Flash Review — Brass: Lancashire

Player count: 2 to 4

Works well with just 2: Yes!

Age: 14+ 

Playtime: 60-120 min

A game of business development and railroad construction during the industrial revolution in England.
Build a solid network and make good use of those built by your opponents, carefully manage your resources, and for God’s sake, only get a loan when the time is right.

This is one of Martin Wallace’s masterpieces, with an intuitive economic engine and original game mechanics that require you to—gasp—share resources with your opponents. You might not like it at first, but if you manage to time your actions just right, you’ll be able to get that second shipyard built in Liverpool, and score the big points by game end.

For me, Brass: Lancashire is absolutely a Top 10 game, with its sister game Brass: Birmingham not far behind. And this new edition is a real beauty.

Most easily forgotten rule: A network connection is required for consuming coal, but NOT for iron.




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Boardgame review — Apocalypse Road

A Bullet by Any Other Name

Designers: Carla & Jeff Horger

Player count: 2-10

Publisher: GMT Games

In the not-too-distant future, everything has gone to hell in a handbasket, yet people use whatever time, energy and money they have left to organize huge car races where ramming and shooting are not only permitted, but rewarded.

Long story short: we finally have Thunder Alley with guns.

A bit of backstory.
Ever since Thunder Alley (the first title in the series) came out, I’ve been teaching the game to a wide variety of players, in personal gaming events and at conventions. I even ran a year-long season at work! And while everyone enjoyed themselves, at least one person—it never failed—asked me at the end of the race, “Is there a version of this game with guns?” People just wanted to zoom around the track while shooting up the competition. And now they can.

The third entry in the ever-growing Thunderverse (after Thunder Alley and Grand Prix), Apocalypse Road is played on a large racetrack that can accommodate up to 10 players. Each track features tight curves, bottlenecks, a rough section through which no lane change is allowed, and an even rougher Jump area where cars risk getting more damaged than usual.

Britain's very own Andover Autodrome

Players control a stable of 10 cars each, four or five of which are active on the track at any given time, depending on the number of players involved. Each car sports its own speed rating (between 4 and 8) and one weapon type (out of three) facing forward, backward, or mounted on a turret. On his turn, a player gets to play a Race card and drive one of his hitherto unmoved cars: the number of spaces moved is arrived at by adding the automobile’s speed to the card’s value.

A sample of Race cards

Movement cards come in five types, most of them simulating the effects of drafting. Lead movement pulls the column of vehicles behind the active car; both Solo movement and Pursuit movement push the column of vehicles ahead of the active car (with subtle differences between the two); Line movement takes vehicles in front of and behind the active car along for the ride; Overtake movement allows the active car to switch places with vehicles it encounters; and Ramming movement causes a collision when the active car catches up with a juicy target.

Combat is fast and simple, and an active car can shoot at an opponent before or after its move. The player declares an adjacent target in the active vehicle’s arc of fire and flips the top card of the Combat deck. If the targeting number shown there is equal to or greater than the car’s defense number, the target is hit and incurs as many damage markers as displayed above the weapon that just fired.

A smattering of Combat cards

Any automobile that accrues six damage markers is removed from the race and replaced with a fresh car from the same team. No more cars available? That player finishes the race with whatever vehicles remain on the track. (No worries: when that happens, the race is almost over anyway.)

Once all cars have been activated—they’re flipped over to signal they have moved—the round is over. Players are left with one or two movement cards, which they can either retain or discard, according to what they perceive might be useful to them once the action starts up again. Everyone then draws back up to six cards, the 1^st Player marker goes to the player with the most damaged cars (give the kid a break), and a new round gets underway.

Vehicles keep going around the track with no specific number of laps to complete. A player scores one point for each of his cars that completes a lap, and one point for each enemy car he destroys, taking them from a pool of point markers in the color of his team. As soon as one player reaches 15 points, the game ends immediately and that player wins.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Twelve pages of rule are all that’s needed to fire up Apocalypse Road, and that’s even counting the page about Thunder Alley and Grand Prix integration: you can play either of the three games on any track in the whole system, with minimal adjustments.

