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This is an interesting combination of a board game and a pick your own adventure. You control a team of four SOE agents who have infiltrated occupied France to work with the Resistance over the course of three linked scenarios.
The game contains three scenarios, each of which gets its own dedicated scenario book, with the numbered options, as well as a sealed envelope that contains the starting instructions and a series of map cards – one for the overall area, the rest for individual encounters. The structure of the game is provided by the pick your own adventure element, which decides where you start and what options you have at each stage. Some of the entries are fairly simple – ‘explore the woods go to 232, explore the village go to 110’, but others are more complex – you might be told to pick a map, gain equipment or boosters, or be given a list of ‘if/ then’ instructions, where the strength of your team or your earlier choices decide where you go next.
The board game aspect starts with your choice of four agents from the eight provided. Each has different stats, ranging from 1 to 3, and covering firepower, stealth, influence, awareness and technical. Some agents have special abilities, which give them extra tokens – one gets firepower tokens, one skill tokens while the leader gets a special ability token that allows the to support another agent. The five agents without special abilities each have one skill at 3, while those with abilities peak at 2.
You also get equipment cards – every agent starts with a Welrod pistol, a short range pistol designed specifically for special operations. In the first scenario you start with a sniper rifle and grenade, and I picked up binoculars, all of which give a specific boost in some circumstances.
You are also given several types of skill booster tokens – firepower tokens, skill tokens (for everything but firepower) and advantage tokens, which can be used for anything but are temporary, earn for good decisions in an encounter and normally lost at the end of it. These can be spent to boost your stats, letting you improve the results of a decision. One early example sees some of your agents attempting to distract someone while others sneak past them. You split the team, then add up the influence scores of the agents attempting the distraction. A low score sends you to the worse result, medium score to a medium result and high score to the best results. At this point you can spend skill tokens to improve your score and get a better result. The key decision here is at what stage do you want to use this limited resource – early in the hope it will have a long term impact, save them for the final encounter, and do you want to use them to up a bad result to medium or medium result to good. Sometimes the differences are fairly minor, and you end up on the same path, but in others a good result can see you going down a totally different path.
The same is true for early encounters. The first scenario begins with you choosing between entering France by sea or by parachute, with each taking you to a different starting point. The game plays very differently depending on which option you take – my choice meant I got to pick which part of the area I wanted to search first, the other starts with a fight! Each of the areas play differently at night and in the day, and time passes depending on your choices, so if you visit one location in the night and take time to search it, the next one might be visited in daytime. As a result your decisions really do feel like they have a big impact on the game, with the order of events important. Decisions within an encounter can also have a long term impact – take one path and you might be asked to circle ‘Q’ on your sheet, take a different route and it might be ‘K’, or nothing. Later this becomes important – I found one choice in particular coming back to haunt me several times, making later encounters harder.
It quickly becomes clear that your early decisions will have an impact through each scenario. The first scenario builds up to a large battle, and the decisions you make before reaching that point have a big impact on how that battle plays out. The setup for the first of these big battles has a series of preliminary steps, where you are sent to particular entries if ‘Q’ or ‘Z’ is circled. The designers have been careful to make sure that some letters are good and some are bad – one might indicate you’ve gained an ally, or a special weapon, another that you’ve been detected by the Germans. The three scenarios are also linked, with an overall score that decides how alert the Germans become – the lower the better, with higher scores making the final scenario harder.
The map encounters continue the combined approach. Each map has a number of possible locations for your agents. Some locations are for long range weapons, others for short range, while some are observation points. There will normally be more positions than you have agents, so you have to decide how to deploy your forces. The big encounter also gives you Maquis allies, represented by white cubes on the map, who have their own stat card. Combat continues with the combined approach – there is no dice rolling in this game, with everything controlled by a combination of your deployment choices, the instructions in the book and any booster tokens you decide to use.
Combat can be quite brutal. Each agent card has a healthy side and an injured side. If you taken an injury you flip the card, unless you are already injured in which case you become mortally wounded, and will die next time advances. Injured agents can be healed (although rarely), but mortally wounded agents can’t be saved. By the end of the first encounter I had two injured agents, and by the end of the first scenario I’d lost one.
The box includes a pad of team sheets, which you use to record key aspects of each game – mark when time is passing, ring letters when instructed etc. One nice feature is that the back of each sheet is a grid to let you record which entries you are chosen – very handy if you get distracted, or accidentally go to the wrong place, allowing you to retrace your steps back to where you were on track.
My first game, played solo, took about an hour and a half. The rules are pretty clear, so I wouldn’t expect the game to get that much quicker. Multiplayer games are cooperative, using the same rules but will all of the players getting to discuss which options to select, so how long they take will depend on your group. Put someone decisive in charge of reading the book and dealing with the tokens etc – it’s not quite the role of a game master, but perhaps not far off. The box says for 1-6 players, but there is no particular reason in the rules to prevent a larger group playing – however I would suspect it’ll work better with smaller groups, three or four – there are no clearly identified individual roles for individual players, so with too many players it’s possible that some might not feel involved.
The game plays nicely, and you really feel that your decisions make a difference. The big question is how replayable it would be. My first game ended with me failing on one objective and partially succeeding on the second, so there is clearly plenty of room for improvement. There are 500 entries in each of the three scenario books, and I visited 61 of them. A different set of agents would have given me different stats and taken my down different paths, even if I’d made similar decisions. Having two different starting points gives you two different game paths. The second scenario also starts with a choice of routes, while the nature of the third will be affected by the results of the first two. Your choice of agents will give you different options, perhaps a combat heavy team one game and a stealth team in another, again taking you down different paths.
