In SAS: Rogue Regiment, 1-4 players take on the role of Special Air Service operators in the days and weeks following the D-Day landings. Their job is to wreak havoc among the Germans through acts of sabotage, assassination, and other forms of mayhem. They’ll use stealth to infiltrate enemy positions, take out sentries, and avoid enemy patrols to accomplish their missions before they’re discovered. But if they’re spotted, the alarm will be raised, and they’ll find themselves seriously outnumbered as they try to fight their way back to Allied lines.

Game Play

[caption id="attachment_306562" align="alignright" width="219"] Sequence of Play for Stealth and Battle Sections[/caption]

Each mission consists of two sections: the Stealth section and the Battle section. The Stealth section sequence of play is used each turn until the alarm sounds (more on this later). From this point on, the Battle section sequence is used. The two sequences are similar, the main difference being how the Germans operate now that the SAS Team’s presence has been discovered.

During the Stealth section, each SAS Team member uses 4 action points to conduct operations such as movement, climbing, and attacking. If any of the Germans are alerted by spotting or hearing an SAS…

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“Ahh, we’re doing wargames now, eh?”

My buddy Kev and I were messaging each other because I asked him if he would try a two-player-only, card-driven war simulation called Quartermaster General: East Front. “No, but I love games that play in about an hour” was my immediate response, one that originated from the same reason why I raised my hand to try this game in the first place.

(A note about the game’s title: no, I am not sure why the game is called East Front, but not Eastern Front. Whenever I talked about this game, players wanted to call it Eastern Front. It’s not Eastern, it is East! I’m sure this is tied to the historical significance of the conflict, but still—I thought it was hilarious how often people got the name wrong.)

Quartermaster General: East Front (2023, Ares Games) distills the entire conflict of the Axis powers’ attempts to invade the Soviet Union during World War II in 1941 into a 90-minute asymmetric cardplay experience. One player takes on the role of the Allied forces of the Soviet Union, as the Soviets are forced to find ways to delay the onslaught of the Axis side while counterpunching their way through skirmishes throughout the western part of the region. The other player is the Axis, represented here by…

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Halls of Hegra is, admittedly, not a hard sell for me. It’s a quick-playing solo game with simple-but-challenging enemy AI, a heavy focus on emergent narratives, and an obscure WWII battle as source material. Check, check, and check. More than that, it’s an experiment in welding historical solo games to distinctively Euro-y mechanics. This is a straight worker placement game. Put me in, coach. I’m ready to play.

Somewhere in This Review I will Accidentally Refer to the Game as "Halls of Hegras," I Am Sure of It

Halls of Hegra is a successful marriage of worker placement with a standard wargaming format. Place workers, execute commands, survive enemy fire, wash, rinse, repeat. There are a few things that separate it from similar designs.

Hegra Fortress, located in southern Norway, was never intended to be a part of World War II. It was buried in snow when the Norwegian army set up shop. Just as those men were tasked with digging out the base in advance of the Nazi assault, you benefit from focusing on snow removal in the early game. Many of the best action spaces on the board are buried in a stack of snow tiles, available only once revealed. You want real fire power?…

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There are certain games I have learnt, over the years, that I simply ought not to play. Not because they are bad—this is not about taste—but because they grate against something deep within me. And when I say I “ought not to play” them, I don’t simply mean that I don’t enjoy them. It's worse than that. I become unpleasant. I am miserable. The people around me are miserable. It is for the health of the gaming ecosystem as a whole that I pass on these games, the most prominent examples of which are Catan and Ticket to Ride.

It took me a few years to figure out what the issue was. It’s a matter of luck. Games can be placed on a spectrum between the entirely luck-based (Candy Land) and the perfectly strategic (Gaia Project). I enjoy games at every point along that chart. I relish a round of L.A.M.A.—which reminds me, I haven’t played L.A.M.A. in far too long—as much as I do a game of Pax Pamir. I’m a joy to have at the table in all cases.

It’s when perception doesn’t meet reality that I run into trouble. Games that feel like they exist closer to…

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For me, General Orders: World War II was a highly anticipated design, authored as it was by the dynamic duo of David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin (Undaunted, War Chest). My interest increased as more information came out. A light wargame that takes thirty minutes to play and uses worker placement? No need to draft me, I volunteer!