The game mechanics are straightforward and effective, and can easily be taught in about 10 minutes. (Five, if your pupils have already played one of the previous games in the series.) Movement represents the biggest chunk of rules to chew, with combat a short-and-sweet dessert. Maybe too much so for some people—keep in mind this is no Car Wars clone, but rather an exciting racing game with a layer of weaponry thrown on top.

Some of the rules are not all that clear (do you need a targeting check for a collision attack?) and one or two others are missing (how do you handle the dotted spaces on the Essendarium track?), but overall you’ll find what you need in there, with plenty of examples to drive the points home.

The Countdown Clock rule is the only one that feels out of place. It requires every round to end with the removal of one VP marker from each team’s pool of yet-to-be-won VPs (to speed up the game), and it’s stuck to the back of the rulebook, under Winning, instead of being part of the End-of-Turn Sequence on page 4. It’s also missing from the turn sequence printed on the tracks themselves, and is sure to become Apocalypse Road’s most easily forgotten rule.

FUN FACTOR

I’ve been expecting Apocalypse Road for a long time: my fellow racers and I started wishing for a mounted-weapon version of Thunder Alley back in 2014, when that first game was published.

And I must say that Apocalypse Road did not disappoint in the slightest.

The game is still very much a racing game, in that the surest and fastest way to score points is to have your vehicles complete a lap as fast (and as often) as you can. But the addition of gunplay gives rise to some interesting side tactics and epic twists, especially since you never know how much damage you’ll deal the car you’re attacking. Will you barely dent a fender, blast the car to smoking bits, or else miss entirely? I was once robbed of a victory—one space away from claiming my last point!—when my daughter Héloïse rear-ended another car in a Hail Mary collision attack… which destroyed the target and gave her the last point she needed to win.

Some of the fastest Race cards sport a burst icon that requires flipping the top card of the Movement Event deck to see what manner of misfortune has been unleashed. Most of the time it will affect the active card: after all, you know you’re pushing your vehicle to its limits when you race it that fast. But some events will target other cars—or even give you an unexpected boost! It’s great fun and adds just the right amount of tension to a crazy move that drags a dozen roaring cars clear across half the track.

The Jump section of each racetrack adds another fun wrinkle. It’s a really rough patch of road where you don’t want to leave your cars for too long, because many of the Movement Events target vehicles specifically in that chunk of spaces. The last thing you want is for your star racer to end up with a busted transmission.

There’s also a crossover in the center of the figure-8 track called the Essendarium, and while it looks super exciting, it turns out to be somewhat of a letdown. The only thing that happens when cars meet at the crossing is that they each get one damage marker. That’s it. No spectacular collision, no special rule for pushing cars back in the loop they just came out of, nothing of the sort. It’s not a big deal, but it feels like a missed opportunity. House rules will abound here, no doubt about it.

WAR PRODUCTION

Apocalypse Road ships with four large, mounted racetracks. Whereas the tracks in the series’ two preceding titles were fine but a little drab, the new tracks look exciting, dangerous and strangely inviting. The game is also equipped with three card decks (Race, Combat and Movement Events), 10 teams of 10 cars, players boards for everyone and an assortment of markers to track points, damage, and a few unfortunate situations vehicles will encounter throughout the race (such as spinning out or running out of ammo). 

Now as much as I love Apocalypse Road, I have to point out a few production shortcomings that I feel might curtail the game’s mass appeal. Some of those problems might stop casual players from giving Apocalypse Road a shot, and that would be a real shame.
 

• Car tokens flip the wrong way, on the short edge instead of the long one. Flipping cars on the long edge is how it’s done in both Thunder Alley and Grand Prix, and it is indeed the natural way every new player will flip cars.
• Some of the teams have their car colors too close to each other. Especially the two green teams, where confusion on the track becomes inevitable.

