Tag Archives: War Game

Peloponnesian War by GMT Games 2019

February 7, 2022 5 Minutes

Designer: Mark Herman

Both Mark Herman as a designer and GMT games as a publisher have become regular sightings on my gaming table for the past couple of years. As I add my 6th GMT game and my 3rd Mark Herman design to my shelf I can’t help but point out that all of these games fall into the must-own, most highly rated parts of my collection. One hit after another both GMT games and Mark Herman can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned.

Peloponnesian War tackles the classic Greek war between Athens and her allies in the Delian League and Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian Confederacy between years 431-402 BC. Now if that doesn’t ring a bell and you have only the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about, don’t fret, you aren’t the only person who had better things to do in history class than pay attention. Everything I knew about the Greeks, Athens and Sparta I learned from movies like The 300 and Troy when I started with this game. I did not walk into this one with some sort of affection for the period or any clue what it was about. I picked this game up because it was a solo game, a Mark Herman design, and a GMT publishing. That was reason enough for me. Regarding the subject matter, I just kept an open mind and dived in. Historical war games are about discovering what you are interested, not making assumptions about what you are not.

Still, like all of Mark Herman’s historical war games, him being a historian and expert in the subject, he provides you within the confines of this game a wonderful history lesson and so when you are done playing this game you will know far more than before you started.

Peloponnesian War has a reputation as being a highly complex solo game with a steep learning curve and a very high level of challenge. Even Mark Herman mentioned in an interview that despite being the designer and fan himself, has a losing record in the game.

Simultaneously intimidated and excited, I enter the world of the ancient greeks… THIS … IS… SPARTA!

Overview

Final Score: (4.55 out 5) Great Game!

Peloponnesian War has the look of a traditional point-to-point strategic war game with a large map, chit tokens for units, dice, and a very procedural structure with lots of phases that drive the gameplay along one step at a time all in an effort to bring historical simulation to the table. This assessment tells only part of the story however because while it is definitely a deep, meaningful historical war game, casual players need not apply, it prioritizes the story of the period and events of the setting over the minutia of historical war game mechanics. In a sense, it’s a game about broad strokes so that the narrative and history rises above the typical chart-based hex and counter historical simulation specifics.

The feel of the game I think will break expectations for historical war game fans mechanically as it’s equipped with a number of unique properties that really diverge from other war games you might have played before. This should not be a surprise to anyone in the hobby given the designer is quite famous for leading rather than following, but this particular game is so unique that using common game referencing like “it’s like X game” is simply not possible here. This may ultimatetly be a good or a bad thing.

For example, being a solo game you are playing against the AI, a fairly standard approach, but one core feature of the game is at different points there is a possibility that you will switch sides, taking over one of the two nations at war with each other (Athens and Sparta). This means that all of the progress in the war, all of the success you have had, even if you potentially brought the game to the brink of a victorious conclusion thanks to a well thought out strategy, it is all handed over to the AI and you are given the terrible situation you have created yourself to deal with. This very traumatic twist creates a unique atmosphere in the game that demands a completely different approach to the concepts of winning and strategy. You want to do well, but not so well that if you switch sides you won’t have an alternative path to victory when you take over for your current opponent. It really is a fascinating concept, unlike anything I have experienced before and dare I say, brilliant. In fact, so brilliant, after having played with this mechanic I’m actually shocked it hasn’t become a staple of solo game design as it solves a major problem solo games have which is providing players with the type of challenge only a human opponent can provide.

Peloponnesian War’s scope is quite wide and zoomed out. Being a game about broad strokes, big plays, and important events means control is intentionally hindered in many ways. In the course of a single round, sweeping changes may take place on the board and while you make the decisions on this grand scale, your ability to control these events, in particular, the outcomes is quite minimal. You can put the pieces together, formulate a plan but in a sense, the execution of that plan is not going to be followed to the letter as you might want it to be. This feature of the game takes some getting used to.

For example, when you give an army instructions to attack and besiege a city 20 spaces away as part of a brilliant strategic move, there may be several routes the army can use to get there. Some of the routes may be tactically smarter and perfectly safe, while others are fraught with danger and risk of being intercepted and destroyed by enemy forces. You do not get to pick your route, this is left to random chance presumably reflecting the absence of intelligence in the period and the idea that you are the leader of the nation giving orders, not the commander leading the troops. This lack of true control means the game is often very chaotic, sometimes the plans go off without a hitch just as you intended, other times the route taken leads to disaster leaving you to deal with the fallout.

This lack of control is a staple of this game, as a player, you are a sort of a god-like entity that offers guidance to the nation you lead, but in the end, the commanders and armies you instruct have a will of their own. The output is the narrative, the story of the history you are playing a role in creating but often simply sitting back and enjoying as a spectator nodding in approval or shaking your head in dismay. The fact that you sometimes switch allegiances gives you a kind of unique ownership of this entire narrative. You see the game from an unusual perspective because while you care what happens to Athens since you currently represent them, you are also deeply concerned for your opponent, Sparta, because next round you might be forced to switch and they may be yours to lead.

A common sight for a historical war gamer, map, dice, rulebook, chits and chit cup. It looks like a duck, but it certainly does not quak like one.

Don’t let any of this broad strokes and lack of control talk fool you however, this game is deeply cemented with real historical gaming, Mark is no slouch in ensuring that the granularity of events of this period are all here both mechanically infused in the gameplay and through the usage of actual event tables on which you will roll as time passes. I’m no expert in the subject so I can’t exactly tell you why King Sitalces of Thrace changing sides is an important feature of the games events nor why there are so many allied Athens units stacked in the city of Larisa, but I can say all of these things have a considerable impact on the strategy you will employ and the outcome of the game you might have.

All of this culminates into a unique gaming experience that is Peloponnesian War, a game of broad strategic decisions in an ancient period of land and naval warfare, fraught with traumatic and often unpredictable events with an uncanny ability to provide you with deep and meaningful historical connections.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: A typical GMT production which is code for “knocked it out of the park.”

Cons: You would have to be a pretty petty person to find a problem here.

I’m going to keep this short, GMT made this game so you know that the quality of the components is tough to beat, in particular in the historical war game market.

The gorgeous mounted map is cotton candy for the eyes, the tokens are perfectly aligned, sturdy and well-illustrated, the player aids are all well designed and on good stock paper.

The rulebook is well written and concise, making it easy to learn from, reference and follow during gameplay all done in a nice logical order. The playbook is excellent with very thoughtful examples that cover most situations you may find yourself in during play. The game comes with a number of unique scenarios including the full campaign and there is a well-written strategic overview of the entire war provided in the playbook that gives you a great starting point and context for the history.

I tried to come up with something to complain about to make this section a more interesting read but GMT kicks ass and takes names in the component department. They get their usual 5-star rating. They are as dependable as a German train schedule!

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: A wonderful execution of theme that brings the history to life in coordination with the mechanics ensuring the history matters.

Cons: The switching side mechanics are not going to be everyone’s bag and infiltrate the narrative in your head, I say here and now, you will either love it or hate it.

While theme in most historical war games is vital, in Peloponnesian War and really any ancients game it can be hard to convey a sense of time and place given the rather rudimentary and sometimes hard to imagine way in which war was fought not to mention how critical the politics and logistics of war were to the effort. You certainly can and must abstract much of the detail here if you are intent on including everything that was historically relevant to the period, but simultaneously the game must be fun and playable. The connection between theme, history and the game mechanics needed to be quite tight, a little too much of one and not enough of the other, and suddenly the game stops making sense. I’m happy to report that in Peloponnesian War, this balance is struck quite flawlessly resulting in a deep and rewarding historically accurate theme.

The Peloponnesian War in general was a unique conflict in that it was fought between one nation (Athens) which was a major naval power and the other a major land power (Sparta). This conflict was further complicated by the fact that Greece and the surrounding landscape are a mixture of critically positioned city-states spread out over many coastal areas and islands. The Peloponnesian War map does a great job of giving this part of the world personality. When you first look at it your eyes will bug out, but after a few plays of this game, you will be dreaming about opening moves due to the brevity of possibilities, all in line with the core historical theme of the game.

This map is big and busy, but unlike so many historical war games I have played with big maps, there is very little space wasted here. Depending on events and circumstances, any part of this map might become important.

The fact that you have this naval power vs. land power in conflict creates a unique strategic problem where one side could decisively win every naval engagement and raid coastal cities unopposed, while the other could do the same on land with little resistance. It really explains why Athens built the long wall of Athens for example, without it the Spartans would probably have little trouble just marching in and sacking the city. Suffices to say many details like this are included in the mechanics to make sure the logic of the history and its relevance is reflected in the gameplay, while simultaneously balancing the game so that you feel this struggle.

The situation is further complicated by the politics of the era, various betrayals, rebellions, personalities and political upheavals that all crept up on the greeks in this period. Again, this needed to be included not only for historical accuracy and context but to shake up gameplay and bring the theme to life. Much of the heavy lifting here is done through the events table on which you roll between rounds, but there are also other subtle historical realities built into some of the exception mechanics like the handling of Syracuse, the importance of keeping trade routes open to Byzantine or like the rebellion mechanics just to name few. None of these exceptions complicate learning or running the game as they are simple to implement, but they infuse the game with historical accuracy and force you to deal with the same problems both Athenians and Spartans had to contend with during this period.

Finally, there was the general logistics of ancient warfare, it was both an expensive and complex matter to field an army requiring a great deal of coordination and leadership. It is a key feature of the historical theme here that balancing the books really meant the difference between victory and defeat. Moving units is expensive and if you don’t have the cash, raising levies is impossible. Except of course for Spartans that fight as a way of life, ready to go into the field in the name of Sparta. All these finer historical points find their way into Peloponnesian War making the game feel alive and creating this exciting historical narrative, but again always infusing the mechanical hardship on you that will drive decisions.

To gaming fans, historical or otherwise what I can say about Peloponnesian War’s theme is that it shines through at every turn. You can read the historical outline in the back of the playbook and find yourself experiencing those historical stories in the game as you play it. I don’t think from a thematic perspective you could ask for more out of a boardgame. It fires on all pistons and nails the history square in the chin.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Highly dynamic full of very difficult gameplay challenges makes this game a serious addicition you will have trouble shaking.

Cons: This design breaks expectations and traditions fearlessly, the result may be too much of a departure for historical war gamers who are this games only identifiable audiance. The movement mechanic is really fiddly.

The word on the street about Peloponnesian War is that its mechanical complexity was quite high and I recall being a little intimated even though the box proclaims it a medium weight 6 out of 10 on GMT’s complexity scale. Having learned and played the game several times, I think GMT judges this game quite well. It is fairly complex and there is quite a bit to learn but it’s not the monster it’s made out to be. I would not recommend it for casual gamers or even those outside of the hobby as a first go at historical wargaming, but for those of us used to the structure of historical war game rules, this one is not going to stump you.

Peloponnesian War is a very procedural game and really if there is anything difficult about moving through these steps it’s understanding their impact, the cause and effect of the actions you take during the decision points of the game and how that alters what happens during the more automated steps that you walk through. It can take a bit of time to fully grasp.

This is the part that is going to be challenging, though I don’t consider it a “learning the complexity of the rules” challenge as these steps are easy to execute, but rather a “depth of the strategy in the game” challenge. This game can feel on the surface, at least at first, to have rather simple decision points, but there are many layers here that are interconnected and if you want to be successful at the game you really need to have a good grasp of these connections.

The first two games I played of Peloponnesian War I lost the game with 0-10 points and that is assuming you aren’t counting negative scores because in that case, I was like -100 points. Getting your head around the strategy actually requires you to understand both the mechanics and the actual history really well which is both brilliant and exciting that this connection is so tight.

In Peloponnesian War most of the phases of the game are quite fixed and are largely about resolving the decisions you made during the most important phase of the game (The Operations Phase).

In the operation phase the only decision you are making is which objective you want to claim (which city-state to attack essentially) and how you assemble the army prior to the attack. Your leader moves around the board picking up military units and when your army is the size you want, you move towards the objective either besieging a city or attacking an opposing army.

This simple decision however is complicated in a number of unpredictable ways that create all of the risk vs. reward in the game because of how this game responds to your actions.

For starters, your army can be intercepted by the opponent many times before you get to your target, hell even before you are done assembling your army. Different units have different rules for interception (Hoplites, Calvary and Naval units). It would be easy to avoid these interceptions if you had full control over the route your armies take, but you do not. The route you must take is always the shortest route to your destination and if there is more than one shortest route you roll dice to randomly determine which one your army will take. This is a feature not a problem with the game, you have to contend with the will of your commanders.

Any destination you choose for your army is going to have multiple paths to get their which will be determined randomly with a die roll. This absence of control may frustrate more tactically minded players.

These interceptions, however, are not 100% reliable either, it is pretty much a 50-50 shot that you are intercepted by any skirmish force and it doesn’t mean your army will be stopped even if intercepted. A skirmish takes place which might result in some minor loses but your army will keep moving unless this skirmish escalates to a battle and you lose that battle. If you win, you keep moving anyway.

This means that as your army moves to its destination which notably could be anywhere on the board as their are no movement limits (a turn is a representation of 2 years of time) there is a risk of interceptions, skirmishes, and even full battles.

Clever fans have created a routing tool which faucilitates the often fiddly random determination of routes. You can find it here Route Finder, It really helps speed up gameplay.

This is where much of the strategy takes place because setting up these interception spots is the only method of controlling and preventing your opponent from getting where they need to be. Key city-states on the map are choke points and in a historically accurate fashion, these places become vital to your strategy. Corinth, Thebes, Piraeus and Byzanthium, all names you might have heard mentioned in the history of this period are critical places you will be keeping a close eye on and fighting over often.

This is only the tip of the strategic iceberg here because while the area control element of Peloponnesian War creates deep and meaningful contemplation, it isn’t as simple as deciding where to put your units.

Athens and Sparta are asymmetrical nations, their positions, strengths and ultimately routes to victory are quite different. What you can do with each is limited really by their unique circumstances, benefits and drawbacks. Certainly, you can say the game is simple, find a way to siege and conquer the opposing nation’s capital but as was the case in real history here, the goal is much easier to express than is to achieve it.

For the Spartans to besiege and conquer Athens is virtually impossible, in fact, all sieges automatically fail due to The Long Wall of Athens. This wall that connects Athens to Piraeus (a coastal city) means Athens can indefinitely hold out when sieged as long as they can maintain a trade route to Byzantium. Naturally, you might think that it’s then as simple as besieging Byzantium but for the Spartans this is not easy as the Athenians is a naval power and Byzantium can only be reached by sea. Since Athens controls the seas such an endeavor is unlikely to succeed in particular since the AI’s defense strategy will kick in and make that a priority to defend.

Its no great wall of china, but the long wall of Athens gave the Athenians an unbreakable defense. Before you can siege Athens successfully you will need to remove this advantage.

This is just one example of the strategic problems you face when playing the Spartans, but illustrates how the game mechanic is in perfect harmony with the historical realities and noteably how the AI is just clever enough so that it responds appropriatetly to your actions.

The Athenians don’t have an easy go either. The Spartans are a land power, they can not only bring far larger numbers to any land battle, but are considerably better warriors in the field so even a small force of Spartans can whoop a larger force of Athenians in the field.

The Spartans don’t have long walls, but they don’t need them as Sparta is nestled in a land space not accessible via the coast rendering Athenian naval power meaningless in any attempt to conquer it. This means that in order for the Athenians to conquer Sparta they have to win an unwinnable land battle!

What this all boils down to is that neither side has the option for a quick victory, they must first change the circumstances of the advantages that the opposing nation has. As a player, you must weaken your opponent by leveraging your advantage (Naval or Land power as the case may be) and grind them down so that an opportunity opens up for that big push against their capital.

There are a number of ways as a player you can do this. Raiding your opponents unprotected city-states which at any given moment are going to be most of them. Causing rebellions and helping them spread will widdle down their strength as well. Creating choke points that will halt the opposing army’s movement and circumvent their efforts to do the same to you. Finally going after your opponent’s source of income will also slowly bring them down.

The Athenians coastal raiding can chip away at Spartan Bellicosity, but beware, as is historically accurate, after the inevitable armestice that will likely appear in your game at some point, the Spartans will get some naval power of their own.

There are also a number of special rebellion triggers for both nations, the Athenians are a bit more suseptable as the Delian League is a bit more fragile, but the effects of such rebellions are also less impactful. The Spartan Helot Rebellion is much harder to trigger, but the consquences are devistating. Certainly both are goals for you if you really want to hit the opponent where it hurts.

The issue of managing your strategy well however is far more complex than simply coming up with a good military plan not only because at any point you might need to switch sides.

Each nation has a two very important properties called Bellicosity and Strategy Confidence Index, two scary sounding words with simple meaning behind them.

Bellicosity is a nations will to fight, in role-playing terms, their hit points. Once a nation is at 0 Bellicosity at the end of a turn they surrender and the game is over. The Strategy Confidence Index is a measure of how well the nation is doing in the current turn, this number can be positive or negative. This property goes up when you win battles/sieges and down if you lose. The SCI affects the Bellicosity at the end of each round, raising it or lowering.

These two properties are linked and part of the gamist element of Peloponnesian War, unquestionably the key to a winning strategy. Understanding how and why is a critical part of the game, but it’s the mechanics surrounding these two properties where I think some historical war gamers might see a serious problem with the game.

Each nations strategy matrix is used to track the various properties for the nation, which includes the AI strategic decision making plan. I don’t talk much about the AI in the review because it is a very simple system and not your true enemy… in case you’re wondering, you are the actual enemy AI in this game.

The important piece of the puzzle to know here is that in order for you to win (as a player) you must score at least 150 victory points. It doesn’t actually matter which nation is defeated in the story of your game per say, dropping your opponent to 0 Bellicosity doesn’t mean you’ve won the game, it simply means the game ends. You win if you have 150 victory points in that moment, else you lose regardless of which nation wins the actual war.

Each nations Strategy Confidence Index at the end of each turn will raise or reduce each nations Bellicosity, which means that if you are winning battles with one nation, the other nations will to fight is reduced, but because Bellicosity is more a timer for the end game condition rather than a victory condition, unless you have scored sufficient points, crushing your opponent could mean you are rushing to an end game condition which will result in you losing the game anyway.

As such, a big part of the meta strategy of the game is controlling these properties, trying to create the conditions in the game regardless of which nation you are running that will result in the game ending when you have 150 victory points. I say meta strategy because this part of the game has virtually nothing to do with the historical element of the Peloponnesian War or your strategy on the map or success with running any particular nation. You are trying to earn victory points and you have to do it in a fashion that doesn’t end the game prematurely. Their is a kind of equallibrium you must maintain and your strategy goes beyond that of a historical conflict and its more about manipulating the game to ensure you, not Athens or Sparta, come out on top.

