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Commands & Colors: Ancients Expansions 2 & 3 Review

September 25, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower Leave a comment

cca23 Britain is pockmarked with standing stones. On a recent holiday we passed them in a dozen different sites. High on windy hillsides or perched above rocky bays, the waves seething over jagged rocks beneath. I love to touch them, to touch my history. They feel like the bones of the country, smooth yet pitted.

Traces of their makers cover the landscape like a swirling tattoo. Hill forts, barrows, buried hoards of gold. Yet they do not speak to me. Their brash Roman conquerors do. Julius Caeser wrote books. His legionaries wrote letters, pleading for thick socks and underthings against the bitter British climate. I had long hoped I might find the voices of the Britons in some forgotten thing. A squashed coin perhaps, or a rusted sword hilt.

I have found them now, in a most unexpected place. In a box, fashioned from green wood and decorated with gaudy stickers.

They are not always Britons. Sometimes they masquerade as Gauls or ancient Germans. It matters little. All these peoples shared a culture, all contributed to my culture and all them were silenced. Their voices drowned out by the shouting of their conqueror, Rome.

At first, Commands & Colors: Ancients seemed a strange place to find them. With its emphasis on lines, leaders and structure, it felt a poor fit for this rabble of proud barbarians. They should be rushing the enemy, half naked and ululating, not trying to scrabble together adjacent units for a line command. I couldn’t see how the system would accommodate them without a lot of extra rules.

The answer is simple. Barbarian armies rely on light units, chariots and warriors. Against them, their Roman empire foes are from the legionary era, with its backbone of heavy infantry. Embellished with the new Marian Legions rule which gives them missile fire to represent their pilums, they are a terrifying force.

The result is a perfect ballet of asymmetry. The Roman army can function like a well oiled machine – providing its commander has a bit of luck and a lot of skill with command cards. The barbarians can’t hope to face them in formal battle lines. Instead they must rely on their maneuverability, flexibility and the momentum advance of the warrior units.

Not that it does all that much good. It’s difficult in many of the scenarios for the barbarians to win. Trying offers a tiny taste of the terror they must have felt. Rough men with rough weapons charging down the most effective military machine of the ancient world. A human tide breaking on a wall of iron.

You might ask why they bothered. The vast contrast between the stickers and capabilities of the two armies offers a clue. These cultures were profoundly different. The barbarians fought to protect those differences. Because they wanted to worship at stone circles under the open sky, not austere temples of marble.

It’s not all about the barbarians. Julius Caesar makes an appearance, alongside his formidable tenth legion. There are special rules to make them appropriately fearsome. There is Spartacus, too, and other slave revolts. They’re allowed to roll burning logs onto the enemy in a unique area-effect attack. When it’s resolved, the slaves themselves lose a block which has to be one of the most appallingly expressive rules I’ve ever seen. It reeks of desperation; and woodsmoke.

The Romans get their own scenario booklet, detailing the brutal civil wars the marked the end of the republic. These are similar to the existing scenarios of Greece and the Punic Wars in terms of the forces offered. There are some new terrain tiles to throw in.

And even though they happened far away, they have their own immediacy. These were not far-flung conflicts in Africa or private violence between city states. These battles were pivotal in western history. Had they gone otherwise, it could have been Mark Antony or Pompey wading ashore at Dover, or no-one at all.

There are over forty new scenarios here. Thanks to subtle use of terrain and novel elements, they offer huge diversity. In place of the blank battlefields of the original there are marshes and coasts, villages and ramparts. Rather than faceless light, medium, heavy toops there are the stoic Legionaries of popular imagination. Waiting in silence as painted devils descend on them from the fog.

I have played wargames where British soldiers fought on British soil from the Wars of the Roses to Operation Sealion. But none felt as personal or evocative as this. With a minimum of rules, these expansion scenarios give voice to a long dead people. They allow us to touch their vanished world like we touch their standing stones. There’s little more one can ask for a conflict simulation.

Cracked LCD- Navajo Wars in Review

March 6, 2014August 1, 2020 Michael Barnes 1 Comment

navajo

Joel Toppen’s Navajo Wars: A History of the American Southwest, 1598-1864 is the story of the slow-motion apocalypse of a people. The game is, as you might guess from the title, about the Navajo (Dine) people of the American Southwest and their struggle to maintain their families, culture and ways of life in the face of Spanish, Mexican and American encroachment. Long before Kit Carson comes onto the scene during the Civil War to rope the Navajo onto a reservation, it’s clear that this is not a battle the Dine are going to win. This is, quite wilfully, a game about the twilight of these people and your success in guiding their fate is measured by a degree of inevitable failure. The game has much in common with other card-driven wargames in that specific historical beats, personalities and turns of events are unavoidable and your ability to anticipate and mitigate the script of history is critical. But it doesn’t really play like anything descended from We The People.