Number 67 belongs to the green team on the right

• The car fronts have a light background, while the car backs have a dark background: that’s how you can tell which cars have moved and which have yet to act. In Thunder Alley, the two sides were very distinct. In Grand Prix, unfortunately, the dark side was just a somewhat darker shade of tan; anything less than ideal lighting made identifying the flipped cars a daunting proposition. Unfortunately, GMT went back to that same shade for Apocalypse Road, and it’s making things more difficult than they need to be. The really strange thing is that the 1^st Player marker, which you flip back and forth between turns to indicate what side of the cars will stand for “not yet moved,” has a truly dark side, which is not at all like the dark color selected for the cars.

Light/dark sides in Apocalypse Road and in Thunder Alley

Cars and 1st Player marker in Apocalypse Road

• The player mats themselves are designed in such a way that two of the three vital bits of information—weapon type and firing arc—don’t jump out at you the way they should. You have to read the words “machine gun front” or “auto cannon turret” when icons would do a better job. That’s actually what they did on the Combat cards: you have a big image of a machine gun accompanied by the words “machine gun.” So why not also use those weapon images on the team mats, along with something like a triangle to indicate front and rear firing arcs, and a circle for a turret? This becomes especially troublesome when you’re trying to read team mats on the other side of the table, because you want some information about firing arcs for cars you’re getting close to. 

Original car layout

I did a quick test in Photoshop, and I like the results so much I’m considering altering my copy to make it look like this on all team mats:

    

• The game setup requires piles of victory point markers to be stacked next to each other at the bottom of the racetrack: you’re supposed to take one marker from your pile each time you score a point, and everyone can easily see the number of points everyone has left to claim. With 10 opponents, that’s 150 markers, and the piles quickly become a mess. So why not use that space instead for a score track, and give one marker to each team? The Countdown Clock rule, which requires every round to end with the removal of one VP marker from each team’s pool, could be an End Game marker that starts at 15 and moves down the score track. Whichever team reaches the End Game marker wins.
  
  

Stacks of VP markers, ripe for the picking

Granted, some of the issues highlighted above fade in the background after a few games. But this is precisely the point: with Apocalypse Road, GMT has an opportunity to hook non-wargamers right off the bat. I want Eurogamers and party gamers to give Apocalypse Road a shot and discover that it’s simple to play and lots of fun.

PARTING SHOTS

What surprised me the most about Apocalypse Road is its simplicity. It’s easier to play than either of the other games in the series, even with the added combat system. The biggest hurdle lies in learning how the different movement types work—exactly like in Thunder Alley or Grand Prix. Beyond that? Just take a shot whenever you think is best, either before or after you move each car.

The game plays well at any player count, and that’s saying something. Naturally, the more, the merrier! With only two or three players, 10 to 15 cars end up on the track and combat becomes less frequent. The sweet spot seems to be around 4 to 8 players, with a nice mix of vehicular mayhem and room to breathe. Gather nine or 10 opponents around the table, and the starting grid gets loaded with 40 (!) automobiles armed to the gills; yet, somehow, it still works. Just be prepared for a little more chaos and a plethora of targets to choose from.

The rules suggest playing to 12 points for a shorter game, which I never found necessary. Even the Countdown Clock rule was discarded after just one play, because when cars start moving around in unison, teams rack up points really fast. The game time indicated on the box (60-90 minutes) is spot on, and a race typically ends with players feeling they could have gone for another half hour of vengeance and reprisals.

Apocalypse Road stands as the best entry point in the series, and if GMT clarifies the graphic design for an eventual second printing, the game will go on to become a staple in many gaming groups. I know I made sure to sleeve the cards in my copy.

 

ADDENDUM: COMPARISON TO THUNDER ALLEY

This is for veterans who’d like a compact, bullet-point (ha!) list of differences between Apocalypse Road and Thunder Alley.

