I feel like one of the challenges I had with No Retreat, and learning AW feels the same, is that all the mechanics feel intertwined and co-dependent. In many games mechanics seem a bit more distinctly executed, but in Paradis’ games I feel like there are lots of mini-mechanics, and they are compact and connected and constantly on.
To me, it’s the combat where this is most apparent. There are six pages of rules for it. There’s unit size, and support rules, and modifiers for major offensives, and mobile tokens, and armor tokens, and attack tokens, and lots of varieties of combat results some of which vary by the type of unit defending, and different types of attacks depending on terrain and type of zone, and different colors of stars that change things, and you can do pincers if you’ve got armored stacks, and then airpower, and now let’s toss in some modifiers with a portion of cards, and now let’s add a card to change the attack completely, and here’s a defender playing a card, and then what about conditions for advancing after combat, keep in mind supply, and now you’ve got a victory point.
Taken individually, none of these things is hard or extensive or overly complex, really, but a number of them are somewhat uniquely applied in this game, and when you need to access a lot of them in short succession it can take some time to get up to speed. I really like No Retreat, and it took surprisingly less time than I imagined it would for it all to fall into place, so I’m hopeful the same thing will happen with AW.
But yeah, what you said. I’d think it’d be hard for a beginner, at least with the regular game. The vision of reducing cognitive load so players can concentrate on strategy feels a bit of a climb to get to.
But I am curious to see what’s been removed for the basic game, because if a good bit of the mechanics are chopped out, it might actually work for a beginner to be taught the game quickly.