Nights of Fire is a block wargame, a genre that seems by and large to have fallen out of style. Was it ever in style? I actually don’t know the level of relative ubiquity block wargames achieved.

It seems like a great format. Units are printed on one side of chunky wooden blocks, and typically angled so that a player knows their own units without knowing anyone else’s. Block wargames incorporate bluffing, memory, and dramatic reveals, which are all good things. I feel like blocks should be a fixture of game design. Maybe the problem is that, outside of Stratego, they’ve seldom been attached to approachable games.

[caption id="attachment_295914" align="alignnone" width="1024"] On the other hand, maybe block wargames haven't caught on with the greater public because they're so hard to photograph without professional lighting...[/caption]

Nights of Fire: Battle for Budapest, the second game in a Hungarian Revolution diptych from designer Dávid Turczi and publisher Mighty Boards, aims to address that. While Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 focused on the initial uprising…

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Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 is a cooperative game in which one-to-four players work together during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when students attempted an overthrow of the ruling Communist Party. The game also includes a one-v-all mode, with one player taking on the role of the oppressor. Both play similarly, with only mild differences between them. Since most of my plays were cooperative, I’m going to default to describing that mode.

The fundamentals of the Days of Ire system aren’t too far from Pandemic, the cooperative Allfather. The board is a network of locations throughout Budapest, each filled with potential allies and enemy forces. Players take turns to execute actions with the goal of clearing events and removing Soviet forces.

Player count determines the number of actions each turn. You can move, activate fighters, resolve events, attack militia, destroy tanks, and give/take cards. Some cards have free actions, while others include resources that can be used to resolve the aforementioned events. Say, for example, that an event pops up in the Radio location which requires one Intelligence. You’d need to have either an active fighter at the location with Intelligence…

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The British Empire was having a bit of a time in the aftermath of World War II. To put it succinctly, the empire was crumbling. Colonial subjects had fought alongside the British in WWII, and now they returned home with military training and a sense of self-worth. Those pesky natives, you know. Don’t they appreciate that we brought them crumpets, cricket, and the eternal gift of an inbred’s face on their money?

The British Empire was an exquisite PR machine, telling its citizens and the world that this empire was different, sharing care and civilization with the savagery of the world. Never mind the fact that every empire has told that lie. For some reason, this time, it took. When she died, people were shocked—shocked!—to hear of the things that happened under Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Most people didn’t hear about them at all.

Flip a COIN

The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire is one of the more recent entries in GMT’s popular COunterINsurgency (COIN) series, an ever-expanding collection of titles about guerrilla warfare and resistance movements. I don’t know enough about the politics of the series to delve into that, but I know enough to know that they are a hot-button topic. There is at least…

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I have long been intimidated by Twilight Struggle, GMT’s deservedly if bizarrely successful two-player game based on the Cold War. It is famously inscrutable and famously long. Playing well, as either the United States or the USSR, requires—requires—knowing the many cards in the deck, and the stages during which they might come out. The rules aren’t that complicated, but remembering the difference between a Coup and a Realignment, remembering what happens when you discard a card for the Space Race, remembering how the DEFCON level works…it’s a bit slippery.

“It’s got a lot of rules, it will take three or four hours, and we’ll need to play a few times to know whether or not we really like it” isn’t a winning pitch for most players. My former roommate would certainly have tolerated an effort, because he loves me, but he wouldn’t have been happy. I try not to push my luck on these matters. It’s important to foster an environment where I can say “Hey, uh, do you want to try this crazy thing?” and the other parties trust that I’m taking an informed swing.

In the absence of a corporeal playmate, I downloaded Twilight Struggle's Steam app and tried a few games. I never made it past the second round. The strategy was too obtuse. The…

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Flashpoint: South China Sea, a two-player game from designer Harold Buchanan and publisher GMT Games, is themed around the political tensions between China and the United States of America in the South China Sea. Fundamentally, it is a straightforward area control game, with players taking turns to manipulate economic, diplomatic, and military influence in Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Think of it as tug-of-war on an international scale.

Players take turns playing a card from their hands for one of its four different effects. This is standard stuff for Card Driven Games (CDGs), a family of designs especially popular in wargaming circles. Flashpoint is an especially approachable entry in the CDG canon, so let’s take a moment to get up to speed those who aren’t familiar with CDGs.

Card Driven Games

CDGs are designed around multi-use cards that depict individuals and events related to the game’s setting. The most famous example is almost certainly Cold War favorite Twilight Struggle, which includes cards such…

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What happens when two global superpowers clash without combat? What ideology will infiltrate the intellect of the public populace? Find out in our review of Twilight Struggle.

