Stripped Down for Parts: Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen

 

Hefty. and very square.

 

And now for something completely different. I wrestled for a long time with whether or not to purchase Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen (Compass Games, 2024). Firstly, it’s a big investment, both of cash and space (regular readers will know we live in a smallish apartment, and storage space is at a premium – I can no longer afford the shelf-space for “occasional” games). I’ve also been leaning harder into historical games over the last couple of years, selling or giving away many of the “family” games I’ve bought over the last ten or so years, and keeping just a handful of favourites.

In fact, around the middle of last year, I made the decision not to acquire Burning Banners. I drew a line under it and moved on, telling myself it’s too much to commit to. I’ve been divesting my collection of a lot of RPG material because I’ll never get around to using most of it. Since beginning A Fast Game, I’ve been doubling down on historical gaming, not all war-gaming exclusively, but I have avoided fantasy an sci-fi (that’s not to say I’ve cleaned house, but in the last three years I’ve bought just one Sci-fi game, To Honor Grandfather (Cheese Weasel Logistics, 2025), and that was pretty much solely because of the Traveller RPG connection (I have every intention of grabbing the Belter (Game Designers Workshop, 1979) re-release from Compass Games when it finally lands.*

That resolve was shaken by a couple of confluent events. First, I stumbled across a review by the gentlemen of The Player’s Aid in my YouTube recommendations, and my FLGS was selling copies for a very reasonable price†, along with a 10% discount because it was the end of the year and obviously that reignited my interest – fairly passively, but definitely kindled.

 

The cover illustration is a Chris Moeller original and a fan favourite (Billy Thomas mentioned it was one of his favourite covers during a recent Town Hall). It well conveys the feel and tone of the game inside; a group of heroes leading a haggard army against the titular witch-queen, Lilith and her horde of otherworldly minions. The rendering in purples, distant blues and browns make the banner titles in red and white pop on the box.

The cover also lists the six playable factions of the game; three “bad-guy” factions – Orcs, Goblins, and the Army of the Night – and three factions who may seem like good guys in comparison the others – the Oathborn, Fjordlanders, and the Eastern Empire.

I should just take a moment to mention the weight of the game. The box comes in at a little under 3.9kg (8½ lbs). If you have a bad back or impoverished upper-body strength, you may require the assistance of a burly friend or manservant to get the game home.

Box-back.

Burning Banners is a fantasy game, replete with the trappings of a fantastical setting. It’s set in the imaginary world of Kalar, where six races battle, sometimes in alliances, sometimes on their own, for supremacy, glory, treasure, and whatever the scenario’s victory conditions dictate. Let me say form the get-go, I get that fantasy games may not be your thing. But be in no doubt that Burning Banners is every bit a wargame; combat is gritty and sometimes lethal, and fortune smiles on the well-prepared.

The box-back offers a glimpse into the setting, with its rich internal history and lore. It also presents a taste of the gorgeous map art, some of the denizens of Kalar (the map extract and counters are shown at true size; 1” counters and 1 ½” hexes), and some sample cards and coins (the game even has a production component for each player’s forces).

The game breakdown is one of the nicest I’ve seen, with icons for each qualifier drawn from the game art. The game’s complexity is rated at low/medium; Burning Banners has two modes of play, the Basic Game is a straight-forward wargame of armies clashing and trying to gain the upper hand, while the Advanced Game introduces Heroes, Spells, and superior artillery (Monsters) to pound and confound the enemy. The scale of the game is one “Imperial League to a hex and a yearly turn cycle of four seasons, while each unit marker represents an Army or a Hero.

Popping the hood.

The game duration is listed as an hour plus, depending on the scenario (I’d estimate at least two hours for the shorter multiple player scenarios using the Advanced Games rules), and there are scenarios accommodating two to six players. Burning Banners’ solitaire suitability is given to be Medium, though I think that would be a little higher with the Basic Game scenarios, and the recommended age of players is, of course, fourteen and up.

The post cards. Superfluous, but they do look really good.

The first thing you see upon removing the lid is a small bundle of art prints. These are referred to on the back of the box as postcards. They serve no in-game purpose, but they replicate some of the character art from the game on a much bigger scale than you’ll see on the counters. I’m a bit ambivalent about this kind of thing in games, but I didn’t grow up in a world with videogame art books and people who collect pop-culture character bobbleheads as a retirement plan, so I’m not qualified to judge.

The Rulebook.

Burning Banners comes with three booklets; the Rulebook, the Campaign Book and a Traveller’s Guide to the World of Kalar. All are printed on nice, weighty semi-gloss stock, presented in full-colour and profusely illustrated, and rendered in a Palatino-reminiscent typeface and font size that never had me reaching for my reading glasses.

Sample Rulebook spread. Readable and well illustrated.