In a way you can say that as a player you don’t care who wins or loses the war, you care about your scoring conditions. Now one important additional point here is that if you force a nation to surrender you do score some bonus points, but the value of these points is based on how quickly you did it. You earn 200 points divided by the number of game turns it took for you to make that happen. So if you force a surrender of a nation in turn 3 for example you would score 67 points (rounding up). That may be enough to bring your total to 150 points and you could potentially win, but if the game goes long, say 8 rounds you would only earn 25 points, not likely to put you over the top. As such, winning quickly and effectively with one nation might be a good strategy, but if it fails, you might have weakened the oppossing nation so much that when you switch (a very likely occurrence if you are very successful with a nation) you might have defeated yourself!

Now if your doing math and you know there is a maximum of 10 turns in the game and you must score 150 points, you can roughly calculate that you will need to win 15 battles/sieges since each battle earns you 10 points. The issue is that when you lose a battle or siege you lose 15 points. So for every 2 battles you lose you have to win 3 battles to make up the points.

Suffices to say, if the nation your running is forced to surrender, the likelihood of you winning is pretty slim, so you still need to end the game by ensuring the nation your running is victorious. Its not an absolute necessity, you win if you have 150 points either way, but its hard to put numbers like that on the board without those end game bonus points. The fact that you risk switching sides by winning battles and raising your current nations SCI which acts as a modifier to the roll to determine if you switch… Well, lets just say that shit gets pretty bloody complicated and I realize as I attempt to explain all this I am probably confusing you more than helping you understand. All I can say is that Its a brilliant mechanism that will have you scratching your head trapped in an infinite state of analysis paralysis. To me, the mark of a great game.

Personally I absolutely love this aspect of Peloponnesian War, to me, its what makes this such a great game. That said I can totally understand how a historical war gamer, accustomed to playing a game that rewards military strategy and tactics exclusively might see this meta, gamist approach and element as a major flaw of the game. I would warn anyone considering Peloponnesian War to really consider if that sort of mechanic works for them. It is in fact a common complaint about the game in reviews and the merits of this meta mechanism is often debated on BBG. I do understand both side of this debate and I would argue that this structure and mechanism is what makes this game absolutely brilliant, but certainly very non-traditional.

There are many awesome solo games that follow traditions and meet expectations like Enemy Action: Ardennes for example which also include exciting and unusual mechanics. Being traditional yet fresh is not mutually exclusive. Peloponnesian War however is a pretty big departure from such traditions, enough so that it may be a problem for some historical war gamers.

I haven’t touched much upon the gameplay differences in the various added scenarios of the game nor the two player variant which I’m yet to try. In fairness, to me those things are just bonuses, remove them and my opinion or this review would not change one bit. I will say that expanded content like this is appreciated and one day Im sure to get to it, but I play this game for the main campaign. I have completed a total of 4 games before writing this review, enough to form an opinion and write the review but not even close to enough to put it on the shelf. In fact as I write this review the game is setup behind me on my hobby table and frankly I rather be playing it than writing this article!

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tile:

Pros: The dynamic nature of the game creates a wide variation of challenges that keeps you coming back for more.

Cons: The high difficulty of the game might be a turn off for some and replayability really hinges on your affection for some of the unusual mechanics and approach this game requires.

Historical war games very often have a limited shelf life because they are built around very specific starting conditions and the dynamics are often limited to preserve the historical context of the game. Peloponnesian War does not suffer from that even though the main campaign does in fact have a fixed historically accurate start.

The game is simply to dynamic, a single activation in the operation phase can have lasting effects that echo all the way to the last turn of the game. The events are randomly generated and the order in which they appear has huge impact on the outcome of the game, but perhaps above all else is that the side switching mechanic can completetly alter what happens because you as a player are going to influence the game far more dramatically than the actual AI.

This game I believe will have very good longevity, its both addicitive, challenging and narrative. I’m not sure which of those properties I appreciate more. I do believe however that not everyone is going to find themselves as enthralled by Peloponnesian War like I have been. There are some pretty unique elements to this game that put it in a class of its own and such breaking of tradition I think will be rejected by some players.

Once your familiar with the game you might seek out other players to learn about their experiences which further reveals just how dynamic this game is. I look at this situation and all I have to say is… how the hell did that happen!

Historical war game fans looking for a traditional war game in the Peloponnesian War era should know that traditional is not how I would describe this game at all and if that is what you are looking for, one play of this and you are going to wonder what all the fuss is about. It takes an open mind to like this game, a willingness to accept it as a game, less so as a simulation even though it does a great job as a simulation, its just that it does it in a way you are probobly not expecting or accustomed to.

The replayability of this game hinges on your excitement to try to solve this complicated meta puzzle of switching sides, scoring points and dealing with the asymetrical nations. That may feel a bit distant from more traditional historical simulations in which the gameplay is strictly about the simulation itself.

The game is also brutally difficult, if the designer of the game can’t play it well enough to have a winning record, it is unlikely you will either, so be prepared to lose a lot. I’m 4 games in and I haven’t even come close yet.

Conclusion

What I’m going to say in this conclusion now is going to be the most controversial and contradictory thing I have ever said in a review but here goes. This is one of the best solo games I have ever played, I fell in love with this concept almost instantly and I think it’s just pure genius. Mark Hermans approach to game design just speaks to me and though most would argue that Empire of the Sun is his masterpiece, a claim I have made myself in the past, I honestly think Peloponnesian War might actually be his Mona Lisa.

That said, I struggle with the idea of recommending this game to historical war gamers, though strangely enough I would not recommend it to Euro gamers, Ameritrash gamers, casual dabblers or any other “grouping” of gamers you could think of.

This game strays a bit too far outside of the box of standard historical war game design and expectations. It spits in the eye of tradition and established nuances. It is its own thing, a white elephant living in a space outside of the norm. There are players who are going to love this game and you might be one of them, but I honestly don’t know how to categorize this game in a way that would allow me to target a specific group of players or a specific style of game and say “this is for you”. The fact that I think it’s brilliant is not going to change the reality that many gamers will play this game and simply not get it and I get that, I understand why that might happen with this game.

All I can say is that its a risk that you might not enjoy this game despite the fact that to me personally its a bloody revelation. Its games like this that keep me coming back to this hobby again and again. As a board game fan I want something that surprises me and does something unique, this is why I’m constantly buying and trying new games. It doesn’t happen often but every once in a while a game like Peloponnesian War comes along and just blows me away and reminds me why I love this hobby. You might share that reflection if you try it, or you might not.

I thought long and hard about this conclusion as I find it to be kind of unfair to the reader and so I fall back to my general advice about the board gaming hobby. Explore… that is what this hobby is all about. If this game intrigues you, don’t over think it, buy it and give it a try.

Board Game Reviews, Gaming Articles

Review: Imperial Struggle by GMT Games 2020

August 13, 2021 5 Minutes

Designers: Ananda Gupta & Jason Mathews

The first impression Imperial Struggle makes when you open up the box and get a look at the map is that it’s a mystery wrapped up in an enigma. This busy map is intimidating, to say the least, with countless unique spaces, connections, iconography, and dazzling colors. It’s hard to imagine all of this could be explained in a less than 20 pages long rulebook! I doubt lesser men could do it, but Ananda Gupta and Jason Mathews are masters of their craft if they are anything.

These two designers are quite famous and renowned in the historical board game community for what is undoubtedly one of the biggest crossover hits coming out of the historical war game genre in years, the one and only Twilight Struggle. Mr. Mathews in particular however has a number of sleeper hits that, while certainly not quite as famous as good old TS, are amazing designs in their own right in my opinion. Games like 1960: The Making of the President and especially Founding Fathers illustrate his ability to take interesting and diverse pieces of history and turn them into wonderful and dare I say approachable historical games for the uninitiated masses.

Twilight Struggle while based on the cold war is certainly the game most people will associate with Imperial Struggle due to its connection to the designers. This is a game that has almost defined its own genre at this point and is a breakout game that crossed the border into the Euro Game scene producing quite a few clones and re-imaginings today that all try to capture Twilight Struggles very elegant and addictive gameplay. It must have been quite intimidating for these two designers to release a follow-up game referred to as Twilight Struggles spiritual successor, a game that won so many awards and accolades. I can only imagine the pressure to live up to such a reputation and fan expectations must have been enormous.

Twilight Struggle is one of those rare games that despite being a clear example of historical war game design, crossed over to capture the wider Euro gaming audience. A truly rare achievement.

I honestly purchased Imperial Struggle simply based on the fact that these two designers are responsible for what I consider to be one of the finest historical board games in existence and I just had to see what their next game could do. I would however be lying if I didn’t say that I had quite a few reservations about the game, not only because it’s based on subject matter I’m not familiar with, but also because this game just looked complicated, a sentiment confirmed to some degree by many online voices. it’s been described by a lot of reviewers and gamers as being marginally like Twilight Struggle mechanically and with far more complex rules and many exception-based mechanics.

Do Ananda Gupta & Jason Mathews live up to their reputation, can lightning strike twice? does Imperial Struggle hold up?

Overview

Final Score: (4.4 out 5) Great Game!

Imperial Struggle is a historical boardgame covering the nearly century-long global competition between 18th century France and England. It covers the economic, diplomatic, and military aspects of the events of this extended period, including several wars, various aspects of colonization, diplomacy, and countless micro-events that shaped the 18th century.

If you are not familiar with this period of history, don’t worry, you’re probably not alone in that. That should however not sway you from giving Imperial Struggle (or any other historical game) a try. After all, part of the fun of playing historical board games is the opportunity to learn about different periods in history, and in the case of Imperial Struggle, the abstractions are fairly high level. It really isn’t a big requirement to know anything about the history of the game in advance to enjoy it. You won’t be at a disadvantage if you don’t know what the Spanish Succession War was or whyJohn Law was important to history. Most of the history of Imperial Struggle is here for flavor, theme and to give the mechanics purpose. While great effort was made to ensure the many game mechanics that were added gave this game a strong period feel and sense of place, the game can be learned and played without much attention paid to its adherence to history, much in the way Twilight Struggle was.

Imperial Struggle and Twilight Struggle are going to naturally be compared to each other given they share designers and many-core concepts (Not to mention the self-imposed title of Twilight Struggles spiritual successor), but I would argue that these are two very different games, not only mechanically and thematically, but conceptually.

For one, Imperial Struggle is not a card game, it’s an action selection game (3 action selection game to be exact) and while there are event cards and ministry cards that can enhance your resulting actions, the mechanical implications here are wildly different than those in Twilight Struggle. Imperial Struggle has its own identity, it’s a variation or at least a derivative if you will on how the area control and resource management systems worked in Twilight Struggle. It is however different enough that having played Twilight Struggle will not help you here at all, the similarities between the two games are superficial at best.

One of the biggest conceptual differences between Imperial Struggle and Twilight Struggle is that in Imperial Struggle the vast majority of information about the status of the game is in the open and calculable. While players may hold event cards that will have a few minor surprises for their opponent and cards are certainly part of building clever strategies, really this is a strategy game of outthinking your opponent based on the information you both have, much like a chess match. Again this is very different from Twilight Struggle where you really only had your knowledge of the cards in the deck to guide you about what events might occur. In Twilight Struggle there was considerably less information available to you about potential outcomes, in fact you didn’t even know for certain what the point-scoring conditions might be in any given round. This uncertainty about the true state of the game was not only because there were hidden cards, but also because parts of the game involved rolling dice, leaving a lot of the results of actions to chance.

Imperial Struggle’s map is a very busy place with a lot going on, but it’s a “what you see is what can happen kind” of situation, there are very few ways your opponent can affect the board unexpectedly, everything is in the open.

The other aspect of Imperial Struggle that I observed and seems to be a common sentiment among gamers is that it’s complex or at least comparatively more complex than Twilight Struggle. I would argue that this is only partially true. In fact, I would go even further and say that while Imperial Struggle is more difficult to learn to play as the rules are indeed more complex than Twilight Struggle, there is a more logical approach to victory conditions and the strategies required to win games.

One of the truly difficult things about learning to play Twilight Struggle is that to become a competent player you had to have a good grasp of all the cards in the deck and a good understanding of the many subtle, much less obvious, approaches to winning strategies and uses of those cards. This skill took quite a bit of time and a considerable amount of plays to pick up.

In Imperial Struggle, by the time you do your first scoring round, the lights will come on and while it may take a play or two to fully understand the intricacies of every rule of the game, you will have that “aha” moment of understanding regarding what you do in this game to win very quickly. It actually ends up being a much smaller hurdle to learn the rules than the quite extreme education required to fully grasp how to become a competent player in Twilight Struggle. It’s really a bit of a trade-off but I think it’s one Imperial Struggle wins. The rules are more complex for certain, but rules are just a matter of absorbing and remembering what they are. There is no shortcut however to learn to play TS even minimally competitively, you will have to play dozens of games before you do anything but lose horribly.

Twilight Struggle was first and foremost a card game and every card would eventually be played in every game. As such, knowing what the cards could do is a massive advantage in the game, something that could only be compensated for by playing many… many games.

Simply put, the game’s real drawback is that it looks and certainly is a bit complicated from a rules perspective and that will be the impression of most people who see it spread out on the table for the first time, but in truth, this is actually a much more straightforward strategy game once you get past this learning curve. In fact, I would again go even further and say it’s actually closer to the mid-range end of the spectrum of historical board games once you understand the basics of the iconography of the map and the victory scoring conditions of the game. Unfortunately unlike Twilight Struggle, I don’t think it will actually cross over into the Euro Game scene for the same reason most historical and historical war games don’t.

Imperial Struggle suffers from “rules exceptions” and this complaint about Imperial Struggle I have heard and share (and is a quite common complaint about historical war games in general). There are just a few too many “it works like this BUT…” rules. For historical wargamers, this won’t be a problem. After a few turns, you will naturally compensate for this if you play historical war games with any regularity, it really is a pretty standard learning curve for the genre. Euro Gamers and likely much of the crowd that adopted Twilight Struggle outside of the typical historical wargaming communities despite its historical war game roots are likely going to be considerably less tolerant of such a thing. In fact in Euro game design, as a rule, exception-based rules are generally considered “bad design” and players generally see rules as facilitation for good gameplay while in historical games exception-based rules get a pass if it makes the game more historically accurate. It’s a philosophy difference, but a hump many and perhaps even most mainstream board gamers may not be willing to hop over.

At the end of the day, Imperial Struggle in many ways is rightfully compared to Twilight Struggle, but I don’t think it quite lives up to the self-endorsed title of a spiritual successor. It does perhaps illustrate how games evolve from each other and certainly, Imperial Struggle is an evolution of the unique genre Twilight Struggle had created, but there are other games that are far closer to Twilight Struggle that may deserve the spiritual successor title. More importantly, Imperial Struggle is not going to cross over into the more general gaming communities like Twilight Struggle did as the exception-based rules of the game and some of the complexity involved with the event cards are going to put this one just out of reach. Worth pointing out however for me and my gaming buddies it in fact did cross-over, so I may be wrong about that. I really hope that I am.

It may be more appropriate to say that Imperial Struggle is heavily influenced by the designs of Twilight Struggle, but players should be prepared for an entirely different experience in a like-minded genre and understand that this is in fact, a historical game made for historical board game fans, not at all like the cross-over hit Twilight Struggle but I think fans of heavy Euro games should make an exception for this historical game as they did for Twilight Struggle because I think this one is worth the effort.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Above and beyond the call of duty on every front, GMT nails it.

Cons: Some minor complaints regarding font usage on cards, the rulebook could have been a bit more organized.

Reviewing GMT games components is always a pleasure, simply put, they never disappoint and continue to outpace their competition in the components department by a wide margin. Not only are Imperial Struggles components impressive both from a quality and aesthetic standpoint, but you get this amazing and superior quality for half the price of other publishers. It’s amazing what they squeeze into a 60 dollar game.

For starters, the mounted board is absolutely gorgeous made of heavy grade, scratch-resistant material that you will never tire of looking at or cease to be impressed with. Player boards are made from equally impressive hard-board stock as is the general administrative sideboard where investment tiles and event cards are managed.

When index material is used like the war boards or player aids, GMT went with full color, glossy, and very heavy index paper material that doesn’t warp or bend and will withstand considerable handling.

The cards in the game are also a hard stock, glossy finish with color illustrations that are a pleasure to hold and shuffle. I will complain about the use of too many fonts, in particular, Italics which are not easy on the eyes and it’s not always clear why something is Italic or bold on the card. This causes you to have to strain and re-read the cards to get an understanding of what is flavor and what is relevant to the game and while I understand the reason for doing this was to add more period flavor into the game, I’m a firm believer that cards in a game should always favor clarity over anything else. They should have a very clear separation between flavor and mechanics. These cards often do not.

The Rulebook is a high-grade stock, glossy and full color and explains the rules sufficiently, however, I think much of the complaining about the game “complexity” stems from some poorly chosen organization and lack of focus on some of the more complex rules elements. This isn’t a bad rulebook, but it isn’t great.

The rules themselves are explained in less than 20 pages and the game comes with an additional 20-page playbook to give you extra clarity. Despite that, I still found it a bit difficult to understand many concepts in the game that would later turn out to be quite simple. There was just an odd mixture of overwording really simple things that made them sound complicated, while in other places more complex elements were not elaborated on sufficiently and would not “click” until you read over examples. It’s clear that part of the cause of this was the fact that the rulebook never repeats itself, so if a rule is explained in one place and used in several other places, they simply reference back to the original text or assume you have read the previous section and remember that it applies to the whole game. This saves on page count but isn’t terribly helpful when it comes to learning the game and given this game’s higher complexity, extra clarity should have been favored over page count.

It’s extraordinary what GMT managed to fit into a box for 60 dollars, this has got to be one of the best deals in historical wargaming right now.

The token quality here is excellent and well sized for handling to such a degree that clipping won’t be necessary (these are not chits, they are tokens). There is a metric ton of them and not always for particularly good reason. For example, there is a set of Bonus War Tokens for each nation, for each of the four wars and while the art is different in each of the sets for thematic reasons, functionally the sets are all identical. This seems to have been largely done for flavor to create a historical connection to the tokens but it creates an unnecessary amount of token shuffling in a game that is already a bit fiddly.

The inclusion of a GMT token tray is much appreciated and certainly helps with the organization, a really nice touch that shows that GMT is really thinking about how to make your life easier when you play their games.

While I had some minor complaints, as they always have, GMT nails it on component quality and once again establishes a standard for the industry that hopefully will pressure others to follow (I’m looking at you Compass Games!)

Theme

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Pros: Visually captivating, captures the tension of the competition between these two 18th century superpowers with some great historical tidbits that really sell the theme.

Cons: The theme is forced in some places creating unwanted complexity and fiddliness and ultimately not that critical to the enjoyment of the game.

Imperial Struggle’s attempt to breathe theme into the game is done in a number of ways but comes across for the most part in aesthetics and artwork. It takes a few plays and a bit of exploration in particular if you are not familiar with the historical period to understand the significance of many of the mechanics and cards and how they all connect to the relevant history. This of course is part of the joy of playing historical fans, but I have to admit that these things are not immediately apparent and really illustrate how much depth this game really has. You don’t just play Imperial Struggle, you explore it and study it.

