Stripped Down for Parts: Guerre Eclair

 

 

Oh, happy day! Designer Yasushi Nakaguro’s Guerre Eclair (NUTS! Publishing, 2026) arrived a couple of days ago, but I had some things to finish off before I could pull it apart and have a proper look at it. The game was originally released by BonSai Games in Japan under the name The Rise of Blitzkrieg (BonSai Games, 2019). I own several NUTS! games, but this was the first game I’d ordered directly from the publisher. This was an impulse buy – not something I’m prone to – and shipping coset nearly as much as the (discounted) game itself. Looking back on it, I should probably held off and ordered it from Hexasim, along with La Der des Ders (Hexasim, 2025) and saved a few Euros on shipping, but Guerre Éclair did arrive inside of two weeks, which is quite impressive.

Guerre Eclair is the third in NUTS!’ Combat Rations series, following up from 300: Earth & Water (NUTS! Publishing, 2018) and Port Arthur (NUTS! publishing, 2020). The games in the series (thus far all reprints of BonSai games, as will be the fourth instalment – check out my interview with Mr Nakaguro for more) come in a uniform clamshell box, with a small, mounted board, nice components and cards

Each game in the Combat Rations series has had a different artist attached to the job. For Guerre Eclair, NUTS! went with Zuzanna Wollny. Ms Wollny is better known for her book and poster illustration work and for her truly stunning murals. The box cover is a sepia monochrome illustration reminiscent of a French soldier’s nightmares of the Front; tanks and dive-bombers baring down on the ill-lead defenders of the homeland. The result is effective and helps reinforce the theme and set the pace of the game. But it doesn’t set a rigid path for the rest of the art, as we will see shortly.

The clamshell box design. This appeals to my inner product engineer.

The defining feature of the Combat Rations series – for me at least – is the clamshell enclosure. The roughly C5 envelope-sized box is hinged and sealed with a magnetic clasp. Theis series isn’t the first to use the clamshell design (I have a couple of Osprey games that sport this style of case), and I don’t think it would be appropriate for a lot of games, but it’s a good fit for the Combat Rations ethos of short, numerically low-component, highly replayable games that will travel well – in a case or a backpack. If I was travelling with one, I would probably put an elastic band around the whole thing, just to be sure, but I’ve always had a belt-and-braces approach in regard to keeping things together.

Inside the box. This also doubles as a handy dice tray.

NUTS! Publishing always puts a premium on presentation, and the Combat Rations games are no exception. The inside of the box, looks like an ammunition box that’s been repurposed to hold a French infantryman’s personal effects. This was the same conceit that lined the Port Arthur box, only with a Japanese soldier’s ephemera. It’s an oddly affecting touch, bringing the historical event down to the level of the personal.

The box-back. 

The box-back description leads with a short description of the historical situation, the German invasion of Belgium, Holland, and France in May 1940, as well as a brief account of the game play. The usual caveats of two-players – I don’t see how you could play an effective solo game with the amount of hidden information crucial to play – and a recommended age of fourteen and up are advised. Forty-five minutes is the advised game duration, which I think would be true for anyone familiar with the game, but I’d anticipate an hour or so for an introductory game.

The rulebook.

The rulebook A5 in size, is printed in full colour on a good weight of low-gloss paper-stock. It runs to twenty pages, while the rules proper amount to eighteen pages (including nearly five pages of illustrated examples of play). The rules are pretty straightforward - number of the game’s concepts are familiar from 300: Earth & Water, but executed a little differently. 

Sample spread of the rules. The examples of play appear on a yellow background.

I’ll save the recounting of play for an AAR, but I would say that, in my experience with Mr Nakaguro’s games, simple rules bely rich, decision-point filled gameplay.My only complaint would be an unjust one; the font is a little small for me to read without glasses, but this is a grievance directed more at the injustices of age and decrepitude than the quality of the product, which is undeniably excellent.

The game board. Once again my crappy phone camera does not do justice
to the rather lovely artwork.

The map board is – as one would expect – small (roughly 11” by 17”); it is however mounted, and both attractive and functional. The art is a departure from the original Japanese release, which took a more utilitarian approach with a political-style map – it reminded me a little of the European campaign map in Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games,2018). Ms Wollny’s map is representative of the terrain encompassed in the theatre as it would appear during summer campaign; the lighter greens of the grassy fields give way to the dark, foreboding tones of the Ardennes. The movement in the game is point to point, with clear paths marked out between locations. Each location is defined by its shape; representing a town or city (ellipsis), a port (diamond, with an anchor) or a fortress (heptagon, with a turret silhouette). Belgian locations are marked in yellow, and the single Dutch city, Dordrecht, in orange. Control of locations is crucial to Grman victory, something we’ll touch on later. Finally, there are four Bases, three German – Saarbrücken, Prüm, and Düsseldorf – and one for the Allies – Paris, at the opposite end of the board.

Also incorporated into the edges of the board are a turn track (five turns, each representing roughly a week across May and June), and a Momentum pendulum track. Momentum is treated as a currency in the game, allowing the players to spend points gained on small advantages.

The German Shield fronts, illustrated in the sepia tones of a dust-infused breaking dawn.