The rulebook runs to sixty pages. The first half is devoted to the rules for the Basic Game, though more is presented here than will be used in the introductory scenario. The next fifteen pages of the rulebook cover the Advanced Game, introducing rules for Heroes, Monsters and how they and the various card decks interact with the game. The last quarter of the Rulebook offers a guide to the different card types (Hero, Magic, Treasure, and Blessing), a five-page glossary (always a good idea when presenting new concepts), and a helpful guide for reading the counters on the back cover.

The Campaign Book. Scenarios are called Campaigns in Burning Banners.

The Campaign Book boasts no less than twenty-nine scenarios (referred to as Campaigns in the game), with guidelines on how to link the final ten into a Grand Campaign of truly epic proportions (cue Battle of Five Armies music). The scenarios are really well laid out graphically, with easy-to-read symbology for the involved factions and their turn order, and colour-coded stat-block-style boxed notes highlight the pertinent information for each faction involved in the given scenario (Starting Income, Opening Builds – available currency for building your initial army and any bonus Heroes – and any Special Rules as applicable). Each scenario also includes a contextual paragraph placing the current campaign in the context of the larger history of the era.

Sample Campaign (No. 16 - three faction).

For the shorter Campaigns, everything fits onto a single page. As they get more complex, these expand to two pages, but are always laid out over an open spread – no needing to flip a page back and forth.

The Traveller's Guide to Kalar. Worth reading.

Also included in the game is a Traveller’s Guide to the World of Kalar. This is a sixteen-page distillation of the lore of the Burning Banners universe. This is a place that Mr Moeller has obviously inhabited for some time, fleshing out a history and pantheon of the game world as lovingly as Greyhawk or Glorantha.

The Traveller’s Guide has been prepared with an eye to brevity and humour. While this isn’t critical to game play, it’s definitely worth a read, and to have on hand for players acquainting themselves with the Heroes and events in the game for the first time and helps contextualise the action and the stakes as the Campaigns play out.

Four 22' by 17" mounted map sections that meet up perfectly.

Mr Moeller is first and foremost an artist; it was his job for many decades with Wizards of the Coast and is still his passion. This is obvious in Burning Banners and, to my mind, most clearly in the game’s map-boards. The map was hand-drawn in the style of fantasy cartography going back to the Lord of the Rings. This means that the illustrative quality of the play surface can only be appreciated from a single view, but this should hardly matter during play. Cities and settlements, terrain and rivers are all beautifully rendered and use a mix of textural cues and symbology to convey information about the battleground.

Sample map, laid out and looking really pretty.

The game map is divided into for mounted sections. Practically speaking, these fit together very well (immaculate edge-matching), and the segmented map allows for many scenarios to be played on one of two of the map sections, rather than having to clear the whole table for each Campaign. Each section is 22” by 17”, making the whole map roughly comparable to a two standard-sized map game footprint with a portrait orientation. The hexes are a full 1½” across, the better to accommodate the 1” unit markers.

Map detail. Nice.

The map is hand-drawn; every city, village, tower bridge looks a little different. There are coniferous forests further to the north and deciduous groves to the south. The overall effect is stunning, but these details aren’t all simply for show. Rivers are lined in black as far as they are navigable, and subtle symbology brings a wealth of usable detail to the board without taking away from the overall effect.

Counter sheet 7 - markers and currency (apologies for the reverse order - the pics loaded
on top of each other instead of consecutively, and I didn't have the patience to
fix it on the fly).

Counter sheet 6 - mostly Control markers.

Counter sheet 5 - Monsters (brown) and Sea Monsters (blue), oh my!.

Counter sheet 4 - Goblins.

Counter sheet 3 - Orcs (black edge) and Army of the Night (suitably red).

.

Counter sheet 2 - Fjordland (blue), Oathborn (grey) and some Army of the Night.

Counter sheet 1 Eastern Empire (purple) and Fjordland.

 

Burning Banners comes with seven easy-punch counter sheets. These are mostly populated with counters representing units – Armies, Heroes, Monsters, and Siege Equipment. There are, of course also markers and tokens used in play or for tracking activities, or for indicating factional control over locations are about ⅝” in size. Finally, coin tokens in 1s, 5s and 10s are available to keep track of the production economics of the game.

The unit counters are remarkable, not just for the (again) hand-drawn representations of the unit types, but for the clever economy of presentation. Central to the design is an image headed by a title explaining the unit type (some of the more common units have multiple illustrations depicting the same unit type). A coloured bar down the left edge distinguishes the faction, while a torn brown strip on the right will intricate if the unit has been damaged (on the verso of the counter or just started off as a weak unit. Each unit has a build cost in the top-right corner, in a point-up yellow square; this represents the cost to create or repair the unit. Some armies are Feral, wild beasts under factional control; these are marked by their production cost appearing in an elongated (diamond-shape) yellow square with a vulpine face in the bottom half.

An army’s Movement rating is indicated in the lower-right corner. In most cases this will be an unadorned number. In the case of Huge allies (wyrms, giant eagles, actual giants), this number will appear in a black hexagon.