The illustrations on the map, in particular, the use of colors have a kind of 18th century naval map feel to it and immediately imprints on you this colonial period feel. This is important because the true historical flavor of this game isn’t going to jump out and grab you, so initially, you are leaning on the aesthetics to sell the game and the map does a great job of that.

The event and ministry cards are where most of the real historical flavor is put on display, where important people and events are illustrated and their game effects aligned with their historical significance. For those of us less familiar with the 18th-century conflict between France and England, the playbook provides more detailed information about these events and people in an effort to educate you and get you into the spirit of the theme of the game which is greatly appreciated and highly recommended. This was done with Twilight Struggle as well and while I think some players might skip it, I found the information fascinating and it helped to enhance the experience. More than that, these event cards are going to help form your strategy, which in turn will bring the game closer to the history it’s based on. It’s not scripted, but you are definitely going to be leveraging the historical advantage of France and England in this period and your strategies will at times very much reflect the historical approach the nations took. Again, I can’t stress enough how this generally comes later, after a few plays, it’s not something you will get right away.

The Event and Ministry cards are where much of the theme comes to life, each card represents and reflects mechanically a piece of the 18th century conflict between the two superpowers of their time.

A good example of this is the Jacobite rebellions and uprising. This is one of Frances’s key political and military advantages and will be a true and proper thorn in England’s side throughout the game. This is represented with Jacobite Rebellion conflicts in the various wars which when won by France will earn them opportunities for a lot of extra victory points using the Jacobite Uprisings ministry card and because this card appears in all Era’s of play, its not something that England can ignore. France can literally win the game through clever use of this card, good strategies for the Jacobite Rebellions (conflicts in the wars) and good positioning in Scotland and Ireland. Now if you don’t know the significance of the history here, don’t feel bad, probably most people don’t and that is ok. It does not change the fact that Imperial Struggle creates a very strong connection to the themes of these historical elements and really infused the game with a significant amount of real history. If you’re like me, it will have you googling like crazy after playing Imperial Struggle and I would venture to guess that is exactly what the designers are hoping to inspire.

I have to say however that Imperial Struggle is a very abstract game and while you do get a sense of this sort of global competition for resources and territory and a tremendous amount of history is infused into the mechanics of the game that lead to historical strategies playing out in the game, I really didn’t get the sense of this being a hard simulation of the period.

It was rather clear to me that in many places “more theme” was being rather forcefully injected to compensate, like the use of War Bonus Tilesets that were mechanicaly all the same, but have alternate sets for each war just so different images and words could be printed on the tokens to give relevance to their historical significance. I found this a rather pointless endeavor, as the game is so abstracted in so many places, the thematic significance of having different sets like this is completely lost in the shuffle. You’re not going to care who or what the token represents in a historical context as much as you are going to care that it’s a +2 bonus.

While the art and general atmosphere of the game has a very nice period feel to it, any Euro gamer that plays this game will recognize it as a sophisticated action selection point salad rather than getting a sense of 18th-century history. The history part of it is there, but the game doesn’t really force it.

Ultimately the biggest effort with impact to the theme of the game is the map and the implications of locations (positions on it). You will be analyzing this map constantly and will be making new discoveries on it all the time from a strategic angle, but it’s doubtful that you will find any real connection to the theme here beyond some familiar locations you might assign some historical significance to. It really falls into the background during play and you are going to be spending far more time counting territories and calculating military strength in a bid to score victory points, then you are going to be emotionally drawn into the 18th-century conflict between France and England.

For example concepts like Wars are abstracted to the absolute highest extremes, you are not actually moving troops, or preparing for battles, you are far more likely going to be looking for the most optimal plays to make to score victory points and get tokens on the board. This by and large is a victory point salad game and has far more in common with heavy abstracted euro games than it does with historical games or historical war games. That isn’t to say there is no theme or history infused here, because there is actually quite a bit, I’m just not sure you are going to get invested in the 18th-century conflict between France and England playing Imperial Struggle. The abstractions are quite heavy and in a way, the mechanics and gameplay are so involved that it draws your attention from the historical theme on which the game is based.

In comparison to Twilight Struggle which is a very thematic game, Imperial Struggle falls quite a bit short in the theme department by comparison. I think it’s mainly because in Twilight Struggle every action a player took always triggered a historical event (as you would always play an event card) and so the result was a game OF events wherein Imperial Struggle you are most of the time trying to leverage the most you can out of your action selection tokens which are kind of nameless, themeless actions really not representing anything. Even when event cards are triggered, because of the flow of the game to that point and its focus on action selection, the significance of the themes and history on these event cards kind of take a back seat and just become ways to enhance your actions.

I would argue that the cards are unnecessarily complicated for the purpose they serve in the game as well, it would have been much better to keep these cards straightforward, clean, and simple. The designer was very clearly trying to infuse more themes into the game by creating a strong link between the event cards and their place in history which is to be applauded but as such these cards developed a much more complex structure in an effort to make them come off more thematic. I don’t think the effort was successful here as the complexity of these cards gets under the feet of a game that is otherwise brilliant in the gameplay department, hurting, rather than helping to enhance the gaming experience.

Cards are a great way for any historical war game to breathe theme into a game and this is what Imperial Struggle does as well, but the cards are really wordy and often unintuitive resulting in a considerably increased learning curve that could have been avoided with a bit more streamlining of the effects and text.

All and all, I think how much you theme you get out of Imperial Struggle is really going to depend on your extracurricular activities between plays and how much you understand about the history involved. There is a lot of history infused into the mechanics here and once you get to know the game many nuanced strategies, knowingly or not you are likely to make many historically accurate decisions. Imperial Struggle, however, is a very abstracted game as already mentioned several times and this 18th-century theme isn’t going to force itself on you.

More importantly, I really felt that even though this is clearly a historical game, meant to be about a very specific and rather interesting point in human history, the theme here is really not that important to the quality of the game. Imperial Struggles success as a game does not hinge on its ability to draw you into its theme, this is very much a game about good gameplay and deep, contemplative strategies. Its greatest moments are going to be when you pull these off.

Wars are a very important and tense part of Imperial struggle but also abstracted to such a degree, that it boils down to trying to get the highest value tokens on the war sheet and making sure you control as many bonus strength items as possible. Great mechanic, but not terribly thematic.

When you deconstruct this game, It’s a very good competitive point salad and a very challenging one at that and while I think different people will have different levels of emotional attachments to the theme, if you are looking for a deep, thematic game about the conflict between England and France in the 18th century, I’m not sure Imperial Struggle is going to give historical war game fans that in a sufficient dose. This game you buy for the excellent gameplay and strategic board game it is.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: This game is a tight, cerebral competition that absolutely nails the action selection and area control gameplay.

Cons: Some aspects of the game are overdone creating unwanted rules complexity and rules exceptions.

Imperial Struggle is a truly triumphant evolution of the unique area control genre that Twilight Struggle exemplified and arguably perfected. The alternate design path Imperial Struggle takes is a considerable departure from its predecessor (Twilight Struggle). Where this game differs from Twilight Struggle is also where it shines and looking at these two games side by side from a gameplay perspective, I think I would lean towards Imperial Struggle as the better game of the two despite being significantly different enough that they can happily live on my shelf side by side.

Imperial Struggle is a tense game in which every action, every move, every nuance becomes part of a larger picture that is a very complex and deep strategy. This is a game you don’t just learn to play, you study it like chess or poker, where it is not only a matter of calculation, although this is a big part of it, but also your ability to predict and assess your opponent’s strategy. Thanks to its open nature, you have information to base your prediction on staring you in the face on the map and in the investment tiles that are all on display. As such the game has a more contemplative and direct approach to strategy, rather than how it is often done in its predecessor Twilight Struggle where you “gamble” on a move hoping it pays off.

The wonderful thing and perhaps the reason why I prefer Imperial Struggle over Twilight Struggle is that there are so many different strategies, nuanced by a wildly asymmetrical game space on which they are executed. Every advantage on the board you can leverage, every push you successfully make, each position you claim, they all collegiate into this absolutely amazing gameplay experience that rewards you for your success and does not hinge on the luck of the draw of cards or toss of the dice. When you win at Imperial Struggle it’s because you have outplayed your opponent, victory in this game is earned through intelligence and deeply meaningful execution of strategy. It is in my mind, exactly the evolution of Twilight Struggle I wanted to see.

The game is hindered, albeit ever so slightly by a relatively steep initial learning curve, though I would argue when you come out at the other end, this game is ultimately much simpler to grasp. You’re not going to need more than one game before the haze of the rules starts to clear up and you can see the game for what it is, while at the same time I think this game is tailor-made for repeated plays as you will constantly find new avenues to explore.

The core of the activity of the game revolves around the action selection of Investment Tiles. Each tile has a major and minor action, of which there are three types (Diplomatic, Military and Economic). Each tile offers a certain amount of Action Points for the specified action and the entire game boils down to trying to achieve the most with those very limited actions & action points. You enhance your actions with an occasional well-timed play of event cards and enhance your general strategy for any given round with the use of ministry cards that offer more global bonuses and benefits. Furthermore, you can gain additional benefits by controlling certain board spaces.

Fundamentally speaking, Imperial Struggle’s core mechanic is unquestionably Euro-centric, the core of the action is the action select system defined by these Investment Tiles.

Now I won’t pretend like the actions you take are “simple” as there is moderate complexity in what you can do with your action points and Imperial Struggle does struggle, pun intended, with a considerable amount of exception-based rules. These exception rules are really the biggest part of the initial learning curve as they aren’t always intuitive and can create questions you might not find easily answered in the rulebook. I found myself on a number of occasions stumped and searching online forums for an answer. This may explain why the general consensus is that Imperial Struggle is a more complex game than Twilight Struggle is. The focus and organization of the rulebook can sometimes make finding rules a bit of a frustrating process, as it too, is not always intuitive and well thought out.

Still, I feel very strongly that the effort made to learn to play this game is well worth the rewards. Find yourself an opponent willing to make a similar effort and what you have is one extraordinary game that will have you obsessing about finding new ways to win after every play.

One aspect of the game that I think comes across really well is the pressure that players can put on each other, causing both players to constantly have to re-assess and often adjust their strategy. For example, you might decide that you are going to try to win Europe, but your opponent undermines you just enough to make it a shallow victory, while he works on expanding his power in North America. Suddenly what you thought was going to be a gallant victory in Europe becomes a minor one, while you take a pasting elsewhere. This is a very simple and general example, in reality, these pressure points are often a lot more localized thanks to the way the various wars that take place between rounds can focus your attention. During each war, there are 3-4 conflicts taking place and those conflicts dictate what aspects on the map will be important, driving player decisions. The global market demand has a similar effect and also changes each round, which means that from round to round, elements on the board become less or more important and not always in predictable ways. This forces you to consider everything on the board at every turn, there is nothing that can be ignored and every game is going to be wildly different.

There are many driving forces of player decisions, but there is no question that the economics of Global Demand plays a pivotal role in what becomes important on the map. You must control commodities, the scoring opportunities are many and can easily swing a game.

The back and forth play of actions is as much about timing as it is about what you do and because the investment tile selection available is randomized at the start of each round and different every round, you can’t really always count on being able to execute your plans exactly like you want to long term. Compromises will have to be made, strategic adjustments will have to be made and sometimes, plans will need to be abandoned altogether because of the actions of your opponent or circumstances on the board. There are almost two simultaneous things that happen in the game, one is the long-term strategy your building towards whenever you can which is often disrupted by clear emergencies on the board. Again, this creates this wonderful tension and pressure at every turn and is really what makes Imperial Struggle this really exciting strategy game.

The game really swings back and forth and earns the title “struggle” because that is exactly what it feels like.

Now I mentioned that this is a very abstract game and as much as I would like this gameplay to be contextualized more in the theme, as the gameplay is so strong here, the abstractions are just too heavy to maintain a thematic connection during play. Simply put, there is so much going on here, you aren’t going to be overly focused on the significance of the theme, gameplay will always be first and foremost on your mind.

That does not however mean that you won’t have an emotional attachment to the game as it unfolds, quite to the contrary, you most certainly will. Imperial Struggle might not get the 18th-century theme to the forefront of the experience, but make no mistake, Imperial Struggle is a good and proper battle of wits between players and it will bring the competitive player out of you. Perhaps some with a greater imagination then I might create a better correlation between the historical events and this tension the game produces. You are going to become deeply invested in the outcomes of the game and obsess about your mistakes either way.

The first time I played Imperial Struggle, I immediately needed to play it again, it was just that good.

There are a few blemishes and unfortunately, they stem from some of the failed attempts in this game to force more theme into it. The event cards have to be my biggest complaint here, as already mentioned, they are just a bit overcooked and just add unnecessary complexity to an otherwise very elegant game mechanic increasing the learning curve as a result, unnecessarily in my opinion.

There are also exception-based rules which are sometimes a bit much and can frustrate new players. The human brain can only juggle so many rules and I think I had played the game 4 times before I was certain that we had completed a game without making any rules mistakes, a problem I pin squarely on these exception-based rules that aren’t always referenced anywhere except the rulebook, not even in the quick reference sheet.

While the rulebook has some vagueness in the language, it clearly covers all rules, there are no omissions here, but reading the Playbook is one sure-fire way to clarify some of those exception-based rules. The only problem then is remembering to implement them and herein lays that complexity that is so often referenced in this and many other reviews of Imperial Struggle.

These two elements combined, exception-based rules and complex event cards, are the root cause of this game going from a mild-mannered middle-weight Euro and straying into the complex historical game genre. It’s really unfortunate because this game is just a notch too complicated to pull out with the general gamers and is ultimately going to fall into the historical wargamer clubs.

That doesn’t make it any lesser of a game, Imperial Struggle is an absolutely fantastic experience, but be wary of who you introduce it to. While Twilight Struggle broke the barrier and reached across the aisle to pull in Euro Gamers you might expect Imperial Struggle to do the same. I think Imperial Struggle goes just a bit too far into the historical war game side of things to make the transition easy.

Replayability and Longevity

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Pros: This is a game without a shelf life, it’s fantastic now and it will be fantastic 100 plays from now.

Cons: A bit of an unsteady playtime with no real catch-up mechanics.

Imperial Struggle may just be one of the most replayable games I have laid out on my table in years. It’s addictive and I think the big contributing factor here is that there are just so many interesting things on the map. There are countless nuanced elements with extremely viable strategic potential and while generally speaking you have to navigate every aspect of the game (Diplomatic, Economic and Military) to achieve victory, there are quite a few different approaches to this that open the game to repeated plays.

I think Imperial Struggle, like Twilight Struggle is going to be one of those games people will talk about years after its release with the same energy and passion on their first play as their 100th play. This game has incredible potential for longevity and while I think we can expect quite a few rules adjustments and fixes for the game, as there are certainly plenty of ways it could be improved with just a few carefully chosen changes, I think Imperial Struggle is great just the way it is.

The game takes about 2-4 hours to play. The reason for the range is that just like Twilight Struggle, while some games will go the distance, a great many will end at some point in the middle. It is very possible for a player to achieve victory as early as turn 3 or 4. This means the game falls somewhere between a nice afternoon and a game for the evening. I would say it’s better to plan for a 4-hour game than assume you can finish in 2 or 3. Expertise in the game will not change this playtime, quite to the contrary, the more expertise two players have the less likely the game is to end early.

I would argue however that the game does not have much of a catch-up mechanic, if you fall behind enough, you are likely to lose in the end. This might be seen as a drawback, but there is a kind of breaking point in games where, if a player gets sufficiently ahead it becomes evident the opposing player has no chance and I find many games end with a surrender by your opponent who rightfully identifies that he can no longer win. This isn’t a bad thing, quite to the contrary, once you reach this breaking point, it’s a far better option to give up and start a new game, than spend a couple of hours just going through the motions of finishing. One thing I can say is that, unlike Twilight Struggle if you fall behind, it won’t be because of a bad card draw and poor luck with the dice. This is a pure strategy game and if you lose early, it’s definitely on you which is why I think once two players gain experience with the game, it will very likely always go the distance.

I give this game high marks for replayability and longevity, this is one that will not only remain on your shelf but isn’t likely to collect dust.

Conclusion

I’m not sure Imperial Struggle will be the spiritual successor to Twilight Struggle everyone hoped for, it is a game that is wildly different and targets a more traditional historical wargaming community. Though one might argue that Twilight Struggle was a game designed with the same intention and was simply adopted by the general public regardless and perhaps Imperial Struggle with benefit from a similar fate.

Arguably, 1960:Make of the President is probably a much more appropriate game to earn the title “spiritual successor”.

In either case, Imperial Struggle has a considerable initial learning curve with many exception-based rules which means it’s a fairly typical approach to historical war games. It also means it strays considerably from Twilight Struggles’ more streamlined approach to playability which I believe to be at least partially why so many Euro gamers were able to adopt TS. I don’t believe the same can be said about Imperial Struggle.

To me however none of this matters, I consider myself a historical wargamer and if we are being quite frank, I didn’t find the game particularly complicated to learn at all personally. I can see how Euro gamers might look at this game and proclaim it “heavy”, but to veteran wargamers, this game will definitely fall into the mid-range, perhaps even low end of the complexity spectrum depending on what you are already accustomed to. This is a game that relies quite heavily on rules structure and concepts historical wargamers should be quite used to and it should give them little trouble if any. After a couple of rounds of playing Imperial Struggle, it all clicked for me and I immediately began to understand and see the game’s immense potential. Sure, due the exception-based rules, it took a few games before we ran it 100% right but that in on itself is also kind of a common thing with historical war games.

This is an extraordinary game that offers a fantastic mental challenge and creates great tension and strategy that will take years to fully explore. The mechanics are both logical and clever, the strategies deep and meaningful and the gameplay exceptionally rewarding. I fell in love with this game after a single play, but unlike so many historical war games on my shelf, my adoration of this game had very little to do with its thematic presence and connection to the history of the game and everything to do with its truly brilliant mechanics. The machinery here is what really makes this game the fascinating experience it is.

It’s a bit strange because while I don’t believe Euro gamers will adopt this game as they did Twilight Struggle, I actually believe they should. Any Euro gamers willing to struggle through the learning curve will find that this actually is an extraordinarily brilliant competitive point salad game at its roots, something right up their alley. In fact, were it not for the exception-based rules and the unnecessarily overindulgent event cards, I could see how this game would have made an even better cross-over game than even Twilight Struggle was. It very oddly has mechanics far more in common in heavy Euro games than it does with historical war games, it ticks many of those Euro boxes.

What I can say about Imperial Struggle is that it’s a gem with a few rough edges that, for historical wargamers aren’t going to be an issue at all, but maybe a bit of a problem for everyone else. I can also say that this is just another example of why Ananda Gupta & Jason Mathews are celebrities in historical wargaming circles, there are fun games and then there are games like Imperial Struggle, literal examples of amazing game design no serious historical wargamer can afford to miss despite its oddly Eurocentric mechanics. That is not to say Imperial Struggle isn’t fun, but it’s a very cerebral kind of fun, in line with what you kind of expect from historical war games.

