Nate Dray's Analysis and Review of SPI's "The Punic Wars" from S&T no.53

 

“The Punic Wars” from Strategy & Tactics magazine no. 53, Nov/Dec 1975

 

Over the years I’ve played “Punic Wars” a handful of times before the recent tabling. I’ll be honest, I like this game and this time I played it for several days using the Second Punic War scenario. Not all day every day, but it went on for easily 5x longer than the average game I play. I lost count of the turns. Each time one side got the upper hand, the other side made an epic comeback. So, a war of attrition that’s “fun” and a small aspect of a game becomes real world attrition and that’s not so fun. It was, though — until I realized that outright Victory of any kind was very very difficult to achieve. The designer almost certainly knew this was the case because there are express rules for players agreeing to end the game. Then the winner is determined by who has the most Victory Points awarded for territorial control. 

In my case, after messing up a small but ultimately significant rule having to do with relief forces entering a hex with besieged Friendlys, and with the Romans far ahead, poised for a territorial victory, I ended the game declaring Rome the winner. 

 

Hannibal doing the thing...

There is only one glaring problem with this game: sea travel is too costly and dangerous especially given the speed and distance possible with a terrestrial move by Leaders. There aren’t enough advantages to be had traveling by sea to offset the potential danger of losing an army in the water. Even with extra Fleet Points and a good Leader, it’s still too unrealistically risky. If sea transport was as dangerous and lethal as depicted in “The Punic Wars” game, people would never have moved troops by boat and we know that isn’t the case. 

Movements of forces during the Punic Wars from "Warfare in the Classical World" by John Warry.

 

“Punic Wars” is a simple game that feels big. It has rails, but still feels open and full of potential. Intriguing (performance attenuated) randomness. Just enough chrome for flavor. Tasteful restraint. All made sensible. This rule is x because of y. Lots of things feel right; the differing diplomacy and election rules, attrition, control, sieges, all well modeled, stylistically coherent, but still easily managed. Nothing extraneous that breaks the flow. And it has a nice rhythm, which is important to me.

In the end, what appears simplistic and abstracted actually might be some decent simulating and modeling of the major relevant kinetic factors in the Punic Wars so that the situation can be played as a game with reasonable outcomes that may differ from the historical record, but nevertheless are defensible as sort of alternate history, i.e. “if this had been this way or another, the outcome would have been different and here's how and why.” That's what a decent simulation ought to do, I suspect. And it's a pretty good game.

Carolingian Conundrum by Nate Dray

 

Carolingian Conundrum, an Analysis of the game "Charlemagne: Master of Europe" by Nate Dray

This solitaire game is a clever mechanical puzzle. The three-cup system is very interesting. I have the canvas map, and the chunky laser cut counters and artwork are really cool. The overall aesthetic is fantastic. The box is flimsier than I’d like, though. 

The rules writing and rulebook are excellent. Everything is crisp and clear. No issues learning or referencing rules.

Charlemagne might be fun, but also might be tedious, punishing, a bit ahistorical, too random, and senseless in places. For instance, why would traveling around allied and historically friendly regions have to be conducted only as a forced march and why would that provoke a hostile reaction? It's also pretty difficult. Only played four games. No wins. Yet feels more or less solvable, like once you get it down you could optimize and game it, but for me there are three major issues with Charlemagne, Master of Europe:

1.) Randomness can completely defeat you. From my experience with this, you can lose the game even while seeming to play well. That initial setup can significantly disadvantage the player right off the rip and it has nothing to do with performance or player decisions. One of my games, I pulled both End Turn chits with only one hostile cup draw between them and because of the random setup and the draws there was no way I could have avoided the almost immediate loss. Turn one. Game over. I did a forced march and lost the game. That's a pretty big bug in my book. One expects extra randomness in solo games, but to lose a game solely as a result of game randomness without reference to player's decisions, agency or performance is just bad design. Probably a bug that could've been solved mechanically. Makes you wonder if there are other less obvious issues with the machine.

2.) There’s no concrete reference to time here. Time is completely amorphous and that bothers me in a historical game. The player also always seems to be reacting rather than steering things which I feel doesn’t properly represent Charlemagne’s modus operandi. But maybe I’m not fully appreciating the designer’s intent. You, the player, aren’t competing with unruly German tribes or Arabs so much as competing against the historical Charles and I don’t know if I like that. Right or wrong, the emphasis is almost entirely on cash flow and combat and I think that’s sort of reductionist in terms of the net impact of the reign of Charles the Great. I assume the church and road building functions are proxies for his administrative reforms, but it seems to give the cultural impact short shrift. Court intrigue can crop up in the latter stages of a game but are dealt with statically, meaning, if you previously made enough money or beat up enough Saxons, your political rivals will fail. I don’t know if that’s a good representation of Frankish power politics. And it isn't particularly intriguing either.

 

3.) The tactical display. I know I'm in the minority on this and many games make use of this sort of thing, but I don't like these little abstract tactical display combat resolution things. It's tedious, boring, and fiddly. It’s just chucking dice on and on with minimal influence on the outcome from a player's "tactics." It interrupts the game and is distracting. Takes me out of the more important, to me, macro strategic part of the game and yet it seems to be the primary focus of the game, i.e. where the player invests the most time during actual play. It all takes place in one small corner of the board (Cruel Necessity does this too and I dreaded battles in that game for these reasons as well) and I think that’s an odd and off-putting design choice. Why make this big beautiful game map if the majority of the game is actually played in a small space in one corner of the board? I find myself wanting to avoid battles because they’re annoying and since it’s a core function of the game, this is obviously problematic.

I REALLY wanted to like this game. I wanted to love it, actually. Such high hopes.

In the end, the whole thing feels a bit forced. Like a retheming of a design that was intended to model a completely different set of circumstances, which I believe it is or was. Just a couple too many bits of sort of tacked on chrome here. The system doesn’t really suit the situation or theme, in my opinion. It was originally developed for Agricola, Master of Britain which I think would be a much better fit for these mechanics. And I think the original system was a tad simpler, which I'd find preferable. I also had a sense that I was being pushed in a certain direction and that might mean that with this game there is only one way to skin the cat. That would be wholly in keeping with this type of game; once solved, it' done, like a puzzle should be. One of the only tools to mitigate this effect is the introduction of randomness, but as pointed out before here, too much or the wrong kind of randomness can ruin the game experience and cause frustration.