FULL REVIEW BY GAMERSDUNGEON HERE

In the world of board gaming there are some games that almost transcend the hobby and reach out to popular culture to a point where a game can become a house hold name, something even your parents will likely recognize, something you can find on the bookshelf of your average joe. Games like RISK, Monopoly, Battleship and Stratego are some examples that spring to mind.

For people in the hobby of board gaming however there are other titles that have similar sentimentalities and are almost synonymous with board gaming history. These games might not transcend the hobby but they inspire the word “classic” and find common ground into conversations of your typical hobbyist. You would be hard pressed to find a board gamer out there who would not refer to the world war II grand strategy game of Axis and Allies as such a classic. The most popular of the Milton Bradly masters series games, Axis and Allies is for a great many old school board gamers one of their first experiences that broke them out of what is generally the accepted mass market board game lists. Most people have likely played RISK at some point in their life, but Axis and Allies was the cross over game for many that almost defined a persons transition from someone who sometimes plays board games to someone who is a board gamer.

The guy we have to thank for Axis and Allies is Larry Harris Jr., a board game designer who unlike so many designers out there spent nearly a lifetime trying to perfect one game. Sure he designed a few others (not trying to sound dismissive here), but over the last 30+ years Larry Harris has tinkered with Axis and Allies almost exclusively, creating variations on the game and trying to perfect the original version. It is very clearly a labor of love and In interviews when he talks about Axis and Allies he doesn’t speak as a person who made a game for others to buy, but a guy who made what he viewed as the perfect world war II game that he wants to play himself. He designed Axis and Allies for him and his friends and as a gesture of good will let everyone else get a copy as well.

It’s important to understand this aspect of Larry Harris because it is very rare for him to design and release something other then Axis and Allies. In fact designers of his caliber and attitude towards perfection are quite rare. When Larry Harris announced that he was making a new version of Axis and Allies, aka his dream project of an even larger and more epic version of the game, well, lets just say for us old school gronards and Axis and Allies fans this was the news of the century.

That game was finally kickstarted back in 2019 and found its way to table tops in 2020. That game is called War Room and today I’m going to talk a bit about why this game is so special and why anyone who loves the old classics like Axis and Allies should be paying attention.

Why Axis and Allies was so popular

Before we can talk about why we should be excited about War Room we need to talk about Larry’s first love, Axis and Allies and why it was such a popular game.

The thing you have to understand about the early days of the hobby is that their was a very clean divide in board gaming both as a hobby as as a design between games that were for the masses like Battleship, RISK or Monopoly and then there were games for gamers, things you probobly have never heard of like Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, or Ambush. Essentially the world of board gaming was divided between people who were making games they thought they could sell and people who made games for “gronards”, those beard scratching old fogies’ who believe games needed to be simulations of something and historically accurate. Games with 100 page rulebooks that complicated the shit to a point no reasonable human being could ever be expected to understand how to play and required a masters degree in English comprehension.

Axis and Allies among a few other games that should but won’t be mentioned changed all that. It was one of the first games that was released that had a manageable amount of rules that you could reasonably expect anyone to understand, while at the same time having that deep strategy and historical relevance of a game that old gronards would appreciate it. Larry broke the barrier between popular culture gamers and simulationist/historical war gamers. He gave us a crossover game that went beyond the simplicity of a dice chucker like risk and included the high level play of games like Third Reich which were the exclusive stomping grounds of veteran historical war gamers to that point.

For many, myself included, Axis and Allies invited you into a whole new branch of board gaming without making you feel stupid and that was both an achievement of design but also of production. Larry Harris understood the secret of games like RISK. It wasn’t that they were simple, it was that they looked amazing on the table top. Truth is that generally speaking, people are smart enough to figure out complex games but most gamers really don’t want to stair at ugly game boards and chits for 10 hours when playing one. Being a good game was simply not good enough, it needed some sex appeal.

Presentation was important, he understood that games were also toys and that people played games for the experience, not just for the deep strategy. He understood that war games in particular were about inspiring the imagination, giving players a sense that they commanded armies, that they were in charge of a grand strategy. He understood that games needed to inspire a feeling and a lot of that came from visuals.