I love it, but I recommend it only to historical wargamers and Euro gamers who are looking for something really challenging that might be just a few notches outside their normal comfort zone. If you are a Twilight Struggle fan, I’m not sure this game shares enough similarities with TS that you will find it anything but mildly familiar. It is a great game and it’s likely that you picked TS because it too is great, not because of anything specific about a preference regarding mechanics. Sometimes a great game is a great game, how or why doesn’t really matter, and Imperial Struggle while not exactly a spiritual successor to Twilight Struggle is indeed a great game inside the broad confines of the genre.

Board Game Reviews, Gaming Articles

War Room by Nightingale Games 2019

July 31, 2021 5 Minutes

Designer: Larry Harris, Jr.

Doing a review on a game like War Room is an intimidating proposition for a number of reasons not the least of which is knowing full well that a game of this size, scale and subject matter would require a tremendous effort just to fully grasp before you could speak intelligently about it. In fact, getting sufficient plays of a game that takes 8-10 hours to play, that has as many intricate gameplay elements as War Room has, could potentially take years to assess fully. While It would seem almost mandatory to do so to do a review justice, I can’t wait that long to do a review of a game. Despite feeling that doing this review has a kind of a prematurity to it, at some point, I had to put something to digital paper. This game has been in my collection for over a year already, it’s time!

War Room is a massive world war II event game the likes of which I can safely say is rarely ever seen in this hobby. It’s a game designed with little regard to cost, your available table space, or playtime, not to mention the lack of adherence to design principles that might be considered “standard” in the industry for the genre. It’s a game that lives in the world of excess, with few expected barriers and presumptions about what a game should be, no matter how you measure it. Really the only other game I can think of that might actually be able to give this one a run for its money in sheer size, scope and length of play and out-of-the-box thinking is Mega Civilization (originally Advanced Civilization). In a way, I think War Room is a kind of lifestyle game, a hobby in a box if you will to be played, studied, debated and explored over the course of years.

Mega Civilization is a game for 5 to 18 players! Its average game time exceeds 12+ hours and they don’t even make tables big enough for this one. Excessive is an understatement.

War Room puts you into a role of a commander of one of seven nations involved in world war II in what I can only describe as a deeply strategic and very intricate war game that comes with all of the sensory inputs money and good, albeit often unconventional game design can buy. This is not just a game that wants to be played, it’s an event that wants to be experienced and explored. War Room demands and takes far more from you than any reasonable person will typically expect from a board game night and whether or not it yields rewards in equal measure is going to really depend on how open-minded you are about the concept of what “gaming” is. In many ways, War Room really stretches the definition of “board game” considerably, partially living in what I like to call “an activity” rather than a game.

At the same time, the game’s rules are in line with a typical mid-weight board game in terms of complexity, Euro or otherwise, which gives the impression that it is not just for an audience made up of existing fans of Larry Harris classics like Axis & Allies or wargamers in general but rather it wants to welcome the less initiated. This is in line with the magic trick Larry Harris is actually pretty famous for given how broadly accepted his Axis and Allies is for example. Whether or not Larry Harris succeeds with War Room to make this game simple and accessible enough for the average gamer is disputable. I have played plenty of games that have been adopted by the general gaming public that fall into far higher levels of rules complexity than this one, but War Room has many very unique gameplay elements and strategic concepts that are extremely heavy. Hence while players may be able to learn the rules of the game easy enough to move pieces around, learning to play War Room well and understanding its very intricate design is likely well outside of the reach of the casual gamer and definitely reaches into the realm of serious historical wargaming.

Axis & Allies is a stone-cold classic, but unlike War Room, its design adheres to a lot of conventions of the era. War Room tends to break a lot more conventions in game design.

The other equally difficult part of doing a review for a game like War Room is that it’s nearly impossible not to have a love affair with it the moment it arrives and you get your first look at that beautiful black coffin box and its elaborate goodies inside. How do you stay objective holding such a visual treasure in your hand? How can you possibly comment on its shortcomings when you can feel the love, blood, sweat and tears that must have gone into creating what will undoubtedly be a piece of board gaming history?

War Room is gorgeous, if you’re a gamer and this doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know whatever will.

It’s going to be hard, but I’m going to try to be as objective as I can be!

Overview

Final Score: (4.9 out 5) Near Perfect Game!

War Room is an evolution of Axis and Allies, a game that ups the ante in terms of scope, detail and components considerably while at the same time attempts to bring that same beloved A&A experience we have enjoyed for decades to the table in a kind of modern re-imagining of the game.

Played on a huge round map of the world, War Room allows up to 7 players grouped into two teams, The Axis and The Allies, representing the different nations of World War II to fight out the entirety of the war in all its glory and detail.

While this game is clearly inspired by Axis and Allies in countless ways to such a degree that even some of the old A&A strategies actually apply here, War Room’s evolution as a game design strays into new realms some drawn from modern game design, while others reach back to classics that pre-date even Axis & Allies. It’s also a game that hinges on a lot of psychology, much of the games intricate gameplay has to do with the ability to predict and anticipate your opponent’s actions, but this isn’t always going to be based on table strategy, but rather reading what sort of people your playing against and with. Strategies can vary wildly for each nation and player personalities are often going to dictate this far more than sound strategy.

It’s a mutation of Axis and Allies for sure, one that remains true to its original core concept of being a game that is reasonably easy to learn and a more approachable war game hoping to capture more than just the seasoned historical wargaming veteran. It tries to be a game the novice enthusiasts can play, while simultaneously building a clear bridge for veterans to cross. I think Larry Harris is a master of building such bridges and with War Room, I believe he makes a gallant effort to reach beyond the hex and counter crowd as he did with the original Milton Bradly classic, Axis and Allies. Unlike Axis and Allies, however, the depth of the game here is definitely influenced far more by historical simulationist wargaming and as such, it’s far more of a stretch to presume a more casual crowd will play this game. I’m not sure historical wargamers will agree, but to me, this is a very heavy historical war game even though it has a fairly high level of abstraction and lacks a lot of the typical adherence to historical accuracy.

War Room is the Rolls Royce of board games of that there is no doubt, it demands the highest of prices to get it to your table which means it is going to have to measure up to the absolute highest of standards and expectations as a game. Simply put, at a shocking price of 240 us dollars, this is the single most expensive game you will ever buy and as such you have every right to have very high expectations. There are no excuses allowed for taking shortcuts here, nothing but perfection is acceptable. The only question is, does War Room deliver on such high expectations?

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: No expense was spared, every component is visually impressive, of the highest quality and serves a practical purpose

Cons: It would have been nice with an extra set of dice.

At 240 dollars I don’t think it’s unfair to expect to have your mind blown when you open this massive box and I assure you that whatever your standards for board game components are, this game will exceed them. It really sets a new standard in particular for the historical war game genre that few will ever be able to measure up to. War Room is an expensive toy that is certain but, it’s for gamers like me with disposable incomes who love gaming and are ready to dish out any price for the best of the best and this is exactly what you get with War Room. Simply put, it is eye-popping beautiful, comprised of the highest quality of components money can buy. The publisher has spared no expense in making you feel like you got your money’s worth.

Now is any game actually worth 240 dollars? It’s impossible to say, I mean it’s a board game, an evening’s entertainment and I think it comes down to what I like to call the connoisseur effect. For example, I like wine, it’s delicious, but there is no wine ever made nor will there ever be that is worth more than 20 bucks to me. I’m not a wine connoisseur, I give zero fucks that it’s a 1939 Brunello, I’m not going to pay 500 bucks to drink it. If you are a connoisseur, however, the experience and perceptions you have take on an entirely different meaning. I think War Room is like that for gamers. If you are like me, a connoisseur of board games, paying 240 dollars to experience a game like War Room is a steal, for everyone else, the quality of the game and its components isn’t really ever going to justify paying 240 bucks for a board game. There are far cheaper alternatives for an evening of board gaming entertainment and that is a perfectly understandable conclusion to come to.

The box is chock-full of excessively overdone components that should have fans of wargaming shaking with excitement. The attention to detail here is beyond the call of duty.

War Room is a love letter to Axis and Allies fans, in particular the approach that was taken with the components. The goal here isn’t just to give you pretty toys to play with, every component in this game was meticulously designed and selected to assist in streamlining gameplay. It’s a visual treat there is no doubt, but it’s a practical one as well and I think Axis and Allies fans, in particular, are going to really appreciate the efforts here (or anyone else for that matter) . Whether or not that makes this game worth 240 bucks is something every gamer is going to have to decide for themselves, but for me, as a connoisseur of board games, I’m smiling from ear to ear and I have already forgotten how much this game cost.

Now when you do open this box, the first thing that will jump out at you is the size of the mounted map which while absolutely gorgeous, made of very sturdy, scratch-resistant material, is massive, far bigger than most of us have table space for. This is going to be a problem for your average Joe as you are going to need some serious real-estate to play this game. Just the map will take up the largest of tables and because it’s round, even large rectangle tables will have trouble fielding this one. You really need a very large round table, one of those very expensive big board game tables, or a couple of tables stacked together to make this work.

Fortunately not only is the map beautifully illustrated with clear iconography and a very practical approach to colors to ensure everything can be cataloged at a glance but there is a tremendous amount of design thought that went into making sure that this map is perfectly streamlined for gameplay. While huge enough to really capture that visual experience of an actual war room, the map is barely big enough to ensure there is sufficient space for all the stuff that will be placed on it. In fact even at this size, sometimes the map is too small if you can believe that. You are going to use every inch of the space of this four-piece puzzle map that clicks together into a seamless circle and despite its size, it’s going to get crowded in many places. I guess what I’m saying is that while the map is excessively large, it’s the size it needed to be.

Even on a very large war game table, this game is going to get crowded. There are few games in the board game market today that require this much space, even fewer still that make such great use of it.

The game also comes with stackable plastic “chits” that are color-coded and shape-coded to represent the various units in the game (Ground, Air and Sea). Now initially I was quite skeptical about this because when I first set up the game it looked completely crazy and seemed to have far too much relation to hex and counter games that are notoriously difficult to assess at a glance. Square, round and diamond shape plastic units were stacked together each with different colors, it just looked like a rainbow-colored mess. It was really difficult to tell units apart and while learning to play I constantly had to check the reference sheet to know what is what, it all just felt very unintuitive.

Thankfully your brain is a tool that adapts and Larry Harris is smarter than all of us. I found that within a round of play, I had everything committed to memory and I could do an assessment of the units in any space on the map in seconds without even having to focus on it. You just make an almost instinctive association between shapes and colors that becomes second nature (thank you right hemisphere of my brain). What seemed like a very unintuitive mess, quickly turned into one of the most brilliant design choices of the game as it solves the big problem all war games have of trying to organize in a sensible way massive amounts of varied troops on a huge map. No stacking checking, no disorganized mess of miniatures with not enough space or ugly chits or cubes. These pieces do a lot of heavy lifting to keep the game organized and because they are plastic with indents that connect like Legos it’s easy to grab and move units around the board. Frankly, it’s just brilliant, it takes what is typically a very fiddly part of wargaming and makes it reasonably effortless.

The plastic pieces in this game look great on the map, creating great atmosphere, helping to bring the theme to life, but its how practical they are that makes them a brilliant piece of design.

Next, we come to the cards. Now, this is not a card game, the cards are really just there as a way to streamline the process of accounting and administration of resources at different points in the game. This feels excessive because it is, but again, it’s just one of those things that help speed up gameplay and excessive is kind of part of War Room in general. The card quality is as you would expect, excellent, made to last, the art on the cards is representative of photography from world war II picture archives which helps give it that sort of World War II black and white feel and they are well organized into cardholders that will put a smile on even the pickiest of OCD patients. There is no need to sleeve these, they will hold up without them in particular since there is no card shuffling involved.

Each player also gets a large matchbox-like holder for all the various tokens and components for their nation. This again is cleverly organized and compact with a top piece that fits snug that serves a practical administrative purpose. This top piece uses plastic pegs for tracking resources, which is something that you must reference often. This again just helps keep the game streamlined and easily accessible which is key as throughout the game you are constantly accessing your opponent’s status and resources are a big part of that when working through decisions.

Each nation also gets a “nations order book”, this double-sided notepad is used for tracking your orders and purchases in the course of a round. Again the design here is just very well thought out and helps to facilitate play. Everything you need to know when making orders or doing your production phase is on it so no need to reference rules or charts.

Now I know people will sometimes complain that “eventually” these notebooks will run out and you will have to replace them but these notebooks have hundreds of pages and on average you will use 3 to 4 sheets per game so you would literally have to play a hundred times before you ran out. I assure you that by the time you have played this game as many times as you would need to run out of sheets you will have died from natural causes, it’s effectively a lifetime supply. The notebooks are colored and made of high-quality paper, again, nothing but the best from War Room.

The movement of troops is done in secret and only revealed when all nations have committed to their actions. In a sense, this is the core of the game that really creates the unique experience of War Room.

There are many other auxiliary components that I would call luxury components to be more accurate including several mounted boards. 2 tactical battle boards, a morale board and a couple of quick reference boards. The quality is extremely good in every regard and all of these boards are very practical and useful in streamlining gameplay. I particularly like the size of these boards, yes, it requires even more space, but the print is large and important information is highlighted to facilitate both gameplay and especially learning to play. Cleverly there are mini maps of the main map on the opposite side of the reference boards which really facilitates gameplay during the planning phases.

The components are tightly designed, with great use of color and built for usability. There is a lot of excesses here, but everything is geared towards keeping order.

You also get 10, 12 sided dice, these are proprietary dice designed specifically for the game and again the logic and purpose behind the dice are very practical. Each face on the die is a color corresponding to a unit type, so it’s very easy to know what and when you successfully hit something without having to reference a table as is the case in almost every war game I have ever played. I don’t know why games don’t do this more often, the use of symbology or color as is the case here is so much easier to work with.

There was even care taken for the color blind by adding symbols on the dice to make these readable which I think is a very thoughtful practice you don’t see in board games very often.

I do wish there was an extra set of dice that came with the game as there are times when you could expedite the game considerably by fighting multiple battles at the same time (since you have 2 battle boards). It’s really a worthwhile investment to get a second set for this reason alone.

When it comes to the manual, while it does not follow along with the classic “war game” indexing design which actually might have been useful here, it is nonetheless still very clear and referenceable. The manual is sectioned out by phases of play and there was a lot of attention paid here to ensure everything you need to know about a phase is included. This is a color-printed manual with plenty of pictures/examples and though I found myself reaching for online resources to learn how to play as I find that much easier to do, generally this is a relatively simple game to learn and teach in particular for seasoned wargamers. I definitely think it’s much easier than Axis and Allies was to learn because the rules have a sort of natural intuitive design, I found that they sink in a lot better. I’m not entirely sure everyone would agree, it’s really just a question of how your brain is wired I think.

There are a few quirky rules that require some double-takes like the whole Japan-Soviets non-aggression pact that is defined with a wall of text that probably could have been simplified but for the most part, no trouble getting this one to the table.

At 240 bucks I expected to be impressed and I was, the components are top-notch, no expense was spared both from an aesthetic point of view and a practical one.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Near perfect execution of the theme, capturing everything that makes WWII such an interesting historical topic with just the right amount of abstraction.

Cons: Historical accuracy is not adhered to at the same intensity as most historical war games and I think historical war gamers will find room to complain.

When it comes to War Room’s theme, I think there are a number of successes that are immediately apparent, a couple of things that are really well done but in a very subtle way you might not really catch on to right away and one thing I think the game intends but doesn’t explicitly define as a rule that actually makes this one of the most thematic WW II games in existence.

The first and most immediately apparent thing about War Room that instantly sells the theme is the giant round map littered with military units. It’s just so obvious where the inspiration for this type of presentation comes from with the obvious hint in the name. This feels like a game about a bunch of generals hunched over a table making high-level strategic decisions in a “War Room”. The game captures this perfectly and delivers on that promise in a big way, really the only thing missing are those push sticks so that you can reach over the table and move units into position (notably you can buy this as part of the Jumbo Pack expansion for War Room).

War Room is clearly inspired by pictures like this and its this sensation it captures perfectly.

The second thing that really works to sell the theme is the hidden movement mechanic in which players plan all of their troop movements in secret simultaneously and then reveal them and execute them in turn order. This is not only an amazing and notably very classic mechanic which I will talk a great deal about in the gameplay section but is pure magic when it comes to selling the theme here. Not knowing what your enemy’s plans are, having that “fog of war” is an amazing sensation that really just nails that feeling that anything can happen. You build a plan together with your friends, you put your orders in and hope for the best.

More than just that however one thing that really comes across is that when players are preparing to write their orders their is an immediate realization that this is a team game and you can’t just decide what your nation will do on your own. No nation in the game is so strong that it can just do its own thing and secure victory, nor can one player on either the Axis or Allies side win the game alone. The effect during a game session this creates is that players will huddle together and plan in a collective, which immediately creates an amazing atmosphere. There is wonderful collaborative thinking that is just natural in the game and it really changes the game from one of many players to a game of two teams.

This is great because you are going to care about the results of every battle, of every move, of every well-executed plan even if your nation is not involved in it. Everyone makes contributions to the team, not just on the board but in the course of this collaborative strategy building. You are looking at the game from a global perspective, trying to anticipate your enemy as a group and your allies are going to point things out, you might otherwise have missed. You will come up with ways where your moves and your ally’s moves produce outcomes you could never hope to achieve alone. The Axis and Allies powers really become the core entities of the game and the comradery between players is instantaneously created. It’s a wonderful thing that not only creates a great environment for gaming, but gives you great insight into the classic Shakespearian quote “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” as the diversity that comes from success and failures may spark some intense conversations among team mates.

The more subtle element of War Room that inspires the theme which I really didn’t catch on to at first is how the battles are not necessarily resolved in a single turn. During each turn, every battle is fought only once and if this results in units remaining in a region from both the Axis and Allies sides, the area remains disputed. I love this for game mechanic reasons, but thematically this has a fantastic side effect.

This creates this atmosphere where certain regions on the board become battlegrounds that need to be re-enforced and plans you made the last turn will suddenly be put to the test, as you may need to pull reserves from other regions that were meant for other things to support an ongoing front line. There is this war development feeling where the unpredictable results constantly have you scrambling to adjust your plans. This not only presents players with interesting strategic and tactical decisions as part of War Room’s gameplay but has this way of creating memorable stories you’ll talk about when the game is over in almost a quasi-historical context. You really get this great sense of alternative history from this mechanic. Larry has a great eye for this sort of gameplay because what it really does is make the game feel like a live-action role-playing game, where players will become obsessed with holding territory, or pushing through even though what started out as a strategic decision becomes a point of pride. We must win Poland, we can’t let the Russians take it, I don’t care about the cost! This in turn builds the story of the game and makes it that much more memorable.