Mr. Toppen’s take on the subject is unusually sensitive, heartfelt and compassionate. He believes the Dine can survive, even if the history states otherwise. And as someone that has grown up in and around the Navajo people as they exist today, he’s certainly a qualified observer of their traditions and values. There is a palpable sense of respect in this game, a passionate sense of understanding that this game is about families more than it is about armies. Planting or harvesting corn, having children, seeing people grow old and die, moving to more arable land and listening to the wisdom of an elder talking down a particularly ferocious bunch of raid-happy braves are some of the smaller yet more profound moments of this game.

It’s designed as a solitaire experience- Mr. Toppen explicitly states in his notes that he didn’t want one player to have the extermination or subjugation of the Dine as a goal. So instead, he designed an absolutely brilliant mechanic that automates the opposition. It’s a fairly complicated system, but the short version is that it operates on a sequenced series of chit activations that determine what your Spanish, Mexican or American adversaries are going to do. They might conduct raids, build missions, attempt to subjugate, or even do nothing during periods of relative piece. This system works in concert with a cube drawing mechanic that reflects the effects of raiding and occasional die rolls so that it’s never completely predictable.

The kicker is that certain effects might cause these chits to flip over or move in their sequence, effectively simulating an intelligent adversary that adjusts plans according to the player’s actions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it “feels” like playing against a live opponent, but it does generate a sense of shifting priorities, simulated tactical judgment and shifts in long-term agendas. It’s a distant cry from the usual “whack a mole” card flipping or triage-based activation systems that drive most solitaire games.

There is a cooperative option, but to be honest I didn’t even try it because I didn’t think it looked particularly interesting. I think this is a game that is actually best experienced by yourself. Freed form the social expectations of tabletop gaming, you’re better able to dig into the game’s very complicated mechanics and rich story. And frankly, I think you kind of need that space because this is not a simple game in any way. It’s not one of those that’s “actually pretty simple once you get the system down”. The rules are reasonably easy to grasp and a playbook tutorial is an absolute must. But once you’re in the wilderness with this game, pouring over its charts and flowcharts, flipping through the player aids, and referencing the rulebook at almost every turn the last thing you want is to feel responsible for someone else’s fun.

In addition to the amazing AI system that makes this one of the more robust single player options available, there are other absolutely brilliant mechanics at work. In particular, I love that certain benefit cards (Blessing Way) cards can be held in the hand but they are a liability. If a card comes up that activates the Enemy Way that is on every Blessing Way card, you’re hit with a negative effect. It’s a great decision point- hold on to a valuable card at risk. The familial systems are smart, simple and appropriately abstract. Men can lead the kinds of raids and counter-raids that typified the conflict of the titular Navajo Wars. Raiding a lot increases your family’s ferocity and lowers their ability to evade when interlopers conduct raids of their own. Women produce trade goods. Children grow up- or they might be captured in one of the nasty slave raids that occurred during this period. All may become elders, in time. The sense of organization and community is handled at the highest level, but it imparts a strong sense of who these people were and what their drives were.

There’s just so much to this game. Managing morale. Balancing the military footing of the Dine versus their cultural level. Dealing with the effects of drought. Feeding your people. Raiding to try to get horses or sheep. Trading with local forts or tribes. Developing cultural advancements. Fighting (or evading) battles. Dealing with random encounters. And there’s always the need to mitigate the effects of looming historical events that can seriously alter the course of the game.

All of the above means that Navajo Wars is a very complicated game with complex, interlocking systems. It can be quite intimidating and at times even rather opaque. And then there’s the fact that playing it one thing, but playing it correctly is another. Playing it well is another proposition. It is most definitely not a game to pop open, punch, and get to playing the first night you bring it home. After playing through the tutorial, several false start games, quite a few abandoned ones and just a couple of complete to-the-bitter-end ones I still feel like I don’t have a handle on how to win it. I’m still not even able to sit down to play without having the rulebook and player aids open the entire time. But it feels worth the effort (and wading through its fussy administrative processes) because playing Navajo Wars is mostly a sublime pleasure punctuated by moments where not only do you get it, you get how profoundly impactful and resonant this game and its historical narrative can be when it is at its best .

