RIP Klaus Teuber, the creator of CATAN

The German board game designer Klaus Teuber has passed away at the age of 70. He is best-known as the inventor of the board game Settlers of Catan (more recently, just Catan), often cited as one of the most important board games of all time.

Teuber was born in Rai-Breitenbach in what was then West Germany in 1952 and started designing board games in the early 1980s, whilst he was working a day job as a dental technician in Darmstadt. Inspired by Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, he created the fantasy board game Barbarossa (1988), which was a significant hit and won a coveted Spiel des Jahres prize.

Several more board games followed, with varying degrees of success. Teuber was inspired by Viking stories of colonising, farming and resource-gathering (rather than the more traditional stories of blood-letting) to create a game based around building a new civilisation on an island, both competing and cooperating with fellow players. This resulted in The Settlers of Catan, originally released in Germany in 1995 and the USA and  UK in 1996. The game was an instant, massive success, rapidly outselling all of his other games combined and garnering immense attention in the gaming press. In 1998 Teuber decided to quit his dental day job and incorporated a company to expand the Catan franchise further.

Since the late 1990s, The Settlers of Catan - since renamed just Catan - has sold almost 40 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling board games of all time. Catan has also been celebrated with being the game that jump-started the modern board gaming renaissance; despite its age, the game is still well-regarded as an excellent entry point to the modern genre. The game has seen numerous expansions, various enhanced editions and a whole ton of themed versions taking on franchises like Game of Thrones and Star Trek. A Catan World Championship is also held every two years, along with various online and physical tournaments at conventions across the world.

Teuber himself always seemed vaguely perplexed why the game took off as it did. Neither of the two board games he designed subsequently, Entdecker (1996) and Löwenherz (1997), did anywhere near as well. Teuber has spent most of the years since working on different editions and versions of Catan instead.

Teuber passed away on 1 April after a short but severe illness. He is survived by his wife Claudia and two sons, Guido and Benny. Klaus Teuber's impact on the global board gaming scene cannot be overstated, and he will be missed by everybody who's ever enjoyed rolling dice, dropped a hexagonal island tile down the back of a sofa or gotten into an argument over the value of wood versus sheep.

Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare

One of the most popular two-player board games of the past decade or so is Memoir ’44, Richard Borg’s attempt to combine wargames, board games and those plastic toy army men that kids used to play with. The game was a huge success, shifting millions of copies and spawning numerous expansions (the latest of which, New Flight Plan, drops next month). But if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably sat there at some point and though, "Killing Nazis is fun and all, but what if you could do it in space?"

Memoir '44 is, of course, not the only game (or even the first) to use Borg’s instinctive, card-driven order system. The system, dubbed Command & Colours, has been used to produce versions set in – among many others – the First World War (The Great War), the Napoleonic era (Command & Colours: Napoleonics), the American Civil War (Battle Cry) and in a fantasy land of dragons and elves (BattleLore), the latter of which even spun off a splendid Game of Thrones spin-off version (the hugely underrated Battles of Westeros). So, the system has already show itself to be malleable enough to be applied to numerous different settings. In fact, it may be more surprising that it’s taken so long for a space opera version of the game to appear.

Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare (Command & Colours: Red Alert was probably avoided out of fear of confusing Electronic Arts’ lawyers) is a game of starship combat. As with most Command & Colours games, it is played on a battle map made up of hexagons. Hexagonal tile pieces supplied with the game (and bolstered in expansions) form scenery, allowing you to quickly change and customise maps to make for numerous scenarios. Most versions of the game have tiles representing hills, forests, lakes etc, but this version instead has planets and asteroids. Your units can hide behind this scenery to avoid being attacked by breaking line of sight, or hide inside it to gain bonuses to defence. Red Alert is the first game to make this somewhat hazardous, with dice rolls determining if your ships can successfully navigate the asteroid field without being hit (insert inevitable Empire Strikes Back references here). 

Each side has a fleet of ships, divided into three broad classes (Fighters, Strike and Capital), each in turn divided into several types: Fighters, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers and Flagships. Each type consists of three models (representing the strength of the unit), but can be bolstered to a “Heavy” version with four models. Some scenarios assign you the ships you’ll be using, but most require you to draw a “task force” card at random and then fill up the rest of your fleet through a point-buy system.

Once you’ve assembled your fleet, you assign orders. The map is divided into three sectors, a centre and two flanks. Each side has a certain number of Command Cards, which direct you to order units in certain sectors. For example, a “Probe Right” command allows you to move one unit in the right sector, whilst a “Flanking” card allows you to move 2 units in each of the right and left sectors but not in the middle. Red Alert incorporates the extra card mechanic from BattleLore, with “Combat Cards”. These are special cards which can dramatically bolster your abilities in battle, but have to be activated with “Command Stars” (replacing the “Lore” of the fantasy game). You gain stars at the end of each turn, or through dice results. 

Most commands allow you to move your units can move a certain number of hexes and then attack. Each ship type rolls a different number of dice depending on the range: Fighters roll 3 dice against units in adjacent hexes, 1 dice against units two hexes away and then nothing beyond that; other ships have much longer ranges. The outcome on a die roll tells you what ship type you’ve hit, a generic “blast” symbol (which effects everything, but some ship types can ignore a certain amount of blast damage), a star (which gives you more command points) or a “Red Alert,” which is basically a beefed-up “Retreat” symbol. In a nice twist – and a rule that I must admit I’m considering adding to Memoir ’44 – Red Alert/Retreat only triggers if you simultaneously hit the same unit. No more running away just because reasons, which could get aggravating in some of the other games.

There are some nice additional twists. The Command & Colours system has struggled with the idea of counter-attacking, namely whether units that are attacked should be able to respond immediately. Some versions of the game allow automatic counter-attacking, others simply don’t allow it at all (most notably Memoir ’44) and others have a somewhat confusing system which allows you to counter-attack but only with certain units at certain times. Red Alert’s solution is to allow counter-attacks but only through the use of command stars: if you spend 2 stars, an attacked unit can counter-attack immediately. This adds a nice element of strategy to the game. Do you counter-attack immediately, or hold the stars back to trigger a crafty Combat Card the following turn? 

If you’ve played a Command & Colours game before, you won’t be surprised to hear that Red Alert plays in much the same way. It’s relatively fast, allows a great deal of tactical depth despite fairly straightforward rules and looks fantastic. In fact, the biggest difference between Red Alert and the other games isn’t the rules or theme, but the sheer size of the game.

Red Alert is almost preposterously huge. It’s so huge it doesn’t even have a board, instead having a tablecloth starmap covered in hexes. The game fully expects your average dining room table not to be big enough to hold the game without draping over the edges (and if you want extra space for your cards, tokens and cheat sheets, good luck). In terms of table space, the game takes up at least twice (and possible more) the space of Memoir ’44. The reason for this is simple: the miniatures. 

