This is the first in a short series of blog entries on the fine Martin Wallace game, A Few Acres of Snow. In Part 1 - Starting Up, I give a brief overview of the game and look at the initial board and deck setups. About the game...
A Few Acres of Snow (AFAOS from here onwards) is a 2-player card-driven wargame set during the French & Indian wars (1754–1763), where France and Britain fought for control of the lands and resources in North America. Players take on the roll of either the French or British and begin the game with a preset deck of cards (1 & 2) and a preset board position representing their starting town/village locations (3).
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(1) The French player's starting deck.
5 of these cards will be randomly drawn for the French
player’s opening hand.
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(2) The British player's starting deck.
5 of these cards will be randomly drawn for the British
player’s opening hand.
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| (3) Partial view of the initial board setup. |
Your goal in AFAOS is to achieve more victory points than your opponent. This is done by settling new locations with villages (cubes), upgrading them to towns (discs) and by capturing your opponent’s villages/towns by force through sieges and Indian attacks.
Most locations on the map, when controlled with a village or town marker, reward the player with victory points as indicated on the board by the little purple hexagons. You will notice from the initial board setup above that you begin the game with some locations already settled and therefore already have victory points to protect (4).
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| (4) The "Pemaquid" location is owned by the British player at the start of the game. |
In (4) above, Pemaquid is worth 2 victory points to the British player because of the red village (cube) marker. Should the British player upgrade the village to a town later in the game, the red cube will be replaced with a red disc and Pemaquid will then be worth double victory points.
... in Part 2 I will be taking a closer look at the card types and exploring some first turn options for each player ...
>>> Part 2
Gary was tempted very tempted to buy this game, interested to see what you think of it. The debate rages, is it broken.
ReplyDeleteCertainly not broken in my opinion (after 30-40 games). A second edition of the rules was released recently and these tweaks do improve the experience, but it's been a joy anyway to explore different strategies with each of the two nations. I can't recommend this enough. :)
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more. We were aware of the reported flaws in the game prior to getting into it and as a consequence avoided the tactic that had supposedly 'broken' the game. In my opinion the game is assymetical in design and it is easier for the Britsh to win but this is a strength not a weakness.
ReplyDeleteThere is an online implementation of the game on www.yucata.de which is well worth a game or two if you want to see how it plays. Let Gary or I know if you want a game.
Cheers gents hope to get a game with one of you at Qcon.
ReplyDelete