I have yet to play a war game completely composed of cards that I've
really enjoyed. Most games that attempt this and are entertaining are
really mechanical games with a war theme added to them (Atlantic
Storm) or simply a game that awards too much luck to the player with
the best draw (Battlecards). The Battle for Hill 218 (Your Move
Games, 2007 - Darwin Kastle) is a card game with a war theme, but in
reality, it's more about abstract card placement than it is about war.
This will honestly determine whether or not you enjoy the game or
not. Coming into this game expecting a war game is a mistake.
Because even though the cards slightly emulate their real-life
counterparts, it will always feel like a short, tactical card game.
Some will enjoy the speed of the game, which possibly can take only
five minutes. Some will also like the fact that the game packs an
interesting punch with a twinge of randomness. I myself had a hard
time getting into the game because of the abstract nature. However,
even though the theme only slightly matches the mechanics, the game is
quick and works well. I just can't shake the feeling that the Hill
218 is more of a card placement exercise than anything else.
The game takes place on an imaginary grid centered around a single
card - Hill 218. Each player starts with an identical deck of twenty-
six cards, and two Air Strike cards. Players draw five cards from
their decks, placing two on the bottom and keeping the other three.
One player goes first, and then play alternates for the remainder of
the game.
On a player's turn, they simply draw two cards and play two cards
(although on the very first turn, the start player draws and plays
only one). When playing a card, a player deploys it to an unoccupied
space on the grid. The first unit is placed in a player's "base" (the
space directly behind Hill 218), after that, a player must place it so
that it has a line of sup****t (uninterrupted cards leading directly
back to the base). A few units can be deployed differently: the
paratroopers can start almost anywhere, and Special Forces can get
sup****t from a card diagonally.
After being placed, a card will attack the enemy if possible. Each
card shows what adjacent cards the unit can attack. Tanks and
Artillery can destroy the unit they attack, but most units need at
least one other unit sup****ting the attack (cards have diagrams about
how they give sup****t). Once a card is laid down, it can still
sup****t other attacks but will make no attacks.
Players can also play an Air Strike card on their turn, which simply
destroys one enemy card in play. A player can only do this twice per
game. The game continues until either player occupies the other
player's base - at which point they win, or all cards in the decks
have been used - at which point the player with the most units on the
board wins.
Your Move Games is starting to master the art of condensing a
complicated game into a small box. Battleground: Fantasy Warfare took
an entire hobby and smashed it into a deck of cards. After my initial
reactions concerning Hill 218, I'm starting to think something similar
has occurred here. Hill 218 seems to have taken a large tactical war
game and condensed it into a very short card game.
At first I thought that the game was completely lucky, that there was
little strategy. Then I downloaded the computer version from the
company's web site and was soundly destroyed by the computer a dozen
times in a row. I'm starting to hold my own against the computer, but
it's slow going and certainly disproves any ideas of luck that I was
holding.
Hill 218 tends to take a lot of the concepts of war gaming and
applies them in an abstract way, yet keeps the basic essence of them.
Artillery has long range combat; paratroopers can land in any space;
tanks are quite powerful, etc. The pictures on the cards, which are
photographs from World War II, do a lot to add to the theme. While
they don't detract from the icons on the cards, they do quickly show
how the card affects the grid. I'm not sure that the time period is
exactly necessary - changing the setting to Napoleonic or modern
combat would seem to have no bearing on how cards were played, but
it's likely that the World War II theme is fairly popular.
This isn't a game in which players are amassing large groups of
troops to destroy the enemy. Rather, a player is simply attempting to
form a line of sup****t into the enemy's base. This can be done with a
very few cards (as the computer has shown me to my bitter annoyance),
and most units can be dislodged and killed quickly as the game goes
by. For some reason, the game really reminded me of Your Move Games'
first product - Space Station Assault. That was a game which had a
similar concept, as space****ps formed lines to destroy one another;
yet it just didn't feel like a space****p battle to me. When comparing
the games, I noticed that the same designer, Mr. Kastle, has come up
with both; so the similarities weren't just in my head.
But where Space Station Assault did absolutely nothing for me - and I
so dearly wanted it to, as I adore space - Hill 218 continues to grow
on me. For some reason, the game manages to give me a bit of tactical
fun in a small box. Yes, I wish that the cards didn't have a black
border which shows off the nicks fairly easily. Also there will be
many times that I simply want to order a tank around a battlefield.
But once I get past the oddity that the cards can't move (which makes
sense when I seriously think about it), or the fact that the bases
seem so close to one another (it's an illusion), I find myself playing
five or six games in a row.
I didn't commit myself much to the game in the beginning of this
review, because that's how I felt about the game - I had initial
negative reactions to it. My words were, "Is that all?" when I played
a game, because I was certain that I had missed something. And
because of that certainty, I played the game again, and again - until
I realized that I was playing repeat games not because I was trying to
find a spark in the game, but because I found it.
I'm still not willing to go out on a limb and proclaim Hill 218 a
great game. I fear that it doesn't have enough replayability to keep
my attention for the next ten years, and I'm not sure I will be able
to entice as many folks to play it as, say, Memoir '44. But it is
entertaining and fast and does a good job of distilling the essence of
a battle over a hill into ten minutes.
Tom Vasel
"Real men play board games"
www.thedicetower.com
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