Associated with the German bases are three card shields. These will conceal the German player’s division of forces across the three bases. The German player divvies up his available forces across the three bases in response to their victory objectives (more on this when we gat to the cards), and in response to the Allied troop placement, which is completed first.

The German-facing side of the shields. These conceal the players distribution of troops
across the three bases.

The shields as printed double-sided on light card, each with a unique illustration on the opponent-facing side and the name of the base printed on the German player side. They are perfectly adequate to their task in structure and size and come pre-folded rather than simply scored on the fold, which is another nice touch. I don’t know about others, but I always seem to mess up and mis-crease at least one of the folds, left to my own devices.

Clockwise from Top left: French (blue), German (grey), and BEF (ochre) units,
and the two Tracking discs for the Tern and Momentum tracks.

The game has no counter-sheet, but instead uses little wooden meeples – soldiers and tanks representing French (blue), British (ochre) and German (grey) forces – where the BonSai release had similarly coloured cubes and discs. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded if the publishers had decided to go with blocks, but the end result is more evocative, with infantry and armour being instantly discernible, and more familiar to Euro-gamers trying out a war-game.

One thing I can appreciate is the attention to detail. The Allied and German tank pieces are different silhouettes. It’s a little thing, but it indicates the care that’s gone into the preparation of the game as clearly as a bowl of M&Ms with all the red ones removed.

Sample cards from the Operations decks for the Allied (left) and German players.

Guerre Eclair comes with three short decks of cards; an eighteen-card German deck, A fourteen-card Allied deck, and a four-card Objectives deck, as well as a single Surrender card. These are standard poker-sized cards, and are printed on a good weight of card stock. Guerre Eclair is a Card Driven Game (CDG), but instead of dealing off the top of the deck, the players can choose which cards they wish to utilise in that round. Cards can be spent to make a move action or utilised for their event. Some cards are only usable in combat for some kind of benefit

The cards are beautifully presented, with thematic art and clear instructions. The art is what I’d call realistic through an impressionist filter. Given the physical scale of the game, the development group may have been tempted to go with a cartoonish style for the artwork generally. Instead, the pictures maintain the serious tone of the game and its subject. Even the choice of fonts for the titles, each reminiscent of period propaganda posters from France and Germany respectively, maintain the thematic integrity of the art.

The four German Objective cards (only two ever in play, with just one revealed to the
Allied player and one hidden), and the Allied Surrender card. I've gone through the
rules once but am still at a loss as to the purpose of the Surrender card. I'm sure
I've just missed something obvious.

The game has four Objective cards, which provide the victory conditions for the Germans. This makes things interesting and adds to the replayability of the game. We’ve seen the same device in another France’40 game, Dunkirk: France 1940 (Worthington Publishing, 2018) but there’s an added twist here; at the beginning of the game, the German player draws and Objective card, then places it where both players can see it. This is the open objective. He then draws a second Objective card, but this one is concealed from the Allied player. To win the game, the German player must meet the demands of one of these Objective cards. This will be easier said than done; while the Germans have advantages in hand-size and a numerical superiority in available troops, the Allies only have to delay the Axis progress over five rounds to spoil a German victory.

The game also comes with four 10mm dice. I've yet to haven't to take the game out for
a spin, but I suspect there may be a case for a couple of additional bones to avoid
the occasional consecutive roll for numbers.

Finally, the game comes with four small but quite readable black six-sided dice. These are nice dice, with a good weight despite their diminutive size. The beauty of the clamshell case is the game comes with its own dice tray.

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I’ve been on a bit of a Napoleonics jag of late, so I think it’s time to mix it up a bit. A fast game is indeed a good game, especially on a school night, so I hope to get an AAR of our first Guerre Éclair game to you, faithful reader, within the next couple of weeks (in between further Napoleonic excursions, I'm sure).

Stripped Down for Parts: Port Arthur

 

Charles S. Roberts Award 2024 nominee for Best New Edition of a Previously Published Game

 

Port Arthur (Nuts! Publishing, 2024) is the second release in French game company Nuts! Publishing’s Combat Rations series. Both this and the first in the series, 300: Earth & Water (Nuts! Publishing, 2021 – you can read my review here) were designed by Yasushi Nakaguro and previously published in Japan by BonSai Games, as is the projected third game in the series, Guerre Éclair (Nuts! Publishing, ~2025), originally released as The Rise of Blitzkrieg: The Fall of France, 1940 (BonSai Games, 2019), is due out later this year.

Port Arthur is an asymmetric game about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. This conflict saw the defeat of the Russian Empire and the removal of its navy as a credible force on the world stage, and started the Japanese military on a road to national domination and empire building which would lead with tragic inevitability to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, and the nation’s wholesale defeat for years later. It’s a big canvas to be covered by such a small game, but 300: Earth & Water deals with successive generations of Persian rulers trying to bring a few belligerent city-states to submission (and failing each time, historically). Mr Nakaguro is adept at drawing the key threads from historical conflicts and weaving them into compelling, playable narratives.

Port Arthur shares the signature Combat Rations series magnetic clasp
clamshell enclosure. All up, it's a gorgeous package.