The miniatures are big, well-designed and very cool. The Commonwealth spaceships are all chunky red cylinders whilst the rebel Confederation ships are sleek green angles. Did I mention big? Fitting four Confederation Battlecruisers into one hex requires some creative manoeuvring. The build quality of the miniatures is exceptional and a long way beyond the “plastic toy army men” feel of Memoir ’44. The stands for the ships could be a bit more robust (and you may want to consider supergluing the stands to the bases), but otherwise the quality is exceptional.

This quality extends to the tokens, which are hard-wearing, colourful and easy to parse, and the cards, which are well-designed, eye-catching and easy to read. I invested in some card holders for the game as it makes life a lot easier, and takes up less room considering how enormous the rest of the game is.

 

And that’s really it. Red Alert is Richard Borg with the training wheels taken off, allowed to indulge himself with large miniatures, a battle map so big it’s verging on the preposterous and a veritable ton of tokens, cards and dice. But the rules are clear and well-thought-out (which they really should be by now, as the rules system turns twenty next year), allowing for gripping, exciting and fast gameplay (scenarios will typically take about an hour to play, rarely a lot more) and lots of moments you’ll be remembering for years, such as when I triggered three Red Alerts on an enemy Heavy Battlecruiser with a Fighter swarm, which scared it off the map altogether, or braved an asteroid storm that destroyed one of my fighters to deliver the killer blow to a decimated Destroyer the enemy was trying to limp to safety, which allowed me to seize enough victory points to win the battle.

The game does have some negatives. Aside from the “challenging” battle map size, the quality of the stands isn’t quite as good as the miniatures they’re sitting on. In particular, using “long stands” for the Destroyers and Cruisers is a weird choice and makes it more likely that some of the stands will snap. I’d prefer it if they used the “short stands” used by Flagships and Battlecruisers for everything, which are far more robust. 

Another problem is the perennial “I don’t have the card to execute this strategy!” issue. Most Command & Colours games are set in pre-modern times with unreliable communications, in the thick of the fog of war, so it makes sense when your units don’t follow up on a successful attack or don’t come to one another’s aid. In a science fiction game set thousands of years in the future which even notes that your ships have FTL communications and even has cards for disrupting enemy communications, this is far less convincing. It would have been interesting to see a bolder reinterpretation of the rules along the lines of Battles of Westeros, which ditches the three-sector approach altogether for “zones of command” around special leader units on the battlefield, which feels like it could have been translated to this game with ease. As it stands, Red Alert is almost exactly the same, rules-wise, as BattleLore in space, and owners of that game may wish to consider if they want a reskinned version with spaceships but needs a much larger amount of space to play. 

The other issue is cost: Red Alert isn’t particularly outrageous by modern board game standards, clocking in at around £80-£90, which is about the same as say Star Wars: Rebellion but with vastly superior-quality components, from models to cards to tokens. However, that is comfortably twice the cost of Memoir ’44 and the game only comes with eight scenarios (half that in the Memoir ’44 base set), which feels a bit skimpy. Unlike Memoir, this game does have the Task Force system, which effectively allows you generate fresh battle scenarios. In addition, I suspect it won’t be long at all before we see lots more official and fan scenarios appearing online. 

Overall, though, Red Alert (****½) is enormous fun to play. It’s spaceships shooting one another, with great rules and quality components. If you do really like it, you also don’t have to wait for more material: the game has launched with no less than six expansions, adding everything from Carriers to Dreadnoughts to Space Platforms and transport ships. There’s also three larger and more robust expansions already firmly in the planning stages, one of which adds a third, alien side and another that will expand on the idea of planetary landings and ground assaults. You can buy Red Alert through all good board game stores and websites (but shop around, as the price is varying significantly from shop to shop at the moment).

The classic DUNE boardgame is being reissued

Gale Force Nine Games have confirmed they are reprinting the original Dune board game released in 1979 by Avalon Hill. Out of print since the early 1980s, the game has been lauded for its tight mechanics and rich theme, a forerunner of the modern board game scene from the same designers as the long-lived Cosmic Encounter.

Gale Force Nine have picked up the gaming rights to Dune and are working with other publishers on content: Modiphius Entertainment are also producing a Dune pen-and-paper roleplaying game and Gale Force are also working on a tabletop miniatures game.

Regarded as a classic of the board game medium, Fantasy Flight Games mounted a campaign to reprint the game a decade ago but were unable to win the rights, instead issuing a clone called Rex: The Last Days of an Empire, set in their own Twilight Imperium universe.

No release date has been set, but Gale Force may be eyeing a mid-2020 release date ahead of the release of Denis Villeneuve's new Dune film, which starts shooting imminently.

RED ALERT: SPACE FLEET WARFARE hits the shelves

If you're a boardgamer or a wargamer, you've almost certainly encountered the name Richard Borg before. A veteran games designer of several decades' standing, Borg hit the big time around the turn of the century with his Command and Colours rule system, most successfully in the WW2 variant, Memoir '44, one of the most popular and biggest-selling 2-player board games of all time.

There are numerous other versions of the game, including ones set in the American Revolutionary War (Tricorne), the American Civil War (BattleCry), the Napoleonic Wars (Command & Colours: Napoleonics), World War I (The Great War) and a fantasy version, BattleLore, which in turn has spawned a Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones spin-off, Battles of Westeros, which is fantastic (but did not involve Borg at all).

One of the most logical directions to take the rules system is upwards, into space, and the latest game in the series is now sneaking onto store shelves in the USA, and is already on wide release in Australia. It should be hitting UK shelves over the next two weeks or so.

Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare pitches the Commonwealth against the Confederation for control of known space, in pitched battles involving battlecruisers, dreadnoughts, flagships, carriers, space stations and fighters. Lots of fighters. Most Command and Colours games are heavily based around terrain, which is less of a thing in Red Alert although there are tokens to represent planets, gas clouds and, in a first for the series, moving terrain tokens for things like comets and asteroids.

Command and Colours' immense success has been down to the fact it always looks fantastic - colourful maps dotted with excellent miniatures or block counters - but is very easy to learn to play. Scenario maps allow you to set up a battle map in minutes. Each map is divided into three sectors, a central one and two flanks. Each player has a hand of cards and on each turn a player may play one card. This card will say something like "Advance right flank" or "Advance 3 units of your choice". There are also special tactics cards which do things like boost your attacking or defensive power. Each ship has its own attack strength and its own abilities and differing amount of hits it can sustain. And that's pretty much it.

The simplicity of the rules combined with the tremendous tactical depth afforded by the rules has made the Command and Colours system thoroughly addictive and compelling, and it looks like Red Alert has hit the same spot.

The game is being released, unusually, with the core box and six expansions in one go. Alongside the core set, the following expansions are available to expand the roster of ships in each fleet and the amount of space phenomena that can be encountered:

• Vice Admiral Flagship
• Carrier Starship
• Dreadnought Starship
• Logistics Ships and Space Platform
• Meteor Storm
• Space Rift

Further expansions are planned which will add at least two additional factions and also allow for planetary assaults and landings.