The combat Strength of a unit is indicated in black or white bars, or a combination thereof, in the upper-right corner of the counter. White bars represent Light Dice (d6s), while the black bars indicate Heavy Dice (d8s). In combat, one die is rolled for each bar on the counter, of the colour matching the bar. Hits are 5s and up, so a one-third chance of a hit on a Light die, and a one-half chance on the Dark dice. In combat the Defender also rolls; every successful roll by the defender blocks (cancels) one of the Attacker’s hits. It’s an elegant mechanic for a less civilised age.

The Player's Aid Card, Front (right-side) and back.

And Inside the fold.

Burning Banners comes with two Player’s Aid Cards. These are 11” by 17” bi-fold cards and they are laid out rather brilliantly. The front panel covers Combat Resolution, the inner panels offer a clear explanation of the Turn Sequence, Actions, Free Actions, and the Winter season procedure (this kicks in with the Advanced Game), And the back panel offers an annotated Terrain Effects summary.

The nominal bad guys (vampires are still bad, right?).

The nominal good guys.

Each of the six factions has its own Faction Display, a small, double-layered board that houses the faction’s available armies, heroes and other markers, and reminds the player of the special attributes particular to that faction (e.g., the Fjordlanders are accomplished seafarers; they can move by ship as a free action, and can increase their sea movement by two).The  double-layer design with cut-outs for the units and other markers probably isn’t necessary, but it is a nice touch, and will probably appeal to gamers more familiar with Euro-games. Burning Banners is an obvious candidate for hobby gamers who have tried something like Scythe (Stonemaier Games, 2016) and are emboldened to try something more classically war-gamey but aren’t quite ready for Death in the Trenches (Compass Games, 2022).

The Season Display, kind of the odometer and fuel gauge of the game.

Game progress is recorded on the Season Display. This display card and the Magic Card Display, which is used in the Advanced game along with the cards, is mounted on a medium-heavy weight of cardstock (both are single sided). The Season Display has a Season Track representing three game years, Spring to Winter, a Turn Track for the participating factions, and an Income Track, for, well, keeping track of each faction’s current income. Each season is a Turn in game terms, and each scenario offers guidance as to the opening and closing of the given campaign; Campaign 17, for example, runs over six turns, from Spring of Year 1 to Summer of Year 2.

The Turn Track has six columns, each with three positions denoting the three phases of play each faction works through in their turn. The scenario notes dictate the order of play, and Faction Tokens are placed on the Turn Track for each faction represented in the current Campaign. This is a neat way to keep everyone on the same page, but for multi-player games, I think I’d be commissioning one (reliable) player to manage the admin of the tracks, to avoid overreach (that is, people reaching over the board, knocking pieces or – heaven forbid – drinks in the process).

The Magic Card Display, like it says on the label.

As previously mentioned, the game also comes with a Magic Card Display. This isn’t as fancy as the double layered Faction Displays – it’s simply a board marked with places to keep the fresh Spell and Treasure decks and the discard piles for the played Spell and Blessing cards. I’m just getting to the cards now, so you’ll have to bear with me for a moment.

As I’ve mentioned, The Magic Card Display and Season Display are presented on a nice weight of board, but I didn’t mention they also feature rounded corners. It’s a minor thing, but it demonstrates the careful thought that has gone into the production of this game. Along the sides of the

Four sealed card decks as they come, 206 cards in all.

Burning Banners is a card assisted game. At least I think it is. I’m only just starting to delve into the Advanced Game rules, but as I understand it, the cards are there to offer random adjustments, in the form of boons and Blessings, or acquired as Treasures.

Every fantasy story should have a little magic, and the cards are how this is introduced into the game narrative. There are three types of cards; Spells, Treasures and Blessings. The Spells and Treasures are drawn from shared decks, while each active faction has its own Blessing deck. During play, the cards a player as collected through the course of play (during the Arcane Study phase of a turn) can be spent to improve the odds in a fight or become “owned” by the faction in the case of Treasures.

The cards themselves are very nice, printed on a typically good weight of cardstock. They are attractive without being overdone – they don’t each sport individual illustrations or fancy fonts. Instead, they each sport a Title, a game function presented in a text box in the centre of the card in a eminently readable font and size, and some colour-text in a slightly smaller font at the bottom. Overall, great presentation, and nothing to distract from the gorgeous map and counter art.

Clarifications. Just don't call them errata.

Finally, the game does come with a couple of two-column sheets of notes. Before you start on a song and dance about errata in Compass games, the two sheets (two and a half pages) of notes are all Clarifications, note further explaining this or that rule where an early adopter of the game has found the Rulebook somehow lacking. I for one welcome these notes, I can be a bit of a meathead at times and any assistance is welcome.  