Like 300: Earth & Water, Port Arthur comes in a clamshell-style box, fastened with a magnetised clasp. I was a little suspicious of these when I first got 300, but the box both opens easily and secures well. It no doubt helps that the materiel of the game collectively doesn’t weigh too much. The box is roughly the size of a fat B5 envelope, or a 280-page Picador paperback (or a bit shorter than a VHS cassette case), so they’ll slip easily into a briefcase or backpack for a traveling game.

The artwork for the whole package was provided by game artist, Maud Chalmel. Ms Chalmel is an accomplished illustrator in the area of family games, but I believe this her first venture into wargaming. Some people have talked about Port Arthur having a cartoonish quality to the artwork – a view get if based on the box-cover alone – but taken as a whole this description does the work justice. Ms Chalmel brings to every aspect of the game an art-nouveau quality that is both historically appropriate - it was popular in fin de siècle Europe and elsewhere and itself references the influence of the Ukiyo-e tradition. The result feels appropriate for the subject, and the whole effect is really quite stunning.

The box back.

Thew back of the box is less forthcoming about the game than I would have expected. It begins with a paragraph referencing the key events of the Russo-Japanese War – the invasion of Korea and the battles of Mukden (on land) and Tsushima (at sea), and the subsequent destruction of Russia’s Baltic Fleet. The box-back also lets us know that this is meant to be a two-player game for players fourteen and up, and that the playing time should clock in at around 40 or so minutes.

The rulebook - sixteen pages of full-colour goodness (about fourteen pages
of rules, including illustrations).

The rulebook for Port Arthur has been printed on a good weight of a higher gloss paper (the kind more commonly seen in Euro-games) and runs to just sixteen pages. I am still going through the rules but, so far, the English translation is solid (unlike a lot of European publishers, Nuts! tends to print separate copies in French and English), and I don’t anticipate any difficulties getting the game to the table, barring the usual time and opponent-availability issues.

The mounted map. Lush.

The board is gorgeous. It might well be one of my favourite game boards for its appearance. Like 300, it is a small, for panel – A3 paper sheet-sized – mounted board, covering Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China, Manchuria, and Russia, with the surrounding waters divided into sea areas, and holding boxes for the ports of Vladivostok, Port Arthur, and Diego Suarez. Movement is regulated by point-to-point locations on land, and by area movement for sea-borne ships.

Along the left edge of the board is the game’s scoring track. Like 300, the game scores on a pendulum track, beginning at zero, and scoring at the end of each turn. Unlike 300, there is no sudden death victory if a side reaches the maximum points (five) – the game plays out for the full six turns. At the end of the game, Japan has to have points on their side of the scoring track, and maintain control of Mukden to gain a win, otherwise its an automatic win for the Russians.

Two A5 punchboards. The counters come out cleanly - no sanding.

The counters are pre-rounded easy-punch pieces printed on a heavy weight grey-core cardstock. The majority of the counters represent the ships of the Russian and Japanese fleets, but game markers and a turn track are also included in the mix. There is also a Port Arthur Blockade marker that gets placed n the board when the Japanese player manages to restrict navigation to and from the port (the actual locations of Vladivostok and Port Arthur on the map are indicated by colour-coded anchor symbols linking the holding boxes to their geographical position.

As with everything else, the counters and markers just look really good. The ship counters are rectangular and feature a full-strength side on the front and a damaged side with a slightly greyed-out image on the back. The Russo-Japanese War was rough on the Russian navy, which ended up loosing the bulk of not one, but two fleets.

Player Aid Card. Small but useful.

Port Arthur comes with a single, double-sided Player Aid Card, printed on a really light cardstock. The front offers set-up notes and an annotated Sequence of Play, while the verso presents further notes for conducting sorties and naval operations, and naval battles. Two PACs would have been nice, but a lot of games deliver a single

Dice and meeples.

The game also comes with six dice and six Japanese soldier and officer meeples. The dice are on the smaller side, but that’s fine in a travel-size game. The meeples are used to mark locations on the Manchuria land-track where the Japanese player has conducted successful attacks. I get that fancy meeples (these do look very cool) are a selling point for some, and Nuts! Publishing is a business with a reasonably large footprint in the family game market as well, but for my money I would have been happy with wooden cubes or discs as markers. This by no means detracts from the game, I just don’t think it will add all that much to my experience of it.

The box interior art; a really nice finishing touch to an all-round attractive game. 

The box interior art found in Port Arthur is one of those strictly unnecessary but really nice details that Nuts! Publications often squeeze into their publications. While it doesn’t add anything to gameplay, it The enclosure is styled as an occasional box for keeping photos and other mementos that might be kept by an operational officer to remind him of home. It’s thoughtful and eloquent, a reminder of the humanity of those involved at the very outset of one of the most inhumane periods of modern history.

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So, that’s Port Arthur. Add one more title to my TBP list. I would like to get an AAR posted in the next month or two, but I really can’t promise that. It does look like an interesting and challenging game though, and with a play-time of about three quarters of an hour, it’s definitely a contender for a weeknight turn

 

 

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.