by Billy Riley, 14 July 2022 ~ #UnboxingDay
I know of the American Revolution, but I don’t know a lot about it. I know some people somewhere who were well looked after by the United Kingdom got all uppity about tea or something and had a tea party in Boston.
As you can see, I don’t know a lot about it, so when I saw a strategic game based on it, and well aware I didn’t have one, I decided to jump on board.
I hadn’t heard of the designer before. A quick search on BGG shows only 3 games. It’s got mixed reviews on BGG – from 1’s to 10’s – so who knows how this will play out.
Anyway – I have it – so let’s see what’s “in the box”
Box Art
It’s a strange one. It has a kind of “enlarged” look about it. Like someone has taken a 200px x 200px picture and expanded it to 1980×1220 or something. It’s certainly not a clear image. I don’t know if that’s on purpose – maybe to signify a hand painting of the time (where they that unclear)? – but no, not really a fan of the art.
The back of the box is thankfully clearer. You can read this at least and it shows it has a high solitaire suitability. I think I’ve been here before with Compass Games though and I’m not sure I always believe their solitaire suitability rating.
Action Cards
There are 51 Action Cards. They’re decent enough in terms of quality. These provide various – well – actions for you to carry out. I haven’t played the game so I don’t know to what degree they drive the game but a quick glance at the manual suggests they enhance the activities of units.
Army Cards
There are two Army Cards, allowing you to store your units on these cards when forming armies – preventing the need to move stacks around I guess
Player Aid Cards
There are 2 single sided cards and 3 double sided. The single sided ones are reinforcement cards.
The others hold information tables such as Terrain Effects Chart, Combat Tables etc. There’s also a welcome Sequence of Play
click images to enlarge
Dice
Two dice included
It’s nice they let you know they are not blue and red
Manuals
There are two booklets with the game. One Rule Book and another Play Book. They’re nice semi-gloss paper. I think I’d have liked a slightly bigger font though.
The rule book is 20 pages total with 2 pages on index.
There’s not a lot in the way of graphics, but there are nice pointers to parts of the Play book.
The Play Book is 12 pages with a bibliography and 2 pages of Designer Notes. There’s also a Gazeteer of Place Names – but it literally just lists the names of the cities and the abbreviated state…that is not going to be much help to anyone outside the US if I’m honest.
The Map
There are 2 paper maps – 34” by 24” for a total size of 34” x 48”. In order to land on my table, I will have to orientate North/South on the map being East/West – but I’m cool with that, though it will make finding places even more difficult.
Counters
The counters are a mess – as in, they’ve all fallen out their sprues. They’re decent quality but – alas – small at a ½”. I need to remember to look at this in future when I buy games because ½” is not really cutting it for my eyes anymore.
Errata
There’s a full page of errata. I can’t see anything in there that’s groundbreaking
Thanks for joining this month’s #UnboxingDay with the Armchair Dragoons and we hope you enjoyed our recon of our recent acquisitions. You can always leave us your feedback in our #UnboxingDay thread, or in the comment area on this article, below.
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