Once I get my hands on the game, I'll readers know how it plays and if it's worth picking up, but so far it looks very cool, and I suspect enterprising gamers will already be working out how to substitute the existing ships for miniatures from their favourite SF setting (such as Star Wars, Babylon 5 or Mass Effect).

Board Game Catch-Up #2

Following on from the previous board game catchup, here’s a few more games I’ve managed to try out in the last few months. 

X-Wing Miniatures
Fantasy Flight Games

This is a pretty straightforward game: one player has X-wings, the other has TIE fighters (approximately three million expansions are available to change this up, of course) and they fly around a board trying to shoot each other. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail and sometimes they crash into an asteroid or one another in a somewhat anti-climactic fashion.

There is a phenomenon in board gaming called “spectacle gaming”, where the quality of the gameplay itself is rendered irrelevant by how beautiful the miniatures are and how cool they look sitting on the table. X-Wing Miniatures certainly fits into this bracket: the pre-painted spaceships are gorgeous and it’s fun moving them around the board. It’s less fun when your game has been going on for ten minutes and no-one’s managed to hit one another yet because of the dice rolls, or the game ends because someone’s flown their X-wing into an asteroid and can’t avoid it because space in the Star Wars universe isn’t three-dimensional, apparently.

I was a bit disappointed by this one, but the good thing about it is that it’s been enormously popular, meaning the model runs are large enough to make the models very well-priced, so if you want Star Wars ships on your shelves for decorative purposes instead (or perhaps to illustrate a roleplaying campaign), this is one of the best ways of doing that. I would be intrigued to give Armada (which is this game scaled up with capital ships) a go, as I suspect the rules work far better with slower ships, firing arcs and other fun elements from big ship combat. 

Zombiecide: Black Plague

CMON Games/Guillotine Games

Most zombie games employ clever mechanics to make for games of gut-wrenching terror and tension. Zombiecide: Black Plague has no truck with this and allows your team of heroes to run around annihilating zombies like there is no tomorrow. This is basically Hero Quest with zombies and that’s enormous amounts of fun up to a point, when the game starts feeling a little repetitive and a bit too easy. A fun and good-looking game, but not one I’d rush out to buy.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Ragnarok Publications

An amusing card game designed by fantasy author Mark Lawrence, with guest flavour text from authors including Robin Hobb and Wesley Chu. Basically the four horsemen of the apocalypse are rolling into town and the players have to organise things so that they are left standing rather than the other players. There’s some great tension and ideas here, but the game feels a little fiddly in the rules and the quality of the cards could be a lot better, especially given the price. Diverting but not essential.

Exploding Kittens
Ad Magic/ADC Blackfire

One of the biggest Kickstarter successes of recent years, this is fast-paced comical card game where there are kittens primed to explode and players have to avoid getting blown up by them using a battery of comical cards designed for this purpose. The game is funny (in a dark kind of way), with great artwork from the Oatmeal team and allows for some interesting strategy, although it’s still a relatively lightweight game. Good for kids, parties and after-meal entertainment.

BattleLore 

Fantasy Flight Games 

A fantasy take on Richard Borg’s Command & Colours system (also used in Memoir ’44, which we discussed last time and Battles of Westeros, see below), which adds magic, gryphons and undead to the classic C&C gameplay. This is a handsome-looking game with great production quality and some added tactical depth to the C&C rules which makes for a more interesting game, but also a somewhat-longer playing one. This is a very fine game but it does sacrifice one of the main appeals of Memoir ’44, the fast setup and playing time, in favour of somewhat more depth, which arguably it doesn’t quite achieve. As usual, there are also a lot of fairly expensive expansions which you really need to keep the variety and interest up. The game has recently gone out of print, effectively replaced by the somewhat more generic Runewars Miniatures Game, which is a shame.

Fallout: Wasteland Warfare
Modiphius Entertainment

Wasteland Warfare is the second tabletop game based on the Fallout video game, following on from Fantasy Flight’s decidedly underwhelming board game from 2017. Wasteland Warfare is unapologetically a tabletop miniatures wargame whose primary goal is to sell an absolute ton of add-on models, but it cleverly includes enough stuff in the base box to actually work very well as a standalone board game (especially if you access the fan community to download more scenarios and missions). There’s a lot of fun to be had here, especially the mission objectives which are quite varied, but beware getting sucked into the money pit of spending lots of cash on awesome models.

The rules are quite decent (and a major round of applause for including range tokens in the box instead of asking people to bust out rulers and measuring tape), although I think ultimately the game might be more useful as the miniatures component of a roleplaying campaign, with Modiphius rumoured to be working on an RPG behind the scenes. 

Axis & Allies: Zombies

Avalon Hill/Hasbro 

Axis & Allies: Zombies is a variant of the classic WW2 board game which adds zombies to the mix. This initially appears to be gimmicky as hell, but the game remarkably uses the idea to really mix the game up, causing massive land battles to take place where normally there is no combat at all in a regular game (such as the North and South American mainland, or in Africa). The result is a game that overcomes Axis & Allies’ perennial problem – the predictable opening moves of a standard game – and adds fresh life to an old favourite. The game is also excellent value for money, as you can play it as Axis & Allies 1941 (the base “introductory” version of the game) or Axis & Allies & Zombies, and it also includes a deck of cards for use with Axis & Allies 1942 (the current “standard” version of the game) to add zombies to that version as well. An unexpectedly strong game.

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu Z-Man Games

Do you like Pandemic? Do like Lovecraft’s books? Why not mix the two together? This also sounds a bit gimmicky, but the revamping of the Pandemic rules to account of hordes of cultists and shoggoth running around works really well, with you now having to move around several classic Lovecraft locations shutting down portals instead of curing the virus, with the “outbreak” cards instead replaced by a different Old One arising, their influence impacting on the game in different ways.

Rather than being a silly mash-up game, it’s one that cleverly rewrites the rules to accommodate the theme and is a different enough game to warrant some table time alongside standard Pandemic. Nicely recommended.

878: Vikings 

Academy Games

t’s 878 AD and the kingdoms of England are being overrun by invading Danes. It falls to King Alfred of Wessex to unite the people and rally large armies to throw back the Danes into the sea. The result is an excellent team game of strategy. Team games are surprisingly rare in modern board games, which tend to be either co-op (everyone versus the game mechanics) or competitive (everyone vs everyone), with teams often being alliances of convenience with backstabbing not uncommon (see A Game of Thrones: The Board Game or Twilight Imperium). 878 has two permanent alliances with the two players on each side cooperating (to the point of moving each other’s units around) and using their unique faction abilities to bolster themselves on the field of battle.

The result is a fast-moving strategy game with lots of interesting twists and is relatively straightforward and easy to understand.