Another really sneaky way the theme slips in is through the morale system. The morale of your country is really just a marker that will inevitably decline in the course of the war, even if you are winning the war, you are going to lose more units than you will build and it really taxes the infrastructure of every nation to the point where eventually everyone’s morale starts falling. The effects of morale result in you slowly having fewer resources and more drawbacks as time goes on and there is this general feeling of war exhaustion in the game and a global decline of effectiveness.

The moral system in the game is simple enough mechanically, but its impact is quite critical. In general, it’s quite difficult to take any capital without first reducing a nation’s morale significantly.

You go from making these deeply thought-out plans, massive assaults and invasions to eventually a couple of units scraping over regions you never thought would end up being important to the game thanks to the way stress is gained in the game and how that affects morale. You can’t help having this imagery of the early war of a nice clean city feeding units to the front lines, to the eventual total chaos of Europe at the end of the war where everything is in ruin and whatever soldiers you can muster are fighting over street corners. The morale mechanic is just a really simple and streamlined way to represent the abstract concept of a nation’s war weariness with a big impact on the feel of the game. It creates this really noticeable difference between an early game, mid-game and late game.

Finally, I love the way the production works in the game and the difficulties of building units, safeguarding them and deploying them where they need to be. It creates a great supply chain issue for every player and forces considerations like potential air raids and risks of building units too close to the fighting. It just feels wonderfully thematic and reminiscent of the fact that fighting the war was a lot more involved then having battles, its really about all of these micro-decisions that together are your strategy for the conflict.

All of this combined gets you War Room, a game that I would not label either historically accurate or a simulation, but one that just feels great as a game, as a presentation and as a gaming atmosphere for the players. I suspected that War Room would click for me thematically, but I did not guess that ultimately it would be the most important aspect of the game and in the end the biggest contributor to the review score. It was just something that needed to be just right and War Room just nails it without overcomplicating things in the name of historical accuracy. It’s just the right balance.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Countless amazing nuances that together create a top notch strategic war game that will have you debating tactics and strategy endlessly.

Cons: This game is an odd fit that will be hard to get to the table, its long, really begs to have at least 4-6 players and to have a good game you really want players who are going to deep dive into the game at the highest level to truly get the most out of the experience.

While gameplay and design are always going to be important to any board game, I gave the 4 point tilt to Theme and a 3 point tilt to Gameplay because I feel so strongly that this is an event game, an experience that is driven far more by the game’s presentation, its historical significance and the story it tells then by the mechanics of the game. If War Room didn’t succeed at presenting the theme successfully, it’s hard to imagine that gameplay would save it given its enormous demand on the players. This is a game that needed to have a far better reason for people to be excited to play it than just the mechanics of the game. Fortunately, War Room does not only succeed at really bringing the theme of the game to life and gives you that big epic event war game feel, it’s actually a fantastic game design too!

There is so much to cover here it’s hard to know where to begin, but I think it’s important to be thorough because there are so many well-thought-out mechanics here that it would be a shame to skip the discussion on any of them. Wall of text incoming!

The Strategic Planning Phase is perhaps one of the few departures in typical wargaming design in War Room, though it’s not a new design. Quite to the contrary this particular hidden movement mechanic is born from one of the all-time classics, Diplomacy and is seen partially replicated in games like Game of Thrones the board game for example. Suffices to say there are far too few war games in my opinion that make use of hidden movement and hidden action mechanics in general. Fog of war done right is the best thing you can do for a good war game.

Writing movement orders in secret and executing them in turn order is a great mechanic on its own, but making part of the order writing, bidding in secret on turn order, is about as clever as it gets in creating tension during this phase of play. In particular given how absolutely critical turn order in War Room is to any good plan, in fact, the later in turn order you act the more likely the positions of units will have changed causing your orders to be less effective. Bidding on turn order however requires you to spend (win or lose) one of the most precious resources in the game, oil. The tension this brings to the game is quite electric as it not only defines who will ultimately be on the offensive but often, who stands the best chance of being in a strong position on the following turn should their plan and execution work out.

Overbidding however can result in you lacking a key resource (oil) during the later equally critical production stage and as such, it’s not only absolutely vital to get this balance just right, but it’s a crucially important decision that can be wasted if you execute your plans poorly or planned poorly to begin with. Much of the game’s strategy revolves around this subtle order/movement phase. It’s tense, exciting, surprising and makes the game feel like your skills at predicting your enemy gives you a clear advantage which makes it feel that much more authentic and thematic. I can’t say enough about how much I love this mechanic and how it really defines why War Room is such a fantastic game.

The strategic phase of War Room single-handedly turns this from a fairly standard war game into one of the most unique gaming experiences you will ever have. Simple design is often the best design and it’s rather shocking we don’t see this mechanic used more often in games.

I think another very subtle aspect of this mechanic that makes it so great is that its team based, which means that your nation’s involvement or lack of in any particular series of events, offensives, defensives or strategies does not exclude you from the game. Hell even if you are eliminated from the game entirely as the case may be at the tail end of the game, you are still going to have very strong opinions about what your allies should and shouldn’t do. You plan together and you win or lose together. This collective planning just creates a great table atmosphere and comradery, making the game’s ultimate length far more tolerable than most games as you are always involved no matter who’s turn it is, or what level of importance your nation has in any given situation or even the outcome of the game.

There is a lot of subtlety in the rules of unit movement, with elements such as pinning, embattled hot spots, the special way air units and transports move and little tricks with carriers and other naval units. All of this is important to know, but I will just say here and now that all of it is fairly logical, structured in a way that represents the units well and gives them the appropriate feel and purpose in the game. Suffices to say that every unit is precious, so how you use them is vital to your operations and this understanding doesn’t require more than a couple of rounds of play to get the basics.

The game is not terribly forgiving however, making a blunder can cost you dearly and a game of War Room can be decided at key battles. Understanding the combat system, the benefits of each unit, having a good mixture to gain that all-important force advantage and many other subtle elements create a pretty high level of complexity in terms of strategy. This of course could be seen as a drawback, as more attentive players, those that analyze the game and really get to the root of understanding the flow of the game are going to do considerably better than the casual player with a basic understanding will. It’s why I think that while the game is not so complicated rules-wise that casual gamers would struggle with understanding the rules, they are likely to get horrifically crushed by players who spend time diving into the game’s many intricate strategic possibilities.

Its very clear that Larry Harris wants to extend War Room beyond the standard historical war game audience and a great deal of effort was made to make that so, but this is a very deep and heavy strategy game, the rules may be simple enough to grasp, but this is a deep well that is going to be out of reach of the average casual board gamer.

The combat operations phase while sometimes it might feel a bit overcooked, is designed very specifically to create more situational results rather than random results. What I mean is that, unlike Axis and Allies where each unit has a set series of stats, in War Room, how you approach combat can have a dramatic impact on the results of a battle. Most units have more than one way they can be deployed in combat (called a stance) and this often makes a difference in who they attack (air, ground or naval), how many hits they can take before they are eliminated and how many dice you get to roll on the offensive. I can’t stress enough how much these micro-decisions can impact battle results. This may actually be one of the most involved combat resolution mechanics I have seen in a war game and is well outside of the normally expected designs if for no other reason than how involved it actually is. Typically war games focus on giving you lots of options and flexibility in the strategy leading up to a battle, but the battle resolutions are always simple. Here Larry Harris pushes the actual combat system so far it’s almost an entire game on its own.

Just a quick example is the tank unit. Now if you play this unit more aggressively you get 4 dice against ground targets for a tank to roll, but in this stance, they can only take 2 hits before they are eliminated. Alternatively, you can be more defensive and get only 2 attack dice for ground targets and 1 die for air targets, but it takes 3 hits to eliminate the unit. The impact on combat results this will have is quite dramatic, especially when you are doing this sort of thing with a wide range of different types of units.

Additionally, there is something called Force Advantage, where having a greater variety of units gets you the considerable benefit of black and white die results (black being wild result and white being a result that allows you to hit any already damaged unit). This can make a huge difference in particular in larger battles. There is an additional mechanic for naval warfare called Port Advantage where fighting with a home-field advantage gives you extra dice to throw during naval combat.

There are other subtle things in the combat operations phase such as submarine’s ability to dive (escape being destroyed), bombing raids that allow you to destroy factories and units in production and convoy raids that allow your naval units to attack your opponent’s resource production.

The entire combat operations phase is probably the most complex element of the game in terms of rules, but not to such a degree that it will confuse you in how it works. There is no doubt however that managing well is going to have a huge impact on the results of battles and it’s here where more casual gamers might struggle to get it right. It is however important to understand it, as it is during this phase where you can squeeze out advantages one battle at a time which will ultimately service your ability to win the war. This is because, in War Room, every resource and every unit is precious, there are no disposable units and very often 1 unit, 1 additional hit can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

I suppose the only real complaint here, as already mentioned, is that this mechanic has a lot of nuance and as such it can take time to resolve battles. I say overcooked, but this may not be entirely fair as I find these nuances interesting, fun, strategic and kind of necessary, but it does slow the game down considerably since you execute the battles one at a time. It’s helpful to have an extra set of dice as this would allow you to execute multiple battles at once, but then again, the excitement of watching a battle is not diminished if you are not involved. It’s a team game after all so you are always vested in the results of every battle and their are no rules against allies providing advice during these battles hence the team effort does not end when the battle starts. Its worth pointing out that in each battle a commander is assigned for the battle and he has the final say in all decisions. When we played War Room, everyone was huddled around the combat board when there was a fight, there was no lack of interest, every battle in War Room matters to everyone.

I think this complaint must have been quite common during the first printing of the game as, during the 2nd printing (2nd edition) simpler, alternative battle resolutions have been provided known as “quick play” rules. This however is more of an indicator that the complaint was about the length of the game, less so about the quality of the combat mechanic and if this is the case I agree with it. I actually think the combat mechanic is excellent but I understand that many gamers are not going to have the 8-10 hours this game takes to play, so this optional quick play mechanic I’m sure is quite welcome by many as it would surely speed up the game.

Personally, I rather wait until I have the time to play this game as designed and use the full mechanic. It’s an event game, I see no reason to play the alternative quick play rules personally. If we are playing War Room, let’s bloody play War Room not some “Quick Room” version.

The morale phase is really a very simple phase where you determine if any nation’s capacity to fight is reduced as a result of stress caused by losing battles and taking casualties. Simple to execute but vitally important.

The thing about the morale system in place here is that it acts both as a kind of game clock and a measure of success. All nations will take far more casualties than they will build units so there is but only one-way morale will go and that is down. This, however, can be stalled through success and while players will focus on winning the war through achieving the game-winning objectives, there is a great deal of activity built around causing and reducing stress. Sometimes you just need to win a few battles in insignificant places just to earn some medals (medals are used to reduce stress and gained when winning battles), while other times you will attack an opponent in a weak spot just to cause them more stress. The goal isn’t always just the war objectives, though stress works toward that direction regardless, often you will act based on the stress and morale situations on the board of your opposing nations and your own.

The morale system is almost a kind of political influence and pressure coming from your nation. You need to maintain your nations will to fight and so you must often do things you don’t want to like back off from a front line to prevent casualties or make risky attacks knowing it will hurt your opponent more to gain stress than it will you, even if the tactic is not sound long term. I guess what I’m saying here is that like the generals of World War II, you are often pressured by your nation to take actions you know to be poor tactical or strategic decisions just to appease them.

It’s a fantastic system that does a great job of selling the themes and subtle nuanced problems World War II commanders faced and though of course it’s very abstract to such a degree that I think simulationist historical wargamers will balk at such a thing, personally I think it’s amazing both as a mechanic and as a thematic element of the game.

The production phase, more specifically the many elements that can influence the production phase is what really brings a lot of life to the game and a sense of realism.

The production itself is pretty cut and dry. You spend your available resources to build units each with their own cost and you build those units in factories designated by “chimney stacks” in regions you control. Those units are considered “in production” and become available for deployment on the following round, but they are put on the map with a production token on them. This in itself is a pretty simple way of doing it, but what it does is present the game with an opportunity to implement one of the fundamental and often overlooked aspects of World War II, the raiding of strategic resources, factories and the capture of enemy units. Thankfully War Room includes mechanics that cover these subjects in an elegant way and in turn makes the air war that was so crucial during World War II, equally crucial in the game.

The production phase is a kind of standard design here, but the impact of putting the pieces in production on the board creates unique strategic opportunities for players which in turn adds to the World War II feel of the game.

While units are in production they can be attacked by air units and because air units can enter enemy territories without being pinned and they have a movement of two, it creates a circumstance where airpower can be projected behind enemy lines. This forces players to think past just the obvious front-line battle zones and consider what your opponents may target with their air power. The advantage of destroying someone’s units in production cannot be overstated and these vulnerable targets make for easy pickings if left unguarded for enemy air units. Additionally, your factories (smokestacks) can also be attacked and when done successfully this permanently reduces how many units can be produced in that region, this adds to the importance of this air war as well. On top of that, your railways can also be attacked and destroyed. Railways are used to move troops through friendly territory quickly and when destroyed can really screw up your ability to get units where they need to be.

For all of these reasons the air war is a vital component of the game and it turns what might otherwise be a straight-up area control game into something far more strategic and thematic. The strategies involved here in defending your air space and vital production and transport regions vary wildly and I’m sure we will still be discovering the many ways this mechanic can impact a game for years to come, but what I find to be true is that it’s very subtle. I have heard players complain that this mechanic has too little impact on the game and that it’s a waste to do anything more than trying to go straight for the region control but I think this is a lack of experience talking. It may not seem all that important that you lose a couple of factories and/or units here and there, but the cumulative effect of such losses has massive implications towards the end game where every unit, every production point and every railway passage become absolutely critical. I suspect the experience will eventually reveal to new players just how important and impactful air raids on opponent’s production can be.

A game of War Room is won by controlling certain regions depending on the scenario. I personally have only ever played the Global Scenario which dictates that the allies win the game if they control the Greater Germany and Japan regions while the Axis powers must control two regions picked from Britain, Moscow or the Eastern United States.

What I can say here from a balanced perspective is that the Axis powers have their work cut out for them. Controlling the Eastern United States is truly difficult and highly unlikely so I would imagine the war is typically won by controlling Britain and Moscow by the Axis powers which are both much closer and rely far more on land and air power which Germany and Japan have ample of. Trying to take the Eastern United States requires you to have some major naval victories and that is quite difficult and almost entirely up to Japan to do. Not impossible, but certainly requires some top-shelf strategy and a considerable amount of luck I would imagine.

Taking Greater Germany by the allies however is also a very difficult task in particular in the early game when the allies are largely on the defensive and if Japan executes a good control strategy of the Pacific, they can be a force to be reckoned with, notably, one the US must take on almost entirely on their own.

It seems vital that before you even attempt an invasion regardless of whether you are allies or axis of any capital city, you must significantly reduce the nation’s will to fight by reducing their morale. This means the war, in many ways will be fought primarily in other regions in that attempt by both sides.

I would say the game favors an allied victory but it’s difficult after my limited experience with the game by how much. I think if you are playing a game with a mix of new and veteran players it’s wise to make the veterans play the axis powers and the new players play the allies.

Lady luck certainly plays its part in War Room, at its core, battles are resolved by chucking handfuls of dice and while players have plenty of strategic options and tactical decisions to make to ensure conditions are in their favor, dice be dice and they can certainly turn the game in unexpected ways. I would not, however, say this game can be won by gambling on dice results, there are certain statistical factors that are quite reliable and in all but the most extreme cases, the larger and more varied force will usually beat the smaller force.

I would say from a gameplay perspective, the team that will win is the one that can consistently execute the three core aspects of play the best. Unit movement (hidden) and position, morale management and the air war with the naval war taking its fair share of the pie as well though not quite equal to the other three vital core aspects.

The game is quite sensitive to opening move mistakes and as such there is a real fragility in the early game which is going to be tough on newer and less attentive players. If managed poorly, it can sink either side quite significantly but I would say that the axis powers are far less likely to recover from early mistakes than the ally powers, while far less likely to make them if for no other reason than that the US is this sort of mid-game force that appears and can bring some heavy firepower that can easily overwhelm the axis powers if they aren’t crushing it in the early game.

Round 1 “opening move” strategy discussion is something of a hot topic online for War Room and it is no surprise as it is absolutely vital. There are many such strategies and the heated discussions offer a wealth of advice that will have your head spinning.

Surprisingly, the Italians and Chinese while seemingly irrelevant on the power scale compared to the other nations play a considerable role in the war. The Italian campaign in Africa can cause irreparable damage to Britain and topple the empire with the help of Germany on other fronts very early in the war if they execute well. The Chinese on the other hand can be quite a nuisance to Japan if ignored and for The Empire of the Sun, invading China yields very few rewards and does little to hurt the allies as a whole. In a way, they have to deal with them and the only benefit of doing so is that they remove them as a threat, but failing to do so can cause serious problems in later stages of the game.

The final note I’m going to make in terms of gameplay is the absolutely excellent attention that was paid to the creation of the world map. There are so many interesting nooks and crannies to explore and leverage on this map, it’s really this sort of massive puzzle that reveals countless opportunities for players to explore alternative strategies. It’s such a great feat of engineering to me from a design perspective and does so much to keep the game interesting despite static starting conditions.

There is so much more that could be said about the subtle ways War Room creates amazing gameplay opportunities, the countless strategies and tactics that can be deployed and the general atmosphere the game creates. War Room is a deep well that will encourage you to explore the game’s many strategies over and over again, it’s a testament to amazing game design.

That said there is one problem the game cannot escape. It takes 8 to 10 hours to play, it really begs for at least 4-5 players and truth be told to really get the most out of it you need dedicated players ready to dive into this one with their heart and soul. That will make this one tough to get to the table unless you are lucky enough to be surrounded by such players. Certainly, you can bring in casual gamers and teach them to play, but if you mix experienced players who really dive into this game with casual players that just want to chuck some dice, you will discover that games of War Room can be effectively won as quickly as 2 rounds of play. To get a really good, competitive game of War Room going, you need everyone at the table to be analyzing it with a full understanding of how the game works beyond the understanding of the rules.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:

Score:
Tile:

Pros: Infinite replayability, immortal longevity!

Cons: Its a very long game, your not going to get to play it often enough

I will keep this section short and sweet as their really is only one word I would use to describe the replayability and longevity of this game. Infinite.

This is not a game you are going to play often of that I’m certain unless you are lucky enough to have friends that have 8-10 spare hours on a regular basis. It’s an event game and I would encourage you to treat it as such. Certainly, this is not a “board game night” type of game, you can’t just whip it out on a group of unsuspecting players and say “hey let’s play War Room”.

You need to prepare, the game is long enough that your players will need a mid-game break to regain their strength and I would say it’s not a game for people who are looking for a casual gameplay experience. This is a game that draws on and is enhanced by excited players who want to step into the role of a World War II general leading a nation into one of the greatest conflicts humanity has ever seen. It’s an amazing experience, but its certainly not a casual one.

That said, in my opinion, it’s a game you will not tire of playing, it’s not going to wear out its welcome nor will you run out of new ways to approach trying to win the war in different ways. Each nation offers a very different experience and every player is going to see the game through a unique perspective, likely surprising even the most experienced veterans. There is just a lot to explore here and the static start really doesn’t injure the game’s replayability.

