four factions are Wreath, Sword, Eagle, and Pillar, as demonstrated in the top-corner of the Player Aid Cards above. Yes, the PACs are actually cards, like those in the deck. This makes sense; everything you need to be reminded of fits on the two sides of the card.

PACs are double-sided.

Cards are always placed and played in the same orientation (top edge of all cards facing north). When a player places an Influence card, they can only place a card on their side of an Emperor. This may put their card against a different edge of another Emperor, and that’s okay, so long as one edge is meeting an Emperor legally. When an Emperor is surrounded, he is resolved, i.e. the faction with the highest level of influence over that Emperor collects that card and puts it in their prize pool (called a scoring area in the rules).

Influence suits and Barbarian deck (some Barbarian cards are incorporated into the
Influence draw deck at the beginning of the game).

Now, let’s talk components. The game comes in a solid, 2-inch box that nearly all GMT products come in these days. While I didn’t find the cover art particularly inspiring, I don’t actually hate it. And you don’t play the cover.

The forum, populated.

The board is also the high-quality print mounted on heavy card-stock for which GMT is so well-regarded. It looks nice; it’s probably not going to win any graphic design awards, but everything not specific to the players has a home on the board, which is something I’ve come to appreciate. While we’re on the board, I mentioned the Forum before. When you play an Influence card, you replace that card, but you don’t draw it from the deck; instead, you visit the Forum. And this is the bit I really like. The four boxes are marked 8 or less, 6 or less, 4 or less and 2 or less, and the selection of cards is arranged from lowest to highest value. The card you last played will dictate your choice of cards. If you played a 1- or 2-value card, you can choose from any of the four cards displayed. If you played a 7 or an 8, you are limited to the lowest-value card in the Forum. It’s a little thing, but brings a lot to the table in terms of balance, and adds another lever to the strategic options of the game.

Initial set up for a four player game.

The cards are all printed from the same stock, which will be familiar to anyone who has bought a Card-Driven or Card-Assisted game from the publisher. The cards are square, but they are a standard size used in some Euro games, so sleeves should be easy enough to come by. And you will want to sleeve these; thy are going to get a lot of use.

Emperors awaiting their turn in the big chair.

Materially, there isn’t much to The Barracks Emperors, but that’s no reflection on the game. This should be reflected in the price when it reaches antipodean shores. The components are all good quality, though, as I mentioned earlier, you will probably want to sleeve the cards (at least the Influence and Barbarian cards) as they are the workhorse of the game.

Emperors are resolved when they are surrounded on all four sides. The placement
of the Red 3 influence card will cause both Gordian III and Probus to be resolved.

Everything you need to play is here. If I had one gripe, it would be that an extra four pages to the rulebook with a historical context essay and some design notes would have been nice, but I’m a bit of a prat that way. I think I've just been spoilt by games like Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna. This absence is mitigated somewhat by the little bio-notes on each of the emperor's cards (spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for any of them).

 

* Normally I would reserve a Stripped Down for Parts piece for more visually stunning games (like Task Force), or ones with a lot more going on (expect something in the future on Mr President), but I did this on request DL on the Adelaide Board Wargamers group on Facebook. I didn’t do this instead of a full review – that will come after I’ve had the chance to play The Barracks Emperors a couple of times. Thanks for reading all the way through.

 

 

State of Play: more Lasalle shenanigans and some recent acquisitions

 

Wednesday saw a return to the Peninsula, circa 1810 or thereabouts, with a game of Lasalle (2^nd Edition; Sam Mustafa Publishing, 2021; click here for my earlier comments on this game). It’s always a treat to get to game with B’s superb 28mm miniatures, but victory was not to be given by the fates to the British and their Portuguese allies this time. I won’t dwell on recriminations. Suffice it to say; rolls were fumbled, tactics were thwarted, and the enemy was not amenable to our hopes and desires. In my defence, I wasn’t at my best on the night, having been wrestling with a cold all week. But no excuses; the better tactics carried the day; D and I conceded in the sixth of the eight turns, after our light cavalry was routed and our left flank colapsed.

Portuguese Light Cavalry face down French Light, with the help of a
Foot Artillery battery. Or at least, that was the plan.

Still, the table was resplendent, Redcoats, Portuguese, French and Italians taking to the field. Congratulations to K and H (with able assistance from B handling the Italians) on their win.

Portuguese Reserves arriving on our right flank, too late to reverse our fortunes.

French artillery, well-positioned, but ultimately ineffectual.

