ATTACK!

 

That’s right… you have to say it with the exclamation mark… ATTACK!

Being a game involving world conquest and political tensions, this game was easy for me to instantly like. Having a Deluxe expansion set to complement the regular Basic set allows for a progression of all the rules, which is really needed… not due to the rules being too confusing or complex, but because this games fails completely with their manual. I have never been so frustrated with the rule book from a board game before! After reading specific sentences over and over, a 5 minute conversation was then required to try to decipher exactly what was being told. It is a large negative against the game, but once that hurdle is overcome, the game play itself makes it worth the mental struggle.

 

The Basic set was enjoyable to play and I was open to playing several times before moving on to the expansion. The Basic set comes with a full sized map of half the world (The Atlantic Ocean, North America, Africa, Europe) and the Deluxe version uses the other half (Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Asia, Australia), or allows for the two maps to be played together (hope your table is at least 5’ long! Mine is not…

The game is divided into years (turns) and the years divided into seasons (rounds), each season allowing each player to choose 1 of 8 different actions to perform (winter actions are on occasion only which in itself adds a whole other facet to the game). This way each round for each player can be completely different and game play doesn’t not become boring (even when losing the game).

Aspects of this game that I really approved of are:

- It comes with more than enough pieces and also mentioned in the rules that one could add pieces from other games (or home-made, etc.). But I have yet to utilize all pieces of one piece type

- Political ideologies allow for each player to have their own advantages (but I think they could still play a larger role in the game… I guess some special modifications are needed)

- The Economic improvements allow for each player to gain certain advantages, but there are too many advantages for a single player so even the winning player cannot gain all the advantages

- The combat phase limits the amount of pieces one can attack with which makes the battles less confusing, and the extra pieces are used as reinforcements after each dice roll

- The game dictates what pieces are lost which I find is relieving so I don’t have to ponder what piece to remove for several extra minutes (but makes the strategy of what units are attacking first that much more important)

- Game length is variable. Games have averaged around 2-3 hours, but have yet to find a table that allows for use of both maps

But there were also aspects of the game that I wasn’t so impressed with (besides the instructions!):

- The game did not come with anything to put the many pieces in. No containers, no bags… nothing. And don’t forget that there are a lot of pieces

- Each unit type has a larger piece that looks the same to denote that it is five units as opposed to one. But the size difference is minimal and they would get easily mistaken (a little paint fixed this though)

- The 2 boards together are too big to play on most tables. But it wouldn’t be the first time that I crawled around on the floor playing games for hours and hours

 I think that these guys got the right idea…

by DJ Mikey Bones on Mar.01, 2011