I will say that it would have been nice to have alternative setups, either through the use of alternative dates (periods) in the war, or alternative history starts altogether. If Axis and Allies is any indication of the future of War Room, I would venture a guess we might see something like that in an expansion in the future.

I hold this game up to other eternal epic event games worthy of your shelf space and time like Twilight Imperium, Advanced Civilization, Game of Thrones the board game and of course the Milton Bradley classics like Axis and Allies and Shogun (also known as Samurai Swords and Ikusa). It’s an experience, one with an endless shelf life.

Conclusion

It’s really difficult to come up with something to say as a conclusion to the review that would surprise you, this is an amazing game, plain and simple and while I can understand between the price tag and the length of play this is certainly not going to be in everyone’s wheelhouse I can say without reservation that if you are an Axis and Allies fan and you are looking for something that can stand up to such a classic, War Room is an auto-buy, price be damned!

On a personal note, War Room is the Mona Lisa of my collection, I display it proudly on my shelf not only because it’s a visual treasure, but because it is hands down one of the finest pieces of game design I have seen grace my shelf in years. It is a masterpiece, a triumph that deserves all the accolades a board game can earn. In fact, I will go even further and say that this is the single best board game I have ever owned or played in my life, period. If my house was burning down and I could save only one game from my collection, it would be this one without question. You can expect this to be in my number 1 spot on the next top 10 best games of all time and I suspect its reign will be long and distinguished.

Is it a perfect game? Not really, not because of a design flaw, but simply by the fact that it takes 5-6 players 10 hours to play it, which just means it has limits to how often you will play it. A perfect game would be good to go for all occasions and this, like an oddly shaped puzzle piece fits in only in very specific situations. That doesn’t change my mind about how I feel about it, but it does change the game’s ultimate rating, for perfect, it is not.

At the end of the day however for me, it comes down to War Room as an experience, it’s here that War Room shines above all other games. It’s unique and creates magic at the table, as a fan of all things gaming, War Room is without a doubt one of the most exciting things that have come along in gaming for a very long time. I cannot recommend it enough.

Board Game Reviews

Review: Field Commander: Napoleon by DVG 2011

May 17, 2021 5 Minutes

Designer: Dan Verssen

The Field Commander series by Dan Verssen is celebrated as one of the big standouts in the world of historical solo war gaming and while admittedly this is a very niche genre of gaming, it’s small community of fans is fiercely vocal, passionate and loyal. This is a series that counts Field Commander Rommel and Field Commander Alexander as two of the most highly regarded of the series, but It is Field Commander: Napoleon that is universally hailed as the best in class by fans and by no small margin.

The latest addition to the Field Commander series is Fleet Commander Nimitz, another DVG game that brings the solo genre of gaming into World War II Pacific. I feel like I should just mail DVG my credit card to speed things along.

In these pandemic times while we are stuck in our homes waiting for the vaccine to arrive that will mark the day when we get back to our usual gaming routines, I have spent a great deal of time playing solo board games. While the list of games is long and distinguished, I felt like I was not really branching out beyond games based on World War II and I really wanted to. I decided I wanted a new game in a different era and I have to be entirely honest that I picked the Napoleonic Era almost completely at random. When you do a search for a Napoleonic Era solo game, Field Commander Napoleon is the one google screams at you to try.

With only the most cursory research, I found and bought a copy of Field Commander Napoleon on sale and that is pretty much the entire story. I knew very little about the Napoleonic Era when I bought this game and it would be my first exposure to the Field Commander series. I have to admit however I felt quite comfortable with that because Dan Verssen as a designer and DVG as a publisher has built up a lot of good will with me. After all it was DVG that made B-17 Flying Fortress Leader a permanent fixture in my hobby room, a game I have played more times then I care to admit and if the Field Commander series was even half as good as the Leader series, I had nothing to worry about.

Overview

Final Score: (4.45 out 5) Great Game!

Field Commander: Napoleon is a war game about the entirety of Napoleon’s career on the battlefield, from his early exploits in 1796 in Italy to the 1815 “War of the Seven Coalitions” which produced the infamous Battle of Waterloo.

The game is split up into two separate parts of waging Naploeon’s campaigns, the first a top level strategic game where you move armies on a more grand scale in a bid for dominance in an area control game and the second the more zoomed in level of play where you actually command your troops on individual battlefields in a tactical mini game.

Throughout the game you transition between these two separate but very related sections of play as you attempt to complete the objectives of 11 unique scenarios that are linked together into a campaign which when completed gets you a final score for self judgement and/or bragging rights.

The gameboard is compact with all the information you need about a scenario printed for you at arms length. This game makes use of every inch of space, small enough to play outside in the garden on those slow lazy summer afternoons.

I find solo games to be very hard to review because it’s difficult to know when your experience and expectations of standard multiplayer board games should be applied as a point of comparison to a solo game and when you have to judge it by the unique standards that apply to the solo genre. A solo game is a very intimate experience which lives in your head and your opponent is essentially a sort of AI built from some governing rules which often include a decision process driven by dice. This is certainly true about Field Commander Napoleon and almost entirely foreign ground in standard multiplayer board games.

This rather unusual setup, unless you are already used to playing games like this, is going to feel very much outside of your experience, which is really a round about way of saying that while this is a board game and it has many of the usual bells and whistles of a board game, the experience of playing a solo board game is wildly different from playing a game with an opponent which includes multiplayer games that you play solo.

Field Commander Napoleon is no exception in this regard, but Dan Verssen has made every effort to make this game as strategic and tactical as possible while simultaneously thematic and historically vivid which are the real selling points here. In the end, if I had to give this game a description, I would call it a strategic and tactical puzzle because in a sense, this game presents you with challenging problems to solve in its grand strategy and on its tactical mini game and those problems are solved by coming up with very unique and I would argue very clever ways of exploiting the mechanics.

I love DVG solo games and I would be hard pressed to pick my favorite but it would most likely come down to a battle between B-17 Flying Fortress Leader and Field Commander: Napoleon. In either case, both games are on my “highly Recommended” list for solo gamers.

In a sense the core mechanic of the game is quite simple, but each new scenario presents you with new conditions and rules that change the dynamics of those base mechanics and so with each new scenario you sort of start over and have to rethink and reassess the whole game. What works in one scenario to “beat it”, will fail horrifically in the next.

Components

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Pros: Feels like a Deluxe edition, great example of good use of tokens, great production value all around.

Cons: It’s pricey.

The sticker price for Field Commander Napoleon is about 100 bucks which is considerable (almost twice as much) if you compare it to the cost of the other Field Commander games like Rommel or Alexander. I got lucky and found it on sale, but it did have me wondering what it was about this particular game in the series in comparison to the others that warranted such a big bump in cost. In my review of B-17 Flying Fortress Leader, another DVG game I also bitched about the price, though I didn’t find it outrageous or anything, but I’m finding more and more that historical war games seem to carry considerably higher cost then any other genre and solo games seem for whatever reason to be the most expensive of them all.

When I cracked this box open, it became immediately apparent why this game is so expensive. The game comes with 7 full color mounted boards for the campaign portion of the scenarios which includes a separate battlefield map for fighting the zoomed in tactical battles. There are also 6 Full very thick counter sheets with beautifully illustrated tokens, various index sheets for campaign tracking and quick reference and of course a full colored rulebook.

This is a very nice production and while pricey, I think it fits the price quite respectfully, in fact it felt like what you were getting here is a deluxe version of a game that might otherwise have a cheaper alternative version.

I always appreciate mounted boards and I’m happy to pay for the privilege, DVG could have cut the games cost and sold this with paper maps and that would have been fine too. Solo games with a paper map is probobly the one time I would say I’m considerably less adamant about high quality mounted board productions. Clearly, DVG felt this game deserved the extra production value and having played quite a bit of this game at this point, I have to agree with them. As you will discover in this review, I adore this game and when a board game is this good, I want that deluxe component treatment. Clearly DVG anticipated this games success and never bothered putting out the “cheaper” version of the game selling it as the Ferrari it is.

I always say that there is a right time to use tokens and a wrong time, every game is different and it really depends on the purpose of the tokens in the game, whether having them facilitates play or hinders it. Historical War Game publishers and designers are notorious for being so adjusted to using tokens for everything they often fail to make this assessment and very often get this wrong.

In the case of Field Commander: Napoleon, the tokens actually have a mechanical purpose in the tactical battles to help represent unit formations, logic in their organization on the campaign map and are easy to distinguish at a glance without having to manipulate them which all works to facilitate gameplay. They are gorgeous of course which helps to sell the theme and general feel of the game, but pretty tokens is not a design decision, its an artistic one and this game was clearly made by a great designer that understands that functionality comes first. Dan nails it here with perfectly designed tokens that serve to make this game better as they are functional, informative and multipurpose.

When it comes to the components here I really have no complaints, its a game on the expensive side, but their is no price gouging on the cost to value so you get what you pay for and what you’re paying for is deluxe.

Theme

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Pros: Great sense of drama, fantastic connection between mechanics and theme, looks great on the table.

Cons: This game nails it, no complaints!

When it comes to solo games, the presentation of theme is quite important and I will always tilt the review score towards it. When you play a solo game you are playing alone, you are in your head which means the game your playing needs to inspire your imagination, give you that internal dialogue and story about what the game is trying to convey thematically.

In the case of Field Commander Napoleon you are meant to actually be Napoleon, in fact, if Napoleon (represented as a token in your armies) is ever killed on the battlefield, the game is over and you lost! I love that, it personalizes the game but this is just one very simple way the theme is conveyed. The games thematic presence goes far deeper then that.

The true brevity of the theme actually pours through the gameplay and really the mechanics and theme are so linked that they are almost one and the same. This game does not rely on art, cards, flavor text or other abstract things or displays to tell Napoleon’s story and bring the theme across, it is almost all done exclusively through the decisions you make driven by the games strategic puzzles. Puzzles which in an abstract way are based on historical events, in other words, based on the same problems and decisions that Napoleon himself faced.

Now of course this is done with a light touch in abstract ways as clearly the events of Napoleon’s life on the battlefield undoubtedly came with immense historical detail, a game trying to replicate that would likely be highly complex and what Field Commander Napoleon tries to make out of that is to give you the sensation of the issues Napoleon faced in a more digestible form.

There are three layers in how the game accomplishes this.

First and foremost are the unique scenario challenges. Each scenario presents a number of unique problems assumingly based on historical realities of the times. For example the 1798 “Egyptian Adventure” scenario has you dealing with a “plague” rule which increases the cost to resupply (heal) units. “The Harsh Conditions” rule has you rolling for casualties anytime you move units as part of larger armies and the “No Cannon” rule means you have to win this entire scenario with infantry and Calvary units alone, no Cannons for you!

Naturally its hard to convey the impact of such details in a review in which your understanding of the rules is limited, but suffices to say the impact of these conditions create a very unique problem that requires a completely different approach to resolving it than you might otherwise take to complete the winning conditions of a scenario.

Each scenario takes this approach by infusing it with rules reminiscent of the special historical events of the period and through this the theme shines through. Now if you’re like me where you don’t actually know the history beyond the basics, these things might have less of an impact but their are more abstract associations you will make that really don’t require the history lesson. The Plague and Harsh Conditions rules for example are not that difficult to associate to thematically even if the real history is unknown to you, it’s Egypt (a desert), plagues are always easy to imagine taking place in the1800’s. It’s really not that much of a stretch to give your imagination some fuel to get those important thematic visuals. The designer probobly understands that while anyone who picks this game up is going to be a fan of historical war games and Napoleonic History, its unlikely we are all going to be history professors that will get every reference, so this is sufficiently gamified to allow the theme to shine regardless of how much about the history you actually know.

The second way, which again is a very mechanically driven approach the theme is conveyed is through the tactical battles. This is a kind of a mini grand strategy game and the campaign map, the movement of troops and management of resources are all part of the core game, but really the scenarios key moments are resolved on the battlefield. Hence the tactical battles are are fought whenever your units find themselves on the same spot on the campaign map as the enemy.

When this happens all of the units on the campaign map in that spot are moved to the tactical board, essentially its a bit like zooming into the campaign map to lead the troops personally on the battlefield. Just this act of zooming in on the battle immediately triggers your imagination as you see the game as this grand strategy campaign, but you don’t have to imagine the battles, you are actually going to fight them out, with actual battlefield tactics first hand.

Big meaty battles like this can have some crazy outcomes, position and formations are critical. This tactical mini game way of resolving battles is just what the doctor ordered to sell this theme.

On the tactical view of the game formations matter, position matters and the orders you give your troops matter. This is a round by round, straight up fight where you and your enemy move across the tactical map shooting cannons, forming lines, charging, flanking and all the fun stuff of war (in the game sense, obviously these battles were probobly quite horrific).

Now I will talk about the gameplay and mechanics of this part of the game in the gameplay section in more detail because they are absolutely brilliant, but if we are talking strictly theme, this way of handling combat is just dripping with it. Crazy stuff happens on this tactical battlefield. Sometimes soldiers get routed at the worst moment, sometimes they refuse to follow orders all together, they get caught out of position, or make valiant pushes that force the enemy to turn and run. Its just fantastic, the whole thing! For me, this is one of the most fun mechanics of this or any other solo game I have ever played but I don’t just love it for its mechanical genius but because of what it does for this games thematic presence. It just nails that Napoleonic Era feel with perfection.

The final peg to the Field Commander Napoloeon’s perfect handling of the theme is the time pressure aspect. Every scenario has a pretty harsh time limit in turns in which you must win the scenario (else you lose it by default). You can’t just dilly dally around and wait for that perfect circumstance to execute your master plan. Turns are extremely limited, you have to act and you have to make due with the circumstances you have at any given moment.

This creates drama, tough decisions and forces you to make a lot of high stake gambles. Put together when you successfully pull it off you can’t help but cheer at the table even though you are probobly alone and there is no one there to hear you while simultaneously when you fail, you will be pounding your table with a fist of rage. This very simple application of pressure applied to the game turns brings out tremendous energy, creates this constant tension and makes this entire game extremely hard which is exactly what you want it to be. You want to feel like Napoleon and nothing says Napoleon more then pulling a victory out of thin air when facing impossible odds by making hyper clever plays and gambling like a maniac.

The gambling however is not luck and this is where all three of the pegs of this theme kind of come together into a gorgeous thematic margarita. You know the conditions of the scenario so you are managing the campaign level game to ensure you limit the scenarios drawbacks as much as you can. You make tough, often risky decisions but because you control the tactical battle, you don’t have that “roll a die and hope for the best” battle resolution. You are the one managing your soldiers on the battlefield, giving them orders, setting their positions, making those tactical plays. So when you win a battle, it doesn’t feel like luck is driving your victory or your story, you feel in control and your success and failures are your own and because your under time pressure to get it all done before the clock runs out, the tension and drama of each round is vivid giving the whole thing this very thematic and story rich feeling.

It just comes together beautifully. Field Commander Napoleon is an amazing, thematically rich game and I can totally understand all of those accolades it gets from its fan base, because when it comes to the most important part of a solo game, the theme, F.C.N. sticks the landing like a Olympic champion.

Gameplay

Score:

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Great use of scenario based rules, fantastic tactical battles that give you a sense of control and perfecting pacing.

Cons: Advanced rules for more experienced players would have been nice, AI can be quirky at times.

While the theme is absolutely vital to a solo game in my opinion, gameplay has to be a close second. Thankfully Dan V. understands this quite well and gives us a game in which I would describe the gameplay as a perfect garnish for the thematic main dish. Even if you don’t agree about my priorities here however, the gameplay isn’t going to disappoint here, it doesn’t play second fiddle to the theme, it is extremely strong on its own with mechanics so smooth you almost wish this game had a multiplayer mode.

In describing this game, its very easy to become fixated about various areas of play and while most parts of the game are very simple, one of the magic tricks that Field Commander Napoleon pulls off is knowing when more detailed mechanics pay off and when less detail helps to make the gameplay quick and snappy. As such I can’t say that any specific mechanic is some sort of revelation, but all of these different levers put together results in a game that just works.

The campaign rules for example that govern your resource management, troupe movement and resupply all work to support the games core in a simple and direct way. You always have a good understanding of the impact of your decisions on the main campaign map and their is zero confusion about how to execute the rules thanks to a crystal clear rulebook. All you are really doing on this map is making high level choices that will setup the second, more critical part of the game, the tactical battles.

The special rules of the scenarios however are what transforms this campaign mode into something much deeper and it’s within these special rules you will find yourself altering how you view this part of the game and how you use its mechanics. There is no one strategy fits all kind of thing happening here, even though without the special scenarios there would very obviously be one.

Each scenario is unique, from setup, to special rules, alternative supply methods and even different scoring methods. There are 11 scenario and each is truly unique.

How you move troops, how you choose to re-enforce your battle lines, how often you save resources as opposed to spending them all, when scouts are important and when they are not. All of these micro decisions are going to be put to the test with each scenario and you will make very different decisions based on it.

If there is anything to complain about its that perhaps the game is too simple on this high level campaign mode. After a few plays, the decisions you make are driven by a kind of experience and informed view of the game as a whole you eventually gain. I think it would have been nice if there were some “advanced” rules that more experienced players could inject into this campaign level game to increase the complexity. It takes a few plays through all the scenarios to get to this point however which is going to give you hours of exciting gameplay making the discovery so it’s a minor complaint if one at all, but I do think its a missed opportunity.

I do understand that in the modernization of game design the mantra is “simple” which translates to approachable and is seen as streamlined and preferable in the eyes of publishers, but this game targets historical war gamers who appreciate some meat on the bone and I think designers have to remember who their game is for.

The AI movements and responses are as you would expect a bit robotic at times and a bit too random at others as dice and charts control them. This can create some wacky results, but typically the AI ends up being hyper aggressive and you can rely on it to charge into your troops to diminish your efforts every round. The time pressure element of this game doesn’t give you the luxury of buying your time, so you have little choice but to be equally aggressive in your pursuits and while the results can vary from game to game in how well the AI ultimately plays, it generally produces challenging and interesting games. Certainly the one thing you can depend on is that the AI will often act in unexpected ways which I think is what you want and strangely sometimes these odd behaviors though they might not pay off on the current turn, in the next two it may turn out that these strange moves give the AI a force advantage in some key area.

The scenarios themselves are definitely not easy, in fact, their are no “introduction” scenarios that give you an easy victory so that you can get your head around the game. The AI immediately crushes you in your first game and I found it took me a solid five or six attempts to win just the first scenario. You do get better at the game rather quickly and while each scenario presents you with a unique challenges that will trip you up, the difficulty of the game kind of levels out and while it remains “difficult”, in time you will build up the skill set needed to successfully complete all 11 scenarios.

