A Few Acres of Snow

Earlier this year one of the more popular current board game designers (Martin Wallace: Age of Steam, Brass, Automobile...) came out with an interesting game that I'd heard nothing about. It was added to Yucata earlier this month and I've played a few games of it (mostly against Andrew) and really like the game. It's a deck building game, like Dominion, except it simulates the France/Britain conflict in North America circa 1700ish. So it's a wargame where you build your deck as you play!

It's a two player game with very asymmetrical starting positions. The French start with a lot of points on board and have more immediate military power in their deck. The British start with a smaller deck, more cash, and their starting cards tend to be more powerful. The cards you can buy as the game progresses are different for the two teams, too. The British have more military power available for purchase. The French have better access to the Native American cards which allow for ambushes/raids to do damage outside of the main combat mechanic. There are cards to take to try to counter what your opponent is doing if they're singularly focused on one thing.

The game has multiple end conditions as well which can have people building different decks. The British win by conquering Quebec. The French win by conquering Boston or New York. Alternatively if either side places all of their colonies or towns the game ends and the highest score wins. Finally if one side kills/raids enough colonies or towns from their opponent the game also ends with the highest score winning.


Multiple end conditions is pretty cool but potentially degenerate. The French start out with more points on the board but if the British plan is to take Quebec that doesn't much matter. They flat out win by taking Quebec so as far as they're concerned the French could start with a billion points and it wouldn't matter. (Of course, if the French did start with a billion points they'd focus entirely on defending Quebec so it should matter, right?)

It turns out the way the game works as printed there's a brutally degenerate combo for the British. They have a path to Quebec that is, by all accounts, unstoppable. We're talking 95+% chance to win if you're playing Britain and know what you're doing. (You get down to a 5 card deck pretty easily and then get into a position to spend your turn making 6 dollars, buying a card for 7, drawing the new card immediately, and playing it into a fight. This keeps your deck at 5 cards so you're guaranteed to be able to do it again next turn. You lose a dollar per turn but you can spend a turn making 12 dollars instead of buying a card if you feel like it.) Eventually you win the fight and all those cards you bought go into your deck so your deck is no longer degenerate. Unfortunately for France you now have more strength in your deck than he can ever buy and you're one step from Quebec. Guess what's going to happen...


On Friday the designer came out with 'patch notes' for the game in an attempt to balance things out again. He made 4 rule changes which are pretty much entirely focused on stopping this one strategy. The game was a lot of fun when I didn't know about this strategy (I did something similar to Andrew but didn't get my deck to 5 cards so I was slower) but my interest in playing had waned. Now I want to give it a go again! (Yucata did an update with the new rules changes very quickly!)

The changes are:

- Remove the worst card from the French starting deck. They started with a 10 card deck while Britain started with a 7 card deck which made it easier for Britain to build a degenerate deck quickly. France can still buy the card for no money if they want it. (It will take one of their two actions for the turn to buy it, though.)
- Nerf the 'reserve' which was an area you could store cards temporarily between turns. The idea behind the reserve in the first place was you often need specific cards together and this would let you store one piece of a combo until you drew the second one. How it was actually used is people would just shunt their worst cards to it and never retrieve them (which is how Britain could get down to a 5 card deck so easily). Now you can't store the location cards in the reserve. (Location cards tend to be worse than other cards but you start with some and you get more as you get points on board. It would be like if you could island away all your victory point cards in Dominion as your first couple turns!)
- Indian raids get an extra square of movement for free. This buffs an underused strategy in general and in particular opens the door to stopping the degenerate British opening by allowing a raid of Halifax before they can use it as a springboard to Louisbourg (and then Quebec).
- Home support got nerfed. Home support is a card which lets you draw 3 cards without using either of your actions for the turn. This was how the British could buy a card, draw it, and play it all in one turn. The way it works now is home support can't trigger a reshuffle. If you don't have 3 cards in your deck then you don't get 3 cards. You can have as many as are left in your deck and then you can wait until the end of your turn to shuffle. So when you buy a card and put it in your discard pile there's no way to draw it in the same turn. This fits the theme of the game (troops from Europe take time to arrive) and makes the card really bad in a 5 card deck. It's still good in a fair deck, though!


It's a pretty great game (I will probably buy it if I see it in a game store sometime) and I'm happy with these rule changes. I'm a little worried that raids are going to end up really overpowered but since they were useless in games where people knew what they were doing it's probably good that they got buffed.