Fittingly, I think it’s one of the best-looking titles GMT has produced to date, a handsome game that captures the spirit of the people and their story. I love that the family member chits have actual photographs of Navajo on them. The board looks like the work of a Navajo craftsman, with simulated materials like polished stones to mark each of the point-to-point geographical areas. The look is appropriate because everything about this game feels carefully handcrafted, meticulous and detailed.

I haven’t reviewed a GMT game in quite some time, even though I strongly believe that they are one of the most consistent and valuable publishers working in hobby games today. You can always count on a GMT game to not only be well-supported, but also immaculately presented with great rules writing and clear, concise graphic design. By sticking to historical and real-world topics, I’ve found that GMT’s titles are among those most likely to get into some of the more interesting possibilities of game design. My 2010 pick for Game of the Year, Labyrinth, for example, was a brilliant analysis of the War on Terror with a very specific political perspective that invites the player to engage the content and participate with the designer in not just creating a hypothetical construct of possible military outcomes but also in exploring the social, cultural and political aspects that define the great conflicts of history.

For me, this holistic view of history is what defines GMT’s top games and distinguishes them from the more traditional “conflict simulation” titles. It’s one of the knock-on effects of the influence of card-driven wargames over the past decade and a half, this notion of wargames telling broader, more inclusive stories far beyond the hex-and-counter games of the 1970s and 1980s. Not that games focused on battles, troop movements and so forth are somehow lesser. But every so often GMT releases a game that is more than that, something that reaches for a more widescreen view of history. A game like Labyrinth or Twilight Struggle. Navajo Wars, a game that I took the liberty of listing as one of 2013’s Barnes’ Best before a formal review, is one of these landmark titles.

Fading Glory Review

June 14, 2013August 28, 2022 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

I’ve always wanted to like traditional hex and counter wargames more than I actually do. The idea of recreating the strategic intricacies of historical battles is wonderful, but the execution too often involves hundreds of counters, irritating mental maths and quickly becomes dry and stolid. The aspect of Generalship they seem to reward is logistics rather than strategy.

Enter Fading Glory. It’s a collection of four scenarios based on Victory Point Game’s Napoleonic 20 series which is simple to learn, has no more than 20 counters per side, and will play in an hour or two. It’s been given a visual makeover by GMT who’ve added lovely art, mounted boards and a new scenario, Salamanca, not in the original VPG lineup.

It’s a luscious package, a cut above the bland art and drab components that most wargames are saddled with. Unfortunately the revision process has completely screwed up the rules. It really isn’t a difficult game but with rules sections that are never used, discrepancies between the rulebook and the player aid and often confusing terminology, neophyte players are unlikely to realise that. It should be simple, but has been made maddeningly inaccessible.

Thankfully GMT has already addressed most of the issues with a FAQ. Yes, they should have got it right the first time, but in this instance the publisher deserves to be cut some slack. Not only because are GMT the nicest, most gamer-friendly publisher in the business, but also because Fading Glory is an excellent game.

When hex and counter games get it right, what results is an absorbing compound of puzzling over maneuvers, planning ahead and strategizing with the undeniable thrills of raw chaos. In the past, smaller scale games have had trouble in recreating this heady mixture simply because they lack the potential for variety that keeps things interesting.

Fading Glory doesn’t just break that mold but grinds it into powder. For starters you’ve got four distinct scenarios here, each with its own board and counter set. Then you’ll find that they have super-fast “historical” variants based on late battle positioning, and other alternative history options to explore. Add some optional rules such as face-down counters for fog of war and personalised leader counters which completely transform the way the game plays and you’ve got a recipe for enormous replayability.

But the game is compelling even without all of these options. The standard rules set has zones of control and a combat resolution table and all the things you’d expect of a stripped down hex wargame. But it does two simple things that make it incredibly exciting.

The first is that each side has a morale track, which wears down as units are defeated in combat and results in a loss if it reaches zero. Nothing new there. The catch is that these points can be spent for a significant advantage: extra movement, more favourable combat odds or a better chance of reviving destroyed units. Morale is rationed incredibly thinly – it starts at less than ten and rarely increases – so spending it is like amputating fingers. But the temptation to blow it all to achieve one decisive action is a constant torment.

