I played 1775 last night and it was fantastic. I hadn’t played 1812 but I keenly listened to the praise I heard from podcasts and Board Game Geek. The two games use a card driven mechanism coupled with faction specific dice to make a very light and exciting game.
The four players will divide into two teams. There are the Patriot Militia fighting alongside the Continental Army and there are the Loyalist Militia with the British Regulars. The game is simple territory control, once your side is the only one with troops left in a colony the colony is under your sides control and the side with the most colonies under control at the end of the game wins.
The players will get some control over when the game ends. Each player has a truce card and when both players of a faction have played theirs the game is over at the end of the round. You don’t always get control over when that card will come out of your deck and you may be forced to play it earlier than you’d like but it is a great tense mechanic.
Battles are fought with custom dice. The sides are either blank, have a running man or have a target. Targets mean your enemy loses a cube, running guys mean you lose one of your cubes to a fled unit area and blanks mean you can orderly move a cube out of battle if you choose and an eligible space is there for you to march to. Now instead of charts to refer to it’s all in the dice. For the British Regulars they have three targets and three blanks, they never flee and they hit half the time. Militias flee on two sides and are less accurate. The battles remain snappy and exciting while still accounting for the historical strengths and weaknesses.
This game is absolutely wonderful. The map is gorgeous but with all the cubes and die rolling it would be easy to write this off as a risk clone, but you would be so amazingly wrong. The biggest praise I can think of is that my fiancé, who doesn’t care for war games, liked it a lot. I do like war games quite a bit and I love thus thing as well. Of course it’s on the lighter side but the game is a great bridge as well as something to play in a relatively short period.
Oh, this looks pretty nice. I’m not a wargamer, but I’m always looking for wargames that can lighten the mechanics while tackling an interesting period of history. I still haven’t gotten Few Acres of Snow because I so rarely play anything 2 player, but this looks like it has some of those qualities as well, but with dice instead of deck-building. Color me intrigued.
I hadn’t even got to role of the French, Hessians, and Native Americans. These tend to be used in the event cards that each player will get and play to augment their turn of reinforcing, maneuver and battle. Also how armies are formed by elements of both players of a faction and you can lead units of your partner as long as they are accompanying one of yours. Then there’s the variable player order accross each round. You are never sure who’s getting the initiative.
Suffice it to say Academy has done an outstanding job of cramming all this into beautiful components with minimal rules. It’s fantastic. Elegant is an overused term to describe a lot of these carefully tuned euro style games, but sometimes there’s no other way to say it.
I wouldn’t really. I like both games a lot but they’re trying to express different things. A Few Acres has a longer scope and its time frame is meant to encompass a good portion of the English and Fench build up and it’s focus is on long term strategic planning with a few furious little moments. 1775 is all about the revolution and the focus is more on a bunch of furious battles and more tactical maneuvering. Strategy and adaptability are a big part of both but they have different ways of expressing their settings.