The Expanse
WizKids

Based on the TV show and James S.A. Corey’s novel series, the Expanse board game reflects the space opera influences of its inspiration by…being a worker placement Eurogame?

The Expanse is one of the odder games based on a licenced property to emerge recently. Each player controls one of the four major factions from the TV show and books (Earth, Mars, the OPA and Protogen) and seeks to build up influence over individual planets, bases and their orbital spaces. Space battles aren’t a key part of the game, although it is possible to build new warships and blow up opponent ships, with instead the focus being on point-scoring. In this manner the game is reminiscent of Catan, Ticket to Ride or Lords of Waterdeep. However, the game’s rather poorly-explained rules make it harder to recommend than those games, which are all faster to setup and play and work the theme into the gameplay much more successfully. The Expanse's rather poor production values - a bland board and murky photography from the show - also feel a bit of a letdown given the game's not-inconsiderable cost.

Still, once the rules were better-understood the game becomes a lot more enjoyable to play, and there are some nice twists on the standard worker placement paradigm, such as scoring only when one of the scoring cards pops up. This makes timing incredibly important in the game, and knowing when to make certain events to happen for maximum impact. It’s still a somewhat fiddly game, it urgently needs a new and better-written rulebook and the theme feels almost incidental (the Rocinante crew “wild card” is rather underwhelming), but there’s enough going on here to make it worthwhile. 

Ticket to Ride: New York

Days of Wonder

Ticket to Ride is one of the very best light or intro boardgames around, a strong title with a fun competitive streak. There are numerous expansions and revisions of the core game, mostly bringing the game to different countries or continents and ramping up the complexity, but New York does the opposite: it streamlines the game right down and the scale with it, being set on a small board depicting New York City.

Ticket to Ride is a pretty light game anyway, so a streamlined version seems redundant. But New York still works, being a fun and small game which works perfectly as a travel game, something you can bust out on a train journey. You can get a game done in under 20 minutes and it's very enjoyable. For home gaming, it's rather unnecessary (and leaves you wanting to play the original Ticket to Ride) but as a travel game it's fun and also impressively cheap.

Battles of Westeros 

Fantasy Flight Games

Yet another game employing Richard Borg’s Command & Colours system, this time in the world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The box proclaims this to be “a BattleLore game,” which is quite thoroughly misleading, as the game has a very different ruleset and is not compatible with BattleLore at all.

This game is worthy of a deeper dive at some point, but briefly this game changes the traditional C&C rules by dumping the three sector approach (where the board is divided between a centre and two flanks) and instead making everything about the leaders. Each faction has at least 2 leader characters who are present on the battlefield and who exert control over a “zone of command” around them. Rather than ordering units in each sector, you instead order units within the zone of command. The game also randomly generates (via dice) command tokens which you can use to order remote units on the battlefield outside any commander’s zone of command.

This approach is then given further depth by each commander having special tactics cards which are mixed into the standard command deck, which adds tremendous variety to the game and to each battle.

This surprisingly elegant system immediately addresses the primary criticisms of the earlier C&C games (that they are too reliant on the right cards coming up) by giving each player much more control over the cards they can use and where they can use them on the battlefield. It also creates more interesting choices as your leaders are also combat units in their own right, but if they are defeated on the field, they can no longer issue orders, so you have to decide between throwing them into the fray or holding them back. The result is much greater and more interesting tactical decisions.

On the downside the game is rather fiddly: you have to manually glue the figures into their bases, there’s a lot of unnecessary tokens and the core mechanic of twisting the units’ flags around after they’ve moved will very quickly result in broken flag poles and flags. I just used fire tokens instead to show when each unit had been activated, which was far easier and quicker.

This game has gone out of print, unfortunately, effectively replaced by CMON Games’ A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures Game, which has much more impressive miniatures but decidedly less engaging rules. Snap up Battles of Westeros (and its expansions) whilst you can.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. SF&F Questions and The Cities of Fantasy series are debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read them there one month before being published on the Wertzone.

WayWord Sisters: A New Board Game Cafe for Dublin

My good friends Lada and Veronika are opening a new board game cafe in Dublin, Ireland, to be called WayWord Sisters. They are running a crowdfunding campaign via Fundit.ie as well as taking out traditional funding.

I've known Lada and Veronika for over three years. They are hardworking entrepreneurs with a lot of experience in hospitality, customer service and board games. They're also geeks of the highest order, and members of the online Song of Ice and Fire community. They once made an epic House Stark-themed sandcastle with Syrio Forel (well, Miltos Yerolemou who played Syrio on HBO's Game of Thrones), which is the kind of geek cred you can't overstate.

Please check out their crowdfunding page, the Facebook community and their Twitter feed, and if you're in Dublin once it's open, remember to swing by and look them up!

A board game catch-up

My home town of Colchester recently opened its first-ever board game cafe, Dice and a Slice, which allows people to try out board games whilst drinking copious amounts of tea or coffee with food. This has provided me with a fine way of trying out lots of board games without having to spend hundreds of pounds, which has been very handy. So here's a look at some of the games I've tried out recently:

Barbarians: The Invasion
Tabula Games

Barbarians: The Invasion can be best described as a death metal version of Settlers of Catan. Each player controls a tribe of barbarians competing for resources (such as iron, treasure and wood) which they can use to muster troops to pillage and ransack nearby civilised kingdoms. The tribes never fight one another, instead competing in a friendly manner to see who can cause the most murder, death and mayhem among civilised folk. Technically it's possible to win by going for economic bonuses, but the victory points you amass from this approach are minuscule compared to those resulting from carnage.

The game's big selling point is the volcano, a three-dimensional model of which accompanies the game. Each player places a figure on each ring of the volcano which determines which actions they are going to to attempt that turn. They can only place figures in a certain linked relationship to the first figure, meaning each player has to carefully plan where they are going to place their figures and what they can do to disrupt their rivals' objectives. In a nice twist, players can sometimes spin the levels of the volcano to throw enemies onto unwanted paths or achieve better outcomes. Each tribe can also build structures for bonuses, worship gods for more benefits and employ a chief with certain skills. If a tribe tires of a chief, they can sacrifice him to the volcano to get even more stuff.

After each go, the players have to either 1) appease a demon who will otherwise rain hellfire down on the tribe in its furious wrath, or 2) go to the pub and chill.

Barbarians: The Invasion is a flat-out insane game which is over-engineered past the point of lunacy and won't use one token when it can use fifteen and three cards instead. I certainly wouldn't recommend buying it - it's very expensive and fiddly - but I'd be happy to play it again if someone busted it out on a games night. Despite its intimidating size, it's a relatively fast and fun game, and worthwhile for someone who likes Settlers of Catan but feels it would be improved by having demons periodically show up.