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I am pleased to report that I have punched some Burning Banners counters and pushed them around the board a bit. While I’ve started going through the Advanced Game rules, I want to play through the introductory scenario a coupe more times to bed down the learnings from the Basic Game before I punch any more counters, maybe even run through it with a second player. I’ve been reluctant to go for multi-player games in recent years, but Burning Banners is a game that will appeal to the Wednesday group (which often swings between four and six players), and there are a lot of two-player scenarios included as well. As I mentioned, a big selling point was it being a Chris Moeller game – like John Butterfield’s output, I’ll pretty much try anything Mr Moeller chooses to release (that I can afford). I’ll write up an AAR for the first competitive game, and see how we go from there.

 

* Since writing this unboxing, I’ve noticed a serendipitous connection among the games mentioned here. Burning Banners designer and illustrator, Christopher Moeller was also responsible for the Compass-version Belter counter graphics. Needless to say, they look quite nice.

† At least it was a reasonable price to my mind. Milage may vary.

 

 

Overthinking it: Weighing in on something so not qualified to talk about

  

 

Jerry over at the Cardboard Commander blog has just posted his take on the most recent Compass Town Hall, specifically the discussion around the reception of Combat! Vol. 3:Arnhem (Compass Games, 2025). CC is always worth reading (and his YouTube channel is always worth checking out), and this was personal for him; in his most recent post he talked about bouncing off Combat! Vol.3. in this post. He begins briefly reiterating his own experience with Vol. 3, and then goes into Compass publisher Bill Thomas’s comments on the public reception of Vol. 3 on the Town Hall (Episode 129, about 42 minutes into the Town Hall and runs for about seven minutes in all) and suggests some options for customers (in general) going forward.

"Any game's harm diminishes me, / Because I am involved in game-kind."
(With apologies to John Donne).

CC made a lot of good points, and I encourage readers to go have a look at both posts (and have a general poke around while you’re there). But the overall reaction to Combat! Vol. 3 that Bill Thomas (for the uninitiated, Compass's owner/ publisher) was referencing during the Town Hall got me thinking tangentially – as is my want – about the wargaming industry and how everything is amplified by social media and its attendant hysteria. This post isn't intended to diminish or repute anything Cardboard Commander brought to the table – to start with, Jerry has played the game while I haven’t. I’m more interested in how the game is being portrayed in the public discourse. Jerry was clear and concise regarding the game about what didn’t work for him. But there has been a lot of spleens vented in the last few weeks (maybe longer – I started to notice it about a fortnight ago), and I wanted to examine the scant evidence available regarding what people are generally feeling about the game, the signal within the noise.

Compass Games is a different beast to pretty much any other company in the wargame publishing sphere. They are one of the very few companies that maintains availability of games when they're selling (I believe Revolution Games and some European publishers also try to keep their back-catalogues in print). So, those that can resist the FOMO associated with the gaming industry in general can probably expect to be able to grab a copy of that game they missed out within six months of the first batch selling out. A side-effect of this is that the reprint files tend to be untouched from the previous version, so the known errata isn’t necessarily addressed, but this meant that I only had to wait about six months for Imperial Tide (Compass Games, 2022) to come back into stock, instead of watching a pre-order number slowly creep up over long years.

As I said, I can't speak directly to the game(s); I haven't played any of the Combat! series (and, to be honest, I’m unlikely to; the granularity of the game just doesn’t appeal to me), but I will say that Compass games sometimes suffer from an expectation of player foreknowledge (the notion having a clear idea of what the designer meant, rather than what is committed to the page).* I haven't seen this myself in the No Peace or Tide games – series games are where you might expect to find this kind of oversight – but I have seen it occasionally in one-off games; nothing insurmountable, but something that disrupts the flow of the game or impedes understanding. Maybe that was what was lacking here. I will say that, in my experience, it feels like Compass can sometimes be a little too hands-off with the way rules are presented, leaving it up to the designer or developer. A while ago at another Town Hall, I mentioned in the chat that I'd just got a copy of Flanks of Gettysburg (Compass Games, 2024) – this would have been about six months after its release – and Brittani Eaton-Koch highlighted it and made an off-hand comment that I'd need to download a copy of the living rules before I tried to play it.

As for the scenarios, that's a different thing. I don’t like commenting on a game I haven't played (which seems to put me in the minority), but enough people are saying there are some issues with them, maybe there should have been more playtesting. But this also comes down to play-tester availability. A lot of people want fully tested games, but would never dream of giving up their own time to playtesting an in-development game because it’s not done yet. If nobody puts their hand up to help out, things are going to be missed. In publishing of any kind, products need multiple sets of eyes, different viewpoints, or groupthink can set in and mistakes will inevitably be made, or existing problems overlooked. That said, I don't have time for complaints about introductory or learning scenarios; every free-standing series game that comes out should assume it may be somebody's introduction to the game and have a couple of on-ramp scenarios to get the newbies started (having said that, there's no reason they can't also be challenging and fun for old hands, but I digress).