I tell myself we managed to retire in good order and save the colours.

In other news, a keenly awaited package arrived from Hanford, CA. Mr President: the American Presidency, 2001-2020 (GMT Games, 2023) looks like a monster of a game with a lot going on, while I’ve already familiarised myself with The Barracks Emperors (GMT Games, 2023). I’m looking forward to soloing this one in the coming week. I’ll probably four-hand the game initially, to get to know it, but I was happily surprised to see it indeed has a solo-play option built into the game by placing Rome (via a card included just for solitaire play) at the centre of the board, the very heart of the struggling Empire.

Okay, neither are strictly wargames; the conflict in The Barracks Emperors is much more political than martial, while the struggle against the forces of history in Mr President are, by the reports of others who have actually managed to get it to the table already, excruciatingly challenging, but wargames they are not. But then, who cares? If I want to mouth off about non-wargames (War-adjacent games?) on my blog about wargames with its regular readership of about five, what of it. Expect reviews for both down the track.

Mr President is a LOT of game,

 

State of Play: The French and Indian War (1-6)

 

 

With T returning to Adelaide, and spending the following week recovering from jet-lag and return-to-work shock, we finally caught up again for a game on Monday night. I wanted to mix it up a bit – and show a little more progress on my 6x6 list in the next Quarterly Progress Report, so I brought along French and Indian War 1757-1759 (Worthington Publishing, 2020). This is a game I wanted to back on Kickstarter, but begged off due to other demands. I finally managed to grab a copy about eighteen months ago, and I’d pulled it out before and pushed some blocks around but this was my first live-fire exercise with the game.

French and Indian War 1757-1759 is a concealed-information block game of three year-long rounds of eleven or twelve rounds each. Movement is point-to-point between the French and British forts and settlements around the Great Lakes region. It's a relatively simple game to grasp and play, but nonetheless presents a deep strategic puzzle. The British have superior numbers, particularly in regular units (and higher reinforcement levels in the second and third years of the conflict), but the onus is on them to win the game by scoring ten more victory points than their counterparts by the end of the third year, or victory defaults to the French. Combat can be a slow grind, but it does capture some of the nuance of the war-making of the period.

Initial historical set-up. Guidelines are included for free set-up.

In our first outing with French and Indian War, we were both still finding our feet. I gave T the British (he instinctively gravitates to the French in Commands and Colors: Napoleonics – Napoleon complex?) being the superior force. We exchanged blows and jockeyed for advantage, but the terrain and supply limitations proved too much of a hinderance for either side to make a decisive push. By 1759, best hope as the French was to run down the clock, and we called it four turns before the end of the game when we agreed there was no way for the British, who were ahead in points, could close the gap for a ten-point supremacy. Marginal French victory.

Militia (crossed muskets) and Irregular (crossed tomahawks) units.

Then we noticed that it was half-past-eleven, and we’d been slugging it out for two-and-a-half hours and neither of us had noticed, so focussed were we on the game. If that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.

 

 

 

Overthinking it: Tarawa 1943 and intent in game design

 

Just before Christmas, a copy of Tarawa 1943 (Worthington Publishing, 2021) arrived from a friendly game store the next state over. It’s a small, contained game – nearly everything fits onto the 17”x22” mounted board. It plays very quickly once you get the hang of it, and it is frustratingly challenging, but in the way that makes you want to set it up again for a rematch as soon a you’ve finished your last game. I must have played it now at least twenty times over a period of two-or-so months; I have yet to completely clear the island of Japanese forces, but each time I come back to it, Tarawa feels like a fresh challenge and something that is achievable with some planning and a little sympathy from the dice gods.

Tarawa 1943 - initial set up

The game comes with a handy score pad, a booklet now common in Worthington games, that will allow you to record your game results over time. The score-pad is designed to make it easy to work out how well you did in your game in terms of Victory Points, based on the number of locations seized, the number of Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) blocks still on the board, and the number of US Maine units lost in taking the island.

In all the times I’ve played, I haven’t once used the score-pad to check whether I had achieved a technical victory based on points. Personally, I’ve always felt that a anything less than a complete clearing of the island and securing of all locations by the time the 30-card IJA deck has played out is a kind of failure. And so, I would reset the game and try again (it’s a testament to the brilliant design and playability of Tarawa 1943 that over 20+ plays, it hasn’t got old).

Can't seem to shift that last bunker.

