Category: Weekend gaming

War Room: Where Axis and Allies meets Diplomacy

War Room: Where Axis and Allies meets Diplomacy

I recently got a chance to play another all-day game of the global WWII game War Room. And by all day, the game continued on for about 8 hours before folks decided to wrap it up because it seemed inevitable that the Axis were going to win in one to two turns. After 8 hours, we had taken seven turns, so it could conceivably have continued for another one to two hours — and it was getting late already. I’ve played this game twice already, and this time I was on the Axis’ team as scrappy little Italy holding on to assist stronger Axis powers and being a big pain in the butt against Great Britain’s navy in the Mediterranean. 

War Room is a 2-6 player game where players take on nations during WWII: three people will be the Allies as the U.S., Great Britain and Russia, while the rest will play as the Axis: Japan, Germany and Italy. Players can also play only the Pacific theater with 2-3 players if you can’t manage to round up enough folks for an all-day game. While it plays similarly to Axis and Allies (with some streamlining during combat), the preplanning of military orders and discussing strategy with teammates are very reminiscent of Diplomacy — but without the backstabbing!

War Room is so large that players need command staves!

First off, to play War Room, you need a very, very large table, and preferably another side table or two to place the battle boards. The player board is a puzzly configuration of a giant circle, similar to those world maps you’ve seen in war movies. Each player receives a slim rectangular box containing command markers and flag tokens, as well as a cardboard pegboard and pegs keep track of their resource tracks.

The game also comes with a million plastic pieces, representing infantry, tanks, planes and bombers, and an assortment of ships, from submarines (yellow ones specifically!) and aircraft carriers and others in between. For those who opted for a game upgrade, the game also comes with large branded sand timers and command staves to move your forces across Europe.  

Each stack of units is assigned a number, which will come into play when you assign orders for them.

There are seven phases of War Room: Direct National Economy, Strategic Planning, Movement Operations, Combat Operations, Refit and Deploy, Morale, and Production. 

Game play isn’t too difficult, if you’re familiar with either Axis or Allies, but there’s plenty of room to make errors. During the Strategic Planning phase, players secretly write out orders on their O&P chart to reveal simultaneously at the end of this phase. Some countries have more command boxes than others, so you’ll have to strategize which units you want to move to which location, and orders can’t be changed once the phase ends.

These fancy sand timers will tell you when time is up!

During this time you’ll also be bidding with your oil resources to pick turn order. Sometimes it’s better to go after everyone has made their move, while other times you want to first so that your troops get pinned. 

Players write down commands on their O&P chart. Italy has 6 commands; others have more.

Pinning happens when an enemy unit moves into your location. If you had planned to move that unit out during Strategic Planning, it now is stuck. During the Movement phase, armies can move one space, or many spaces along the train rail route in friendly spaces. 

You can see the railroad tracks going through Germany and other countries.

As forces move into contested areas, battles happen! Players move their units to the provided combat boards, both both sea battles and land battles. Each side places their forces based on the chart and they roll color-sided dice to determine who is the victor. Various units give you a different number of dice (increasing your odds of winning), and they also may take more damage, while others will get wiped out upon immediate hits. The chart makes it so easy to figure it out. Player roll all their dice and assign hits. If units are damaged, players can spend resources to keep them in play. If they’re destroyed, they go to the Morale Board, which then calculates stresses for the next round. 

This combat board simplifies battles. It tells you how many dice to roll and how much damage units can take.

A country suffers morale penalties when it receives too much stress at the end of the round. Such penalties include no rail usage or disrupted supply lines. These are not good, and it’s hard to lower these penalties once you’ve moved into a higher category, which can be seen in a circle on the turn order track in the middle of the board. 

After the stresses are calculated, players can order new troops or forces by buying them during the production phase. You can write down the calculations for these on your player board. When you put new pieces of plastic on the board, they enter the game at your factory locations, and the factories’ smokestacks show how many items may be placed there for production. But they are not quite available yet to your armies. They’re being “produced” and will be available for use in two rounds. When you produce forces, you move your resource markers down based on how much you’ve spent. 

Units that were destroyed get placed on the Morale Board, which is used to calculate a nation’s stress level.

Then so begins the next turn, which is the first phase: Direct National Economy. You calculate your income based on all the territories you control. This is really easy to figure out because you’ll have the individual card for that territory and it’ll tell you how much oil, iron and OSR (other strategic resources), and you’ll move your little peg up your box. 

Each player gets one of these boxes, which stores your command markers underneath the peg board that tracks your resources. These were all the territories I controlled at the time.

The game continues until the Allies control both Greater Germany and Japan, or the Axis controls two of the following areas: the Eastern United States, Great Britain or Moscow. Players can also play a 6-turn variant if they are unable to devote that much time for a full game.