• Each team is comprised of eight cars.
• Each car sports its own weapon type and firing arc, as well as speed rating.
• Movement types: AR adds Overtake (similar to Working the Pack in TA) and Ram (for collision attacks).
• Cars displaced laterally into a lane that doesn’t exist move one space forward and not back (à la Grand Prix).
• Number of spaces moved is determined by adding the active car’s speed rating to the value of the Race card played.
• High-value Race cards trigger a Movement Event, which is likely to affect the active car.
• Pushing cars ahead always costs 1 movement point and is termed “conditional linking.” Because of that, Solo movement is more powerful in AR: it allows the active vehicle to push an entire column of cars for 1 MP per space, while leaving it free to veer away at any time.
• No “colored” damage from movement.
• Combat! Shoot your active car’s weapon at an adjacent vehicle, before or after movement. Alternatively, ram the bastards.
• No pit stops.
• Each track features a Jump section, a sort of “danger zone” where cars are more susceptible to Movement Events.
• No fixed number of laps: the game is won on points. Score one point for each of your cars that completes a lap, and each of your opponent’s cars that you blow off the racetrack.
• AR seats up to 10 players, or 40 cars on the track at once.

 

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Flash Review — Fort

 

Player count: 2 to 4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 10+
Playtime: 20-40 min

A cute deck-building game where each player is a kid who uses toys to build the best fort in the neighborhood—with the help of his or her friends!

Recruit all the friends you need, stash secrets in your treehouse, and make sure everyone on your team has all the pizza and toys they need.

Fort sticks to its “players are kids” theme all the way through. From individual scoring cards (revealed at the end) being called “made-up rules,” to making the trophy awarded to the player who finishes his fort first into a “macaroni sculpture,” the game really feels like you’re trying to wrangle a bunch of hyperactive kids into a winning fort-building team. Components also look like they were drawn by (talented) kids. But keep an eye on your most valuable friends, because opponents might snatch them away while they’re playing in the yard…

Most easily forgotten rule: You can only play ONE card to follow a leader’s action.

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Flash Review — Jaws

Player count: 2 to 4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 12+
Playtime: 60 min

A semi-coop game set on and around Amity Island, where three players try to rid the waters of a deadly foe, and a fourth opponent plays a very hungry shark.
I know, it looks like a cheap money-grab attached to an old intellectual property. But it’s not!

The game is divided in two acts. The first act happens on the island itself, with Brody, Hooper and Quint running around to try and get people out of the water, while the shark enjoys its all-you-can-eat buffet. The second act takes place on the open water, where humans do their best to kill the shark before the beast can sink their rinky-dink boat. Each role plays very differently from the others, and the split in two acts gives the game a nice narrative arc.

Thematically sound and mechanically exciting—boardgames like this help restore the struggling reputation of movie tie-ins.

Most easily forgotten rule: On the boat, “adjacent” means “touching the white line.”

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Flash Review — Barrage

Player count: 1 to 4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Acceptable
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-120 min

Barrage is an advanced Eurogame where each player tries to build the most profitable hydroelectricity empire.
You will need to erect damns, conduits and power plants, and take advantage of the landscape to make sure water flows your way. Steal your opponents’ sources of water if need be!

Barrage is one of those heavy games that scare people away with their rulebooks, but seduce them back to the table with their stunning looks.
The construction wheel is a stroke of genius: instead of spending resources to build a structure, you “invest” them in the wheel, and those resources will come back to you once the wheel has performed a full rotation.
Plan your needs accordingly.

Most easily forgotten rule: Conduits can be used by all players (for a cost if it’s not yours).

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Flash Review — Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Player count: 1 to 4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Excellent
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-120 min

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a cooperative (or solo!) game of investigation and exploration in the disturbing world of H.P. Lovecraft.
Pick an investigator, build a deck, and join your friends in a harrowing tale of mystery, action and horror. Just don't step into that weird portal at the end of the hall...

AH:TCG is built on (replayable) scenarios that feature ever-changing game mechanics and astounding artwork. I mean, this is one of the most beautiful games in my collection. The imagery keeps me up at night, but it's done with the skill of a Renaissance Dutch master.

Most easily forgotten rule: Successfully evaded enemies are exhausted and will not attack you during the Enemy Phase.

