by RockyMountainNavy, 18 May 2023
Another Boring Unboxing? Not With The Boer War
It would be fair to say that I spend most of my wargame time on 20th Century and modern conflicts. In a change of pace, I decided to look a bit beyond my basic encyclopedic knowledge of the Boer Wars and pledged my support on Kickstarter for The Boer War: Imperial Campaigns Volume I by Joseph Miranda and published by Jon Compton at Canvas Temple Publishing (“Old Codgers Trying to Retire!”). Alas, The Boer War will go down in the history books as one of the last game published by CTP.
click images to enlarge
The Boer War was intended to be the first in new Imperial Campaigns series. As the CTP website announced: “Imperial Campaigns is a wargame system for recreating wars and campaigns during the great age of European Empires from the 18th century to early 20th centuries, using 60 to 80 counters per game and a deck of cards. A single Standard Rules booklet applies to all games in the series, each of which also has its own Exclusive Rules providing the Scenario(s) for a specific campaign.”
The Boer War comes in a standard 1.5″ deep game box. I have to send kudos to CTP for using a real wraparound on the box. As much as I appreciate the efforts of some other small publishers, I like my wraparounds to stay attached to the box. Yes, that seems like a minor point but it is a simple sign of the quality effort CTP delivered.
What comes in that box? Well, for a “small” game the box is “filled to the gills” with content.
A good deal of the content in the box is for a 22″x34″ unmounted mapboard. The board itself is VERY thick.
The counters are in keeping with the CTP pledge to make games for Grognards who are, shall we say, challenged in sight and manual dexterity. The large oversized counters are 1″ which fit nicely into the 1 3/8″ hexes.
As befits a series game, The Boer War comes with two rule books. The first is for the series rules.
Alas, those looking for a rule book that is not a car-manual will be disappointed. Truthfully, they shouldn’t be. The CTP commitment to age-challenged Grognards means the text is a bit larger and crisp with good use of color and graphics.
The Exclusive Rule Book for The Boer War is equally well produced.
While the Exclusive rule book for The Boer War is mostly scenarios, there are also more rules included.
The contents list for The Boer War says there is one deck of playing cards included. In reality, opening the box one finds two decks.
If there is one part of the “grognard vision” in production of The Boer War that maybe comes up a bit short it is the font on the cards and two player aids. A reminder that good light is needed for play and not a dark basement with piles of d20s, weirdly painted minis, and wannabe wargame players pretending to be wizards and bards while they hire henchmen to slaughter hapless creatures.
The Boer War is rated as “Medium-Low” complexity and suitable for solitaire play. With an expected playing time of two hours per scenario (three are included) this could make a good “weekend gaming” title to use in between working off assignments from the Honey-Do List (as in “Honey, do this. Honey, do that”).
Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and saddling up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. (We have an Instagram page and we never use it.)
You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
IF YOU ENCOUNTER A COUNTER CASTING A HEX IN A HEX
AND YOU COUNTER THE HEX WITH A COUNTER-HEX IN THAT HEX DURING THE ENCOUNTER,
AND YOU HAVE TO COUNT HOW MANY HEXES ARE IN THE HEX DURING THE ENCOUNTER
ARE YOU PLAYING A HEX-AND-COUNTER WARGAME?