More importantly however Larry Harris understood how far you could go with the rules before it was too far, too complicated, while at the same time, what within those rules would inspire conversation about strategy. Ask any Axis and Allies player how one wins the game with the Axis powers and you will discover that no two players will ever fully agree despite 40+ years of gaming analysis. The game wasn’t perfectly balanced by any stretch of the imagination, but what it was, was a game that said “hey, you can’t win as the Axis powers, I dare you to try”. It posed a challenge to players and this with its visual appeal has driven the success of the game for so many years.

The Problems With Axis and Allies

Suffice to say Axis and Allies despite being a stone cold classic to board gamers around the world for 40+ years, it had one key issue that most would generally agree on. A problem that actually most war games have, the hidden information problem.

The problem most war games have is that in an actual war, commanders and generals had no idea what the enemy was going to do. They would build strategies trying to predict their enemy and execute those strategies hoping they guessed right. This is a core premise that is very difficult to translate to board games and always had, commonly known as the fog of war.

Typically what happens in a board game is that one player makes a move, the other player see’s the move and then responds with a strategy accordingly. A strategy not based on the state of the game at the start of the turn, but at the end of his opponents turn. This is how it worked in most board games about war (and still does for the most part), especially Axis and Allies where a player would complete their entire turn before an opponent would act, resulting in full information disclosure about the activities on the board.. This however is never how actual wars take place, the kind of information you get from watching an opponent “make a move” would never actually be available to you in a real combat situation. You would have to give orders to your troops and put a plan in motion long before you ever got to see what your enemy was planning and you would be committed to that plan (too late to change your mind). This is what often made wars so messy, fog of war is a real thing.

War Room addresses this and I have to believe Larry Harris understood that this “information problem” was one of the key design issues with Axis and Allies that would result in the game being kind of predictable at times. Players could try different strategies, but those strategies would be revealed before opponents had to commit to any decisions in response. Hence like chess, you make your move based on the information of the opponents last move.

At the core of the War Room design, the game addresses this issue by using a method that strangely enough has been around for decades in another popular stone cold classic game called Diplomacy. The concept of hidden orders that are written down and submitted simultaneously by all participants, then executed in a turn order defined by a bidding process. This brilliant albeit very well known little design is one of the key elements to War Rooms core mechanic, notably addressing one of the key issues with Axis and Allies and in my humble opinion, one of the best evolutions of Axis and Allies.

Hidden movement/orders appears in quite a few modern games as well, many of which have broken my top 10 lists so I’m clearly a fan. Games like Game of Thrones the board game for example make excellent use of hidden simultaneous orders as just one example.

The Things That Make War Room Awesome

Ok so now that we have laid the foundation of the conversation we can talk about the game itself and there is a lot to cover here so enjoy the wall of text.

War Room as a game hangs on five core concepts.

Team Game

One of the big issues with games that have a 6+ hour timeline, in particular grand strategy games is that it’s very possible, in fact likely that some players will be eliminated from contention for the win half way through the game or perhaps even very early in the game. Those players are then forced to sit through hours of play with really nothing to drive them to care. They are going to lose and they will know that for 6 to 8+ hours.

This is one of the biggest issues with big board game classics like Twilight Imperium or Advanced Civilization for example. Long games you can effectively be eliminated from hours before the game will end.

War Room tackles this issue in a very simple and meaningful way. Its a team game. Axis vs. Allies. Your nation might be doing poorly and your contribution in the war may be limited, but you are part of a team trying to win the game together and hence, participating in creating the strategy that will hopefully help your team win.

This keeps everyone involved regardless of the situation of any given player. Its a very simple but very clever approach to solving this issue.

Hidden Action Sequence

In its most simplest form, each player for each nation they control, writes down the orders he wishes to execute for his units. Each player has a limited amount of orders they can give, hence they must choose wisely. Its important to understand that going into this sequence not being 100% certain of the turn order can be very troublesome to any planning. Part of creating the orders is bidding on the turn order with the very precious oil resources, one of the most important resources in the game.

This key design is what drives gameplay and I think is one of the more ingenious ways of handling what can often be a part of the game that creates a lot of downtime. Here all players simultaneously create their orders, teams working together on their strategy also creates a level of collaboration. In a sense it creates a great atmosphere at the table and I believe it to be one of the things that makes this game truly distinct from many other world war II games.

The Stress System

Another rather ingenious approach to design here, one of the key issues with area control war games is that often it really just boils down to who wins in key moments, or who has the most units on the board. It can be difficult in games like this to make an impact on an enemy who is clearly already winning the war. The stress system is how War Room attacks this problem.

