A Few Acres of Snow
A game for 2 players designed by <PERSON>
Introduction
"It is another kind of folly," said <PERSON>. "You know that these two nations are at war for a few acres of snow in Canada, and that they spend over this beautiful war much more than Canada is worth. To tell you exactly, whether there are more people fit to send to a madhouse in one country than the other, is what my imperfect intelligence will not permit. I only know in general that the people we are going to see are very atrabilious."
- Voltaire, Candide, Chapter XXIII
A Few Acres of Snow is a 2 player game set in Québec and New England with the French and British struggling for supremacy in the new world during the Seven Years War.
Note: this review is based on the limited edition, which has slightly different components than the regular release version of the game.
Components
The game comes in the high quality solid box that Treefrog Games has become known for, and inside the box are player aids, rules in English, German, French and Italian, a beautiful map on a mounted board, and the cards that form the core of this game.
Everything you get in the box. Photo courtesy of BGG user <PERSON>The limited edition supplies small houses, buildings with steeples, and fortress tokens. They're beautiful and functional, but I was surprised at how small they were!
The wooden bits in the deluxe edition are beautiful, but surprisingly small! Photo courtesy of BGG user <PERSON>
Rules and Game Play
The Set Up
One player takes the French side and the other the British. Cards are sorted into several piles: each player has a core deck to begin, an empire deck they can draft from (more on that later), and a location deck that adds cards as you settle locales on the map. There's also a shared green deck that both players can draft from containing settlers, Native Americans, and fortification cards.
There are three kinds of cards in the game: the core deck, the empire deck, and the location deck. The decks are asymmetrical in keeping with the different capabilities and advantages for both sides. For instance, the French have a lot of cards with a bateau symbol, while the British have a lot of cards with ship and settler symbols.
The core and location cards serve multiple purposes.
The rules for the game are actually very simple. 92
Each turn players follow this sequence of play:
- check to see if they have won an active siege
- take two actions (one in the first turn)
- refill your hand to five cards (if you have less than five cards)
The actions phase will be familiar to anyone who has played Dominion as you will have a limited set of cards with which to play your actions, and the game play is in developing synergies between what card resources you have available to you and your overall plan of action to subjugate the other side. The core system of A Few Acres of Snow is managing the deck of cards you have through card drafting and deck building as the game progresses. Where this game diverges from this familiar concept is that it is much more difficult to clear your hand of unwanted cards. It costs one of your two actions to discard a card, and you have to pay one money for every card beyond the first.
The actions you can take are broadly classified in the rules as: expansive (expand your empire); aggressive (do something to your opponent); financial (generate money); and card management (tweak that deck).
Location cards, both the ones you start with and the ones you will accumulate serve multiple purposes in the game. They will have the name of places you can get to from there plus show you what you'll need to settle in that place. For example, from Louisbourg you can get to Halifax and you'll need a ship to get there. Halifax also has a settler symbol on its space so in order to settle Halifax then, you would need to play three cards: one with a starting location that can access Halifax, one card with a ship symbol, and one card with the settler symbol.
Here the British have settled and fortified both Halifax and Canso
In the empire deck are cards that will help you depending on your strategy. The British begin with more money and easier ways to generate it than the French so will be able to draft cards from their empire deck more quickly, especially the military ones. Time is the French side however, as their rapid expansion capabilities mean they can overcome the monetary advantage by trading all those beaver pelts from the settlement cards they accumulate.
Expansion is easier for the French as they begin the game with more cards that have bateau symbols and much of map are locations accessible by river. Settling a new locale also has the effect of automatically drafting that location's card into your draw deck. 629