I’ve quite enjoyed my two plays of War Room, with each game being completely different. I’ve learned that moving across the Pacific takes a long time (I played as the United States in my first game), and Italy, while small, can be strategically helpful to Germany and Japan. War Room is such an epic game — to look at on a table and to play! The tension never eases up, and while it does require a time commitment, the game moves quickly and there’s never a dull moment! 

Gamer friends meeting up for Gila Monster

Gamer friends meeting up for Gila Monster

This past Saturday, a large-ish group of us decided to meet up and play games, specifically new releases from Gen Con. It was an informal gathering of gamer friends who decided to try something new and shell out money to reserve a room at the Mesa Convention Center for an event dubbed Gila Monster. It was great seeing local friends and friends from Tucson, and, more importantly, we all plan to expand the guest list for next year.

Choo-choo! Who doesn’t love Russian Railroads at 8 a.m.? Yes, it’s insanely early for me, but I love this game so much that I didn’t mind teaching.

The day started super early at 8 a.m., and first up was teaching Russian Railroads to three other folks. This game is one of my absolute favorites, and I am always down to teach it. It’s a classic worker-placement game, and I love how the scoring ramps up with each round. I also own the American Railroads expansion, which is also great, but I didn’t want to throw that expansion into our learning game. The group had fun, and one couple actually purchased the game from someone at Gila Monster who was selling it. Score!

Next up was My Little Scythe. OH. MY. GOODNESS. This game is just too adorable! It has the same mechanisms of Scythe, but it really encourages you to be friendly to go up the friendship track. You’re still moving along the board, collecting resources and racking up trophies. You can also pick a pie fight, but really only to claim a trophy for winning a fight. There are cute gems and apple pieces. One person on the table said that she wouldn’t have ever picked up this game to play, but was really glad that I suggested we play it. It was delightful!

Let’s have a pie fight! These figurines are adorbs. And like Scythe, you can’t take the same action twice in a row.

I then jumped into a game of Coimbra, a new Gen Con release. This game is tracks galore! The dice are rolled at the start of each round, and players take turns drafting dice. (Your player board actually comes with these cute little dice houses that you place the dice in, so that people will know which dice you picked on the board.) You place your dice on certain tracks, which resolve in a specific order based on the number of pips, so that you can collect cards. These cards increase your income on resource tracks and give you certain abilities.

Coimbra is a great dice-drafting action-selection card-collecting game with four different resource tracks.

At the end of the round, the color dice you picked will you give you resource income based on where you are on that track of the same dice color. Whoa, right?!? So good and thinky balancing which cards you want to take with which dice (because the pips matter for turn order), and then ultimately, which income track you want to go up on. And the board is just colorful and gorgeous. Plus, dice houses!

Dice in Coimbra sit in these little houses so people will know who drafted the dice.

Next up, I played Newton, also another Gen Con release. This game is combo-tastic! It has the same feeling of Lorenzo Il Magnifico or Council of Four of a tight euro game in about 2 hours. You play cards onto your player board, which allow you to take a specific action depending on the symbol of the card. If you play another card with the same symbol in the same round, then that action’s strength will increase — either moving farther along your route or accessing more powerful cards or covering harder-to-reach bookcases.

In Newton, you’re traveling across Europe to meet with scientists, build new tools and discover new theories.

At the end of each round, you tuck one of your cards under your player board so that you have an extra power of that action type. So if collect cards that work well together, you can really crush it with a specific strategy. My scientists helped me cover my bookcase quicker, and I ended up picking up a card that gave me points for all the books I had — ensuring my path to victory. It’s so satisfying playing cards that all work well together.

Look at my pretty bookcase and all my books! Players play cards one at a time on their board to activate actions. At the end of each round, you tuck one card to have an extra strength of that action.

I also got a chance to play Reef. In Reef, players collect pieces of coral to place on their board and score points based on patterns or stack requirements from cards in their hands. The game is quick to teach and quick to learn. On your turn, you either play a card to collect coral and possibly score the pattern listed on the card. Or you can collect a card from the market. That’s it. The key is to collect cards that will give you resources to score points from cards you also have. We played this game in about 20 minutes, and that includes teaching. The pieces are so colorful and vibrant! It’s definitely eye-catching.

Reef has these gorgeous components. It’s a light puzzly game where you score points from cards in your hand based on stacks or pattern formations.

I then took a quick dinner break with friends to Republica Empenada in Mesa. It was my first time going, and I immediately regret not stopping by this place sooner. This place is so yummy! I ordered two empanadas: a jalapeno potato popper and a chicken one. They were both yummy, but I loved the jalapeno popper one better. For dessert, I ordered a banana cream empanada. Heaven! (Banana cream pie is my favorite pie). And I got a Maui Brewing Co. Coconut Porter to wash it all down.

These empanadas are the bomb! Definitely worth checking out this place if you’re in downtown Mesa.