Survive: Escape from Atlantis
Stronghold Games

Survive: Escape from Atlantis is a reprint of a game that I received as a Christmas present about thirty years ago. It's a very straightforward, fast-paced and fun game. Each player controls a tribe of refugees who are trying to escape from the island of Atlantis before it disintegrates completely. They have to escape by boat to nearby, secure islands, dodging sea monsters along the way.

It's a great game which can be surprisingly ruthless, with players unable to harm one another but they can very easily screw one another over by smashing their boats, or stealing a boat out from under the eyes of another player and so on. It may be the most fun passive-aggressive game ever made.

Taken on its own merits, this edition of the game is very enjoyable and a lot of fun. When you compare it to previous editions, particularly the 1980s original version, it does start to feel a bit skimpy. The original Escape from Atlantis had very well-detailed 3D plastic island pieces and a larger variety of sea creatures (including dolphins and octopuses) as well as allowing for more players. Survive replaces the plastic pieces with flat cardboard hexagons which feels and looks a lot cheaper. It also pulls out the dolphins and octopuses and puts them in an expansion, along with the pieces necessary to take the game to six players, which definitely feels like a price-gouging move given that this is a perfect party game or a game to play with younger players.

If you can overlook this slight cheapness (and to be fair the game is a lot more environmentally-friendly and it is a lot less expensive than other board games), this is a fun, enjoyable game.

The War of the Ring
Ares Games

The War of the Ring is, obviously, a game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. The game attempts to retell the entire story of the War of the Ring, with one player taking command of the free nations (Gondor, Rohan, Dwarves, Elves, the North/Shire and the Fellowship of the Ring) and the other taking command of the forces of evil (Mordor, Isengard and Rhun/Harad).

Both sides are looking to score victory points, the easiest way of acquiring such is by conquering strongholds and cities, which is rather easier for the bad guys (whose armies are huge and regenerate after battle) than the good guys (whose armies are smaller and cannot be replenished once their initial forces and reinforcement pool have been depleted). Complicating things further is that the "good guys" are not a monolithic bloc and at the start of the game are actually very reluctant to go into open war against Sauron. Instead the good player has to expend diplomacy actions to bring the various factions into battle, which is easier said than done.

The trump card for the good player is the Fellowship. Each turn the good player can move the Fellowship secretly closer to Mordor with a very clever hidden movement mechanic. The evil player can expend resources to search for the Ring, but these are resources which will not be available for battles elsewhere. If the evil player does nothing, the Fellowship will eventually reach Mount Doom and destroy the Ring and thus Sauron, winning the game no matter how many victory points the evil player has amassed.

This gives rise to an interesting asymmetric game of choice and consequence. Both players have to decide how much effort to expand on either moving the Fellowship or hunting them down, as the actions expanded on this may also be sorely needed to move reinforcements to Helm's Deep or Minas Tirith, or rally the elves of the Grey Havens to reinforce the Shire against an orc army out of Angmar. This is all somewhat familiar, and indeed a similar system was later used by Fantasy Flight Games for the excellent Star Wars: Rebellion.

There is additional complexity to the game as well: both players have access to Characters (aka "Leaders" as seen in Rebellion) who have powerful abilities. Gimli can rally the Dwarves - arguably the good faction least likely to get involved in the war - to battle, whilst both Strider and Gandalf the Grey can level up (to Aragorn and Gandalf the White, respectively), becoming more powerful and adding new abilities to the fray. Evil has access to characters like Wormtongue, who can effectively paralyse Rohan with his poisoning of the king's ear, and the Witch-King of Angmar, who is a powerful general and opponent, but whose very arrival will rally all of the neutral nations to war.

The War of the Ring is a long and deep game, and I wouldn't want to review it further until I have a few more games under my belt. But so far it's a fascinating game with a lot of different strategies, presented with phenomenal artwork and amazingly detailed miniatures. The main negatives I'd say so far is that the miniatures need to be much more clearly differentiated from one another: finding a reinforcement unit for a particular nation in the heat of the moment can be far too difficult.

Memoir 44
Days of Wonder

I've spoken previously of my enduring enjoyment of Axis & Allies, which tackles WWII from a grand strategy perspective. Memoir 44 takes the opposite approach, tackling a single battle from the conflict at a time. Each battle has different terrain, objectives and forces available to both sides, both in terms of units (usually infantry, tanks and artillery) and command cards.

Memoir 44 uses the "command and colours" system used by Battlecry, Battlelore and numerous other titles, and is very simple. On each turn, each player can play a single card. This card will allow for a certain number of units to be moved in a certain part of the battlefield (either of the flanks or in the centre), usually allowing them to move and attack. For each enemy unit completely destroyed, the winner gains a victory point. Depending on the scenario, 4 to 6 points are needed to win. Additional points can be gained from seizing and holding strategically important chokepoints on the map, like villages or bridges.

The result is a game of strategic punch and counter-punch, with units taking damage and pulling back (to avoid total destruction and giving the enemy a victory point), or sometimes brave charges being mounted to allow your troops to rush into pointblank range to inflict heavier damage on the enemy. The focus here is a fast-moving game - the game has a faster turn-around than almost any other modern board I've played - where you can get battles done in under 20 minutes. The game is so fast to set up and comes with so many battle scenarios that you'll find yourself usually playing 3-4 battles in a single session, and you can string your battles together into campaigns.

Memoir 44 hits that sweet spot of being both streamlined and elegant, but allowing for an immense amount of complexity and depth (resembling that other Days of Wonder classic, Ticket to Ride). There are enormous numbers of expansions for theatres like North Africa and Russia (availability is spotty at the moment, though, with even the base game out of stock on Amazon UK but still available in shops) and optional rules for aerial bombardment and naval assaults, but generally speaking the game is fast, fluid and easy to understand, whilst being tricky to fully master. In that sense, it's the perfect board game, and definitely one of the strongest games I've played.

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First thoughts: Fallout - The Board Game

I find board games difficult to review until I've had a chance to really get into them and play them a few times over with a few different people, so as I did with Star Wars: Rebellion, this is more of an early impression of the game after two games, with a full review to follow at a later date.

Fallout is a one of the most popular video game franchises in existence, starting as a trio of cult roleplaying and tactical combat games in the 1990s and then, under the care of Bethesda Studios, transforming into a massive sales juggernaut. The most recent game in the series, 2015's Fallout 4, sold 15 million copies on its first day of release (as a comparison, that's about the lifetime sales of BioWare's entire Mass Effect trilogy) and almost the same amount again since then, making it one of the biggest-selling video games of all time. As with many such video games, the urge to turn it into a board game was clearly strong and it follows in the footsteps of StarCraft and Doom in heading to the tabletop.