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Flash Review — Back to the Future: Back in Time

Player count: 2 to 4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 10+
Playtime: 50 min

Back to the Future: Back in Time is a cooperative game that mirrors the events portrayed in the first movie: get Lorraine and George to fall in love, make sure the Delorean is prepared and ready for the trip home, and of course keep Biff away from it all (while navigating the mischief sowed around town by his gang of ne'er-do-wells)—all before lightning strikes the clock tower!

One of the best coop games I've played, with beautiful artwork, nice components, and a rulebook designed to look like a Tales From Space comic book. I mean, come on!

Most easily forgotten rule: Biff cannot be escorted around the board. That only works for George and Lorraine.

WARNING: There's a ton of BTTF games out there and not all of them are worth the cardboard they're printed on. Make sure you get the right one!

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Flash Review — The Quacks of Quedlinburg

 

Player count: 2 to 4 (5 with the expansion!)
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 8+
Playtime: 45 min

The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a push-your-luck game for the whole family, where you try to mix together the most ingredients possible, without your cauldron overflowing... After each round, players purchase new ingredients to add to their draw bag, deck-builder style, which means your strategy will change from game to game, depending on what ingredients are available.

Beautiful artwork, fun theme, nice components.
A modern classic!

Most easily forgotten rule: Each round, you can purchase at most two new ingredients, and they must be of different colors.

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Boardgame review — Versailles 1919

Peace at Last

Designers: Mark Herman & Geoff Engelstein

Player count: 1-4

Publisher: GMT Games

Right after the Great War, allied powers gathered in France to rearrange the debris left in the wake of that terrible conflict. Part genuine effort to put everything right again and part power grab, the Paris Peace Conference sprawled over six months and produced an extraordinary document that would officially close the books on the first world war.
And buy the globe a 20-year reprieve.

In Versailles 1919, players take on the roles of France, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom as each nation attempts to make its voice heard, right some wrongs, and generally tug on the rope in its own direction. Diplomacy may be the order of the day, but there are deals to be made at that vast table, and so be it if some regions of the world require one more display of military might.

Far from the hexagonized battlefields, the board represents a lavish conference table, complete with adjoining waiting room, as well as polished charts where players track both the deployment of military units and the happiness level of their respective homes.

At any given time, the conference table houses two issues currently under discussion (say, the fate of Armenia, or whether or not racial equality will be included in the League Charter) as well as the current event card. In the waiting room, three more issues and two additional events bide their time. But not for long.

The object of the game is for each player to shape the post-war world in his nation’s favor. Alliances might come and go when objectives align (and then don’t), but ultimately it’s every nation for itself. On his turn, a player can perform one of two Military Actions:  Deploy a military unit to exert some measure of control over a region of the world in turmoil, which grants certain abilities but lowers the happiness level of a nation who’s had enough of armed conflict; or Demobilize that same unit, which curtails a nation’s physical reach but reassures a grieving homeland (and drives up the always problematic Happiness counter). Whatever the active player decides on the military front, however, he must perform one of three Political Actions: Place Influence on two issues, Settle an Issue, or Reclaim Influence from the exhausted box on the board. Each action is mechanically simple, but also rife with consequences and fruitful—or wasted—opportunities.

Placing influence is straightforward enough: the player drops wooden cubes on two issues of his choice, either on the table, in the waiting room, or a combination of the two. And therein lies the catch: in order to add influence, the player must ensure that he gains absolute majority on both selected issues. Not enough cubes to satisfy that requirement? This action becomes unavailable.

Settling an issue sees the relevant card handed to the player with the most influence cubes on it—which does not always happen to be the active player. The issue’s winner scores the associated victory points and must decide how to settle that issue, picking one out of two or three options. Let’s use the fate of German trade as an example: will it be allowed to flourish, or left to languish in a restricted context? The Open Trade option drops an Industry marker on the card and lowers France’s happiness, while Limited Trade adds a Reparation token to the card, lowers US happiness and increases unrest in Europe. Choose wisely: all of those markers will be worth points at the end of the game, depending on selected scoring cards.

