About 30 years ago I received what I consider to be my first real boardgame as a Christmas present from my Dad. The game was Blitzkrieg from Avalon Hill. Of course, I had played all the other standard childhood games but this game opened my eyes to a whole new world. I remember the big map, all the cardboard counters and the rulebook, all I could think was wow! I don't think either one of us thought Blitzkrieg was a great game but it was still a lot of fan to play and play we did' Over the years we played many Avalon Hill games, some were war games and some were not.

The wargames always had a special place in my heart but they all had something in common for both my Dad and I, they were all complex, fiddly and long. We almost always argued over different interpretations of the rules (poorly written as they were) and we would frequently not have the time to finish the games we started. Still, we had lots of fun and I have a lot of good memories from those games.

Over the last several years I have gotten back into board gaming with the same passion I had in my younger years. Now the games that we all know and love are relatively short and easy compared to what Avalon Hill had to offer years ago. Playing an entertaining strategy game in an hour or two (that's including reading the rules!) was unheard of when I was a kid but now that occurs on a weekly basis (if I'm lucky!). I thank my lucky stars for finding Settlers and all the other great German style strategy games I have played in the last several years. I occasionally get in a few games with my Dad every now and then. We still have lots of fun but nothing really brings back our old rivalry like a good ol'wargame.

One day I was searching the web for some game related material and was clicking through the links that my search engine had thrown at me. Not knowing exactly what I was looking for, I clicked on a link to DGA Games. The site immediately caught my eye! Splashed across the page in big letters was the name BATTLECARDS. Pictures of cards with images of Hitler, Churchill, Rommel and Montgomery as well as a Spitfire and a Tiger tank jumped off the page. My mind raced back to the days of game after game of Squad Leader, Panzer Leader, Midway and Victory in the Pacific. What was this!

Now, I consider myself to be a very well informed gamer. I pore over newsgroups, email lists and a multitude of websites on a daily basis, looking for information on the best games. I maintain wish lists of interesting games for months, gathering information to help me decide if a game will suit my tastes and fit in my always tight gaining budget. I had never seen any information on a game called Battlecards! I checked again. Nothing on BoardGarneGeek, nothing on Google Groups. Strange! I looked over the Battlecards website again. It seemed to be a strategic level, card-based wargame. It looked too good to be true and I promptly bought the game.

Battlecards is an expandable, card-based, WWII strategy game. Players control land, sea and air units of the Axis and Allied forces. The currently available set covers the Western European campaign with forces from Great Britain and Germany. A soon to be released set will cover the Pacific theater with American and Japanese forces. Two more sets, the Russian Front and North Affican campaigns, are in the works. Each set consists of a base starter pack which has three decks of cards; an Allied deck, an Axis deck and a common deck that drives the game called the Conflict deck. There are also expansion packs that contain sets of cards that can be added to a starter pack. I should emphasize that this is not a collectable card game but the expansions do allow for a little more diversity in each of the decks and include some interesting units. The Western European Campaign has five expansion packs currently available.

The rules to Battlecards cover the front and a portion of the back of a single sheet of paper and they are fairly straight forward. A nice diagram of how the cards are to be laid out on the table is also included to speed setup. A beginner can go from opening the box to beginning play in maybe 20 minutes or so. As mentioned above, there are three decks of cards in the game. The decks the players use are called the Arsenal decks and consist of the land, sea and air units at your disposal as well as a leader card and a general card. The third deck is called the Conflict deck and is placed in the center of the table. This deck contains an assortment of cards that drive the game and indicate what happens on each turn. A series of Battle cards that represent key battles in the theater are part of the cards in the Conflict deck and indicate the potential for a battle between the Axis and Allied players.

At the start of the game, each player draws six cards from his Arsenal deck and deploys three of these cards, face down, into three possible stacks, land units, air units and sea units, in that order from left to right. These are your deployed forces and are the units that will participate in battles. Therefore, a player will always know what general type of units their opponent has available and their number but not the strength of those units. Units can be deployed in any combination of stacks as the player sees fit, so you could initially deploy all land units or only air and sea units, or maybe one unit of each type depending on your strategy. The remaining three cards are kept in your hand and are called your Reserve hand. The German player begins play. A turn consists of a player drawing a card from the Conflict deck and following its instructions.

The Conflict deck cards can be grouped into four different types of cards. The first type are cards that allow the player to immediately perform an action, generally against the opposing player. The Espionage card, which lets you examine one or several of your opponents deployed stacks of units, is an example of this type of card. These cards are discarded onto the Conflict deck discard pile after the action is taken.

The second type of Conflict card is the Military Buildup card and is also acted on immediately, then discarded. These cards instruct the player to draw from one to five cards from the players Arsenal deck into their hand and then play a certain number of cards out into the deployed unit stacks, followed by discarding a number of cards from your hand into the Arsenal deck discard pile. These cards are the major way that players get cards out of their Arsenal decks and into their deployed unit stacks.

