Tag: French

Grizzled Mon Amis: WWI Card Game

Sacre Bleu, what is this? Ah, a clever cooperative card game about WWI French troops in the trenches, with a strange way of being cooperative, but The Grizzled works.

The goal? Survive. No path to glory. No Anthill to take. Just survive long enough to end the war in one piece, or at least with fewer than four wounds.

My set up as Charles Sauliere with coffee chits. Note the war pile (upper left corner), speech tokens, and peace pile (next to box). Sauliere’s lucky charm is rain, which triggers discards.

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Six Empires A BoardgamingLife Preview

Six Empires is a 2-6 player game of military and diplomatic strategy set in Europe, North Africa, and the New World in the year 1714. Each player controls of one of six empires, each with its unique flavor and play style. In addition to the playable empires, there are 17 independent nations, and any empire which is not controlled by a player remains in the game as a non-player empire.

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Napoleon 1806: The Boardgaminglife Review

While this design, to my eye, offers the occasional mild suggestion of a concept hailing from a range of other models, ultimately it is very much set within its own identity. The components, as one often sees in European designs (this one hails from France) are first rate, with a pleasing aesthetic running through the entire inventory. The game works at corps level, with the current strength and fatigue levels of individual corps depicted via an assortment of wooden cubes (strength) and cylinders (fatigue) placed on the off-board tracks assigned to each corps. There is a distinction between infantry and cavalry strength (different colored cubes whose relevance kicks in during combat), while one might assume that artillery is factored into the range of combat results as well as some events that can come into play.

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Ships of the Line:Trafalgar 1805

Trafalgar 1805 certainly has plenty of colour – sixty minis (supplied painted if that is your purchase option, and flaunting their national ensigns from the stern) will deploy on ten sea-effect tiles, whilst their crews will bustle around on ship logs dedicated to each of those sixty ships, loading different types of ammunition (advanced game), fighting fires, fighting enemy crews, and taking axes to fallen masts, canvas and rope in order to clear the broadsides and ready the ship once more.

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Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble

This is a siege game which represents the defense of an airstrip by the  equivalent of a  French division against more than three Viet Minh infantry divisions supported by nine artillery battalions.   The setting is a valley located in the highlands near the border between Vietnam and Laos in 1954.  The game is divided into 21 turns, each of which represents three days.  If the French have not surrendered at the end of the last turn, the French player wins.  If they have surrendered, the Viet Minh player wins.

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