Review: 300: Earth & Water

  

 

Some games punch above their weight. 300: Earth & Water (Bonsai Games, 2018, Nuts! Publishing, 2021) is a brilliant little game of strategy and fortune. The phrase “brilliant little game” sounds patronising, even to my ears, but it’s the most accurate way to describe this tiny gem. The game comes in a hinged box. much like the Exploding Kittens (Exploding Kittens, 2015) Kickstarter edition clamshell box (the 300 box doesn’t make a mewing sound when you open it, though).

Antonio Sappaerts' evocative cover art.

300: Earth & Water, the first game in Nuts! Publishing’s Combat Rations series, was designed by veteran Japanese designer, Yasushi Nakaguro. The second game in the series, Port Arthur (Bonsai Games, 2020), was released earlier this year, and the third, another French- and English-language reprint of a Japanese game - The Rise of Blitzkrieg: The Fall of France, 1940 (Bonsai Games, 2019), will be released as Guerre éclair (Nuts! Publishing, ~2025) in the new year (both of these titles were also designed by Nakaguro-san, who has over 70 design credits to his name). The Combat Rations series games share the same packaging model and are intended to be beautifully crafted and intellectually challenging two-player games you can fit comfortably into a backpack.

Clam-shell box. I've always been a sucker for fancy packaging..

 

Appearance

The first thing you notice about 300: Earth & Water is the container. It’s a flip box – instead of pair of mating pull-apart halves, the hinged lid opens like a clamshell (or an alligator’s jaw) to reveal its contents. The lid doesn’t look secure at first blush, but flap is secured by a magnetic fastener, which seems to do the trick under normal conditions. With about 1 ¼” depth and the profile of a C5 envelope, the whole package is about the size of a trade paperback and conveys a sense of transportability. I would call the product lavish if the whole thing wasn’t so diminutive.

Inside you’ll find a small four-panel mounted board (A3 sized, or roughly 11” by 17”), a short rulebook, a slim deck of cards, a few dozen wooden blocks and discs, and half a dozen dice in two colours. Everything about the box and its contents is simple and elegant. The colour palette of the box artwork is retained for the board and cards. These are clear, muted yellow-browns (leading into greens for the land areas) and blues – in keeping with the earth and water theme – that make the red and blue of the unit components really pop on the board.

Rulebook sample page. The rules are well laid out and easy enough to pick up, although
some of the card explanations could be a tad clearer (but BGG is a good fallback).

A sixteen-card deck is also included. These perform double duty, with separate playable game effects for each side printed on the top and bottom halves of each card, identified by the ochre and blue title bars. The component inventory is completed with six dice, three each red and blue.

The rulebook is a low-gloss, full-colour, and thoroughly illustrated sixteen pages, but the rules proper come to a mere eleven pages, including a full-page set-up map. The remaining pages offer historical explanations of many of the events featured on the cards, with a very brief but to the point essay on the Greco-Persian Wars on the back cover, and a short bibliography.

Set-up at start, before the Preparation Phase.

 

Play

Historically the animosity between the mighty Persian Empire and an uncertain coalition of Greek city-states is the classic David and Goliath story, played out across and around the Aegean Sea. No less then three times Persians rulers led expeditions into Greek territory to make the city-states yield to their rule, and each time they were successfully resisted.

300: Earth & Water is played out over five rounds, so the Persian player can potentially launch five campaigns into the Grecian peninsula, though that is not a given; some card events may force the players to skip a whole campaign round. Land movement is point to point, with major cities and towns connected by roadways. Sea movement is from port to port; these are indicated by a slightly paler azure half-circle surrounding a coastal city.

Persian reserves at set up (with the Hellespont bridge ready for deployment).

300: Earth & Water is a game of five turns, or Campaigns. The Persians, being the aggressor party, begin in each step of each turn. Each side begins with some forces on the board, and a varying number of points to spend on Armies (represented by wooden blocks, red for Greek, blue for Persian), Fleets (wooden discs, as per the Armies) and cards. Play is driven by card play – during the Operation Phase of the Campaign, each player, beginning with the Persians, may play a card from their hand, either for the card’s event, or as currency to make a move action. Any number of units can move in a single move action, so long as they all start from the same place.

The turn structure is broken down into four steps: Preparation Phase, Operation Phase, Supply Phase and Scoring Phase. In the Preparation Phase the players will spend their resource points on Units and cards. The Persians have twelve points to spend (ten if they’ve carried a card over from the previous turn), while the Greeks have just six points with which to equip themselves, but by going second, they do get a glimpse at the Persian player’s plans for the campaign. The Greek player also has a few other advantages; all their purchases are on a one-for one basis – one point for a card, Army or Fleet, while the Persians must pay two points for each fleet, and they may carry over any unused cards from one campaign to the next without penalty. They also have advantages in combat, which we’ll get to now.

Hellespont deployed; Pella imperilled.

The Operation Phase is where the rubber meets the road. Taking turns (Persians first), each player may play a card, either for its event, or as payment for a move action. Fleets can move from any port to any other port, and each can carry an Army to said port. Armies can travel by land as far as they can through friendly-held cities before reaching an unoccupied or enemy-occupied city.