The other is that adjacent units all have to fight each other: there’s no ganging up on a single victim if it has supporting counters close by, and no passing up a combat just because the odds are unfavourable. This makes every movement phase where you’re in striking distance of the enemy a maze of thorns as you desperately try to plan around the eventualities and buy a slight advantage, and it means the game punishes mistakes with extreme severity. It also seems appropriately Napleonic, since it would seem difficult to coordinate the monolithic formations of the time with a light enough touch to avoid engaging nearby enemy.

There are other small touches of period flavour, such as the ability of cavalry to counterattack or withdraw before being assaulted by infantry and a lovely no take-backs rule that’s designed to mimic the not infrequent blunders of command and control that plagued the age of rifles. Each scenario also has a small deck of event cards related to the way the battle unfolded. But on the whole, and perhaps appropriately for a game at the one counter per division scale, there’s not a lot beyond the scenarios that make it feel historically Napoleonic.

And annoyingly, having built such a wonderful framework for them, it’s the scenarios themselves which are the weakest link. They just don’t seem to have quite enough valid strategic options to explore and regrettably the most famous battle, Waterloo, is the worst offender in this regard. I guess it’s the same old problem of insufficient variety that so plagues other small wargames. But thankfully the tactical nuances in Fading Glory are sufficient to make up for slightly staid strategy.

The remaining two scenarios are set in Russia, the historical Borodino and the alternative history Smolensk. All of them follow a slightly unusual pattern of allowing several turns of pre-battle maneuvering and buildup before forces get close enough to actually clash. And when they do come to blow, all hell can break lose as the dice mercilessly crush your tactical options. It’s not so much the combat mechanics that are responsible for this. They correctly reward the use of overwhelming force, and crowding enemy units before combat. Rather it’s the big morale adjustments you get when you manage to break a unit. But as a commander, you feel largely in control and the sudden swings of fortune add considerably to the thrills and charm. The small number of pieces mean there are relatively few dice rolls, but almost every one feels crucial to success.

It’s unfortunate that the game made such a mess of presenting the rules, else we’d have had a strong contender for the best-ever introductory wargames on our hands. As it stands we’ve got a fascinating game which utilizes creative tweaks to a tried and tested formula and wraps it in a manageable package that should give seasoned gamers of any stripe hours of pleasure. The martial glory of Wellington and Napoleon might be on the wane, but on this evidence their gaming stock is as strong as ever.

Commands & Colours: Napoleonics Review

May 18, 2012August 6, 2020 Matt Thrower 5 Comments

You may recall that at the start of last weeks’ Commands & Colors: Ancients review I stated that there were a number of games based on the system, and that wargame publisher GMT had sent me a big box of stuff related to it? Well, next in the spotlight is the recent Commands & Colors: Napoleonics game, which transplants the action to the fields of early 19th century Europe and the famed conflict between England and France. This is a particularly interesting one to talk about because rumour has it that designer Richard Borg originally designed the Commands & Colors system from Napoleonic warfare. If that’s true then it’s taken a surprisingly long time for the actual game on the subject to appear.

If you missed that review last week but are reading this one, here’s a brief recap of the basic rules system that underpins all the Commands & Colors systems. The board is divided into three areas, left, right and center, and each player has a hand of cards most of which will allow the movement and attack of a certain number of units across one or more of those areas. So, one card might say three units in the center for example, another might be one unit in each area and so on. One card is played each turn. This is a very simple and intuitive way to model the chaos of command and control in real-life battle situations where your subordinates might well be unaware of or unable to comply with your orders for reasons beyond your control. Usefully it also offers some interesting tactical and strategic decisions, both on board and in terms of hand management, for the board game player. This model still makes pretty good sense in the pre-radio era of Napoleonic warfare. Each unit is made up of a variable number of blocks which are removed as the unit accumulates damage in the dice-based combat system until all the blocks are gone and the unit is destroyed.

A lot of the rules framework seems to have been borrowed from GMTs earlier and extremely popular implementation of the system for Ancient warfare. There are still a lot of unit types most of which have small, annoying but critically important deviations from the basic rules structure such as the number of dice they roll or the number of blocks in a unit. This has lead to some curious artefacts, such as the fact that Leader blocks carry with them a substantial amount of extra rules weight in spite of the fact that, although useful, they’re nowhere near as critical as they are in Ancients. But if you’re familiar with that particular game, you shouldn’t need to expend a whole lot of effort to pick up the rules for this one.