I feel sorry for Compass as a whole. Lots of publishers try to have a more or less open discourse with their customers; GMT does their monthly update, Worthington is getting better at communicating their plans and production-status (although I really wish they'd have a few weeks’ lead-time for announcing when their fourteen-day Kickstarter campaigns are going to start; I'd probably back more games given a heads-up), and Legion Wargames has upped their game with a quite active Discord channel. Even MMP does a monthly (IIRC) podcast now, talking about their products, events, and what's in the pipeline.

But Compass is the only company of which I'm aware that has such an open, two-way discussion directly with their public. A lot of designers and developers show up in the chat as well, and most questions get answered, though the answer isn't always what one hopes for. 

Compass is extremely open with their customers, which is a profoundly good thing, but that kind of familiarity breeds a measure of contempt. The company consistently gets more crap for their perceived failings than any other three wargame publishers put together. I was a little dismayed when I saw the three pages of "errata" in Burning Banners (Compass Games, 2024) (in truth, mostly clarifications of rules rather than typos), but I've worked as a copy editor, and I know how hard it is to get everything right on the day. I understand Bill's frustration when other publishers seem to get a free pass on their mistakes. And kicking Compass in the butt has become a sport for some. Maybe they even deserve it sometimes, but in the case of Combat! Vol. 3, it feels like a pile-on.

Combat! Volume 3: Arnhem stats (sourced from BGG, 22 Feb. 2026).

So, let's take a look at the the numbers. Some point to the BGG rating for the game for validation of the criticism (never a good measure to my mind, but let's work with it for the moment). The Overall Rating for Combat! Vol. 3 is 6.9, considerably lower than the previous two volumes (8.4 and 9.1 respectively). But if we dig into the numbers (such as they are), you start to see a shift. At the time of writing, 59 people indicating ownership of the game, of which 40 have given a numerical valuation, and from these 40 ratings we get the less inspiring aggregate of 6.9.

Combat! Volume 3: Arnhem Ratings (sourced from BGG, 22 Feb. 2026).

But let’s dig a little deeper. Looking at the individual rankings adds some nuance. Twenty-seven people rated the game as a 7 or higher (67%), while only seven contributors rated the game as a four or lower (7%). 

If we dismiss the shrillest of boosters and denouncers, removing the knee-jerk 1s (three ratings – 7.5% pf the original forty) and hysterical 10s (six ratings – 15%) from the count altogether we’re left with a more rational pool thirty-one numerical ratings. Keep in mind that this levelling hurts the higher order ratings in real terms twice as much as it does the lower ones – 6-3 removed ratings respectively. Out of this reduced pool, twenty-one people rated the game as a 7-9 (67.7%) while only five rate it as a 2-4 (16.1%), a ratio of 4:1 favourable responses over unfavourable ones, and about 3.5:1 over the middling scores). 

The highest number of individual rating-levels goes to 8, the only level to make double digits (and 25% of full count of ratings overall). This all goes to suggest – as much as such a small sample size can suggest anything – that the actual response to the game is much more positive than the conversation around it would suggest.

None of this means you need to like this iteration of Combat! or the whole series. No game is ever going to appeal to everyone. I can’t speak to the lived experience of people who genuinely didn’t enjoy a game, and I’m in no way trying to undermine anything Jerry said in his blog post, he’s been around the block enough times to know what works for him. All I can do is point to the numbers, and, so far, the numbers for Combat! Vol. 3 aren’t too bad at all.

I don't expect this to change anybody's opinion about anything. This was really an exercise to slake my own curiosity. Thank you to Cardboard Commander for the inspiration, and to all who have read this far for following me down the rabbit-hole.

 

 

State of Play: Commands and Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution - Yorktown

 

 

 

Initial assault on Redoubt No. 9; an inauspicious start.

We had our last game of 2025, and I told T to surprise me. And surprise me he did. For our diversion, he’d set up the Yorktown scenario from the French and More! Expansion (Compass Games, 2018) for Commands & Colors Tricorne: The American Revolution (Compass Games, 2017). The full game of the scenario is Yorktown (Assault On Redoubt #9 & #10)  14 October 1781, the last scenario in the set. It sounds like hard work, and it was.

Seeing French troops set up on the board, I realised this was the first scenario we would have ever played from the French and More expansion. This is an embarrassment as I’ve stated several times here in the blog that C&C Tricorne is probably my favourite flavour of the Command and Colors family, and not just for the eras it covers. It brings a few tweaks that add a little swinginess to the proceedings that I enjoy. The lack of plays from the expansion is something I plan to remedy in 2026.

Opening positions: some manoeuvre required.

T had set himself up to be the British/Hessian defenders manning the stout redoubts, and I took the Continental Army and their French allies. The antagonists have a stronger force going into the game – fifteen infantry units, supported by three artillery formations, against the British eight leg units and one not inconsequential heavy cannon unit – but the two redoubts are tough nuts to crack. Under the Tricorne rules, units behind fieldworks can ignore the first retreat flag in a ranged attack and the first symbol hit of a melee attack.