I’d been happily playing Tarawa this way right up until I watched a playthrough video posted on YouTube by Grant from the Players’ Aid. I’d advise anyone interested in Tarawa 1943 to go watch this; it’s better than any review I’ve read or seen at conveying the tension and pleasure of playing the game. After a brief run-through of how to play, Grant proceeds to play an entire game, falling just short of complete conquest of the island (at this point, I could sympathise). Then, using the score-pad, he went through the steps for allocation of victory points, taking several minutes over it before reaching his conclusion.

Watching Grant go through this process affected me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I had always ignored the victory points tally, but it struck me for the first time that this wasn’t just an additional feature but was incorporated as an integral part of the game experience. I’d been playing the game to my own satisfaction, but not as the designers had intended it to be played. I’d been doing it wrong.

---

On reflection, I realise I haven’t played Tarawa since I watched Grant play it right though with the scoring at the end. I realised I wasn’t playing the game the way it was intended to be played, and I think I felt guilty for not abiding by the designers’ intent. Am I being too sensitive? Is it disrespectful or just plain wrong to play and enjoy a game in a way it wasn’t ever meant to be played?

You could argue that it comes down to respect for the game and rules as published. In the case of Tarawa 1943, I’m either simply ignoring was the designers of the game thought was a worthwhile, or I’m making a conscious decision to ignore any kind of qualified victory and recognise only a complete dismissal of the IJA forces by the attacking US Marines as a true victory.

This is where we start to get into the tall grass of “house rules.” I’m much more familiar with this in roleplaying games and any boardgame, but especially not wargames. RPGs are often designed with closer attention to style than design, and some finagling is sometimes required at the table to ensure playability and the satisfaction of all. I’ve heard of this happening in wargames but have never done it myself (well, I thought I’d never done it).

Looking back, though, I realise I do have something of a history of straight-out ignoring some rules or factors of wargames. The example that most readily springs to mind is Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010). My brother-in-law have played a lot of C&C, mostly Napoleonics. There is a thing in Naps where, if your infantry unit is attacked by a cavalry unit, you can declare that the unit will form square. This doesn’t prevent the attack, but it limits the potential damage to the unit (a single dice), at the price of a random command card from your hand, which is placed on a special board, face down, and returned to your hand when the unit breaks square.

France's neglected Square markers.

We would always set up the square boards and markers each game until we realised that we both had decide independently that the loss of a manoeuvre option (the sacrificed card) was – usually – a greater risk than the loss of a single unit, and that forming square will generally slow the game down, always an undesirable eventuality. This is a case where a decision has been made to give expedience more weight than historical accuracy, but it’s something that we have both tacitly agreed to within the contract of the (our) game.

I’m not sure why seeing how Tarawa was meant to be evaluated set me off like it did. I wrote the first half of this piece the week I started keeping this blog. It’s taken me the better part of four months to complete it. The idea of designer intent has been running around in my head all this time; I keep stumbling across unusual little instances of a game where someone has added quirky rules – some optional, some mandatory – to add some verisimilitude to the situation. Richard Berg was a big one for this. That’s something different from but adjacent to what I've been talking about here, and I think it’s something I’ll come back to sometime.

I’ve also been meaning to write a review of Tarawa 1943 (spoiler alert: I like it), but this piece has been hanging over me the whole time. And I still can’t say whether I’m happy to go back and play Tarawa again the way I always have or not. I think I felt like I was somehow showing disrespect to Grant and Mike Wylie by not playing it through to the scoring stage, the way they had intended. I suspect that, having sold me a copy of their game, they wouldn’t really care one way or another.

So, after a break of three months or more, I think the best course is to take Tarawa off the shelf, play it again five or eight times, maybe use the scoring pad just to track how much or little I lost by, and write that review. It’s a really good game and it deserves that much.

 

State of Play: Sons of Anarchy and some 1944: D-Day to the Rhine

 

Lately Wednesdays have been back to roleplaying, so nothing to report here, but this week we were down one of our number, so B pulled out The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (CMON, 2017), and Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem (Gale Force Nine, 2014). I’d played Eric Lang’s Godfather game before – a solid, thematically-compelling worker-placement game. The consensus at the table was leaning to Sons of Anarchy, though, and I wasn’t really that invested in either game, so I went along with it.

I never watched the series on which the game is thematically based, even though I heard recommendations from the most unlikely sources (economists, theatre-folk); try as I might I couldn’t get all that enthused for it. I never found Breaking Bad that compelling, either.

No game pics, I'm afraid. I was distracted playing the damn game.

