A bride should be met at the door after the wedding by the mother or nearest female relation and a currant bun. The bun must be broken over the head of the bride before she crosses the threshold of her home. -Scottish folk custom.
my mum gave me a currant bun and somehow i managed to delude myself into thinking that currants are different from raisins.. i'm currently picking every single one of those fuckers out so i can eat the pastry in peace
Oh, just give it a peanut and we'll get on with this.
Right, pull up a chair, help yourself to a crumpet (sorry about the footprints in the butter) and I'll tell you about my time with a two-player card-driven war game I've been hanging around with lately. It's part of my quest to find a two-player game with enough depth to have a good wade around in, but straightforward enough to convince Madam Prawn to play me on a semi-regular basis. That quest has taken me across the oceans and back in time, to a contested land of labyrinthine riverways and arctic winters, a land of hostile natives and limited resources, a land that we today call Quebec, but to which Voltaire once pithily referred as 'A Few Acres of Snow'.
A Few Acres of Snow casts its players as the colonial British and the inhabitants of New France at the time of the seven-years war, going head-to-head for control of the territories at the Northern edge of the New World. It is a conflict between old rivals, a conflict of peoples and ideals,a conflict that will be decided once and for all with cards, plastic coins and little pieces of wood.
Each player starts with a slim deck of cards with which to perform two actions per turn, influencing the events on the board. Actions that include, amongst others, settling new areas, developing your existing holdings, earning money, drafting more cards into your deck, and of course attacking your opponent.
If this is starting to sound familiar it's with good reason. If one were in a particularly reductionist frame of mind, it would be possible, and only mostly inaccurate, to describe A Few Acres of Snow as Dominion bolted on to a Risk board. While that may touch on capturing the physical playing of the game (there is a lot of shuffling), what you'll be using those cards and bits of wood for forms a much heavier and more solid-feeling framework of choices than the lightning-fast and feather-light Dominion. That's not solely because of the mere presence of a board, though I won't deny I think that's part of it. It's mainly because to accomplish anything requires sets of cards that work together in an number of different and fairly sensible ways. If I want to besiege somewhere, I'm going to need a card for a nearby location, one to provide an appropriate means of transport and of course some kind of military. To fortify a village I'll need that location's card, a fortification card and enough money to pay for the construction. If Dominion is a Formula-1 car, this is a Sherman Tank.
No, don't give it a currant bun.
It is also a cruel game, while there are times the optimal course of action is obvious, you'll be cursing all those Native Americans cards you've drafted, or those unnecessary locations you possess, and are currently as useful as ice-skates in the Sahara. And you can't just discard them, at least not for free, futhermore you'll only be drawing enough new cards at the end of your turn to get back up to the minimum hand size of five.
Still, sooner or later, one of you will place all of one kind of settlement, or capture the requisite number of enemy settlements, to win the game. Or even deliver the military coup-de-grace, achieved if the French win a siege or settle in New York or Boston, or the British do so in Quebec.
So, there you are. This is a rich- just let it sit there- and involving game- try another peanut- that will provide- don't show it the mouse!- many hours...
Okay, so we can't really ignore the elephant in the review anymore, can we?
If this isn't the first thing you've read about A Few Acres of Snow, you'll probably know what I'm talking about, if it is or you don't, well, there is a widely recognised flaw in the design of the game. There is a strategy for the British player that all but ensures victory. Every time. I'm not going to go into the specifics of it, because I don't know what they are and nor do I care to. But it exists.
Now, here's the thing, I own the second edition of the game, which contains rule tweaks to supposedly lessen the effectiveness of said strategy. Though I understand there is some debate as to how effective these measures are to that end. So, does any of this matter? The game's broken, right? Move on, nothing to see here...
See, I don't know if it's as cut and dried as that. Though if you think it is, fair enough. I can certainly appreciate your point of view on the issue, and it's not like other publishers and producers can get away with faulty product. But is it faulty? In absolute terms, I guess so. But from what I gather the break in the game was found after extensive rapid-fire online play, and I can only assume by people who were driven to parse out the very best possible strategies in the game. That's not a bad thing of course, far from it, and if the game's original playtesters had had that mindset I probably wouldn't be having to type this flipping paragraph. Or the last one, come to that...
But that is not my mindset. I generally want to best the opponent I'm playing, not the game I'm playing. And perhaps those rule tweaks do the trick. But even if they don't, and I or my opponent does one day stumble on the killer strategy... well I suspect by then I'll have got my money's worth- even if that does mean I don't want to play the game anymore. Hey, you never know, maybe I'll even come up with an effective counter.
Can I recommend A Few Acres of Snow? Well, yes and no I guess. If you're someone who doesn't want an imperfect product, and that's entirely fair enough, then probably steer clear. If, however, you like the sound of how this plays and don't mind the fact you may one day obsolete your own game, or that such a thing is possible, this is a lovely game to get lost in. I definitely get an exceptional feeling of immersion from being heads up with someone else over this heavily wooded and river-strewn landscape. For me at least, that's worth the problems.
I may just have to spend the rest of my life avoiding certain parts of the internet like the plague.
Oh how we all yearned to be new york city boys. Like Rob. What a cunt, thinking he's a rockstar, thinking he's cool, with his greasy pile of shit hair attempting to be a scene kid. Oh look at me i'm a scene kid. Pffft, puurlease. What a dick.