So what’s changed? There are two key differences that distinguish Commands & Colors: Napoleonics from its peers in the system. The first is a set of rules specifically designed to mimic Napoleonic tactics, specifically the ability to cavalry to run away from infantry attacks, for infantry to form square against cavalry charges and for artillery to combined their attack dice with infantry or cavalry assaults in a combined arms attack. The other is that in this game, and this game alone, the number of dice a unit rolls in combat is related to how many blocks there are still in the unit. This is a very curious change because the fact that units fought at full strength regardless of damage until destroyed was a major source of criticism for all the early Commands & Colors games. The given reason was that large-scale military units often do function reasonably effectively until attrition in morale or numbers makes them suddenly collapse is not entirely unreasonable, but I could see no good reason why the same logic should not apply to Napoleonic warfare. Why was this chosen to be different?

My initial, cynical, assumption was that this had been done simply to differentiate a new product from its predecessors in what’s becoming a fairly bloated product range. I am pleased to say that actually playing the game proved me to be wholly wrong. The combination of attritional damage and the Napoleonics-ear specific rules together is what gives the game its authentic, realistic age of rifles flavour. Infantry advancing across open ground will likely be severely depleted before they can return fire, and the job of you as the commander is to utilise other unit types, terrain and lucky command cards to ameliorate this effect as much as possible. Without the dice-per-block rule, it’d be trivially easy to advance and then assault at full strength. The new rules do not only give the system a properly Napoleonic feel, but make the required strategies and tactics for success subtle and well differentiated from other Commands & Colors games. Gamers well versed in previous iterations of the series should still find plenty of challenge here.

I am, however, left wondering why exactly they’d want to bother looking. Whilst certainly a good and interesting game, Commands & Colors: Napoleonics suffers from a very unfortunate problem of simply not being quite up to scratch when compared with other Commands & Colors games, even from a variety of different angles. It isn’t quite as deep and satisfyingly realistic as the Ancients game, but it has the same issues with the substantial weight of rules feeling a little too much for the chaotic system that underpins it to bear properly. It isn’t as quick playing, lightweight and exciting and Memoir ‘44 but it has the same considerable set-up time because (unlike Ancients) terrain plays a vital role, and all the scenarios have plenty of hexes to add to the board. It’s neither one thing nor the other, and I can’t see all that many circumstances where I would pick this over one of those two games.

This is unfortunate. There’s a quality game in this package, one that I enjoyed, and one that designer and developers clearly worked hard on to give it the necessary Napoleonic flavour, and for the most part succeeded: it’s just that in the process they also created a game that fell into the valley between two peaks. I’m certain now of something I have only suspected before, which is that the world now has enough Commands & Colors games and their associated expansions. It’ll be interesting to see if other gamers hit the same burnout with the upcoming Samurai battles iteration. In the meantime, if you’re a particular aficionado of the system, or of Napoleonic warfare, this is well worth your time and money to check out. For the everyone else, the existing games in the lineup should prove sufficient.

Commands & Colours: Ancients Review

May 11, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 4 Comments

If you google Commands and Colors, you’ll get a startling array of results all of which are connected to a simple game system for modelling warfare that’s become so wildly popular with board gamers that it’s spawned a mass of iterations across historical and even fantastical settings. However, ask most experienced gamers what the best of these titles is and they’ll tell you it’s Commands & Colors: Ancients from GMT games, which deals for the most part with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. That publisher recently sent me a big box of various Commands & Colors material for review and, given that an iOS implementation is due from Playdek some time this year, Ancients seemed a good place to start.

All the Commands & Colors games operate on the same basic mechanical principles. The board is divided into three areas, left, right and center, and each player has a hand of cards most of which will allow the movement and attack of a certain number of units across one or more of those areas. So, one card might say three units in the center for example, another might be one unit in each area and so on. One card is played each turn. This is a very simple and intuitive way to model the chaos of command and control in real-life battle situations where your subordinates might well be unaware of or unable to comply with your orders for reasons beyond your control. Usefully it also offers some interesting tactical and strategic decisions, both on board and in terms of hand management, for the board game player. One of the reasons that Ancients is so feted amongst all the games that use this system is because the era is so peculiarly well suited to this model. In more recent warfare, order relays have been improved by things such as flag signalling and more recently radio, increasing exponentially the ability of a commander to command effectively. Back in the ancient days though, there was nothing but runners to communicate orders down the line and things could and did become exceptionally confused.