I was fortunate to start the game with a decently strong hand, offering
some options for proceeding.

But first I had to get my fellas up close enough to make any kind of worthwhile attack at all. This took three turns. The Continental player goes first, and the early turns involved edging Colonial and French units into position to advance on the enemy’s works. Meanwhile British potshots had some success in thinning out my troops. Cannon proved wholly ineffective against T’s lobsters. Whoever engineered the redoubts deserved a commendation.

At turn four I was finally in a position to make a concerted effort against Redoubt No. 10 (Continental Left). Three Brave French Line attacked on a Bayonet Charge order, throwing themselves against the desperate British defence... to an inconsequential result. No casualties on either side. This initial strike set the tone for the whole game.

The initial French assault on Redoubt No. 10, with
the road to Yorktown visible on the right.

Over the course of the next eight or nine rounds, we both took some hits, but neither of us had lost a unit (or gained a banner). Fearing the possibility of the No. 10 Redoubt being overrun, he had begun to T had begun to bring his heavy cannon down to lay fire on the French attackers. It was already a good way toward the redoubt when I saw my chance. I’d moved two Light troops up to the tree-line between the redoubts, attempting to bring them behind No. 9 for a clearer shot – Light units are better at range than regulars, and can move more quickly if they forgo combat, but other issues kept cropping up needing attention.

Mid-game: much blood spilt, with nought to show for it.

At turn fourteen, I had my lightbulb moment. By this time, we’d both taken some hits and scored off one another. I’d managed to get a much-diminished Regular unit behind the No. 9 battlements, and to replace it with another the following turn, when T’s counterattack finished off the first. The tide had begun to turn, but no end to the game was in sight (it was starting to get late by now, and it was a school-night). I’m not proud of my actions, but something had to be done, or we would have to call it a draw short of any clear victory.

I interspersed my following actions between maintaining the gains I’d made (the Continental player gets (or keeps) a Temporary Victory Banner for each fortified hex they occupy) and double-timing my two light units up the road to Yorktown and its two vacated Fieldworks hexes. I held two, and we had by now two legitimate Victory Banners each (T was about to get is third).

I didn’t announce my intentions to take Yorktown, and T was too distracted with the redoubt action to notice until the final move. By the time my Light troops entered the vacated fieldworks at the edge of the occupied city, I had managed five Victory Banners, and this action gave me the last two to win the game.

End state. Yorktown Occupied, but at a cost.

It felt like less of a victory than it might have, but the game had been a twenty-two round slog, and I come back to my earlier comment; the Yorktown defences are a terribly hard nut to crack for the Continental player. I think I may have still won if I’d gone ahead with my original intention of flanking Redoubt No. 9 and likely capturing its attendant officer, but this may have taken another five or eight turns. T tends to feel that a win is a win, but to me this felt a little gamey to take too much pride in the success.

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: Desert Blitzkrieg: Rommel’s North African Campaign

 

 

 

I have mentioned several times over my time with A Fast Game that I don’t and won’t ever ask publishers for review copies of games, and that I wouldn’t accept offers of copies in exchange for content or reviews. This is still the case. I don’t judge other content creators who do this; they all have their reasons, and I enjoy their hard work. I just want to keep my independence and not feel like I have to write about games that didn’t do it for me.

Now, I’ve also mentioned here and elsewhere that I won a copy of Desert Blitzkrieg: Rommel’s North African Campaign (Compass Games, 2025) that was part of viewer draw for around a dozen different prizes all up in an extended pre-Christmas Compass Town Hall. This came as a complete, but timely surprise. I’d actually found seller on eBay with a couple of copies and was going to buy my own in a week or so, but now I didn’t need to! To maintain karmic balance, I put the cash I was going to spend on that toward a copy of Christopher Moeller’s really gorgeous-looking Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen (Compass Games, 2024); I finally game into its sheer awesomeness and bought a copy, but I haven’t decided whether I should write about it on A Fast Game or not. If you have an opinion about this, let me know in the comments.

So, this was a situation I hadn’t anticipated. In the end, I decided to go ahead and write about Desert Blitzkrieg, even though I didn’t technically buy it myself because, a) I was going to buy it before this copy landed in my lap; and b) it’s too interesting looking a game not to spend some time over it and share what I learn. So, here’s my first look at Mike Vitale’s Desert Blitzkrieg.

The box top captures the essence of the game in a simple montage of images split between British Cruiser tanks from very early in the conflict, with an inset Rommel looking typically heroic, and the iconic photograph of the one of the Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG) teams prepared to set out on another mission below. The Desert War, at least in the early years managed to keep a veneer of gentlemanliness that had well and truly worn off by the time of Operation Torch. This game covers the early part of the North African campaign, roughly up to Rommel’s historical defeat at Second El Alamein.