The Fallout Board Game is certainly impressively-designed. The game comes with a number of map tiles which can be arranged to represent one of four distinct locations: Washington, DC (as depicted in Fallout 3), Pittsburgh (from The Pitt), Boston (Fallout 4) and Bar Harbour, Maine (from Far Harbour). Each map is made up of settlements, raider camps and points of interest (usually ruins you can explore for loot). The game can be played for up to 4 players and there are 5 different characters you can choose from to play: a Supermutant, a Ghoul, a Vault Dweller, a Wastelander and a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Just this little fact - that even the last-arriving player has at least a choice of two characters to pick from - shows some thought has gone into making the game welcoming.

The primary role of the game is to gain influence points. The first player to hit the target number of influence points wins. This varies by number of players; 11 points are required to win the 1-player game and 8 in the 4-player game. However, if the game ends before the target is reached, no-one wins. Influence is gained by doing missions for a faction. Each different map location has two factions which are fighting one another: for example, the Institute and the Railroad are the two primary factions in the Boston/Fallout 4 campaign. The balance of power between the two factions, which is also tracked, shifts due to player actions. Should a faction achieve dominance, it wins and thus ends the game; if this increases a player's influence points beyond the target, they also win; if not, the game ends with no winner.

This mechanic immediately makes it clear that players must be careful in how they proceed: blindly supporting one faction, perhaps because they agree with their philosophy, may help that faction but work against the player's interests. Players may instead choose to play both parties against one another and profit from the resulting chaos, which is great if you're that kind of player but if not, it can be a bit odd. The game feels like it forces you to be a Machiavellian, selfish mastermind regardless if that's how you want to play or not.

Missions and objectives are undertaken via a ridiculously massive deck of cards. These cards act like quests in the video games: you usually blunder into a situation, get an objective and then follow it through which leads to successive quests. In the game's oddest quirk, individual players pick up quests, but all players can follow the quest and resolve it. To put it mildly, this doesn't many sense and it can get extremely frustrating for a player to pick up a good storyline, try to follow it through only for another player to not only complete the line, but do it for the rival faction and screw over the narrative. In some quests - where it might make sense for another player to blunder into a situation and upset the apple cart - this makes sense, but in most it doesn't. The game also never reveals how other players even know what quest another player has picked up on the other side of the map.

This goes to the biggest flaw of Fallout: The Board Game: it never really resolves if it's a cooperative game, a competitive one or an outright antagonistic one. Players can't attack or kill one another directly in combat, but they're also not friends, as only one player can win. Players can swap or barter equipment with one another when they're in the same spot but their interactions are otherwise indirect: one player might be supporting the Institute and pushing things along and another player comes along and interferes with the quest and helps the other side out. If the game was more overt about the player relationship with one another this might work, but since it isn't, it doesn't. The game feels like it's four players each playing their own game where the only way they can interact is screw one another over, often illogically.

The game does work quite well when it focuses on the survival/scavenging element. Exploring ruins, getting into combat and "levelling up" your character are all very satisfying. However, the exploration element and the quest element feel a little bit in conflict: spend too much time scavenging and levelling up and other players focusing on the story quests will pull ahead; spend too much time focusing on the story and you may find yourself lagging behind in strength and capability. Given that the game can end very abruptly - the number of influence points you win for completing objectives can vary rather unexpectedly - it's possible for players to get into the game, not achieve very much and then the game ends. The length of the game is also an issue: for the first time playing a Fantasy Flight game, I felt that it was a little short. There's not enough time to get into a really meaty, absorbing game mixing story and combat and scavenging. FF clearly wanted a two-hour game to attract more casual players familiar with the video game universe. Games can go longer than two hours, but it requires people to deliberately work towards that by avoiding completing objectives, which feels artificial.

Fallout: The Board Game ultimately feels like a game where the theme has been allowed to overwhelm gameplay. Too many systems in the game are there to make the board game feel like the video game, which begs the question as to why the player shouldn't just go off and play the video game, especially as the biggest difference - the multiple players - feels like it's been tossed in with no forethought. This is a shame because the game does atmosphere quite well, the exploration and combat mechanics are fun and the actual choose-your-own-adventure story part of the game is solid. It's just that, right now (and Fantasy Flight will likely be throwing us an expansion or three sooner or later), the game's systems don't feel like they've integrated together very well into a cohesive whole.

I'll play a few more games and see if greater familiarity with the game and playing different scenarios improves my impression of the title.

Franchise Familiariser: Axis and Allies

One of the most notable and popular board games around is Axis & Allies. Originally released in 1981, the game was designed to depict the full scale and scope of World War II in a concise board game form but with greater complexity and depth than Risk, the then-dominant popular wargame. Since its release almost forty years ago, the game has sold many millions of copies to become one of the most popular board games of all time.

However, several changes of ownership, several edition changes and the release of a series of related-in-name-only spin-off games have left the casual gamer potentially confused over which edition to pick up or check out. If you fall into this bracket, this Franchise Familiariser may be of some use.

A game of Axis & Allies Anniversary Edition in progress. German units are shown in black, British units in tan, Russian in red and Italian in brown. American and Japanese forces not shown.

The Basics

Axis & Allies is a series of board games which attempts to depict major military conflicts (predominantly World War II) from a military and economic perspective, but in a relatively straightforward and streamlined manner. The Axis & Allies franchise is at heart a deliberately asymmetric game which intends to replicate (in broad strokes) the key difference between the two main sides in the Second World War: the Axis powers start the conflict with enormous and formidable military forces, but if the Allies can withstand their initial onslaught, their superior economic might will, in the long run, turn the tide of the conflict. Whilst modern board games attempt to reduce the role of randomness by substituting card choices for dice rolling, the Axis & Allies games revel in rolling enormous numbers of dice. The dice mechanic is very simple: the game uses a standard six-sided dice and you want to roll as low as possible to inflict enemy casualties.

Games of Axis & Allies usually revolve around the combined use of ground troops (infantry, artillery and tanks), air forces (fighters and bombers) and naval units (submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers and transports) to win battles and seize territory. Territory zones have an economic income, which allows the victor to increase their supply of money and buy more units for the next turn. Victory goes to the side which achieves either an unassailable position (agreed by mutual consent) or seizes its military objectives, usually key cities and enemy capitals.

The core factions of each game are the Axis and Allies. Most editions of the game feature the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and United States as the Allied side with Germany and Japan forming the Axis. Some editions of the game adjust this, introducing Italy as a third Axis side and China, the ANZAC forces (Australia and New Zealand) and the Free French as additional Allied factions. Depending on the edition, the game can be played by anything from two to nine players, although nine would be considered excessive (and the ANZAC, French and Chinese players would have relatively little to do). The most common variant is a four-player game with one player controlling each of Russia, Germany and Japan, and a fourth player controlling the USA and UK.

Recently the franchise has expanded to cover the war from three levels of play (beginner, intermediate and advanced), as well as developing spin-off games of varying quality, from the very well-received World War I 1914 to the poorly-received Guadalcanal. There are also video games inspired by the series and a more hardcore miniature wargame which shares the name.

The traditional Axis & Allies logo.