A typical issue, with two options to choose from

After an issue is settled, the event card currently on the table is resolved, causing anything from the retrieval of spent influence cubes to unhappiness for nations with deployed military units. Then, the active player brings a new issue and a new event from the waiting room to the table, and a random crisis is triggered. And let’s face it: most of those crises are uprisings in the making. (More on those later.)

Retrieving influence involves nothing more than taking back a handful of cubes from the exhausted box, along with whatever military units might happen to be waiting there. But the timing of this action—in essence a “skip a turn to come back stronger” move—will often make or break the success of a nation as it tries to control the playing field, and retires for a quick rest when matters cease to concern its interests, if only for a short while.

Uprisings, you say? Very well, let’s get these out of the way.
When an Uprising Check is required, the region under the most stress is subjected to a die roll: the higher the roll (and the higher the unrest in the targeted region), the better the chances of an actual uprising. Military units deployed to checked regions allow for some die roll manipulation: boots on the ground can help push the turmoil pendulum in one direction or another. Should an uprising actually come to pass, the player holding the most issues pertaining to the affected region loses the issue worth the most VPs: that issue is unsettled and goes back to the table. (This represents the issue being brought up and debated once more.) Players bid military units and influence cubes, with the highest bidder assuming (or reassuming) control of the issue at hand, and then deciding its fate anew, hopefully scoring a few much needed markers.

This strange waltz keeps on until the Game End issue card shows up, heralding the game’s imminent conclusion. As soon as that particular issue is brought to the table, and a player decides to settle it, the game is over.

Then, a combination of scoring cards and relevant markers, happiness levels, own flags proudly displayed on won issues, and point values on issue cards themselves determine each nation’s final score. Whoever records the highest number in his log leaves the table a victor.

WAR PRODUCTION

Versailles 1919 comes with a mounted six-panel board, and a host of counters to represent the variety of outcomes settling an issue one way or another might generate. Issues are represented by beautiful tarot-size cards, while events reside in a regular deck of equally adorned cards. Wooden cubes for influence points, wooden discs for military units—some of the game’s understated material belies the forces unleashed through the drawn-out negotiations.

Also in the box sits a scoring pad that seems to take up a lot of space: indeed, scoring a four-player game where each participant is required to add seven numbers feels like it shouldn’t invade an entire letter-sized sheet of paper. (I ended up creating my own compact scoring sheet.) As of this writing, GMT was unfortunately not providing a printable scoring sheet on their website—a temporary situation, to be sure.

GMT games are usually overflowing with dense player aids, whereas Versailles 1919 features but one, devoted to explaining extra steps involved in solo play. Otherwise, the rules of the game are so straightforward that a summary fits snuggly on two-sided reminder cards distributed to all players.

Some minor mistakes made their way onto a handful of cards, and while those are no game-breakers by any means, GMT is having the culprits reprinted and will make them available for free to customers who have purchased Versailles 1919.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The game only needs 14 pages of rules; add a couple more for two-player and solo instructions. As short as the rulebook stands, it does a fine job teaching the game, in a style that both flows as a learning tool and clicks as a reference manual.

Learning how to play Versailles 1919 requires a single reading of those rules, and explaining it no longer than 15 minutes. Its inner workings are so easy to grasp, in fact, that new players will furrow their brows and smile to themselves when, at the end of the short lesson, you proclaim “that’s it!” and get the game started. Surely it can’t be that simple, right?
Well, the truth is wearing vertical stripes to make it look thinner.

You see, while Versailles 1919 certainly runs on a very simple engine, things quickly become tangled. A lot. Not so much that you would fail to see the entire tree of ramifications for each of your possible actions—but ramifications there are, and it’s not unusual for them to reach surprising depths.

It’s a real treat to see the slow-motion trap ensnare fresh victims as new players engage with the game for the first time. The first few turns make it all feel like you’ll be mindlessly sprinkling the board with influence cubes… and then, when those cubes become scarce, knots tighten and players start to realize their fates are entwined. How much can you pull on an opponent’s thread without unraveling your own tapestry?