It’s a very simple system. Anytime you lose a territory with a strategic value (which is most of them) or take a loss in units, you gain stress and as your stress reaches certain threshold you begin taking penalties to your resources and your ability to wage war.

What this means in the scope of the game is that your can’t simply make a B-line for the victory conditions of the game focusing your entire army in one place, you must consider the world map as a whole and defend your positions or suffer under the weight of mini snipe attacks and watch your nation become worn down by stress even out of a winning position. The game doesn’t become about that one key battle or key strategic area, but the many battles around the world, each a potential stress point that can lead to the slow degraded performance of the whole nation.

Tactics Matter

One aspect of grand strategy games is that they zoom out very far to handle the scope of the game, which often results in the battle resolution systems being rather watered down abstractions, leaving you with a feeling that battle resolution is just pure luck of the die. Its a strange contradiction, where you play a 8+ hour game about a grand strategy but the actual individual battles boil down to a single roll of a D10 for example (I’m looking at you Empire of the Sun).

In War Room tactics actually matter. What units you bring to bare in a fight and how you decide to position them on the battlefield can turn a battle you might have lost into one you may win.

The battle board does slow the pacing of the game down as each battle on the board must be resolved individually but this creates an atmosphere that makes the game feel like a genuine war. Each battle becomes a mini event and though the game can still hinge on wild die results, you can do quite a bit with your tactical positioning to control the results of a battle.

If your more aggressive you may take bigger loses but you will also cause more casualties. You may know that a battle is lost, but may then focus on shooting down planes of your enemies to hurt their ability to project power in the future. Just a couple of ways where tactics and grand strategy come together in War Room.

Vulnerable Industry/Resources

War is about resources and one of the keys to any grand strategy game is the ability to attack your enemies supply lines, blow up their industrial centers to hurt their production and shutdown their transportation systems to hurt their mobility.

All of this is considered in War Room and all players must deal with the fact that they have vulnerabilities all over the map where they produce units and the method by which they transport them. Your factories can be bombed, your convoys transporting precious resources can be attacked, your rail lines can be bombed destroying your ability to move troops in your own territory.

This key addition helps the game become about something more then just taking territory, edging the generally simple gameplay into more complex strategies. To win, you want to crush your enemies ability to produce units and so attacking their resources is not only a viable strategy, it’s often the key to victory from a weaker position.

General Insight

To me War Room appears to be a game that tries to be both a war game for the deep strategist, while a fun event game for the enthusiasts without underwhelming one, while overwhelming the other. I think mileage may vary here, but as a fan of games like Empire of the Sun and Paths of Glory, I don’t find the rules and strategies of this game to be underwhelming and given my local groups play games like Game of Thrones and even Twilight Imperium on occasion, I don’t see why they would struggle with the rules of War Room.

It remains to be seen however if an 8 hour war game about World War II is captivating enough for my gaming group to keep their attention. I know that with my gaming group, if they love a game 8+ hours is not a problem. We play RPG’s like Vampire: The Masquerade and miniature games like Songs of Ice and Fire that extend well past that play time on a regular basis and I don’t hear anyone complaining.

For me personally I see War Room as less a game in the strictest terms and more of a fun event that can be run a couple of times a year. To me, event games like Advanced Civilization, Twilight Imperium and Game of Thrones the Board Game are always the most memorable games in my gaming history. I don’t play them often, in fact, some I don’t play for years at a time, but when we do, its amazing and I hope War Room will be yet another addition to that glorious history of gaming events.

From a presentation angle War Room is absolutely gorgeous on the table. It screams play me, being huge, bright and exciting to be around. I love games that inspire the imagination and give you a sense of time and place, a game that gives you a role to play and makes you feel like the whole thing is part of a larger experience that extends beyond the game. I believe War Room to be such a game.

Finally I would argue that the game manages to be huge in size, epic in scale and visually appealing while not being fiddly. To me this is a big deal when it comes to selling the concept to my fellow gamers. Realistically speaking in our group we have a lot of games competing for our table time and shelf space, so we get quite picky about what we are willing to invest in. This is particularly true when we are talking about the big event games as we already have quite a few very established favorites. War Rooms sexy size and visual component combined with its epic scale and simultaneous action phases I think will all contribute to my groups adoption as a new member of this rather exclusive club, but that initial play experience is going to be critical to its long term success. Games like this typically only get one shot to impress, but I do believe War Room has the nuts and bolts to pull it off.