Designer Michael Vitale has been involved in wargame design and production for longer than I’d realised. BGG lists Desert Blitzkrieg as Mr Vitale’s third game design credit (the earliest being the extraordinary Timelag (Gameshop, 1980)). I was pretty sure this didn’t tell the whole story, so I contacted Brittani-Pearl Eaton-Koch from Compass Games (and Desert Blitzkrieg’s editor), asking about Mr Vitale’s other work for the publisher. Ms Eaton-Koch replied, “He's the co-designer of Iberian Tide with Gregory Smith, and the designer of Desert Tide & Hannibal's Tide.* [….] I think the big thing BGG fails to cover in his designer credits, though, is the fact that he was one of the original partners in Nova Game Designs (original publishers for Ace of Aces, Axis & Allies, the Battletech book games).”

Box back. For the first time I can remember, I'm questioning a little the standard
"recommended for age 14 and up." There's just a lot more going on here than a
straight-forward hex-and-counter game. 

The box back offers a view of the whole map, along with some sample unit and HQ counters. The written blurb doesn’t spend any time on the history covered, jumping instead into a thumbnail description of the game and its design philosophy.

The graphic key familiar from other Compass games informs the reader that the complexity of the game is rated Medium (with which, with my limited reading of the rules so far, I would concur), each turn represents a month, units are primarily Regiments, and the game is designed for two players, though solitaire suitability is rated Medium-High. A shorter scenario will play out in two-three hours, but a full game will likely require ten hours or more to see to its conclusion.

The rulebook follows the Compass custom of the cover match the box-art.

The Desert Blitzkrieg Rules of Play runs to thirty-six roughly 100gsm, light gloss-finish, full colour pages. The booklet is usefully illustrated – lots of example pictures and diagrams, thin on the filler historical photographs or illustrations found in some rulebooks. The whole book is presented in a readable double-column format. At this stage I haven’t spent enough time with the game to comment on the clarity of the rules (at time of writing, I haven’t even punched and clipped the counters yet), so that will have to wait for an AAR, but I have every confidence in the editor.

Sample page of the rules. The illustrations are nearly all useful rather than decorative.

I can say the rules are presented following the Sequence of Play. I’ve noticed recently that this pattern has helped me to grok unfamiliar games more quickly than when they’re laid out to some other system of logic. I like to get to know a game by laying out the map and pushing some counters around, and the manner in which the rules are presented suits this learning-style much better (or maybe I’m just growing more impatient with age).

The rules run to sixteen pages, with another page of optional rules. The rules envision play of the full twenty-one turn game, but two shorter scenarios – O’Connor’s Offensive (a four-and-a-half turn “training” scenario), and the five-turn Short Game Scenario are included. Both of these can be played in an evening. Also included are five pages of Designer’s and Player’s Notes, and seven pages of Examples of Play (and a full-page Table of Contents in lieu of an index).

The mounted map-board. As usual, apologies for the sub-par lighting.

The mounted map represents the theatre of operations in the North African campaign, from Aghelia in the west to El Alamein in the east. Movement in the game is point-to-point, which makes sense for a Western Desert game at this scale; the desert is vast but offers only so many serviceable paths for regiment- or brigade-sized formations. The board- and counter-art are the work of Bruce Yearian, a veteran wargame artist whose name should be familiar to anyone who pays attention to such things. Mr Yearian has a talent for combining usability and ascetic value in his maps, with a view to playability.

Built into the map-board are separate Victory Point tracks for the Allied and Axis players, various holding boxes for the two sides for Eliminated units, Reinforcements, and for the Allied player, Withdrawn units, as well as marked positions for the shared Event Card deck and discarded cards. Perhaps the thing I love most about this board set-up, though, is the Turn Track, which is amended with places for all of the Axis and Allied reinforcement units, all right there and ready for action. I’m always appreciative when reinforcement schedules are included in a game – the extra time sorting through counters to populate them is well worth the inconvenience for uninterrupted play – but to have it there on the board is a boon. The whole play area is an exercise in good planning and layout.

The Battle Board, printed on a good weight of card-stock, with pre-rounded corners.

Manoeuvre and supply tracing are the domain of the main board, but when one side attacks the other, the action transfers to the Battle Board. This is an 8 1/2” by 11” board, about the same weight as the counter card-stock, divvied up width-ways into two halves, one each for the Allied and Axis forces. Each half is in turn split into two rows, representing each sides’ Front and Second Line. The box-description mentions that battles can play out like a mini-games in themselves.

In the event of a Combat action., the Battle Marker counter is placed at the point of action on the map-board, while beach side arranges their units in two battle lines on the Battle Board, starting with the player with less units in play (discounting other assets, like Air Support). Here the clash will play out for at least one full round before a side may withdraw. In subsequent rounds, the players may move units from the Second Line to the Front Line but not off the Front Line. Combat continues until one side withdraws from battle.