When an Army or Fleet reaches an enemy-occupied city/port, combat ensues. Combat takes place over one or more rounds. The players each roll of dice reflective of the number of units participating, up to a ceiling of three dice. Whoever rolls highest on any of their dice wins the round and the loser returns a block to their draw pool. But it’s not that simple; the Persian empire had massive resources in equipment and manpower at their disposal and relied on brute force and weight of numbers. The Greeks, on the other hand, had superior training and discipline on land and technological advantages at sea. To reflect this imbalance, in either theatre, any fives & sixes rolled by the Persian player are considered a value of four (there are some card events that temporarily nullify this imbalance). After a round, the loser may choose to fight on or to retreat to their last location (Fleets retreat to the port from which they sailed). Combat continues in this fashion until one side has either retreated or is eliminated. Then the opportunity for action goes to the other player.

Persian Armies threaten the heartland of the Hellenic peninsula.

Either player can choose to pass on a turn, and even pass for consecutive turns, but when both sides pass, that Campaign ends. The Supply Phase is next. Between campaigns, armies are expected to live off the land they occupy. Every city held by a side is checked for supply; the Persian home cities of Ephosos and Abydos can support any number of troops from one Campaign to the next, while the Greek home cities – Athenai and Sparta – can only support two Armies between campaigns. All other cities can only support a single Army between Campaigns, as indicated by the amphorae attached to each city. Persian-controlled cities must be able to trace an unbroken line of communication through friendly occupied cities back to the Home Cities of Anatolia or they too are lost (the armies presumably deserting for the good life in the Greek peninsula).

Another feature of the game is the Hellespont, a pontoon bridge connection Mysia and Thraki, at the narrowest point of the channel between the two shores (represented by a inch-long brown rod). The Hellespont may be constructed by the Persians at a cost of six points during their Supply Phase. It’s a big investment, but once constructed, the bridge allows the Persian Armies to cross into the Greek peninsula effectively by land, instead of relying on the weaker Persian Fleets to transport their Armies to hostile shores. While not a definitive winning strategy for the Persians, this can bring much more pressure onto the Greek player over consecutive Campaigns. T can be destroyed by a successful Greek attack on Ephosos; take the city and destroy the bridge.

The last phase of the campaign is the Scoring Phase. Each side tallies their influence calculated by cities under their control (i.e., still occupied by an Army); two points for their Home Cities, and one for each other city. Subtract the lesser number from the greater and add the difference to the higher scoring player’s total. Scoring is managed on a pendulum continuum, like Twilight Struggle (GMT Games, 2005); if you’re down four points and you score two, you’ll be down two points – you’ll need some more wins before you’re back in the black.

Greek seaborne assault on Eretria. The Greek Fleets will have to see off the single
Persian Fleet before the Armies can land to take on the Persian garrison. If the
Persian Fleet manages to take out a Greek Fleet in the initial combat, that Fleet's
attendant Army is also lost, which may make the Greek player rethink
a second round (even with the odds advantage).

The cards are a random element in the game. Some actions are situation-specific, such as allowing the Persian player to ignore the ceiling on all his combat rolls for a given battle, or to cancel the effect of an opponent’s action (if played in response to the action being played, not retroactively), while others are mandatory, like “Sudden Death of the Great King, which, when drawn by the Persian player, cancels all action of the campaign at hand – including scoring – after the conclusion of the Supply phase. Some cards are potential game-shifters if not outright game changes, if the Fates hand you the cards you need in the rounds you need them.

A sample of the card selection. The events are tightly thematic, their game effects
reflective of the historical situations described.

The game concludes at the end of scoring of he fifth Campaign, or at any point when one player reaches a total of six points. This is conceivably possible mid-campaign through judicious card play, but unlikely.

Game play is generally smooth and swift once both players are familiar enough with the rules. The box advises to expect a game to last around forty minutes, but this doesn’t take into account the knuckle-gnawing analysis paralysis that can set in when deciding play to execute at the cost of another equally promising (or equally ambivalent) play. Tense situations will, in my experience add some time to 300: Earth & Water, but you should still be done inside an hour.

 

Appraisal

For an asymmetric situation, 300: Earth & Water is a finely balanced game. Victories seem to be split roughly equal, but in all the games I’ve played I’ve rarely seen a victor with a higher score than three on the last turn. The best comparison I can make with this game is to something like Tarawa 1943 (Worthington Publishing, 2021) in terms of brevity and tension. For a super tense and engaging fifty-or-so minutes, 300 is the two-player equivalent of Tarawa.

300 even comes with its own dice tray.

I get that some folks just don't like small games. That's okay, everyone has their preferences, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this game simply on the basis of its footprint. 300: Earth & Water offers a masterclass in operational strategy and does so in the time it would take to sit through a university lecture by Edward Luttwak. For a game that presents such tight, limited options for both sides, the challenge of the game can’t be overstated. Like Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes! (PSC Games, 2022), 300 delivers a deeply intriguing and satisfying game experience, but unlike Caesar!, it isn’t merely a puzzle game at its heart, but a rich (if admittedly simplified) operational challenge for both sides. The challenge is to plan and work toward good outcomes for your next campaign and the one after that, while you are executing your current campaign. It’s that multi-tier thinking that makes 300 such a rewarding game.

Three-times CSR Award nominee Nakaguro-san has a reputation for designing deceptively simple-looking deep strategy games, such as his Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: War in Asia and the Pacific (Bonsai Games, 2017). This is my first game by the designer, but if 300: Earth & Water is anything to go by, I’m eager to try anything Nakaguro-san has to offer.