The third type of card are called Kept cards. These Conflict cards instruct the player to keep the card and the card is placed into a players pile called the Kept card pile. These cards may then be played on subsequent turns to help the player or hinder his opponent in a variety of ways. The final type of card is the Battlecard which may signal the start of a battle. Almost a third of the Conflict deck are Battlecards while a little more than a third are Military Buildup cards. The last two types of cards make up equal portions of the final third of the Conflict deck.

Each Battlecard consist of a description of which units may participate in the battle (land, sea and/or air) as well as any unusual victory conditions which would signal the end of the battle. Also on the card may be a list of prerequisites which must be met before the battle can take place as well as the number of victory points the winner of the battle gains. The prerequisites are typically one or more other battles won by one or the other side. Occasionally certain unit types (land, sea or air) must be present for the prerequisites to be met. The aggressor in the battle may also be indicated on the card which determines which side fires first. If a player has none of the deployed unit types listed on the Battlecard, the other player wins the battle.

If neither player has any of the listed unit types or the designated aggressor decides not to fight the battle, the battle doesn't take place and the Battlecard is discarded. Otherwise, each player turns the unit stacks indicated on the Battlecard face up. Battles consist of turns made up of four rounds of combat during which each player fires particular units designated as being able to fire in that round. Artillery and sea units are able to fire in the first round, air units in the second round and ground units in the units in the third or fourth rounds. A final round is the withdraw phase where players may remove some or all of their units from combat. The turns are repeated until the units of one player have been eliminated or withdrawn, or until the specific victory conditions for the battle have been met. The winner of the battle gets the victory points indicated and possession of the card.

Battles are resolved one unit at a time starting with the aggressor units able to fire in the first round. Each unit has an attack value against each of the three unit types as well as a defense value vs each of the unit types. The attacking player chooses a unit and compares that units attack value against land, air or sea units (whichever is applicable) to the defenders defense value. Certain unit cards (a General, for example) and some Kept cards can add bonuses to these values.

A card is then drawn from the Conflict deck to resolve the encounter. All Conflict cards have a number associated with them ranging from 1 to 25 and this number is compared against the total attack and defense values. If the value on the card is less than or equal to the attack value and greater than the defense value, the attack succeeds and the defending unit is discarded to the Arsenal deck discard pile of the defending player. This occurs for all of the aggressor units able to fire in the first round.

Then the defender fires any units able to fire in the first round. This continues through the remaining rounds of a turn and the turns continue until a player has won the battle. Winning a battle is not the end of the game however. To win the game, a player must win a majority of the points available from the battles in the Conflict deck (38 points in this basic set with the average battle being worth about 5 points) or you can altenatively win the battlefor your opponents homeland.

Comparison With Other Popular Card-Based Games

That's about it for the rules, it's all pretty straight forward. But how does the game really play you ask? One of the big things that I noticed when I first played Battlecards was how different it was from other card- based games. For comparison, consider Magic: the Gathering, the Flagship series from GMT and the Down in Flames series from GMT. Both Magic and Flagship are tactical card based battle games. Both are fairly quick and easy and suffer from the same card based luck-of-the- draw issue that any card game has. Each has a take that feel to it where each player tries to attack his opponent, turn after turn, until one player finally succumbs.

GMTs Down in Flames series also has this take that feel when playing dogfights but has much more involved decisions when playing the campaign games, at the expense of a lot more rules. So how does Battlecards differ from these games? Battlecards does have tactical card play that is similar to what you see in Magic and Flagship. But as mentioned above, winning a battle is not the end of the game. You must win multiple battles to claim victory and this allows for some great strategic decisions.

Also, the fact that the game takes multiple battles to win means that the luck-of-the-draw issue does not play as large of a role since the games tend to last longer. As an example, I recall one game where I was unable to get any of my Arsenal cards out into my deployed stacks for the first half hour of the game. However, with some luck and skillful card play, I was able to avoid any major confrontations and eventually came back to win the game. Overall, Battlecards is easier to learn (and teach) than Magic while offering greater strategic depth with the same easy, tactical card tactical card play. Look and Feel The quality of the components is something that gamers look for in a good game and Battlecards does not disappoint in this regard.

The cards are standard poker size with plastic coating. No card protectors needed here! They stand up very nicely to repeated riffle shuffling, which is more than I can say for most card games now days. Another aspect of the game which I really enjoy are the pictures on the cards. Anyone who has played Magic or any of it's many spin-offs (including Flagship) is aware of the concept of a picture used to represent the unit or action in question.

The pictures on the Arsenal decks in Battlecards are actual WWII photographs of the units represented on the cards, a very nice touch indeed! The cards in the Conflict deck also contain actual WWII photographs as well. For me, these pictures on the cards really enhance the wargame feel of Battlecards. I get into this game in a way that I can't in standard wargames with the hexbased maps and cardboard counters.

The Third Deck

The Conflict deck is what makes this game different from most card- based games. It brings a strategic element to the game that is both elegant and intuitive while maintaining the flow needed in a card game of this type. In addition, the use of these cards as the combat resolution mechanism rather than dice or some other mechanism is a great idea that keeps the simplicity of a card game but still allows for a luck element that should be present in any tactical combat game. The variety of cards in this deck keeps the game interesting and prevents the game from becoming the tit-for-tat, last man standing card game that many games in this area have become.