In this regard while I can’t complain too much, the game does have that “I finished it” feel to it. While the game is varied and dynamic enough that you can play the full campaign a few times, I think most people will likely shelve the game after a few play throughs. It is a fun experience however that you will think back on fondly and eventually that will drive you to dust it off the shelf to have another go. I seem to cycle games like this into my gaming routinely every few months and I can see this one coming back around. This comment might belong in the replayability and longevity section, but to me this is a product of the really fun gameplay and strong mechanics of the game to such a degree that I think it must be stated here.

The big winner of this game however is the tactical battles which are really the addictive component of this game and the center that makes everything else look much better than any part individually. It reminds me a bit of an old Nintendo game called Genghis Khan in that, your efforts on the campaign map can either give you an edge in the tactical battles if you have done well or make these battles really difficult if your campaign management is lacking. Yet despite this, if you are clever about how you manage tactical battles you can flip the switch and produce victories where you should have been defeated, turning a short coming in the campaign mode into an advantage after a tactical battle. This aspect of the game gives you this amazing sense of control over your destiny and I absolutely love that about F.C.N, in the same way I loved it about that silly Genghis Khan game.

The tactical battles have you making round by round decisions like the formations of your units which can be column or line. You also give units special orders using order tokens that define things like charges, flanks and other more abstract orders that represent advanced preparations and things of that nature. Depending on formations and orders, you sometimes need to make checks to see if your units will actually follow your orders, which is a round about way of creating a sort of system of risk vs. reward in these tactical battles. Then there is the whole concept of timing, some of which you can calculate based on what you do know about the battle and other times you have to adjust things as you go or react to changing events and AI decisions. This is because the AI randomly draws from a cup of special orders and so the behavior of the AI on the battlefield is going to trip you up and have you scrambling during the execution of each round.

Rarely does a tactical battle go exactly according to plan and because tactical battles have a mechanic that randomizes the length of the battle , their can be time pressures you have to deal with here as well which really adds to the games many tough decisions you have to make and unpredictable results you have to contend with that will have you adjusting your overall strategy.

All of this results in some fantastic play elements that are both challenging, fun and thematic. All the things you need a game like this to be.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:

Score:
Tile:

Pros: 11 Scenarios with multiple ways to complete them successful will keep you busy for quite a while.

Cons: Some more meaningful goals beyond top score and some more advanced rules with high difficulty settings would have helped keep this one on the table longer.

Scenario based games have a tendency to get “played out” in the sense that once you have beaten all the scenarios a couple of times, the game sort of runs out of steam. It will definitely take some time to get their with Field Commander: Napoleon, it certainly is not an easy game, but eventually it will land on your shelf and collect some dust.

The question is whether or not you are likely to find the urge to pull it of the shelf for a second or maybe even a third round and I believe the answer is, yes… yes you will. I know I did.

I waited quite a while before writing this review just to see if after beating all 11 scenarios would be as interesting the second time around and not only was it just as much fun, but it actually reminded me of just how great this game really is as I discovered new strategies and alternative ways to beat some of the scenarios.

I of course wish their were more scenarios, advanced rules and perhaps a little bit more meaningful goals then just trying to beat your top score, but the game certainly has plenty of fun filled hours of gameplay that warrant its purchase.

Conclusion

Field Commander: Napoleon has easy to learn rules, a great sense of drama and theme, a subtle but meaningful grand strategy game layered with an absolutely fantastic tactical mini game built in. This is all wrapped up in a deluxe production and while price might be an issue, you certainly get what you pay for.

The short and sweet of it is that this game was a big hit with me, it certainly rivaled my other favorite solo game (B-17 Flying Fortress Leader), so if you like the Napoleonic Era and are stuck in your house playing games alone, Field Commander Napoleon comes highly recommended.

Board Game Reviews

REview: Napoleon’s Imperium by Compass Games 2021

May 11, 2021 5 Minutes

Designer: Andrew Rowland

There are many reasons why a boardgame might find itself on my hobby table ranging from the theme of the game, to the designers reputation, because it got great reviews or because it’s part of a series or uses a mechanic I already love. Napoleon’s Imperium however is probobly one of the most unique reasons for which I have ever bought a game before, it was because of the story behind the game, the long and intriguing road this game and its designer took over the course of decades.

Andrew Rowland’s Story about the making of Napoleon’s Imperium is not only heartwarming and inspiring, but really shows the intention of the design as a lifestyle and event based game.

I was intrigued by Andrew Rowland’s personal story to bring a game he had played and worked on for decades out of a personal labor of love and transform it after all those years into a released product. From construction of massive and very elaborate table top versions of the game for his personal use to the dedication to a life long project, its just a fantastic tale that you just want to find a way to be part of. There is a great interview with Andrew that gives you some additional insight into his story.

This interview highlights added details to the story and really shows the dedication of Compass Games to bringing games to our attention most publishers might ignore, something commendable we as game fans would love to see more out of game publishers. Kudos to Compass Games for being the hero!

Needless to say I got very excited about the prospect of playing a big, large scale Napoleonic era game by a designer who spent decades perfecting it. That sounded like something right up my alley and I took the very deep plunge into a game that cost a whopping 150 American Bucks making this one of the more expensive games on my shelf along side games like War Room and Twilight Imperium.

Overview

Final Score: (4 out 5) Great Game!

Napoleon’s Imperium can probobly be best described as a war game that wants to be more than just a game for board game night. This is a game that desires to be an event, an experience, it wants you to get excited about the history on which it’s based and the global scale which it represents. It’s a game that has as many exceptionally unique elements, some of which translate to a standard board game, while others are clearly meant for something bigger. Sometimes the game actually felt like a made for tv movie that has a story that should be on the big screen. It reaches into spheres of play not typically found in a standard historical war game. As it does many things at once it always confines the game to simple, easy to absorb mechanics so that you can lean back, imagine and think strategy rather then rules. I did find however that there is a nagging question that needs to be answered where this game is concerned, an odd one. Exactly what sort of audience is this game for?

It’s a game that is simultaneously a historical war game clearly rooted in the Napoleonic era while also being a very simple game mechanically that would easily translate to any type of pre-industrial global conflict, a sort of general war game. Is this mean it targets historical war gamers or casual war game fans?

It has fairly deep strategic potential for exceptionally complex executions of team based tactics that play out over hours of play, while being wildly random and chaotic at times suggesting its akin to classic dice chucker’s like RISK. Is that make it a casual game or a serious gamers game?

It takes real historical elements into consideration and makes it part of the game, while also being very a-historical to a point that just a cursory look at the map for example you recognize real history is compromised for game balance indiscriminately. Again, does that mean its aiming for historical accuracy, alternative history or is it just for fun?

In a sense its all over the map in terms of design approaches that might typically be fussed with a specific expected audience. Make a simple game for casual gamers, make a complex historical game for war gamers, make a shorter game for novice players, make a longer game for hardened veterans. Generally there are some rules that are followed in game design, N.I. seems to reach into all these spheres of design simultaneously throwing caution to the wind and as such, it’s a bit tough to identify its intended audience.

It takes some digging to connect the dots between the game play, design and the games development history to understand that what it was before this egg hatched as a published board game had considerable influence on the final result. This may explain why the game is so different in its approach compared to your typical historical war game released from Compass Games or a more standard design approach you would typically expect that targets a specific audience. The thing is, Napoleon’s Imperium may be a lot of things, but typical, expected or standard are not words I would use to describe this game.

I think if I were to offer my general impression of the game, I would call it, strangely good, oddly familiar with a very classic style while also being completely unique. N.I. sort of feels like two games. The game it wants to be because of its roots and the game it is, because of the conditions under which it was published.

I think I would make my case by saying that the experience of playing this game was often halted by very obvious observations about how the game could have been vastly improved from a component perspective, while at the same time surprised by the many really clever ways the mechanics were simplified to represent high level concepts in a hyper efficient way to make for an outstanding strategy war game. It’s a kind of an odd contradiction with the game that the mechanics are so efficient, while the games components often are not. A contradiction that was likely preemptively cured in its previous form as a large table top game with miniatures as many of the complaints I have about this game are directed at presentation and fluidity of using the available components, in particular the tokens. Mechanically, I think I can honestly say I’m in love!

I think in the end the quality of the game as a whole is really going to be perceived differently depending on your preferences and what it is about board games you value. For example if you pick this game up because you think its a historically accurate war game in the Napoleonic era, you are likely to be disappointed, but if you just love great war games about the Napoleonic Era, your in for a treat. If you love epic war games for their visual presentation and atmosphere for those big event days, you are not exactly going to get that here, but if you love epic war games for their high level strategies and story they tell, this game is chalk full of that sort of thing.

These kind of odd contradictions, make Napoleon’s Imperium hard to recommend, but not because it’s not good, because it really is, but because it breaks expectations in many ways and it’s hard to really pin point what category of gamer its going to appeal to, what sort of gaming group its suited for. Will historical war gamers like it? Or is this more for the casual RISK crowd? Is this an event game? A lifestyle game? or is this for a casual board game night with friends and family? Its a really tough call.

In the end my approach was just to shed expectation and judge it without trying to categorize or answer questions about it’s intended audience because I don’t have all the answers. What I know is when I’m playing a good game, I know when something feels right and works. When it comes to Napoleon’s Imperium, there is a lot to like and a lot to be excited about.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Full color, clear and concise rulebooks makes learning the game simple and easy to reference. Very nice artwork, especially on the battle cards, gorgeous map that services gameplay well.

Cons: Average component quality is in contrast to the price of entry. This game begs to have higher production value and should have gotten it given its price and origins.

When I first got a glimpse of the price tag for Napoleon’s Imperium I have to admit I was a bit nervous. I knew from reputation that Compass Games is known for mixed component quality on many of their games. I knew with this game you were getting a couple of paper maps, some tokens and some cards which didn’t seem to be in line with the rather high price tag. At the same time I was so intrigued by the prospect of this game, and its developers story/history, I just had to play it. So… I shelled out the dough and a few weeks later it arrived at my door step. I figured worse case scenario, I just donated to a worthy cause.

Upon opening the box, I can only describe my first impression and the experience as a whole as a crushing disappointment. Unlike Andrews experience of unboxing the game which he filmed (see below), my opening wasn’t marinated by three decades of work coming together into a realized dream in a released product. I can only imagine how for him, the moment of seeing his vision turned reality in a box was life affirming, peppered by his unique perspective.

It’s always fun to see a proud designer unbox his own game, in the case of Andrew who worked on the game for decades, it’s particularly special.

Cruelly, for me this was one out of hundreds of unboxings I have done, it was something routine I do, just another weekend with a new game. Perhaps my opinion is skewed by this repetitive routine, perhaps I’m a bit jaded by years of reviewing games. I like to think rather, its because I do this all the time, that I have a firm understanding of what a gamer will expect from a game he just dropped 150 bucks on. This isn’t my first rodeo after all!

Of course I knew going into this little venture that it was going to come up a bit shy of what you might expect at this price range, I don’t buy games without researching them first, but It just seemed impossible that for 150 US dollars this was all there is in the box.

What’s In the Box?

Two fairly thin, easy to accidently rip maps that you have to handle like they were ancient relics. The quality of these maps is quite standard, which is to say like all paper maps, its generally poor. Even after the first unfolding of the maps I already had white creases and edge cuts, which again is not that unusual for paper maps, its why as gamers we prefer mounted boards. Paper maps is something we expect for “cheaper” games, mounted maps for expensive ones, this is and should have been the ladder and it should not come as a shock to the publisher as this isn’t their first rodeo either.

This map will not survive for long (especially with my gaming groups typically rough handling of games) which is disappointing for two reasons. First, because this was a 150 dollar game and second because the map has stunning art work which is both inspiring and functional. This just makes the production quality of it that much more painful to bare as you will be frustrated with trying to preserve this beautiful work of art’s condition over time.

You can say what you want about the quality of the paper the map is printed on (spoiler alert, basically a large napkin) but from an artistic viewpoint, this is a beautifully illustrated map.

The quality of the tokens I would describe as “standard” as well, which again, would have been fine for a standard price which this game does not have. I do appreciate the larger “jumbo” token size for handling during play, no tweezers needed and the art work (pictures of original miniatures from Andrews grand table) are very charming touch….however… It would later turn out that the organization and use of the tokens in this game in general hinders play. You are constantly having to make “change” as the tokens represent different quantities of units, you are routinely adding and removing them from the board by the handfuls.

Tokens were just a poor choice for this game, almost anything would have been better as the information on the tokens is really not that necessary as units stats can be found on the nation cards and a are quickly memorized. The tokens are just their to represent quantity and it would be better to use dice, cubes or disks, or dare I say it, miniatures or plastic soldiers. Anything that doesn’t require to do more than a cursory look at the board to get an accounting of “how many units their are” in a location of which type.

In your typical historical war game release, these tokens would be perfectly acceptable, at 150 bucks, not so much. Quality is not the only issue here however, functionality is as well, tokens were just the wrong choice for this game, their is too much handling of them involved, it comes off clumsy.

The battle and point card stock and nation index cards are also average quality, nothing that will blow you away, but very serviceable. I would suggest sleeves for the battle cards, from personal experience, this level of quality benefits from sleeves for long term preservation. Fortunately aside from the initial shuffle, generally, their is not much handling of the cards needed during play. The unique art work and flavor text do make these cards stand out and are a big part of how the theme is tied together (more on that later), suffice to say they are very pretty and functional.

The rulebook is probobly the only high quality component reflective of the games price in this box. Color printed with clear and concise rules that make learning to play the game a snap. Lots of illustrations and examples for clarity, and quite thorough, answering questions for even the rarest of circumstances.

I think for a typical board game release I would rate the components as “standard”, perhaps in the case of the paper maps I would say they might even be slightly “below average”, I have plenty of games with paper maps made of sturdier stock . At a 150 US dollar price point however I have to say this was a pretty disappointing production value and this is really a contrast based on the cost vs. value, not a swipe at the artwork which I think is very nice. To be frank, at 150 bucks, when I open the box I expect to have my mind blown by the production value of a game, not surprised that my 70 dollar Empire of the Sun at more then half the price blows this component quality out of the water by any metric you can think of. The boardgaming market is competitive and at this price range, you need to be ready to compete, N.I. comes up short.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Important naval battles, reliance on allies, shocking battle results and events, everything you expect from a Napoleonic Era game (I think!?)

Cons: This game just begs for a 3rd dimension, using tokens does not do this game justice and just doesn’t feel right.

After I got over the shock of the production value of the game and crossed into the acceptance stage of grief, I set the game up and started moving pieces around. After all, I was very excited about the prospect of the game and truth be told, I will always bitch about disappointing cost to value in particular in expensive games, in today’s board game market their is just no excuse for low balling components. Regardless of component quality, at the heart of any good game is a great theme and great mechanics, If a game pulls those off, I can learn to live with “varied” component quality, N.I. wouldn’t be the first game to fall into that category and find a permanent home on my shelf.

The question I had at the start of this review is what exactly is the “Napoleonic era” theme? I mean, this is a war game, its played on a large two piece map, there are 8 countries represented and you fight battles for dominance over territory. That is very representative of the Napoleonic era but its also representative of every other kind of war or war game.

I may be showing my historical ignorance here, but to me Napoleonic era is more about the control of the sea’s, the importance of alliances and bold surprise strategies that reflect a period in which shocking things happened all the time.

The theme presented in N.I. I think is sufficient for what the game is trying to portray, avoiding the over reliance on forced historical accuracy, but making it historical enough to feel like it is about the Napoleonic Era. This certainly puts to question how thematic that actually makes the game, is it thematic if a game is about the Napoleonic era but doesn’t actually inject rules to force that historical accuracy to play out?

My exposure to Napoleonic Era games and history in general is soft at best, but I picked up Field Commander Napoleon recently (a fantastic game) and I immediately fell in love with the era’s mystique.

I think it’s here that Napoleon’s Imperium reveals its opinion on the subject and frankly nails it in my opinion, understanding that Napoleonic era theme can be a sensation rather then a series of forced rules. N.I. achieves this in a efficient and rather simple way so that you’re not bogged down by historically accurate result syndrome (HARS) which I find is a common problem in historical war games. I want to play a fun game in the Napoleonic era theme, not be walked through a Napoleonic era history lesson in a scripted game and N.I. gets that and delivers that. That might not fly with historical war gamers who live for historical accuracy and I get that and you have been warned, this is not that kind of game.

The sea’s are critical in this game in how they expose the coasts and make it possible to make shocking surprise attacks forming those really big plays. Keeping up big navies is expensive however and your income is fueled by the land battles and control of territories. This relationship means you can’t just go on an all out min/max strategy of building ships, nor can you ignore the sea’s and focus on land battles. There is this subtle, very careful and very calculated positioning of units as you attempt to trip up your opponent by leveraging the mobility of navies and certain land units like Cavalry. To me all of that screams Napoleon Era, but I have to admit my understanding of the period is largely based on imagery and assumption rather then historical fact, I may not be the best person to ask for an assessment.

Everything you need to know about the nation your running is on these beautifully designed nation index cards and its worth noting that nations are asymmetrical. One key element on these cards to pay attention to is the different cost, movement and strength values of the navies which are of critical importance in the game.

The game is also heavily reliant on alliances, this is not a “I run nation X” game for the win, you cannot win without your allies and coordination between allies above all other strategies is paramount. I can understand why Andrew used this game as a corporate team building game, as cooperation and team play is a founding requirement for a winning strategy. This too I found to be very thematic and era appropriate as wars in the Napoleonic era were very much a team sport, with lots of wheeling and dealing involving multiple countries with recognizable historical figures at the head represented by commanders in the game. Again I may be wrong about this, but it just felt right to me but it is highly abstracted, more a concept then anything governed by rules.

The end result is a game that is at least sufficiently thematic, though I would argue in my ignorance of the historical period that its even more than that. It has it’s own flavor and take on history of course and while I’m not entirely sure that it mimics the history of the Napoleonic war to a degree that historians or historical war gamers would nod their heads in approval, it does so sufficiently to get you into the spirit of things thematically which I think was its target. The general aesthetics and the little historical touches and tid-bits you get from the battle cards add to that flavor and I would argue the historical pressure points are all represented here at least on a superficial level that you won’t have any trouble believing this is a game about the Napoleonic Wars.

The battle cards make great use of art, historical context and bring it together with game effects to add to the theme. I’m not sure historical war gamers will feel this is a sufficient influx of history into the game, but it works for me.

For example Prussia and Austria being located in the center of the map, are clearly in desperate need of support from allies. France and Britain are going to be battling it out for control of the seas, while countries like the Nordics and Spain, can either be great supporters or liabilities in the war. Finally you have Russia and The Ottomon Empire that are basically fighting an entirely separate war, while occasionally throwing their two cents in support of allies. Those elements I do believe are historically accurate to some degree. The map itself, specifically the national divisions of the map might not be entirely historically correct, but their is enough familiar ground here that it delivers the Napoleonic Era wars in a absorbable way without making you feel stupid about the historical realities of such a war. This is a game that advocates fun over realism which I appreciate, but admittedly may not be in the wheelhouse for hardened historical war game purists.

