Espana 1936 and July 4th...

First of all, let's get the prelims out of the way:

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

(Even if it's just another day to you in your land!)

Not sure what I'll be doing tonight, probably just staying home with Cheyenne, since Deanna has her kids. Maybe I'll head up to the Irondequoit space and let Cheyenne run around. I've never been into fireworks, so I won't be missing anything.

As for gaming, well, I stayed up until about 3:00 AM playing around with Espana 1936 last evening, my new game on the Spanish Civil War (very interesting, and brutal, history). Going over the rules again, punching the counters, sleeving the cards, and then playing through two "half" games solitaire -- one ending because I realized I was doing replacement rules incorrectly, the other ending because I was falling asleep. Now, I only solitaire games to learn rules (as I was doing here), and I would never, ever, ever solitaire a card-driven (based?) game. But you know what? I think I may be headed back to this one for another go, and then I'll be able to teach all my gaming buddies -- I'm liking it that much.

I think I'll explain the "Sequence of Play" to give you an idea of how the game goes -- I played only the "basic" game, leaving out the Naval rules.

1. Draw Phase. Both players draw 3 cards into their hands (6 cards on Turns 1 and 6 to signify the start of the conflict and the movement to a new deck in Turn 6 -- each side has 2 decks, 1936/37 and 1938/39). The cards will be the basis of events (mainly reinforcements, but there are also leader deaths, army training, and army degradation) and are also used to modify combat -- either as a bonus to you or as a penalty to your opponent. Cards are important. Use them well.

2. Movement and Plane Assignment Phase (Nationalist first, Republican second). Starting with Franco's side, a player may move his military units (of which there are many different flavors -- militias, regulars, International Brigades, Army of Africa, Communists, Basques, etc.) and tanks anywhere on the map ASSUMING he can move over a track of friendly connections. Moving into an enemy space (even if there are friendly units there -- yes, units coexist in spaces, "contesting" them) stops movement, so there isn't ahistorical teleporting across Spain! The Nationalist player gets to set the pace here, while the Republican player gets to react -- though there are a couple cards which switch the order, giving the initiative to the Republicans. This is a very important phase, as you need to both advance and keep any "holes" plugged. Obviously, one cannot even begin to get the full feel of how tense this will be while playing solitaire!

3. General Assignment Phase (In Turn, beginning with the Nationalist). Generals are the fuel injectors that drive the fighting -- without a general, you cannot attack (though you can always defend). And generals are in short supply -- both sides have 5 total, though some come in as reinforcements and some die. So use your generals well -- place them in spaces you need to attack, don't waste them (as I seemed to do in my first go-round). They are placed first Nationalist, then Republican, then Nationalist, etc., so in a 2-player game I could definitely see some "trickery" used to dupe your opponent on where your main offensive will be. There are some restrictions on where they can go in the first turn, but after that they can go with any friendly unit on subsequent turns.

4. Combat Resolution Phase (In Turn, beginning with the Nationalist). As with general placement, we go back and forth here, first with a Nationalist attack, then a Republican, etc., until all generals have been used. Oh, you can "deactivate" a general instead of attacking -- a good idea, especially if you were "duped" earlier...

Combat is fun, and has quite a few steps -- I will get into them in more detail in a later post, perhaps an AAR one of these days. Suffice it to say that you roll a number of dice equal to your army strength plus any air support (and if both sides have air, there are dogfights!), hitting on 5s and 6s. Now, there are many modifications to these die rolls -- tanks, generals, units themselves (militia is -1, Legionnaires are +1, for instance), and combat cards -- and combat is done on a "one unit vs. one unit" basis. So if you have one 5-strength International Brigade fighting in a space with 4 individual Carlist militia units, the most militia that will be lost on an attack is 1, since the International Brigade can only attack one unit during each battle! Stacking is 4 units of any size, so we have a nice melding of "quality vs. quantity" here, with no "perfect" balance -- sometimes you need a couple big units to blast through a tough space, other times you need 4 militia to make the enemy waste precious time rooting them out. A great dynamic built into an easy system. I really love this sort of design!

5. Upkeep Phase (Simultaneous). Generals and planes are returned to off-map holding boxes, ownership of objective cities are tracked (more on this when I get to an AAR -- some cities are definitely worth more than others!), victory conditions are checked (again, more later!), and the Nationalist player gets to move units from Africa to Spain.

6. Events Phase (In Turn, beginning with the Nationalist). Here's where card events (mostly reinforcements) get played. Each player can play up to 3 each Events Phase, and you can't carry over 1936/37 cards to 1938/39, so you have to figure out the best mix between playing for Events or for Combat Bonuses/Penalties. Once a card is played for anything, it's discarded, forever.

7. Replacement Phase (Every Odd Turn). Replacements are given based on occupation/ownership of Objective Cities. Players take replacements in turn, starting with the player who has less (if they have the same number, Nationalist player goes first). There's a "neat" rule here, in that only certain replacements can be taken in certain years (i.e. in 1936 you can only build 1 strength regular army or militia units, or bump existing 1 strengthers of these guys to 2 strength points). As time goes on, one sees the bigger 3 and 5 strength point units enter now. Also, certain units, such as International Brigades and Army of Africa Troops, among others, can never take replacements -- the only way to get (or "grow") these units is through Event card play. Finally, each space can only take one replacement, per turn, per side. So if a space is weak, the best you can do is is give that space one replacement point -- a whole new army can't pop up in a space via replacements!

8. Status Phase. Both players discard down to 8 cards and then you go to the next turn. 8 cards?!?! I was happy if I had 1 left over from turn to turn, so I don't know why this rule is even here (unless playtesting caught some tactic that used a bazillion combat cards in one turn to break through the lines, who knows).

So, yeah, I like this one so far.

A lot.

2 thumbs up!

I will be reporting more, I hope with a nice AAR one of these days. Just gotta get my local gaming buddies hooked. I don't think that will be too hard.