I was not expecting the box to be so tiny. Well, “tiny” is an overstatement. It’s deep, approaching equilateral cube, but the length and width are surprisingly and endearingly petite. Then you open it, and inside is the tiniest li’l quarter-fold board. This must be how Shaq feels when he plays Concordia. I’m worried I’ll break it. I feel some sort of primal drive to protect this board, to feed it milk from a bottle until it’s strong enough to make it out in the wild.

What I mean to say is, this may be the tiniest quarter-fold board I’ve ever seen. Usually, at this size, they don’t bother folding them.

Deployment

A game of General Orders is divided into four rounds, which follow standard worker placement conventions. Taking turns, each…

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Blitzkrieg touts itself as a game that lets you simulate World War 2 in 20 minutes. In my family’s experiences the latter game is certainly true. In fact, most of our games are often concluded in under 15 minutes.

But let’s not kid ourselves here by thinking that a conflict as epic as World War 2 can be compressed into such a tiny box. If you are looking for something that lets you push a ton of plastics or counters across a world map, then you are better off playing something like Axis & Allies or any one of the hundreds of grittier war simulations out there.

[caption id="attachment_291774" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Almost comic-book in appearance, Blitzkrieg involves drawing counters from a bag and placing them on different spot around the world. In the Pacific Ocean, Allies and Axis powers are locked in a battle for naval supremacy with the latter in the lead.[/caption]

Blitzkrieg doesn’t pretend to be any of those bigger games. Rather, if you are looking for a game that plays like a tabletop trailer of World War 2 in under half an hour, then this game is certainly one to consider.

What’s in the Box

The board is compact and functional. The symbology is easy enough to grasp…

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The Undaunted series, designed by esteemed collaborators David Thompson & Trevor Benjamin and published by Osprey Games, is terrific. Let’s not mince words. With four installments and a substantial expansion, the series has yet to miss. There’s something for everyone, provided everyone is a fan of approachable World War II-themed two-player skirmish games.

Undaunted: North Africa is the second, and driest, installment in the series. The moisture content in this box, when compared to the beaches of Normandy or the snow-covered streets of Stalingrad or the skies above Great Britain, is objectively lower. There are other things to consider when choosing a board game, of course, but it feels worth specifying that you'll want a tub of Pond's and some Neutrogena sunscreen handy.

Why Undaunted?

The Undaunted system marries deck-building to skirmishing. There’s a select audience—myself included—for whom that immediately sells the game, but most of Those People already know about it. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably lived a different life. Maybe gone outside more.

Across the series,…

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Fortitude was the codename for one of the major Allied operations of World War II, with field armies attacking in Norway and Pas de Calais. The Japanese ambassador to Germany believed, before the operation, that forces would then strike across the Strait of Dover. The scale of Operation Fortitude was massive, one of the largest in military history.

You may not have heard about Operation Fortitude in school, and there’s a good reason: it was a dummy operation, made up whole cloth by Allied forces. Operation Fortitude was intended to draw Axis forces away from Normandy in preparation for D-Day. It worked.

Fortitude the game, themed after the operation, bills itself as a solo trick-taker, a fascinating proposition I’ve only encountered in For Northwood!, which I haven’t had a chance to play yet. I was immediately hooked by the idea. How do you translate the muddiness of a trick-taker, the high reactivity of the form, into a solo experience?

Mission Briefing

The goal of the game is to make your way, month by month, through 1943 and into the summer of 1944, the launch of D-Day. You and the German AI opponent take turns playing cards to nine different Tricks, evenly split between fronts in Trondheim and Calais. Each front contains four Tricks, one for each suit in the…

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I wasn’t particularly in the mood for Lanzerath Ridge, to be honest. That’s not to say I wasn’t looking forward to playing the fourth volume in designer David Thompson and publisher Dan Verssen Game’s Valiant Defense series. The second volume, Castle Itter, was at the center of one of my absolute favorite board gaming experiences. It’s just that I have a complicated relationship with solo gaming. The mood strikes occasionally, but the mood has to strike. I don’t casually sit down for a solo game in the same way I would for just about any multiplayer experience.

There are a couple of reasons for this. With smaller solo games, like Warp’s Edge or Under Falling Skies, the experience is apt to become a frantic one. The repetition of the turn cycle gets me keyed up. I rarely leave the table feeling relaxed or fulfilled, even if I won. I still want to play them, because I enjoy exploring the systems, but I’m not positive it’s good for me.