That said I’m not entirely sure that an 8 hour team game with this level of strategic complexity is necessarily an entry level war game either, which speaks again to that nagging question, who is the target of this game? My answer would be, anyone who loves really well designed board games, but I think the design here may be a bit ambiguous in this regard.

I found that it was the components once again that got my negative attention, or perhaps better to say the lack of components played its part in detracting from the “fun” aspect of the experience. I fully understand why the designer spent years collecting miniatures and building large elaborate tables to enhance the visual experience of this game, I do believe it really needs it to convey this theme, as the gameplay itself does history in a fairly abstract way.

Napoleon’s Imperium is at the base of it all a very simple game rules wise but you do spend a great deal of time staring at the board (this is a long game, potentially multiple 8+ hour sessions) because the strategy can be quite deep. You will be planning, calculating and trying to predict your opponents plans in an effort to one up them in a very elaborate cat and mouse war game. You’re hunched over this huge map for hours at a time and what is missing is that visual wow factor you want a game like this to have to remind you that these tokens represent something important about the games theme.

You want to feel like a commander looking at a battle map, sending invasion troops and fleets of ships across the board, ordering soldiers into battle, watching as nations rise and fall. Doing that by carefully fingering about with some cardboard token stacks is just not going to do the trick here even if you have a very vivid imagination. The game lacks that deep history to mechanics connection you normally get with historical war games that help with the illusion. It does this intentionally to keep the game simple and absorbable which I applaud, but the result is that much of its theme is reliant on the presentation of the abstraction. Without that strong visual connection, the game lacks an element of the experience you sort of need to buy into its premise as a game about historical events, about Napoleonic War, about the role you play as a commander of a great nation in history. With tokens for armies, the game comes off a bit like a generic war game that could just be about anything.

It doesn’t help that tokens aren’t particularly functional as a game component here either. The setup of the tokens being used as quantity counters with different denomination defined by different borders on the tokens actually makes getting a good accounting of what you’re actually looking at difficult. There is a lot of stack peeking, making change, counting and re-counting. That sort of thing pulls you out of the experience. The administration here should be made a lot easier, a lot faster.

If there was ever a game that begs to be represented visually in the 3rd dimension with miniatures or plastic pieces, it’s this one, not just for the visuals to sell the theme, but for practical gameplay reasons. Coming off a pretty long stint of playing Larry Harris’s War Room perhaps I’m spoiled, but I can say conclusively that having that visual eye candy in a long but light global epic war game like this, it is just needed to make the experience feel complete. It’s what you want, it’s what it begs to be, while at the same time their are practical “usability” reasons to use pieces as opposed to cardboard tokens in this game in particular.

This is the gaming table Andrew built for his game. I’m not saying this is what Compass Game should have been going for, for their release, but it’s very clearly a game designed for the 3rd dimension for those big event days when you get together with your friends for the whole day or weekend. N.I. desperately needs a closer facsimile then cardboard tokens to get N.I. to be properly represented.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Smooth play logic, fantastic high level strategies supported by great yet simple mechanics, awesome battle card mechanic for historical edge and fun but not frustrating randomness.

Cons: Fairly long play time with significant downtimes.

Napoleon’s Imperium is a game that has rules that can be described quite simply, but strategies deep enough to trigger some analysis paralysis. There is a lot going on in this game but most of it is very subtle, often almost to a point where you might miss it and it is for this reason I find speaking about the gameplay rather difficult.

I found strategies discussed among allies were more general then specific, you will agree to do things like “Invade France”, rather then “move these two Calvary here and that Cannon there”. Hopefully it makes sense what I mean here, this game is played in broad strokes and while the details matter, their is a certain amount of gambling involved when it comes to strategies, you’re not going to be able to calculate your way to victory and if someone tried, this game goes from being slow, to coming to a proverbial halt.

On the surface, the game boils down to players taking turns buying, moving and attacking with units. You chuck some dice for the battles in what is a very simple and straightforward combat system (roll your units strength or defense on a d10) and the team that does this most successfully over 18 turns wins (or whatever length you determine for the game). It really is that simple mechanically speaking and it is here that I think Napoleon’s Imperium will often be compared and likened to RISK, the classic game of war on a map. I would argue rightfully so, on the surface, this is exactly what Napoleon’s Imperium is, a more evolved version of RISK. Luck plays its role in the game and the dice gods can be cruel. This however is the grand deception of Napoleon’s Imperium, it might look like a duck and quack like a duck, but its not a duck.

Comparing N.I. to RISK I think is fair on the surface, but hardly appropriate. None the less, RISK pieces may actually work as a good replacement for the cardboard tokens.

The opinion that this game is “like RISK” would require you to really ignore some of the foundations of this games design that are both far more complex strategically in application then they appear and the rules suggest and far more important to a winning strategy then you may realize in your first game in particular. There are subtle overtures in this game that aren’t immediately apparent, but are made of solid gold.

The first most notable thing about winning a game of Napoleon’s Imperium is that while the game can potentially be won via a capital victory (capturing three out of four capitals of opposing nations), this is so unlikely to happen that it almost feels like it could be omitted as a rule. In the end this is a game about victory points (the player with the most wins) and you don’t need to have a commanding lead in board presence to find yourself taking the lead point wise in the game for the win.

With careful planning, well timed and coordinated attacks (with allies) and clever defense strategies you can slowly and effectively score points in a wide range of ways from winning sea battles, capturing commanders and well orchestrated attacks and defenses while denying them to your opponents. I was quite shocked at the results of my first game where I discovered countries who seemingly had limited effect on the board presence, had scored shockingly high amounts of points. Hence unlike RISK, this is not a game that is strictly about a land grab, but rather it’s more about a well planned strategy of winning battles when it counts, scoring on the oversights and mistakes of your opponents and leveraging the turn order to make responding to your moves and counters moves in coordination with your allies difficult for your opponent(s).

This is not something you will “get” immediately (unless you’re much more clever than I), you sort of catch on after a few turns of playing this game like RISK and failing miserably. You will come to realize that you don’t need to crush Prussia or conquer France to win the game, you can score points in many ways and the path of least resistance is sometimes preferable, while at the same time their will be moments when those big risky battles just have to happen. This game has timing, pacing and planning that go far beyond what the scope of the rules suggest and in this their is subtle beauty.

Much of N.I.’s strategy is driven by the mobility of the games units, in particular and thematically appropriate the naval units. The sea is absolutely critical in this game and creates a dynamic where you can’t just think about your immediate plans, but anticipate where the weak spots of your opponents are, not only because winning sea battles is a great way to score points, but because it’s so difficult to predict where this mobility of navel units will be applied on the map on any given nations turn. They are far reaching and they can bring forces to bare in unexpected ways. No coast is safe and their is always risk in leaving any location an unprotected scoring opportunity for the enemy.

The second thing is that owning territories gives you money, money gets you units and units get you more territories. This rather old school style of war game economic progression is very reminiscent of RISK, but unlike RISK the units you build always appear in your capital city at the end of your turn. This is a key rule and a core fundamental principle of the game that really separates and differentiates itself from games like RISK where supply of fresh units isn’t a simple matter of placing them on the game board when they become available.

Capitals are generally fairly distant from the core fighting (hopefully) which means that reinforcements don’t just arrive in the battle fronts where you need them. This requires extremely careful planning and consideration of defenses of claimed territories, good control over seas as this is your best way to get fresh units where they need to be and of course some foresight and coordination with allies as you will not be able to plug all the weak spots of your empire on your own. Sure you can make a big RISK infused push on your turn and claim some territory, but before you get your next turn, all of the enemy nations will get their turns and you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed on the front lines losing all you gained in a single round, not to mention giving easy to grab victory points to your opponents.

As such victories have to be decisive in light of the whole game round and your defenses coordinated with your allies to ensure the territory you take, you keep for the long haul.

There is also a subtle advantage to losing your capital thanks to the “In Exile” rule. While losing your capital means you will only get half of your income, units you do purchase will appear in any of your allies capitals. Fewer units in a better position can often be far more effective then lots of units at a distance. This rule results in suddenly two nations producing units out of one capital, a dangerous situation for opponents. This can create huge power shifts in localized areas and taking control of one capital makes it that much harder to take the next one. This is in part why capital victories I think will be very rare in this game and you also have to consider how wise it is to stretch your forces just to take one.

The next very subtle but critically important element of the game are the battle cards. What a fantastic mechanic this is. The battle cards effectively represent some historical events, but what they really are, is a mechanic which can punish or help the loser of a battle. These cards are drawn by the loser of a land battle and they can and often do create shifts in resources, positions and conditions of the war. What is great is that after a few games with the same nation, you get to know the battle cards and their is a bit of card counting involved. You will know what cards have been played and what cards are left in your deck. This I think will make a difference as you gain experience, as battle cards can have some very significant effects and anticipating them will make a difference.

For example in my most recent game I scored a critical victory against the British at an important moment that had them on the ropes. It was one of those moments where a plan came together, it was absolutely crushing to the enemy and me and my allies saw our path to victory. However to our surprise the British player drew “The Spanish Treasure Squadron” giving them +10 Income on their next purchase. This turned out to be devastating as they were able to get just enough recovery to prevent defeat and not only reclaim the critical territory but eventually swing the tides of the whole war. I won’t forget about that card anytime soon.

It was a fantastic (albeit soul crushing) and memorable moment in the game, it told a story and thanks to the thematic aspect of the cards felt like a piece of history was infused into the game. This is what these battle cards were meant to do and they deliver on that promise splendidly.

Not all cards are going to have this big impact on the game, Hoodwinked is an example of a minor drawback. Still, every unit makes a difference, 1 infantry and 1 cavalry is equal in income to the value of a capital city.

Finally I have to say that the game is beautifully balanced. This is not a game where one really smart or lucky player will just dominate the board, or where events unfold in a lop sided fashion even in the face of the randomness of the dice and cards. There are no nations with an advantage or any issues with the starting conditions, though both are asymmetrical. Every game of Napoleon’s Imperium, in fact, every round of N.I. was nail bitingly close. The game has that maddening back and forth of plays and counter plays. It just feels like the game has this perfect equilibrium where at any given moment it’s not entirely clear who is actually winning. Everyone always has a weak spot somewhere that can be exposed, shocking shit happens all the time and anytime I think someone is winning, something happens and the whole thing falls back into a scrappy war of attrition until the final moments of the game.

I love a good balanced game, especially one that is as long as Napoleon’s Imperium is. While player elimination does take place, their are rules that offer ways out of this as well (Rebellion Rule) which I absolutely adore! and because it’s a team game, even if your nation is getting crushed, typically you are as invested in your allies strategies and plans as you are in your own, so you never really feel out of the game. I saw this effect in Larry Harris’s War Room as well and this team based approach is quickly becoming my new favorite way to handle long 8+ hour event games like this one.

From an angle like this you really see how pretty the map can be, but put a hundred tokens on the map and it becomes chaotic very quickly.

The game suffers from some fairly significant downtimes and while I would argue on it’s behalf that this is what you get when you play long epic war games, in N.I. its particularly problematic when playing with uneven player counts. In a 5 player game for example you have three players running two nations and two players running one nation. This results in those single nation players having to wait out 7 turns (typically 35-45 minutes before they get to do anything). Now obviously as a team game everyone is invested, but because each player takes their complete turn before anyone else has anything to do (short of defending an attack), it can be kind of boring to sit their for that long while you wait, in particular if you nation fairs poorly in the war.

I don’t want to harp on the use of tokens in this game more than I have already and I’m sure I will sound spoiled when I say this, but as a whole the game is not exactly a visual treat to look at. Waiting for your turn while staring at a bunch of cardboard tokens, watching people count, recount and make change all the time. Let’s just say some of the excitement will exit the room.

Just as a comparison this is what a game that holds a 120 dollar value looks like. I know its not fair to compare the productions of an established company like FFG to a small historical war game publisher like Compass Games, but capitalism isn’t meant to be fair and you didn’t win your paycheck in a lottery.

Is this a huge problem or even a negative aspect of the game? I would argue no, to me a long game is a long game, you know what your getting into with games of this weight and size and you shouldn’t play games like this if downtime bothers you, it comes with the territory. I think its fair to mention it in a review, but unfair to judge a game based on it. Judging a game that is intentionally long for being too long is like going to see a Star Wars movie and complaining about their being too many Stormtroopers.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Great dynamics make this game very replayable and its simple mechanics makes it easy to pull out with just about anyone, no major rules overhead to exclude less experienced gamers adding to its appeal. Very solo friendly.

Cons: It’s a game that may struggle to define it’s place in your gaming group, when do you pull this out?

It’s always tricky to talk about replayability and longevity of a game that takes 8+ hours to play. I mean realistically, I will likely play this game once or twice a year at absolute best if I’m lucky even if my entire gaming group loves it. It has nothing to do with the games replayability and everything to do with normal schedules of people, we just don’t have the kind of time a game like this demands with any regularity, desire plays no part in that. For this reason this game goes into either the lifestyle category or event category of games, for me it would be the ladder.

I guess the question here is more about whether or not this game could be a lifestyle game for a gaming group and/or if it hits that event game status. Whether it’s good enough as a game for players to put together that monthly game, build events around it and/or play it for years and years. Such games are rare, because they have some pretty high standards to meet that go above and beyond your standard board game for board game night. The competition for such table slots is quite fierce.

In a way Andrew Roland the designer of Napoleon’s Imperium kind of answers that question with a resounding yes. He’s been playing this game for decades, but the catch is, he hasn’t been using the Compass Games version of the game. He has been building elaborate tables and investing in expanding components to raise this games event worthiness as a game. It became a lifestyle and event game for his gaming group through that act of elaborating on the visuals, bringing the game into the 3rd dimension, giving it that gorgeous presentation. To me this is a precedent set by the designer for this game and I agree with that precedent, this is really what a game needs to be to hit that lifestyle/event game status.

For me it’s certainly tempting to try and recreate something like that. N.I. has that “casual gamer” quality to it, which means that this is a game you can teach to effectively anyone, non-gamers (with interest) included. It’s not difficult and their is something charming about having a game setup in a hobby room that you play over many sessions at random intervals as part of a close nit group of friends who share an interest. The game certainly tells great stories with big impactful events and it has a kind of renaissance charm to it.

I can totally imagine how with a beautiful looking hobby table filled with gorgeous miniatures on a huge map, this game can definitely fit that lifestyle/event game category. I don’t really see any problems with it mechanically for this to be true.

This is not however what you get with the Compass Games version of the game of course. With Napoleon’s Imperium the board game their is an absence of this visual appeal substituted with rather clumsy tokens that do little to inspire that visual experience. The map is big and beautiful, so there is that, but I would say if you are going to make this an event game, you would need to do as Andrew did and pimp out the components to give this game that satisfying visual appeal. Event games need to have a high level of presentation, games like Twilight Imperium or War Room come to mind as examples. If these games didn’t have that visual component, they would not qualify for that lifestyle category either, it really is a part of it, at least for me and my friends.

I think mechanically the game certainly has infinite replayability, I see no issue in which things would become predictable and repetitive. This game has plenty of dynamic elements, every experience with this game will be unique. In terms of longevity, I don’t see any issue either, you aren’t going to play this game all the time simply because it’s so long, but because the rules are easy to learn, you can safely setup events with players who have never played before, teach them what they need to know on the spot and have a great event. This is a very charming feature of the game and actually rather rare for a game like this especially among big event games. I love my War Room and Twilight Imperium, but these are complex games that take time to learn. N.I. does not have that problem. That approachability gives this game a real edge in this regard.

It’s also a very solo friendly game, there is no hidden information, its very straightforward with everything on the table exposed. This is a make your best move scenario which is perfect for solo play, something I think historical war game fans will appreciate.

My only concern about this game as a day(s) event is that I think at least in my gaming group, the visuals aren’t strong enough to make the event feel substantial as N.I. comes packaged in this release. Our big gaming events are about getting into the spirit of the moment, creating an atmosphere, collectively we want to make things memorable. It isn’t just about gameplay, its about the experience.

An epic board game night isn’t just some guys getting together to play a game, it’s an event, we are going to be staring at this game for hours/days, it should look so good our eyes want to jump out of their sockets!

The board game version of N.I. really lacks that event game spunk that is needed. I think my conclusion in this regard is, yes, the game has great replayability, great longevity, no issues their, but no, it doesn’t tick all the required boxes to make this a lifestyle or big event game, this release is missing one of the key components (aka the visual component) to really nail that side of it firmly.

Conclusion

My journey with Napoleon’s Imperium, in particular this review, was a bit turbulent at times and it’s because I would be lying if I didn’t admit that my ability to review it impartially was significantly compromised. Andrew’s story and the history of the making of this game is something that warms the heart and makes you a believer. This game is a guy’s decades long dream come true and as I reviewed this game, that always weighed heavily on my mind. I chose my words extra carefully, I struggled to be purely objective and sufficiently removed. On the one hand is my need for pure honesty and integrity as I review a game, on the other, I want to give this game a hug and hope Andrew feels it.

If I were to make this short and sweet, this is a really amazing game that services a really cool niche in my collection. A big, elaborate war game that I can teach to anyone very easily, that is both fun to play, stirs the imagination and has enough depth that my notably simpleton historical war gaming spidey senses tingle. Its a good time in a box, its very solo- able which is always a big plus for me and if I find this game sticks the landing with my group, I will pimp the living shit out of it because I already believe it to be … pimp worthy. It has everything but the visuals to make the grade as a truly wonderful game for those big board gaming event weekends.

In contrast however this is a really expensive game, at $120-150 US, what you get in the box, and perhaps partially what you don’t, I can only describe as average and a bit disappointing, less then what you might expect at this price. It’s a pretty game artistically speaking but the included components, not only makes this feel like a poor value at this price point, but the fact that this really is an event level game in its soul means its lack of pizazz and visual appeal really detracts from the potential experience of that big get together.

This is a game that competes for table time with other very visual games like Twilight Imperium, War Room, Axis & Allies and many other “event” or “lifestyle” games of similar caliber, at least it will in my gaming group. Its going to be struggle to get this on the table on big board gaming weekends in my group considering it’s competition and again, it’s far too long of a game for those midweek board game nights.

For me it’s rather heartbreaking to be in a situation where I can’t recommend a game I consider truly great outright because of a cost to value problem. I want to tell you that this is an amazing game, your supporting a great cause and just bloody buy it. All those things are true and I look back on my purchase regret free.

Considering the cost of the game however, I think it’s important to ask yourself the two important questions before you whip out that credit card. When will you play this monster and who will you play it with?

I gave Napoleon’s Imperium a strong score because I believe it’s a great game and I think it has a bright future. I wish Andrew Roland all the luck in the world and I hope that at some point, a publisher will recognize the far greater potential of this game and give it the mega publication with all the bells and whistles it deserves. For now, as the game is today, all I can say is that it’s a pricey investment for what you get in the box. If you got the cash, a willing gaming group and a heart, you won’t be disappointed. Besides supporting a game and designer like this is what our gaming community is all about, Compass Games did their part, so your contribution would go to a great cause.

Was this review compromised, was I objective enough? I plead the 5th!

Gamers Dungeon

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