I’m happy to say that the game was another matter altogether. Eschewing the trap of trying to incorporate characters into a media-tie-in game, the designers went with keeping the trappings of the series – the named gangs, locations that commonly appear or are integral to the action – and used these building blocks to create an interesting, diverting, and well-balanced game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. The mechanics are a combination of worker placement and resource management, with a novel bidding system that sees the value of a commodity dropping with a higher number of units being offered (flooding the market with product). The playing area is three mandatory location tiles and a selection of nine random locations (out of twenty options, making for a good level of replayability), all drawn from places depicted in the series, with each location offering something more or less useful.

Being a worker placement game with limited locations, there will inevitably be some altercations between gangs. This can result with valuable “dudes” ending up in the emergency room, or the morgue.

There are three currencies in the game; money, drugs and guns. These are, to a degree, interchangeable, and different game functions allow the exchange of one for another one a one-to-one basis or sometimes higher. But, as in life, the only currency worth a damn is cash; whoever has the most cash on hand at the end of the game wins the game (though the others might count in a tie). Needless to say, it was down to the two of us who had played before, with H and me tied for the lowest score (respectable walking-around money, but not enough to retire on). And, to its credit, Sons of Anarchy plays quickly (as promised on the box) – even with two newbies, we were done in about an hour-fifteen.

Sons of Anarchy was, as I said, interesting and diverting, a great way to kill an hour, a good filler game (every self-respecting gamer should own a couple). While I don’t feel the need to hunt this down for myself, I would not begrudge playing it again.

Stock photo; better than I could get on the day.

I also managed to carve a little time to of my week to finally get 1944: D-Day to the Rhine (Worthington Publishing, to the table, albeit in a rather truncated manner. I didn’t have a lot of time, but the game comes with a one-turn learning scenario to get you used to the nuances of the game. I’ve played Dan Fournie’s other WWII game, 1944: Battle of the Bulge (Worthington, 2020), which has a lot going for it, and this game, while very different in scope, plays in a familiar fashion. It essentially a classic IGO-UGO system, with the flexibility of fire and movement in whichever order you choose for each unit. Action points, called Resource Points here, are allocated each game turn, and can be used to strengthen depleted units or resurrect annihilated ones, and t activate units for combat and movement. In a nice touch, one RP will activate multiple units in a single attack if they hail form the same command (units are colour-coded for just this reason).

Dice hit on symbols, simultaneous Attack and Defence rolls. Combat can be brutal.

D-Day to the Rhine plays similarly to Battle of the Bulge, and promises to be a fast-playing game, once the nuances are assimilated. In the full game, the Allies have nine turns to make it into Germany and secure key locations, driving off the map to Berlin or Hamburg to seize victory, and it’s up to the Germans with their diminishing resources to stop that from happening.

End of the German turn; damage dealt, but at a heavy cost.

This short scenario has just whetted my appetite; I really want to get this to the table sometime soon. The sooner the better. Maybe next week I’ll be able to carve out an afternoon to play out the full game.

State of Play: Battle Line without tears

 

 

With T still away overseas, I caught up with B at my local watering hole for a few quick rounds of Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000). This time I made a concerted effort not to stray down the rabbit hole of probability, or at least not much further than the entrance (see my previous ramblings on this excellent game here.

Obligatory beer not pictured.

Three rounds were played, the first going to B. I managed to eek out a win in the second, and in the third game, the odds ended up playing us both for fools, with the game ending in a draw. I don’t often win playing one-to-one against B, so I was happy with the 1-1-draw result. I went lean on tactics cards all three rounds, trying to increase my odds of gathering the particular cards I sought to complete the tricks I thought I had the best chance of winning. B is harder to read than T when it comes to what cards he’s hoping to nab, and I made his win easier by conceding a battle of my three 1s against his three 2s, then pulling the Mud tactic card almost immediately, which would have allowed me to stretch that particular battle to a four-card trick, when two of the other three 2s were already on the table. I think this would have only prolonged the inevitable, though, so it didn’t stick in my craw too badly.

In the third game, B had the Red 9 and 10 on one position, and the Red 6 and 7 on another and I sat on the Red 8 for at least two-thirds of the game, which left me in a position to sue for peace (bring the game to a draw), when he played a Red 5 with the 6 and 7, matching my Yellow (Lemon?) 5-6-7 suit.

Battle Line is probably still my number one favourite filler game. The simple line structure and rather arbitrary allocation of card strengths as designated by unit types shouldn’t be able to capture the theme of Greek city-state era land warfare as well as it does. And you have to love a game that has elephants.