State of Play: Brief Border Wars (1/6): The Football War

  

 

I’ve been keen to get Brian Train’s Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) to the table for over a year now. It’s a classic four game box-set in the tradition of SPI’s quad-games; four situations using the same set of series rules, with a couple of pages of exclusive rules to add more flavour to the individual conflicts. It was one of the first games I chose for my 6x6 personal challenge last year. Last year didn’t happen quite the way I hoped, but I’m still keen to finish what I started, and so on Monday night I introduced T to the Football War, which was fought between El Salvador and Honduras.

Train offers a short but informative precis of the war in his designer’s notes for this conflict – and I’d recommend reading his notes for each of the situations, but in short, El Salvador briefly invaded Honduras in 1969 for a perceived short-term political gain. In the end, nothing was gained, many more civilians were killed than soldiers, and under pressure from the US and the Organization of American States (OAS), a cease-fire was reached in less and a week.

Opening set-up (apologies for the plexi-flare).

The game is an interesting puzzle. El Salvador is the aggressor. They have the larger forces at their disposal and enjoy the element of surprise, the majority of their forces setting up on the border, while much of the Honduran army available is still barracked near the capital. But the onus is on them to push out and in many directions to cover more territory than the Hondurans can protect, capture cities, then hold them against a limited but fully mobilised Honduran force. The terrain is working against them. If no roads links territories – which is the case along nearly the whole of the Salvadorian/Honduran border – the movement cost to each unit is two points (double the normal movement cost).

This is probably a good point to break the narrative and talk about mechanics. This is a game that takes seemingly clunky mechanics and works them into a relatively seamless narrative. Play is driven by cards, and there are two suits, white and grey, which are shuffled together and dealt out six cards at a time. Of those six cards, the white-striped ones go to the Designated player (the instigator of hostilities) and the grey-stripped cards go to the other player. Whoever has the most cards in their hand goes first that round, and card-play goes back and forth until both hands are depleted, or until both layers pass their turn. In that case, any cards not played are discarded, the turn marker forwarded one place, and the next six cards are dealt.

Access to the road network is crucial to success in The Football War.

Each deck has 20 action cards, and each action card has two values, Movement and Combat. Each card can be used for one or the other – you can’t move and engage in combat in the same card-play. The Movement number is normally how many units you can move in that activation; one point will get one unit from one area to an adjacent area. As mentioned earlier, the Football War, any non-road movement costs two points per unit.

Combat is handled simply, with one die allocated to each side for their participating units' combat value (CV – the single bold number on the unit markers). Like with movement, the number on the card played dictates how many units can be committed to fights in that round (the points can be split over several areas, and points can also be allocated to air support at a rate of one air unit per ground unit participating. The Attacker calls the shots. He declare which units from BOTH sides will participate in the action (he can gang up on a single enemy unit if he wishes, ignoring other units present in the area), but the defender gets the terrain advantage, up to two extra dice, as well as their own air support. A successful hit will flip an attacker to its Disrupted side, while the defender has the option of staying put and becoming disrupted, or to retreating to a neighbouring area but maintaining its cohesion (essentially an orderly retreat). More hits will lead to more serious results. As mentioned, terrain always favours the defender, and in The Football War, much of the play area is both mountainous and thickly forested. In most situations, a defender is going to get an extra die for each of these for their rolls.

Air support can be a deciding factor *it just wasn't in this case - no hits for both sides).

Each deck also has a random event card, which is declared and played as soon as it comes out. Each game comes with it’s on exclusive rules, and the exclusive rules include a table of random events; when the card come out, you roll a d6 and check the table. Every game runs through 7 turns, so each player will play through their 21 card-deck completely through the course of the game.

At the end of the seventh round, victory is determined. In The Football War, various Honduran cities are allocated values of one or two Victory Points, and any of these locations held uncontested by the Salvadorians go to their score. Being T’s first game, and my first in more than seven or eight months, after playing through the Operation: Attila and the Third Indochina War two handed, I think I can safely say that neither of us had a coherent strategy going in. After some jockeying in the first three rounds, I managed to distract T in the south, where his long-suffering Hondurans had made an incursion into Salvadorian territory, near the coast, tying up some of his limited resources while I made a late break through the northern part of the map, occupying a few unprotected cities at enough distance from his nearest forces to make interception unlikely. The presence of Salvadorian forces in an area is enough to establish control, but if there is also a Honduran unit or units in the space, it becomes contested, and the Salvadorian player can’t claim that point.

At the bottom of the seventh.

At the end of the seventh turn the Salvadorians held cities to the value of 5 points, a draw. Seeing how things played out, we both made a lot of mistakes, but that’s why I always approach a first game out of the gate as a learning game and try to be more invested in the how the mechanics function alongside each other rather than what I need to do, or stop the other guy from doing, to win. I think we both learned a lot, though I don’t think T will be able to curb his “all in:” instinct enough to take advantage of all the benefits offered to the defending player and set up situations to invite the aggressor to declare a fight; or at least, not straight away. With five more games to be played and only four in the box, I think I’d like to come back to the Football War with what I learn from playing the others.