State of Play: Battle Line - making peace with the chaos

 

 

 

The game: nine Flags (red pawns), a sixty-card Troops deck and a twenty-card
Tactics deck, and a four-page rules sheet. The handy reference card
I downloaded from BoardgameGeek.com

I arrived at the expected time for a game with T (remarkably on a Monday for our sometimes inappropriately named Monday night game), only to find he had a visitor. T is taking some extended leave from work, and his boss had come around to discuss a few matters regarding his area. T’s taking a few months off to deal with some things. After introductions, I scurried off to make some coffee and rustle up a suitable diversion, nothing having been set up as yet.

T keeps his games in his home office, among the family’s extended game collection. The shelves run floor to ceiling on the back wall, with most of the wargames on the top shelf. There was no way I was climbing on his swivel chair to try to retrieve something from up there, but a did spot something just about at eye-level which seemed perfect for a truncated game and a chat.

I’ve written about the Reiner Knizia game Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000) previously (and more than once). I have a storied relationship with the game. I like it as a game, and it ticks a lot of boxes for what we’re all about here at A Fast Game – Monday’s session took about forty-five minutes from taking the box down off the shelf to putting it back in its spot. Battle Line a numbers game, which doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I like to play the percentages in a non-gamble-y way.

If you haven’t played it, it’s much more a war-themed game than a wargame; the game involves setting out nine wooden pawns, called Flags. This is the battle-line of the title. Play involves each player consecutively playing a card from their hand before one of the flags, trying to construct three-card runs Adjacent to the flags, then drawing a replacement card from either the Troop deck or the Tactics deck. When each side has completed a run, they determine which side has won and place the Flag on the winning run. The game is won when one side has scored five flags or three adjacent flags (harder than it sounds).

The Troop deck is made up of variously six suits of ten cards each, rated 1 to 10 in value, and these are used to make runs in the following configurations (in descending order):

Wedge – Straight flush

Phalanx – Three-of-a-kind

Battalion Order – Flush

Skirmish Line – Straight

Host – Any other formation (numerical values tallied)

So, a Wedge beats a Phalanx, which in turn will prove more than a match for a Battalion Order, and so on, down to the Host (in a competition between Hosts, the greater value of Troops showing up will carry the day, in the case of a tie, the side who completed their run first is the winner of that Flag). The Tactics deck mixes the straight mathematics of the Troop deck up a little. Various Tactics cards can be played to stand in for a particular (or any) card required but not drawn or allow the removal of a card your opponent has placed, and its re-placement on a run on your side of the battle-line. These are the wild cards that add a little chaos to the mathematical order of the game.

Flags placed cards dealt, anticipation building.

There’s quite a lot going on at the moment in life outside of games so, interestingly, T chose not to draw any Tactics cards at all – usually he’ll draw around half a dozen in a game – and I only drew one, and then only when I needed a Hail Mary for a run I was trying hard to build (I’ll come back to this), which paid off in the short term. We were both playing a fairly pure mathematical game. There’s an argument in literary theory and the development of the detective genre in the late nineteenth century and especially the rise in its popularity after the Great War was a societal response to the diminishing influence of religion as a source of assurance in everyday life; when people lost faith in God, there was still a need for a sense of order, and people retreated into a world where wrongdoers always received their comeuppance, and Truth was always revealed, Order inevitably restored. Battle Line may just be a perfect game for restoring a sense of balance, for a little while at least, in the face of life’s topsy-turviness.

At the outset, the goal for me is to try to win the game by garnering three adjacent Flags. I have never accomplished this, nor have I ever seen it done.* But I have to believe it’s possible, though it might require your opponent to be oblivious to your machinations and entirely absorbed in his own. To accomplish it you need to set an anchor, a solid, insurmountable run at least third Flag in from either end. This will give you the opportunity to win the two flags on either side, or two consecutive flags from the anchor. I can’t say this has been an effective strategy, having, as I said, never won with three adjacent flags, but it carries a kind of logic that I find compelling. And try as I might, I haven’t come up with a better opening.

Needless to say, this is what I tried to do from the outset. I don’t think there is a positive or negative effect related to playing the first card; T did in this game. The first card placed in a run can suggest some clue as to what your opponent is planning to place at that flag, which will in turn suggest what cards he his holding or hoping to collect. I used to approach every game like this, what you might call the Great Detective approach, parsing the evidence in the search for meaning. This way lies madness. I’ve adjusted my approach to Battle Line,

A blow by blow of cards played would be tedious beyond comparison. Instead, I’m going to present some photos of the developing game with some extended commentary on each for the reader’s edification.

About half-way through the game. No Flags claimed yet. I'm working on a Skirmish Line
(straight) for the third from my  right and hoping I can build a Wedge (straight flush) in the
Centre - most of the Green suit haven't been revealed yet. I've already written off the extreme
left Flag, but praying for Elephant reinforcements for the second from right. Straight flushes
are the ideal, even with lower value cards, but you have to play with what you're dealt.

.

I was pretty confident with my Hypastpist Phalanx (second from left) until T began building
his own  out of Light Cavalry, one after another (and one point higher in value). That was
the first flag to fall in the game. 

I'd been holding the purple 9 and 10 for eight or nine rounds, so when T laid out the purple 8
I knew I needed a bit of luck, or some clever Tactics.

The only Tactics card drawn in the entire game, but it paid off.  Alexander gave ne the purple
Heavy Cavalry I needed to beat T's Wedge with the actual purple 8. A case  of winning
the battle but losing the war.

I've just now realised T awarded the third Flag from my left to me incorrectly and I didn't
notice at the time. Clearly his Wedge (straight flush) beats my Phalanx (three-fer), so
technically, he won with with a three-adjacent Flag when he closed his 3 three-of
-a-kind, beating my 1 three-fer at the far left *about three rounds before
the game's natural end.

In the end, the game came down to the last two Flags, which were both taken quite handily by T. Even with a more sanguine approach to the game, I can get a touch of white line fever with some runs; I hold out too long for one result and miss the opportunity to close it with a less optimal but still serviceable formation, only to lose it to an unimpressive but still effective opposing run.

There is a purity of thought in crunching the numbers in Battle Line, a certainty in the absolutism of the game’s parameters that offers a kind of comfort. T likes to use the term, “Playing your own game.” There is the space of play and there are the boundaries, quite distinct. The space within becomes a manageable world of probabilities, where options can be weighed against one another, and you can feel a small measure of control over your own fate, however illusory. It‘s a strange thing, but a game that once represented a kind of chaos in miniature has evolved – for me at least – into something, if not peaceful, then somewhat controllable. I don’t think T ever had the issues I've had with Battle Line – or if he did, he certainly hid them more convincingly, but It seems to have become a safe harbour for him as well.

End state. As mentioned, T should have won about a half dozen rounds earlier, but
in the end, the honourable Opposition was shrouded in all kinds of victory.

 

* While I was finishing this post, I caught up with T for another game. We played Battle Line again, and T won with a three adjacent flag sequence at his extreme right flank, which duplicated the technical result here.