inconsequential ruminations

I spent 5 and a half hours of my life enjoying Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage last night. Rob came over and we had a titanic struggle.



I tried to play Hannibal several years ago, when I had my gaming rebirth. I bought the Avalon Hill version over eBay, before prices went crazy. I persuaded my brother to try it with me and we learnt that sad, painful lesson that you must always read war game rules thoroughly before you play them – ideally both players should. That should be part of a mental health warning on war game boxes. Anyway, it was a major disaster, putting me off war games for years and putting my brother off games in general. Now after playing games like Monty’s Gamble and Ardennes ‘44 (also by Mark Simonitch), Hannibal does not seem too bad.

The new Valley Games version looks absolutely fantastic, with top-notch artwork that is perfectly usable. I am really looking forward to getting the preorder bonus General miniatures. The Roman and Carthaginian dice are a flash of genius.



Most importantly, the rules are nearly perfect. We had almost no questions. The original rules were good anyway, after several revisions from the earlier version, and Valley Games made no mistakes.

I find the level of whining from the BoardGameGeek community at Valley Games totally mystifying. The interview at Boardgame News was harsh too. These people deserve proper respect for doing such a good job. They have delivered a game that no one else could with no major problems. No one enters the game business looking for fame and fortune. They do it from the love of the games. At the end of the day, we all have tons of underplayed games on our shelves – so why give these guys so much impatient abuse?

The game play is very similar to We the People – so similar that I am surprised their BGG ratings are so different. It was good for me in this game that I had played We the People so recently.

From a strategy point of view, a few things really stuck out for me:

• strong attacks into Italy will be tough to pull off – has anyone reading managed to sack Rome?
• combat tends to be inconclusive, unless you can surround the loser with political control markers and combat units.
• it is difficult to convert your enemy’s political control markers without overwhelming force or the right strategy cards.

I should probably read Andy Daglish’s strategy article, but the fun for me is to work it out for myself.

Game balance seems to be very fine. According to the World Board Gaming Championships report, players were only bidding one to two political control markers to play as the Carthaginians.

My only real complaint is about the Battle Cards. They add lots of time, for not much strategy. For smaller battles towards the end they became quite irritating. There is a controversial CRT available, based on some probability analysis of the battle cards, claiming to be accurate to 2%. It does miss out some tactical subtleties, but I suspect it would be worth it for the increased speed.

I did not mind playing this for five and a half hours at all. We chatted a lot and took it easy. Next time we will definitely bring it in under four hours, possibly close to three.

9/10 after one play – the only way is up.