The Series

The Axis & Allies series consists of the following games:

The Core Game

• Axis & Allies (Nova Games Edition, 1981)
• Axis & Allies Classic (1984)
• Axis & Allies Revised (2004)
• Axis & Allies Anniversary Edition (2008)
• Axis & Allies 1941 (Beginner's Game, 2012)
• Axis & Allies 1942 (Intermediate Game, 2012)
• Axis & Allies Anniversary Edition, Second Printing (2017)

Individual Theatres

• Axis & Allies: Europe (1999)
• Axis & Allies: Pacific (2001)
• Axis & Allies: Pacific 1940 (2009)
• Axis & Allies: Europe 1940 (2010)
• Axis & Allies: Pacific 1940, Second Edition (2012)
• Axis & Allies: Europe 1940, Second Edition (2012)

Spin-Offs

• Axis & Allies: D-Day (2004)
• Axis & Allies Miniatures (2005)
• Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge (2006)
• Axis & Allies: Guadalcanal (2007)
• Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures: War at Sea (2007)
• Axis & Allies: WWI 1914 (2013)
• Axis & Allies & Zombies (2018)

Video Games

• Axis & Allies (turn-based strategy game, 1998)
• TripleA (2001)
• Axis & Allies (real-time strategy game, 2004)

Franchise History

Larry Harris (1948- ) is the son of Lawrence Holiday Harris, Snr. (1920-2010), a former US infantryman who fought in the Pacific Theatre of WWII, taking part in battles at the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Philippines. Harris himself saw military action in Vietnam, serving with the 82nd Airborne Division.

Harris developed the original Axis & Allies for Nova Games in 1981, inspired by long talks with his father over his military service. Harris was inspired to create a WWII game which was more complex and true to history than, say, Risk, but was still approachable and easier to play that a detailed, full wargame. In 1984 he re-released the game through Milton Bradley as part of their "Gamemaster Series". This edition of Axis & Allies, known known as the "Classic Edition", became iconic for its colourful map and strong theme. This edition sold over a million copies by itself.

Harris moved on to develop other games (including Thin Ice in 1989) and for some years resisted revisiting his best-known game. In 1999 he relented and released a much more focused version of the game, concentrating solely on the European Theatre. In 2001 he did the same for the Pacific. After experimenting with a series of spin-off games using all-new rules and focused on single battles, not to mention a miniatures of game of dubious connection to the main series, Harris and his team (now working for Avalon Hill, an off-shoot of Hasbro) returned to the original game in 2008, releasing a series of new editions for all levels of play, as well as re-releasing the European and Pacific variants in new editions which could be combined into one massive new game of unparallelled size and scope (featuring over 1,000 miniatures).

More recently, the team has been working on spin-offs which actually use the core Axis & Allies rules but in new settings, resulting in Axis & Allies: WWI and Axis & Allies & Zombies (2018). Future games which take the Axis & Allies gameplay into new settings are also in the planning stages.

Axis & Allies: Nova Games Edition (1981)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Battleships, Nuclear Bombs.

The original Axis & Allies was released in 1981 by Nova Games. This version of the game is noted for its paper map and its use of counters rather than miniatures. Despite its primitive presentation, the gameplay is surprisingly close to that of the "classic edition". The biggest and most startling change is the presence of a nuclear bomb: each side can research nukes either as an alternative win condition or to actually use (the nuke obliterates every unit, friendly or hostile, in a single game space). Later editions of the game removed the nuclear bomb, although some house rules sometimes incorporate the race to acquire a nuke as an optional win condition.

Axis & Allies: Classic (1984)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Battleships.

The classic edition of the game was released by Milton Bradley in 1984 and remained in print for almost twenty years. This version of the game remains iconic for many people due to its colourful, well-delineated world map and its relatively straightforward gameplay. Aside from getting rid of the nuclear bombs, this edition didn't change too much apart from introducing a tech tree where each side could develop new and better weapons as the game progressed, such as heavy tanks, V2 rockets and jet aircraft. Later editions of the game either removed or reduced this aspect of the gameplay.

Axis & Allies: Europe (1999)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany.
Units: Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Battleships.

The first theatre-specific edition of the game focused on Europe and North Africa. This version of the game is arguably the bloodiest - the German and Russian players can expect to lose dozens upon dozens of units apiece in the fighting on the Eastern Front - but also arguably the most strategically interesting, with various variant strategies available (including the Axis diverting more troops to the Middle East or the UK mounting an assault on Norway). This edition of the game also introduced artillery, which dramatically improves the effectiveness of infantry in attacking, and destroyers as an urgently-needed counterbalance to German submarines. These improvements would be incorporated in most future editions of the game.

This game also features some cities which are entire spaces on the board by themselves (Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad) and convoy routes which the Axis player can raid with U-boats to interrupt the flow of resources to the beleaguered UK and USSR.

Axis & Allies: Pacific (2001)
Factions: UK, USA, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Marines, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Battleships.

This version of the game focuses overwhelmingly on the Pacific Theatre, naval combat and the clash between the Allied powers and Japan. This version of the game introduces Marines (as special troops with a bonus for storming islands) and Naval Bases (which give naval forces a boost to movement). Although very popular, this edition of the game has some problems, most notably the simplistic combination of India, Australia and New Zealand under the British banner and the US player taking control of Chinese forces.

Axis & Allies: Revised (2004)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Battleships.

The third edition of the core game is also the least popular. The introduction of the new rules from the theatre games into the base game - such as destroyers and artillery - are welcome, but this version of the game features a particularly hideous world map which is not enjoyable to play on.

Axis & Allies: Anniversary Edition (2008, 2017)
Factions: UK, USA/China, USSR, Germany, Japan, Italy.
Units: Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships.

Released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Avalon Hill Games, Axis & Allies: Anniversary Edition was the first attempt to create a "big" version of the standard game. The game takes place on a map which is over 33% larger than the original with many more territories. It also adds Italy as a sixth faction and introduces new rules for China (which is still controlled by the US player, but is now handled as a separate military power). The game also expands the "victory city" idea, identifying 18 cities which are of strategic value. The first faction to capture a certain number of cities wins. This edition also retains the tech tree from the Classic edition that was omitted from later versions of the game. The only new unit introduced is the Cruiser, which sits between a Destroyer and Battleship in capability.

This version of the game has been cited by many Axis & Allies fans as the definitive version of the game. Out of print for many years, it was recently re-released in 2017 and, at this time of writing, remains on general release.

Axis & Allies: 1942 (2009, 2012)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships.

The new "standard" edition of the game, replacing the unloved Axis & Allies: Revised and Axis & Allies: Anniversary Edition (when the first printing sold out). This game features a new, more realistic map and incorporates Cruisers from the anniversary edition, as well as new, faction-specific sculpts for units (rather than everyone using the same tank and same bomber models, etc). A welcome return to form for the core game, praised for its presentation. However, this edition of the game has been criticised for unclear territory boundaries on the map, cardboard tokens for factories (rather than the plastic units of previous editions) and the removal of bank notes from the game to allow players to track their money, not to mention a highly inadequate number of provided dice.