After dinner, I taught some folks Forbidden Sky, which, in my opinion, is the hardest of the Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert family. It has some neat elements we’re battling — literally! There’s wind trying to push you off the sky island, and lightning that will lower your health points. And then building the sky island with the tiles is much more puzzly because you have to get the rocket ship’s components out as well as the launch pad. I taught the game because I had recently played this game.

Once all the components are on the board, you’ll have to wire them together from lightning sources, and all the players need to get to the launch pad (cue my Arnold voice here) before someone dies or the storm threat level maxes out. One guy ended up dying, so we all lost. Womp womp. But the game has an awesome rocket ship! It makes a little blast-off noise when the components are all wired up, which is pretty neat! I totally forgot to take a photo of our game, but here’s a video of the rocket ship in a game I recently played. We also lost then.

The last game I played is an oldie but goodie: Tzolk’in. Full disclosure, I like lugging this game around because it’s excellent and also because I love my painted gears. Our three-player game played in about an hour because all three of us had played before. It was nice ending a full day of gaming with a game that was familiar and nobody had to teach it.

I love Tzolk’in! I think the wheel/timing mechanism is so unique!

And before you knew it, it was almost 10 p.m. and our room rental was about to expire. I had a lovely time gaming with good friends, friends I don’t usually see unless we’re at a convention. I’m also kicking myself for not learning rules for more games because there were a lot of new releases that I wanted to dig into but couldn’t find a teacher for. So for next year, I’ll plan on doing that.

And lastly, this event was an invite only among friends who wanted to try something new and if we’d have fun renting out a room to game. We definitely talked about expanding the guest list for next year with even more friendly gamers who play the types of games we do.

Arizona Game Fair 2018

Arizona Game Fair 2018

Arizona Game Fair happened last weekend, and I’m seriously still on a high from all the whirlwind weekend of gaming, hanging out with old friends and meeting more new ones. This is the second year of Arizona Game Fair, and I already can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year. Save the date, folks — March 29-31, 2019!

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Rincon Games: Tucson’s board game convention

Rincon Games: Tucson’s board game convention

I went to RinCon for the first time last weekend down in Tucson and had an amazing time! I drove up Friday night to spend the night there so that I can game early in the morning. For those who know me in real life, I am so not a morning person and didn’t want to bother getting up early Saturday to make the 2-hour drive from Phoenix. I only got a day pass for Saturday. Next year, I hope to make it for the whole weekend!

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The second-annual Friendship Con

The second-annual Friendship Con

My friends and I decided to host a second-annual Friendship Con last week, and I had so much fun. It was nice seeing friends who moved away from Phoenix and those friends I haven’t seen since last year’s event.

We played a lot of games, though sadly we didn’t get through all the games on our uber ambitious list. There were a couple sleepless nights for me (I am so not a morning person, and, not gonna lie, it was rough getting somewhere by 8:30 a.m.), but in the end, I got some good gaming in with fun folks!

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Royals, Churchill, Acquire and lots more gaming!

Royals, Churchill, Acquire and lots more gaming!

It was great to get in some substantial gaming this past Friday and Saturday, as my weekly board gaming has been hit or miss because of cancellations and busy schedules. I didn’t actually play any games on Sunday, as I took the time to do some errands and watch Netflix’s Stranger Things. I seriously binge-watched all 8 episodes in one day. IT’S THAT GOOD!

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New games I’ve played: Arkwright, Council of Four

New games I’ve played: Arkwright, Council of Four

Man, where did the time go? It’s already mid-July, and it’s still hotter than hell. I’m so ready for the Phoenix summer to be over! I’ve been staying inside a lot, playing board games naturally. Even amid all the Pokemon Go excitement (yes, I totally downloaded the game), I’m still not venturing outside too much, unless I really have to. And with that, there are two new games I’ve played in the past two weeks, and a couple oldies but goodies …

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A work party and some board games

A work party and some board games

My friend’s brother had a work party at his house last weekend, and he wanted to play board games. So my friend invited me and another guy as reinforcements to teach some games to about 20 people who don’t board game at all.

I loaded up my Big Frakkin Bag (it literally says that; it’s a Battlestar Galactica promo bag from the mid-2000s) with all sorts of party games and shorter games. My board-game friends did the same. We had no idea what people wanted and figured that it didn’t hurt having a lot of game options.

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Recap of Strategicon: Gamex 2016

Recap of Strategicon: Gamex 2016

Strategicon holds its board-game convention three times a year in LA. I had so much fun the last two times I went (at Gateway and OrcCon) that my friend and I decided to make the trek west again.

Over the span of the 3 days I was there, I played 12 games, one that lasted 11 hours. (We left early Monday but the con continued until late that afternoon). It was a great mix of personal favorites and learning a whole bunch of new ones. Brace yourself, folks, there’s a lot of photos ahead …

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