OVERVIEW
WF: WWII is a fast-paced card driven game for solitaire or co-op play. It depicts a small team of Soldiers, placed behind enemy lines, conducting commando / special forces type operations.
The game can be summarized as a two part exercise: planning and preparing for a Mission, and then actually executing it. In this planning phase, you select a Mission and an Objective and you put together a team of Soldiers that you think can best handle it. You select the Skills, Gear and Weapons that you think they will need to get the job done. You have a lot of interesting choices: you can choose a Soldier equipped with a rocket launcher, another who has medic skills and outfit another with a sniper rifle. In all cases, you make these choices using the parameters of the Mission which tells you how much you can ‘spend’ to build your team.
There’s lots of neat equipment to choose from, including explosives, anti-tank weapons and/or defensive equipment (entrenching tools, smoke grenades). You have to keep in mind that Soldiers can run out of ammo and explosives, so deciding how much to take and when to use it is very important. If your machine gun runs out of ammo, you may as well kiss your butt goodbye!
A small team assembled; ready to clear out a bunker with the support of some armour!
Each soldier has their own card which tells you how much gear the soldier can carry, whether they have any special skills, how much health they have, how fast they move and how many actions they get per turn. There is a great variety of soldiers available – you can choose ones which clearly have pre-defined roles, such as medic, a sniper, a machine gunner and there are others with a blank slate that you can customize with skills – some soldiers are much better than others – some are almost useless, while others could probably give <PERSON> a run for his money – but generally speaking, the better the soldier, the higher the ‘cost’ to choose them.
<PERSON> – he can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn. I’m sure the puppy doesn’t help.
The second phase is actually sending the team to complete the Objective. These Objectives range from holding an area, to escorting a convoy to taking out an enemy bunker. Sometimes you simply have to eliminate enemies in a location, but your intel sucks and you wont know for sure what hostiles are there, or, you have to take a specific enemy/structure. As each Mission can be paired with each Objective, the base game offers quite a few different scenarios to play.
Want to go on a Country Stroll and take out some Dugouts along the way?
Once the Mission beings, you better hope you took the right mix of Soldiers, Skills and Gear to get the job done. 449
Fighting your way through the Mission involves moving through various locations until you get to the Objective, then doing whatever it says to do. Along the way, you’ll come across Hostiles that you must neutralize by killing and or suppressing them. You’ll have at least one hand of Action Cards to manage, so along with dice rolling, target selection and positioning, a big part of the game is hand management.
COMPONENTS
The components are fine, with some over-production (the board) and some under-production (shortage of tokens for the larger Missions). Most of the card art consists of old boring photos, very bland and unappealing. Nothing that evokes excitement, that’s for sure. Wish they could have used illustrations for the Soldiers like the one seen on the cover. That’s a lot more evocative.
If only the rest of the art was this nice …
The box comes stuffed with goodies. Lots of cards, lots of thick tokens and a durable, attractive board. The cards are sturdy, but unattractive and have an atrocious graphic design: there are few icons, and the cards are heavy on text and numbers – simply put, they are a chore to read! I really would have appreciated a more thoughtful user-friendly design than the one employed here; but, at least, it does work.
Example of the User-Unfriendly Card Design
Although I don't like the graphic design, WF: WWII doesn't have the worst cards in the world. No, there are clearly better contenders.
... see, it can always be worse. At least I can read the cards in WF: WWII
The board, while pretty, is example of a paradox, both too big and too small at the same time. The board takes up a lot of room on the table but that is wasted space because the board is mostly unused at any given time. Most of the room on the board consists of columns where you play Hostiles (enemies). 336