All Commands & Colours games also add more complex card effects into the deck and Ancients makes full use of these to maximise its model of ancient warfare for minimal overhead. A lot of cards allow you to give orders to units depending on their adjacency either to other units, or to leader units so you’re encouraged to fall in with ancient battle doctrine and try and keep your units in a line, with leaders at vital points of control. Again, usefully for the board game player, it also gives you a lot of tactical and strategic headaches to deal with in terms of trying to keep a cohesive front in the face of a system that naturally tries to split things between three areas of the board, the sorts of headaches that real-life ancient commanders would have had to deal with in trying to keep the flanks of their forces coordinated with the center. The simple and easy manner in which the mechanics put you in the right frame of mind for warfare of the era without you even realising it is just a joy to behold, especially when compared with the wealth of historical simulation games that hit the players with a ton more rules to considerably less effect.

Sadly, while you do get an awful lot of strategic and simulation value from a relatively meagre 18 pages of rules, the game still suffers a bit from detail overload. There are a lot of different unit types in Ancients – 14 to be precise – all of which require very slightly different rules and have very slightly different stats. That’s a lot to take on board. The need for good leader positioning and line cohesion give you a lot to chew over in terms of decision making. And yet the essence of the Commands & Colours system is very much controlled chaos: combat is dice based and maneuver is card based and no matter how much effort to put into learning those rules and planning those moves, your entire game can still be completely screwed over by one unlucky turn. Ancients plays in about an hour, and set-up time, which is typically significant in its peers, is relatively quick thanks to minimal battlefield terrain, so this is largely forgivable. But I still find myself hanging back from a completely wholehearted recommendation on this game because of these issues: it’s simply that the Commands & Colours system feels like it’s better suited to lighter rules and faster, more immediately exciting play than Ancients can deliver, whatever it gives you in terms of simulation value and depth in return.

Which isn’t to say that the game isn’t exciting, more that it’s a slow burning thing that gradually builds towards a crescendo. You’ll start off struggling to keep your line in place whilst moving toward the enemy, and additionally co-ordinating missile attacks from light troops and flanking maneuvers from your more mobile cavalry and chariots. You’ll curse the dice, and you’ll curse the cards more. Then, at some point, one player decides he’s got the momentum and the cards to pull off the big charge, the light infantry will melt away, and a big part of the lines will clash for a grand melee and suddenly the tension is at fever pitch because in Commands & Colors: Ancients, enemy units you don’t kill or rout get to strike back at full strength and that means that in the space of minutes, it’s possible to go from being in the ascendancy to being ignominiously torn apart by the very enemy you’d thought to conquer. Thrilling? Absolutely. Frustrating? Sometimes, and doubly so when you’ve put in the effort to learn the rules and work through the strategies. That’s pretty much the highs and the lows of the entire game experience in one neat package.

I don’t normally pass much comment on components nowadays: if a game is good it’s worth playing even if it looks awful, but there are two things you need to know about what’s in the Commands & Colours: Ancients box. Firstly, wargame publishers are not known for quality components and while GMT are know as a frequent exception to this rule, they’ve outdone themselves here. The board is mounted, the cards thick and well finished and the artwork both functional and striking. Secondly, units in the game consist of wooden blocks to which you apply stickers denoting the unit type. There are several hundred blocks. There are double the amount of stickers. Getting this game ready for play therefore requires a very considerable amount of time and effort. You can do a lot of it while you’re half-watching the TV or, better yet, just having a good chat but if the idea of carefully applying many hundreds of stickers to small bits of wood has you running for cover, avoid this game like the plague.

Even though I have minor reservations about the game play in Commands & Colors: Ancients and can’t therefore join the unadulterated love-in that it enjoys in some gaming circles, I have no dispute with the popular opinion that as a single, stand alone game, it’s the best of the entire Commands & Colors series. When you add in expansions things become more complicated but it’s still right up at the top as a contender. The effortless manner in which it draws players unwittingly into its simulation elements and the uneasy yet strangely addictive balance between luck and strategy that it achieves make sure of that. If you’ve never played a Commands & Colors game but have room in your life for a short military simulation for two, you owe it to yourself to try one, and the one you should try first is very probably this one. Hopefully, Playdek will work their magic and that opportunity will also come within reach of anyone who might otherwise balk at paying the asking price for a physical copy, or stickering all those blocks.