OK, let’s take a look at what I did play, and what were the highlights. And lowlights. I’ll split this into non-war-games and war-games, before I declare an overall winner, so let’s start with the former.
I didn’t get to play a great deal of non-war-games this year, as discussed in my review of purchases for the year, but here are the highlights:
- 18xx: played 1846, 1861, 1889, 1880, 1856, 1812, 1865, and Railroad Barons (which is similar enough that I’m going to include it in the 18xx category); still my current favorite non-war-game game/series; I wish I could get more of these to the table with my regular gaming buddies, but it’s a challenge to get the time
- iDevices: games played on the iPad, either live or asynchronously; I can see there will be more of this coming in the future
- Umm, that’s about it
OK, so what about the lowlights:
- Card games: Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, Ascension, 7 Wonders; they’re all just meh; yet I’ve played the latter two a fair amount at the Dublin Pub while listening to Doug’s band as they’re mostly multi-player solitaire, so don’t require much in the way of verbal communication, and we know the rules and can just play; Ascension works well as an iOS game, however, as games last only 10-15 minutes, about right for the game play
- Macau: I started out liking this one, but the more I played it the more I disliked it as you have to pick your strategy blind, and the winner is the one that guessed right for the dice they rolled and cards that came out
- 1856: attended the Portland 18xx Convention for the first time, and got sharked by someone who had played 1856 more than 100 times, about 10 times more than the other 3 players put together; after the first OR she declared she had won, and that we might as well stop now; that’s why my regular gaming group tends to play new titles when we do play, as it removes the possibility of the person most familiar with the game using their knowledge to run away with it; I doubt I will attend the PDX 18xx con again
And so to the war-games. Highlights:
- OCS Reluctant Enemies: along with Eric, I put in quite a few hours play testing this new game in the OCS series; I really enjoyed being part of the process, and I look forward to getting a copy of the published game
- OCS Baltic Gap: playing the full campaign game with Chuck; it’s great to see the whole campaign develop
- Strike of the Eagle: a great meshing of block, order placement, and card-driven mechanisms
- Liberty Roads: Chuck declaring that invading in the west was golden, from his solo plays, then kicking his butt when he tried for real; I guess I don’t play quite how his solo opponent plays :>
- Normandy ’44: I’m not a great one for playing games solo, far preferring a live opponent; however, this one I played the whole scenario, it was such a good, fascinating game
- Combat Commander: Resistance: an excellent addition to the series, and the game we played had only 1VP in it; tight
And the equivalent lowlights:
- Fury in the East: some interesting mechanisms in this conversion from the original Japanese game; however, the new English version missed some critical rules, changed others (for the worse), and had the developer shooting from the hip in his attempts to fight all the rules queries, often retracting his rules adjudications after the inconsistencies were pointed out; that’s a shame, because it could be a decent small treatment of the WWII eastern front
- 1914: Twilight in the East: Probably the most accurate operational level treatment of the eastern area of operations in WWI; the pacing, manpower/effectiveness modeling just felt right; however, to achieve this the game just felt like work, and was little fun
- Strike of the Eagle: yet another game marred by an atrocious development job; I’d barely got 2 pages into the rules before I found an example of play that contradicted the actual rule; that did not bode well for the rest of the rulebook, and so it turned out; here is a game that needed another 2-3 months of development and play-testing (especially blind play-testing) as the rules are full of holes and game situations that just aren’t covered, and the play aids contradict the rules; the designer and developer are doing their best to cover the questions on BGG, but this should not have been released in its current form; and next time hire an editor as well as getting people to proof your product before printing; I won’t buy another Academy Games product until it’s hit at least the second edition
And so, from all the above, what is my Game of the Year? Drum roll please…..
Strike of the Eagle, from Academy Games.
Yes, yes, I know the rules are atrocious, and that Academy needs to beaten with a stick for publishing it without adequate play-testing, development, or a good editor, but this is an excellent game. The melding of the block game with the placing of orders and the cards just creates such delicious fog of war and angst over what your opponent is up to that it overcomes the awfulness of the rules. It’s just the fine-tuning from further play-testing to ensure all the game situations that come up are covered in the rules, and the editing of the rules to ensure that those situations are explained correctly and that all terms are clear and unambiguous. You know, the tasks that are normally regarded as part of the development. The good thing is that, unlike Conflict of Heroes, where the base rules changed radically from the first game in the series to the second, the bones of this game are solid. I fully expect the next game in the Fog of War series (as Academy calls it), based in the WWII African desert, to be just a tightening of the existing mechanisms, perhaps with special rules for the theater, not a redo.
So, go play this game. Just don’t buy it until the second edition of the rules are out.