Larger solo games don’t have that problem. They exist in a space that I find incredibly relaxing. I’ve set up a game of Comanchería each of the last two Christmas breaks. I bathe in its relaxed rhythms, the complexity and richness of the choices it offers, and the…

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Pavlov’s House, the first entry in David Thompson’s now-venerable Valiant Defense series of solo tower defense games, is punishing. That’s putting it mildly. The terms of my contract with Meeple Mountain prevent me from using more accurate, more colorful language. I lost my first game handily, and that was with three or four rules errors working in my favor.

Pavlov’s House puts you in charge of the Soviet soldiers who held off a German siege of the titular apartment building during the battle for Stalingrad. Each round consists of three phases, working from right to left across the trifurcated board. You start in the area surrounding the Volga, which runs through the city. Here you will attempt to set up communications networks, ready anti-aircraft and artillery, and send both troops and supplies to the house.

This is all managed by a simple but tense card system. You draw four Soviet cards, each of which features a random two out of eight possible actions, then choose three. You get to perform one action per card you play. You quickly reach a point where…

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I would probably get a good amount of mileage out of talking to a therapist about why I don’t like hidden movement games.

“Hidden movement games?”, Dr. Weschler asks through an unintended sigh.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” I say.

She looks over her glasses. “Clearly we do.”

“One player moves around the board in secret, unseen, while everyone else is trying to find them.”

“Unseen? Do the other players have their eyes closed, or…”

“Usually you have a miniature version of the board and a dry erase marker, maybe a chart. Some sort of log of your movement. Everyone else is out on the board like normal.”

There’s an uncomfortable pause. Dr. Weschler waits. I center my glass of orange juice on the coaster before continuing.

“The hidden player has some sort of goal to accomplish. In Sniper Elite, for example–”

“Oh! I think my daughter has played that,” she interjects. The briefest of shadows crosses her face. “It’s terribly violent, isn’t it?”

“The video game is pretty violent, yeah. Fortunately, it’s hard to carry that sort of thing over to a board game. Fewer cut scenes. I suppose there could be a deck of cards you…

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Released in 2022 by Multi-Man Publishing (MMP), A Victory Awaits: Operation Barbarossa 1941 (or AVA for short) is a simulation of the first three months of the titanic clash between Germany and the Soviet Union.  Designed by Tetsuya Nakamura, AVA is a relatively low complexity hex and counter wargame.  Originally released in Japan as three separate games covering the operations of German Army Groups North, Center, and South, MMP combined them into a single box.  Players can choose to play each of the individual Army Group games or combine them into one linked campaign.

Victory Conditions

To win the Campaign Game, the German player must accumulate at least 191 victory points (VPs) by the end of Turn 9.  VPs are awarded for the capture of each major city hex; 10 VPs if there is a line of communication (LOC) back to Germany or 5 VPs if there is not.  Some major cities start with Stand Fast markers on them which the Soviet player can start removing on Turn 6.  If a hex containing a Stand Fast Marker is captured, it is worth an additional 5 VPs if there’s a LOC back to Germany and 2 if there is not.  In addition, 1 VP is awarded for each Soviet mechanized unit eliminated, and 1 VP for each full-strength German mechanized…

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The Dark Summer is the latest title in designer Ted Racier’s “Dark” World War II series of wargames. The Dark Valley (2013) was the first in the series and covered the war on the Eastern Front. This was followed by The Dark Sands (2018) and The Deadly Woods (2021) on the war in North Africa and the Battle of the Bulge, respectively. This latest installment published in 2021 recreates the D-Day landings and campaign in Normandy, France. So how does it compare with other Normandy games, and should you own a copy?

[caption id="attachment_263144" align="alignnone" width="227"] Box cover[/caption]

The “Dark” Chit Pull System

What all games in the series share is Ted’s innovative chit-pull system that simulates the fog of war and the differences in the operational tempo of the combatants. Using random chit pulls – blindly selecting a counter out of a cup – is certainly not new. Typically, it is used to activate specific formations (regiments, brigades, divisions, corps, etc.) on the board. The activation chits for both combatants are put in a single cup at the start of a turn. Chits are pulled from the cup, so rather than one side activating (i.e., moving and attacking) with all their units, followed by the other side doing the same, units…

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