Looking at the number of battles in this deck (about a third of the cards) you would think that a battle would happen about every third turn. But the need to meet certain prerequisites for most battles as well as the ability for the aggressor to not fight a battle decreases the frequency of combat and allows the players time to develop strategies and plan for the coming battles rather than constantly reacting to the last card your opponent played. The addition of several kept Conflict cards that allow some control over when a battle will occur also adds to the strategy of the game, if you play your cards right!

Where's the Beef

The real heart of any good game, in my opinion, is the depth and variety of the decisions that are needed to play the game well. Battlecards certainly have its share of decisions! On the tactical side, should you gang up on one key enemy unit hoping to improve your odds of eliminating it or should you spread out your attacks, hoping to eliminate more units and gain a numerical advantage? Tough choices. Given that units can only fight in specified rounds of a turn, which unit you choose to attack can spell the difference between victory and defeat. Over on the strategic front, do you withdraw your forces from a small battle, worth a couple of points and hope to build up your units for that next big battle that you know is coming up in the deck? Should you deploy a lot of sea units hoping to dominate the next sea battle given that most of the sea battles have yet to show up? I could go on and on but you get the idea.

The decisions that each player makes over the course of the game are what decides the outcome, not that one player happened to get a few lucky card draws in a row.

The Bad

There really isn't much I can criticize Battlecards about. I guess if you don't like luck-of-the-draw issues in card games or any luck at all in your games then you will probably not like Battlecards. But then again, I can't think of any war or battle that didn't involve an element of luck to dictate it's outcome. One thing that did come up that we easily resolved was bringing some type of turn marker into the game. Turns can go back and forth fairly quickly when there isn't a battle but once a battle does come up it might take a while until it is the next players turn to draw a Conflict card.

Given that battles can be relatively long and that the aggressor in a battle is not necessarily the person drawing the Battlecard, we were continually forgetting who's turn it was after a long battle. We ended up using a Matchbox Sherman tank as a turn marker that we passed back and forth when we had finished our turn. Another minor issue that came up was keeping track of the special bonuses that carriers can apply to other units. Usually when a unit is capable of applying a bonus to another unit (either attack or defense) it is a simple matter to keep track of since the unit must forfeit its own action to assist another unit. Simply placing the supporting units card with the supported units card eliminates any confusion.

Naval carriers are a special case since they get two or three bonuses that can be applied to other units in addition to their own action. This is not a problem in a small battle but in a large battle with multiple carriers, where these bonuses are getting applied can become confusing. This was easy enough to fix by making some cardboard counters representing each of the bonuses and placing them on the cards receiving the bonus.

Expansions

Each expansion pack adds 20 cards to the cards in the starter set These cards are a mix of Arsenal cards for both sides in addition to Conflict deck cards, including the occasional new battle. A nice feature of the expansions is that a list of the cards in each pack is printed right on the package, no surprises here! You can buy the ones that look interesting and skip those that don't (although, they all add interesting elements to the game, in my opinion).

Some of the cards in the expansions are not found in the starter pack while others are repeats. It also appears that an effort was made to try to maintain a relatively historical mix of units in both quantity and variety (for example, the Germans only get one Bismarck!). The addition of a few what if type cards (German jet fighters and the atomic bomb to name a couple) adds a nice touch as well.

Optional Rules and More

The DGA Games website (www.dgagames.com) has a page with optional rules that can be used with any basic set or even to combine different basic sets (when they become available) so that players can fight out the different theaters of WWII in one big game. There are rules for team play with up to eight players and lots more. There are even rules for custom deck construction for those of you who like deck building. As more sets become available, the possibilities get very interesting. There is also a FAQ page that may clear up certain aspects of the game for some players.

Who should buy this game?

If you enjoy wargames with a WWII theme and would like a good game with easy rules and no involved set-up then grab this game and its expansions ASAP! You will not be disappointed. If you enjoy card games like Magic and Flagship and don't mind a WWII theme then you will probably like Battlecards. The addition of the Conflict deck driving the strategic aspect of the game is a wonderful mechanism. If you are a serious boardgamer who enjoys plenty of opportunity for decisions in both tactical and strategic play and don't mind luck-of-the-draw issues then you will probably enjoy this game as well. If you are a casual/family game player and you don't mind the WWII theme, Battlecards is an easy to learn, fun, non-collectable game that is accessible to almost everyone.

Overall Opinion

This game really hit the mark with me. The combination of an easy to learn game that has lots of tactical and strategic decisions, different ways of winning and with a great theme is something I look for in a good game. Playing time comes in at about 60 to 90 minutes on average (some have gone two hours while others have been around 30 minutes).

The expandable nature of the game (and the fact that it is not collectable!) as well as the ability to combine this game with future releases is another plus that can't be overlooked. All this in a couple of nice decks of cards! It is clear that the designer has put a lot of thought and effort into the design of this game. What's not to like. Highly recommended!