In addition to designer notes and a nice historical commentary (I love that stuff), the thick playbook provided with Versailles 1919 also sports two detailed examples of play: one for the multiplayer game, and another for the solo affair. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned examples are peppered with mistakes that make learning from those pages a tricky proposition. GMT announced that corrected documents would soon be available to download from gmtgames.com.

FUN FACTOR

While Versailles 1919 reads and looks like a cerebral endeavor, a battle of wits, the game creates a visceral tension you can only experience in playing through an actual game. The simple, thin layers of complexity do stack up, and before too long you find yourself wondering if you should get even more involved than you already are in the fate of the Balkans, or perhaps turn instead your attention towards Europe. After all, the populace is much more tranquil there. For now, anyway…

When uprisings start blowing up various parts of the globe, navigating the repercussions turns into a fascinating chess match. Impose order and your homeland will hate you for it, but let things degenerate and you might end up one of the casualties. In some cases, blaming another nation in order to steer most of the chaos their way could be the best course of action—especially if you can scoop up one of their previously settled issues and fashion it to fit your own needs.

Because of the clever way they are designed, end-game scoring cards encourage players to collaborate, or at the very least leave each other be, for however long that fragile marriage of convenience might last. For instance, if France holds a scoring card worth 1 victory point for each Empire marker (of any nation) in play, it might let the UK get away with a few choice moves, as long as it puts some UK Empire markers on the table and provides France with some precious victory points.

What’s more, each game invariably ends too early. A couple more turns, and you would have had the world just where you wanted it, with your allies playing the exact roles you needed them to. Oh well. At 90 minutes a pop (perhaps all the way up to 180 with a campaign game), why be content with just one go at it?

PARTING SHOTS

As expected with a game of this type, you don’t need a full complement of players to enjoy Versailles 1919. But where other concoctions might devolve into tasteless versions of themselves at lower player counts, this brew loses no flavor. Quite the contrary, in fact.

The standard game plays with three or four players. All regular rules apply, compromises are rampant, and game end shows up faster than an electricity bill in January.

What happens with only two opponents? One player handles France and the other the UK, but each also gets to play an action as the USA at the end of his turn. So France will play his own turn and then an action for the USA, followed by the UK playing his own turn and then an action for the USA, and so on. This peculiar arrangement gives rise to tactics that don’t exist with a table full of negotiators. One player will often perform a counterintuitive USA action because it leaves no American way out for the opponent, or else spend his turn building up for a long-term goal that would normally leave him open to a flanking attack—only to use the USA action to reinforce that very flank.

No opponent handy for a game tonight? No problem. Borrowing from Herman’s own Peloponnesian War, solo V1919 requires one player to split his time between France, the USA and the UK, in a variation where nation victory points become Strength Points. The player starts in the driver’s seat of one nation, while very simple bots handle the other two. When the player’s turn starts, he scores one “player” victory point if the nation he’s playing currently shows more Strength Points than its two adversaries. But whenever an issue is unsettled, the player is forced to assume the role of the straggler—the nation with the lowest strength. Remember, you only score a victory point if the nation you’re playing has the most Strength Points when your turn begins. So while you’re striving to maintain your current nation in the lead, you must always keep things more or less balanced and make sure that the other two negotiators are just a step behind; otherwise, you’ll spend too many precious turns catching up with your feeble nation once you’re forced to sit on the other side of the table. Victory is achieved by scoring 20 points by the time the game ends.

I think I still prefer the 4-player version, for the sheer brinkmanship gleaming around the table with a full roster of opponents. But I’m having a lot of fun with Versailles 1919 at all player counts, and I marvel at the fact that those variations feel so different (and yet so connected) that it’s almost like having three games in one box.

As much as I was impressed with the system introduced in Herman’s Churchill, I vastly prefer this simplified (and quite distinctive) version and would be thrilled if future entries in the Great Statesmen series followed in Versailles 1919’s footsteps.

 

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