A brief review of the games I played at Airecon 4

Classic Warlord

This is a very simple game for a “Wargame”.

You have a board divided into regions that spread across several maps and the ‘full’ map is made up of 8 A4 size boards and covers Europe, Asia and North Africa.

We played on a 2 board map that just covered Southern Europe/North Africa.

Each player has a bunch of tokens in their colour and they’re all over the Map in connected groups called “Empires’.

At the start of your turn, each Empire gets a number of tokens added to it based on how many large Cities (red areas) and Capitals (yellow circles) are in that Empire.

Then you can move out, leaving at least one token in any region you leave. If you move into a Sea region with opponents’ pieces you remove them automatically and take it over.

Attempt to move into a land area with opponents pieces you attack… combat is simple.

You add up how many units are in the attacking region, select a number on a dice equal to or less than that amount and hide it from your opponent. Your opponent will guess the number but If you attack land from the sea, they get 2 guesses.

If they are correct, you lose that many tokens from the attacking region.

But if they are wrong, you defeat the opponents in that region and move in. You also add a bomb to a Region somewhere in the attacking side’s Empire.

Nukes

If you have bombs (which are Nukes BTW) you can detonate them into neighbouring regions to make them inaccessible, removing all surrounding counters from the board.

The board will get smaller and smaller with radioactive wasteland and eventually, only one army will remain.

Positives

Very simple, yet tactical.

Considering all you do is try and guess the number of the dice for combat, it actually adds quite a bit to the game. There is bluffing, you have an advantage for attacking with multiple units and when you get it right you feel great 🙂

Removable boards make for a flexible game length. (60-480 minutes)

It’s a dudes on a map game I like 🙂

Negatives

The Components, while functional, could use an update.

Summary

Very nice game and I’m glad I got to play it at Airecon 4. I can see why groups have been dedicated to it for 40 years.

Long Live the Queen – Airecon 4

The Queen is dead! Long Live the Queen!

Collect the right number of tokens or flip your opponent’s Queen to win…

To do this, each player has 12 identical cards. They are placed in a row with the Queen in position ‘7’ and the rest face down on numbers 2-12 in any order. The one leftover is kept face down and is used in the game too.

A player rolls 2 dice and activates that number… If the card is face-up the ability on the card activates. Then, if a card on that number is face down, it’s flipped face-up.

If both cards are face up they are activated in order depending on that card’s printed value.

The abilities have you move your cards, flip opponents’ cards face down, and protect adjacent cards from flipping and gaining/stealing/swapping tokens of 1 of 3 types of ‘Prestige’.

One (or two I think) turns into the card that you removed from the row earlier.

To win, flip your opponent’s Queen face down or collect 3 of each type of Prestige token.

But, collect 6 of any one type of Prestige and you lose.

Positives

Interesting, fairly unique tactical gameplay.

It has ‘Hidden Depth’…

Nice art. (Different art styles on the Kickstarter)

Negatives

It’s not great and once again, I would rather play Kamisado.

Summary

Better two-player tactical abstract games are available.

Jesta ThaRogue