War Is Hell

We had just the right amount of people show up for our lunch gaming for us to play...

The Grizzled 2-5 players
This is an interesting cooperative game that I saw a play through of. You all play as French soldiers during WWI. The goal is to make it through the war together. This is done by removing and playing all the trial cards on the "peace" pile before all the trial cards get removed from the monument pile. On players' turns, they can play cards from their hand (mostly all bad) or use what little the have to help the cause (remove played or unplayed cards). If the mission is failed (three cards with like symbols), the peace pile gets bigger. If the mission is survived. The peace pile... still gets bigger, but by less. At the end of a round, players show who they offered support to and if there is one majority, they can ease some of their burden. Players then start a new round by dealing more cards from the peace pile and making it through the war.

We had the full 5 player experience. It started out okay. Nothing too bad happened, but the hard knocks cards (cards that are played on your character and change the rules in bad ways) continued to pile up. We failed to have a majority of support in the first round, but improved as things went on. During the entire game we never failed a mission. We even got to the peace card, but it was hard to get rid of cards in our hands and the hard knocks kept coming. We eventually failed because at the end of a mission I had more than 3 hard knocks on me.

We all enjoyed the game. Well, maybe not Rob. He doesn't ever play games and was new to the group. He was trying to find a way to unwind from work. This may have added some stress. He definitely saw the value in the game, but I'm not sure he'd ever play again. One of my co-workers wanted to borrow the game which I would have gladly let them, but I still wanted to play the game since it was still new to me and I had a feeling I was going to play it later in the day.

And we did. After trivia, Spencer, Sarah, Liz and I jumped into the trenches. It was brutal. We failed at least two missions and 3 of the 4 speeches given were complete duds. As soon as we started making traction, the memorial card reared it's ugly face. Poor us.
Spencer had to leave after that and Sarah needed to relax so I dumped out Jungle Speed. We played 4 games of it in all and I won every one of them. I was definitely aided by the fact that Liz and Sarah were a bit inebriated. We still had massive amount of fun.

Tally: 170/185  Bonus: 43/50