Axis & Allies: Pacific 1940 (2009, 2012)
Factions: UK, USA/China, ANZAC, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Mechanised Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Tactical Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships.

A revision of the 2001 Axis & Allies: Pacific game, this edition features a greatly expanded role for China (in line with the Anniversary Edition) and introduces the ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand) forces as a distinct faction. 

Axis & Allies: Europe 1940 (2010, 2012)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, France, Germany, Italy.
Units: Infantry, Mechanised Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Tactical Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships.

A major revision of the original 1999 Axis & Allies: Europe game, this edition is similar but also incorporates most of Africa (rather than just the northern coast) and adds some improvements in the form of mechanised infantry, tactical bombers, airbases and naval bases. This game also features an earlier starting position, with Germany considerably weaker than in the original game and with more work to do, as France is still extant and needs to be defeated before the Axis turns its attention towards the Soviet Union.

Axis & Allies: Global 1940 (2010, 2012)
Factions: UK, USA/China, USSR, France, ANZAC, Germany, Italy, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Mechanised Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Tactical Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships

Axis & Allies: Global is not a separate game but is instead created by combining the Pacific 1940 and Europe 1940 boards and units into one massive map almost six feet in length. This version of the game can be best described as the "ultimate" Axis & Allies experience, with over 1,000 plastic miniatures and eight factions (with potentially nine players, as the USA and China can be played separately). With a play time of 10 hours, this is a game for players with lots of time on their hands and an urge to go truly epic with their game.

Although undeniably impressive, this version of the game is possibly a bit "too much" due to the overwhelming number of units and the huge number of territories on the map which can result in dead spans of time in which not much happens. In addition, whilst you can go for nine players, the people playing China and France may find themselves with not much to do. This version of the game should be approached with the same caution reserved for tackling, say, Twilight Imperium with half a dozen players.

Axis & Allies: 1941 (2012)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Battleships.

With each edition of Axis & Allies getting bigger and more insane than the previous one, someone at Hasbro had the brainwave of developing a "back-to-basics" version of the game. This version of the game is stripped back and streamlined: Cruisers and Artillery have been dumped, most of the optional rules have been junked, the map is much smaller and there are far fewer territories, which are now also larger. The focus is on the five original factions and the idea is to get games done and dusted in two hours or less.

This version of Axis & Allies is fast-moving and short-lived, perfect for game nights where people want to get several different games down or for beginners just starting out in learning the game. With far less features, options and units, the game is also exceptionally cheap, going for a quarter of the price of Anniversary Edition or a third of 1942.

Axis & Allies: WWI 1914 (2013)
Factions: British Empire, USA, Russian Empire, France, Imperial Germany, Italy, Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia.
Units: Infantry, Artillery, Tanks, Fighters, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Battleships.

The first attempt to depict a different time period with the core Axis & Allies rules, WWI 1914 is a major success. The game depicts trench warfare through a very simple mechanic: instead of units constantly attacking one another until the battle is won or lost (as in the standard game, to depict fast-moving battles taking place over weeks or days), only one exchange of fire takes place, allowing players to pour more troops into an ongoing battle in a static line. This allows players to fight battles lasting many months for relatively small amounts of territory, which is historically accurate (whether it's fun or not will depend on the players and their ingenuity in how they overcome the stalemate). Optional rules can bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union through the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the early entry of the USA into the war in force.

Axis & Allies & Zombies (2018)
Factions: UK, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan.
Units: Infantry, Tanks, Fighters, Bombers, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Transports, Destroyers, Battleships, Zombies, Zombie Control Ray, Chainsaw Tanks, various new units (unconfirmed).

Axis & Allies & Zombies is the forthcoming, and possibly inevitable, first edition of the game to add zombies. Adding zombies to WWII has always been a (somewhat inexplicably) popular idea in film and other games, so seeing them show up in an Axis & Allies title is predictable, but possibly interesting. The game will apparently be based on the 1941 edition, with a focus on fast play, and will see the standard WWII game interrupted by the arrival of zombies, who are a force of nature (not under anyone's control). A new card mechanic will allow players to destroy zombies or possibly funnel them towards the enemy, whilst new units like chainsaw tanks and zombie control rays will make for new and interesting strategies. A gimmick? Sure, but potentially a fun one. The game will be released in time for Halloween this year.

Larry Harris's next game, War Room, is a ground-up reinvention of the WWII war/board game with a focus on diplomacy, morale, resources, propaganda and terror weapons, all of which are missing from the more streamlined Axis & Allies.

The Future

Axis & Allies is an older game, but it's popularity remains undimmed. The key to the game's long-term appeal has been how it recreates WWII in broad strokes that are surprisingly accurate whilst not going in the direction of being a hardcore wargame. The game has been credited with inspiring a greater interest in the conflict and encouraging people to read up the actual history of what happened, which was (and remains) one of Larry Harris's original goals. Since Hasbro took over the franchise, there has been some concern of over-exploiting it, with the number of different editions currently available being potentially too confusing (my advice: buy 1941 if you're a total newcomer with limited time, Anniversary Edition if you want a good all-round experience, 1942 when Anniversary Editions goes out-of-print, and the Pacific/Europe 1940 combo if you're a hardcore, experienced Axis & Allies player with lots of gaming time available). Axis & Allies & Zombies could be fun, but it may be a sign of the bottom of the barrel being scraped, although I must admit I'd be totally down for a well-designed Axis & Allies: Middle-earth or a Game of Thrones variant.

Larry Harris's next game is potentially more interesting. Many of the criticisms of Axis & Allies stem from its limited economic model (which ignores resources such as oil and metals), the absence of diplomacy (although that does make sense, as the game opens with the war in full swing) and factors such as propaganda, resources and weapons of mass destruction. Introducing these elements to the existing game would create a confusing and unbalanced mess, so Harris has sensibly designed a new game from the ground up incorporating these elements. War Room is the result of that design process. The game is superficially similar to Axis & Allies, but features more factions (the UK, USA, USSR, China, Germany, Japan and Italy are the base factions), resource types (such as oil and iron), trade (between allies and with neutral nations) and morale (defeats overseas may trigger unrest at home).

Featuring a large circular map and lots of new features, War Room was successfully funded on Kickstarter last year to the tune of half a million dollars and we should see the game on the shelves in the next year or two. Whether it's any good or not remains to be seen, but it's good to see the spirit of Axis & Allies is still alive and being furthered by its creator.


See Also

A handy tool for Axis & Allies fans is TripleA, an open-source video game based on the board game which features a large amount of variant rules and ideas. This is useful for both practice (although make sure you're using the game version which matches the correct edition of the board game), and playing with friends who live far away.

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