The games I played included the following:
I played The Middle Gate (Thermopylae) scenario from Expansion Pack #6 which presents an overwhelming Persian force with about half the number of opposing Spartans, behind ramparts, featuring a vulnerable flank that can be marched around.
The Persians did the flank march and, despite suffering high casualties, secured the flags (victory points) needed for the win. The final score was 10-6 so the Spartans were well out of touch.
It’s difficult to see how the Spartans can hold out here, especially if the cards aren’t there for the required counterattacks. Both sides had turns where the available cards were useless. I’m thinking of using a house rule to overcome this, such as allowing each player to be able to use any one card as a single unit activation (anywhere on the board) instead of whatever it says on the card.
All of that having been said, it’s a long time since I’d played the system and I enjoyed it much more than I remember.
I continued playing the Naktong River Campaign from the Korean War in this top-quality solitaire game system. I completed missions 4 and 5 successfully.
I played First Dance (AP228) again, an early war encounter in Belgium between French and German mixed forces of infantry and tanks. The French enter and set up a defense line. The Germans enter and try to break the line.
The Germans lost two key carriers and troops in the first turn and that decided the game, although we kept playing. The Germans made progress but they no longer had the troops required to capture the objectives. The French tank reinforcements are virtyually invulnerable.
A difficult scenario for the Germans, but that maybe only because it was me!
A sophisticated, two-player, worker-placement euro game with a theme about two clans vying for supremacy in technology and trade as the Portugese bring western ideas into Japan.
You play your workers to choose actions and some actions generate more actions or resources which you can use to generate more actions or resources and so on, each player vying for the best victory point score. Of course, there are multiple ways to attain (and calculate!) victory points.
It was too complicated for my taste. (I don’t mind complicated games but in an abstract game the complication has to bring something to my enjoyment. If not, as is the case here, it feels like complication just for the sake of it.)
The game uses a lot of icons to avoid language and eventually I became familiar enough with them, so it gets a pass there.
However, there’s one nuclear option that allows the opponent to screw with the available actions. I seriously doubt the play-balance of the game because of this.
I also didn’t like the use of color: there were 1,001 colors in use, or so it seemed, creating an obstacle to understanding the game.
In short, although I played it twice and tried hard, I didn’t like it. YMMV.
Part of a series of solitaire games, this one features US (player) versus German (system) soldiers battling it out in WW2 over a range of scenarios. The rules were lacking, but eventually I cracked the code.
The graphics put walls and hedges in the middle of hexes and that doesn’t work for me. It’s like a perversion of Schrödinger’s cat where the soldier in a wall hex gets the benefit of the wall no matter from which side he is attacked! I applied my own house rule to put the soldier on one side of the wall or hedge.
I don’t think it compares favorably with Ambush because of the design decisions, but it’s a brave try and I’m probably going to invest some serious time in exploring the system and scenarios.
One main criticism is that, for the most part, the system gives the German soldiers orders without any regard as to whether they can see the enemy. Orders are, instead, given based on the soldier’s morale. This can produce surprises as well as strange results. And that may be a fair reflection of the chaos of combat. Alternatively, it may be that more logical action choices should sometimes be taken.
I am still enjoying the game because it does generate a decent narrative. However, because of the stated issues, I am thinking about creating my own version of the solitaire system. There is an updated version that has allegedly made some improvements, and I’ll try and get a look at that.