Important Note: 

Twilight Struggle depicts and utilizes actual events that affected real people. Many of the events described in this game were horrendous displays of the worst of humanity. Many readers may have been personally affected by these events. As with any game depicting actual historical events, it can be easy to forget the atrocities of the past due to the required amount of abstraction necessary to gamify history. Any amount of levity throughout this review should not take away from the gravity of the subject matter. Additionally, I have no intentions to promote ideological or moral superiority for either side represented, nor do I subscribe to the dangerous notion of moral equivalence. It’s important to remember that often when taking a closer look at the history of humanity, we rarely see true “heroes” and “villains.” I believe that Twilight Struggle handles this concept with a great deal of respect, but it is worth remembering that, historically speaking, mankind’s morality is, to say the least, murky. 

Twilight Struggle is a game that attempts to recreate the three historical stages of the Cold War through card-driven area control. However, before we dive into…

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Brotherhood & Unity was released by Compass Games in 2020.  It is a card-driven wargame that uses a point-to-point movement map.  Those who have played other card-driven wargames will see similarities with other games of this style.  However, there are some interesting game mechanics and other features that make Brotherhood & Unity an interesting and challenging game to play. 

[caption id="attachment_217079" align="alignnone" width="231"] Box cover art[/caption]

Historical Context

Before getting to those features, let’s first review the historical situation in which this conflict was fought.  Some may remember specific events from this war, such as the atrocities committed against civilians and the shooting down of Captain Scot O’Grady’s F-16 and subsequent rescue mission.  But sadly, many know little or nothing about this war, let alone the history of the region that has made the Balkans a powder keg for centuries.  Fortunately, the designer includes a brief history in the rulebook.

A province within the Ottoman Turkish Empire, Bosnia and Herzegovina was both ethnically and religiously diverse.  It included several different Slavic peoples who practiced Christianity (Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs), as well as Bosniaks ^[1] who were converts to Islam.  After Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War, administration of…

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Welcome back contestants and viewers alike!  Its everyone’s favorite wasteland giant robot game show.  You may be familiar with the four initial sponsor companies that have been wrecking, tagging and advertising their way to glory for some time now in the arena, but today we have a special treat.  Due to GKR’s great popularity and success, two new companies have decided to join the fray. This means new mechs and lots of new destruction to go around. Now, sit back, enjoy the apocalypse, and don't forget to drink Hapsi! 

GKR is set in the far distant (or perhaps not?) future where an unforeseen apocalypse has occurred with many of mankind's biggest cities have been abandoned. All that remains of society comes under the unchecked control of the big corporations.GKR Heavy Hitters Sweet and Salty expansion adds to the beautiful and beloved main title by adding two new sponsored mech units for players to choose from.  

But not everything is bad in the apocalypse; to keep people distracted from the horrendous living conditions and corruption of leadership, the corporate overlords devised a “game show” where company-sponsored “mechs” battle to destroy and tag buildings with advertising in…

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On the fields of fantastic realms. In the outer reaches of space. WWII and Feudal Japan. On tabletops and flat screens, gamers have fought a lot of wars. But as Galakta Games’ This War of Mine and its video game predecessor remind us, Not everyone in war is a soldier. Some don’t fight for glory. They fight just to survive.

The game puts you in the shoes of some of these non-soldiers, as you pass the time holed up in a collapsing squat, waiting for a ceasefire. Until then, you’ll spend your days crafting makeshift appliances, setting rat traps so there’s protein in your pantry, and combating the cold by burning wood that could have been a bed, or books that could have taken your mind off the misery. When night falls, you’ll send scavengers out to scrape up a meager handful of the supplies you need to survive the next day. If it’s not yet clear, This War of Mine is a bleak affair that earns every second of its 18-years-and-up maturity rating.

Based on a video game of the same name, play passes a bit like The Sims, where the characters you control have constant and shifting needs…

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Do you like wargames but hate the buy in cost and insane number of rules you have to keep track of? Have you always wondered what it would be like if the mechs from games like metal gear solid decided to play Splatoon? Let me introduce you to Heavy Hitters, a fun, digestible mash up of what I love about light deck building customization along with the tactical fun of wargaming.

Heavy Hitters is an amazing offering from the geniuses at Weta Workshop, the special effects company behind Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Blade Runner: 2049. Heavy Hitters is an intense battlefield tactics and area control game with a beautiful table presence that does not take itself too seriously. It has a light theme that always makes me think of a setting if the movies Idiocracy and Pacific Rim had a love child.

The general idea is that you are professional “athletes” piloting giant mechs, competing for sponsorships and fame, on behalf of different mega corporations. You do this by damaging your opponent’s mechs but mainly by tagging the dilapidated structures around the battlefield with your sponsors specific logo on “holo billboards.” If…

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