I’m keen to see how the battle board works in context of the game. Battle boards aren’t a new concept – I’m most familiar with them in terms of block wargames – but should add extra depth to individual combat situations, zooming in on the brutality of the action like a slow-motion sequence in a Sam Peckinpah movie.

Two counter sheets, nearly zero waste (just one unused marker).

The game includes two 5/8” counter sheets, 352 counters in all, of which probably a little more than 40% are unit counters; these are all clearly readable and quite attractive. The counters are printed on a nice weight brown-core card-stock and punch out pretty cleanly. Of the units, the Germans are presented in a light grey, Italians in a creamy yellow, British in khaki, and the Commonwealth units get an olive drab background, with the standard mix of NATO symbols for leg units and silhouettes for the AFVs. The national colours are understated, but clearly recognisable. 

The rest are an assortment of administrative and DRM markers. Most of the markers are generic tokens for mnemonic service, such as Combat Attack/Defence, Interdiction, “Entrenched”, Supply Units, and Out of Supply, while a few are function specific, like the defensive bonus level for the Tobruk fort. The counters are all clear and readable. 

The card-deck, still sealed, sporting an iconic AAK promotional photograph.

Desert Blitzkrieg is a card-assisted game. As such it features a small (twenty-six cards in all) shared deck. These offer some advantage to the drawer, and most of the cards must be used in the turn they are drawn.

Sample Event Cards.

While the Sequence of Play lists the card draw as the first step in a turn, the draw is optional. Moreover, each player can only draw from the deck six times across the game’s twenty-one turns (draws is recorded on two six-sided dice – red for the Allied player, grey for the Axis – provided in the game for this purpose). With less than half of the cards being drawn from the deck in a single game,

The general PAC, covering the Sequence of Play on one side (pictured) and
Combat procedure and notes on the verso.

Desert Blitzkrieg comes with two general, double-sided Player Aid Cards, and two administrative cards, one specifically for the Allied player, and one shared. The general PACs cover a detailed Sequence of Play one side, and a comprehensive guide to the Combat sequence on the reverse. These are thorough and well laid-out and should cover 85% of questions that arise at the table.

The Commonwealth/British Withdrawal/Return/Upgrade Schedule. More than a mouthful.

The Commonwealth/British Withdrawal/Return/Upgrade Schedule does what it says on the label; it offers a schedule of (mostly) unit removals, with some returning units and three unit-upgrades (mostly reflecting new equipment arriving for the Allied forces). The complication of the steady down-drawing of Allied forces will resent a challenge for the player, but the Axis player will have their own challenges to face as the game advances.

Omnibus PAC. This is the one that will likely see the most use.

The other shared card is an omnibus PAC covering British and German Armor Upgrades, parameters for Replacement units (these are drawn from the Eliminated box; units not choses for refit are removed from the game), HQ Return after capture (not a given), Capture and Supply Rolls, some specific instructions for the Axis First Turn, and Victory Point Scoring guidelines for both sides.

The clarification slip.

Included in the box is a half-sheet on "Official Clarifications." Compass Games gets a lot of grief from some quarters about errata (I've been guilty of this myself, but just the once), but everything listed here is either a legitimate clarification (something stated in the rules, but maybe not repeated often enough to sink in) or a really minor typo, like the misnumbering of two illustrations on page 12. There is nothing here that will otherwise break your game. Still, it's worth a read.

Box and dice (and baggies, not mentioned in the text).

Finally, the game comes with a set of dice; two d6s (as mentioned earlier, these are to keep tabs on how many Action Card draws each player has made), and three d10, though the rules note that the values on these rolls run 0-9 rather than 1-10. As stated, I haven’t gotten through the whole rulebook yet, but I haven’t got to – or maybe just skipped over – what the third white d10 is for; the other two, in colours matching the d6s, are for rolling combat results, bonus supply tokens and such. I’m sure the purpose will be revealed as I get deeper into the rules, and I’ll bring along some answers in an AAR.

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I feel very lucky to have randomly won Desert Blitzkrieg in the Town Hall lottery and want to “pay it forward” by getting it to the table sooner rather than later so I can talk to the game with a little more experience than I can here. It’s going in the queue; I can’t see an opportunity to play out an entire twenty-one turn game for a couple of months at least, but I think the two shorter scenarios seem doable. The plan is to get confident in how combat works, then try out O’Connell’s Offensive. If it all goes to plan, I should be able to post an AAR in a fortnight or so (there are a couple of things ahead in the queue).

In other news, A Fast Game is coming up to its third anniversary at the end of January. I’m going to try to get one more post up before the anniversary post, but we’ll see how we go. In the meantime, thanks for reading this far, and stay tuned for more on Desert Blitzkrieg.

 

* Sorry, but none of these titles have BGG entries established yet. I am however looking forward to all of them. I'll try to remember to come back and add the links as they become available.