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I recently had the pleasure of playing a preview version of Verdun from Dragon Dawn Productions and designer Ren Multamäki. This is something a little different for me, a trick-taking card game with a very serious theme, one wherein the gameplay is twinned deeply enough to that theme that it will give you pause for thought. Is it successful in this aim? Yes, it really is. Let’s hear a little bit about it from the production company first…
Verdun is a 1v1 and 2v2 partnership card game revisiting the German and French armies fighting in the World War I battlefields of Verdun. As their hands dwindle, players will also have to play cards that help the other side, timing it strategically to minimize their own casualties. The teams alternate being the Attacker, mirroring the back-and-forth nature of the Verdun battles, bringing costly decision-making to the table. Every card played has consequences, and every round is a tension-filled challenge.
This is an incredibly easy game to set up, you’ll be up and running in a minute or two. I really appreciate a game like this as a palate cleanser, where you can get into the meat of it quickly without sorting through endless components and game board configurations. There’s a single card deck – no worries about getting each side’s cards muddled up here. Before the game begins, each side will organise their assets behind each of their five fortifications. Each player then receives twelve cards, which will be used across the following three rounds, each made up of four tricks. In each trick your aim is to minimize your own side’s casualties whilst also attempting to protect your assets and fortifications whilst simultaneously attacking the enemy. Whoever has the most points – or is least into the negative – at the end wins.
To play, the leading player in each trick chooses a fortification to attack. You need to break down the fortifications to lay claim to the objectives beyond. With all cards played, do your sums. Has the attacker outnumbered the defender? If so, flip over the chosen fortification card and add that to the defender’s figure. Usually this will be enough to bolster the defender and hand them the win. If it isn’t enough, however, then the attacker claims the objective that was hidden behind the objective. It could be a POW camp or even the enemy headquarters. It could also be a useless decoy, and you’ve sent so many soldiers to their doom for nothing. Such is war.
Once this part of the trick is resolved, it’s time to tally up those casualties, and you do that from the cards used in the trick. If you won that particular battle, then you put your lowest card in a scoring pile. If you lost, then it’s the highest card. When the end of the game is reached, the number of skulls on these scoring cards is counted, and these will be subtracted from the points you scored by claiming objectives. You need to think hard, then, about every single card you play. How big a gamble are you willing to take? Are you certain you can overcome or counteract whichever card your opponent is about to play? There’s also special cards to play – Scouts, Generals, Spies and Chaplains – as well as stratagems such as mustard gas and barrages to play, which can really crank up the brutality and the number of casualties.
Remember, there’s only two sides here – the German and the French – and you are not given the cards specifically for your army. All available cards are in the single deck that everyone has drawn from, a deck that has been shuffled. In your hand will be a mix of cards for your army and for that of your enemy. In a two player game you will each play two cards. You will have some decisions to make, then. Do you want to lead with your army’s biggest cards and hope to get lots of damage done early? Take that tactic and you might use up your heavy hitters too soon. Do you start by putting out the enemy’s cards first, playing the lower denominations first in the hope that you won’t take too many casualties yourself? Play this way and you might find you only have powerful cards for the opposing army left to play, and you could end up handing victory to your opponent.
The four player game is the real draw here (minor card-game pun there, and no, I won’t apologise), and for me it’s where Verdun plays best. The thing is, team mates should be sitting at opposing compass points, not next to each other, which prevents your buddy giving you a quick flash of your cards without the other team seeing what you’ve got. How well do you and your team mate work together?
You will feel that you are at war, and an old one at there, where communications are limited and you have to hope that you have read your enemy correctly and that your ally is on the same page as you. You will be forced to make moves where you are certain that your cards will cost you casualties, often in the hope that your next move will hurt your opponent more. Sacrifices will have to be made, and you need to time them right, or your losses will mount up rapidly.
At the end, your win will be a negative total. You will have the joy of victory, but then perhaps you will consider what that victory means, what it cost. You threw everything at your opponent and casualties racked up on both sides. It’s possibly the first game I’ve played that comes hand-in-hand with this notion of what cost victory comes at. It’s certainly the most explicit example of it. This notion of war’s cost is baked into the mechanics of Verdun
There’s plenty of scope here for after-match analysis, and lots of good-hearted passing of the blame – how could you not read my mind and know exactly which card I wanted you to play? On the other hand, there’s room for smugness in victory, proving once and for all that you and your partner of choice are the dream team.
The theme, then, is obviously as serious as it gets, and that shouldn’t put anybody off. It is, in fact the game’s greatest strength. You’ll rapidly find yourself drawn into the strategic symbolism of the plays that are available to you. Your choices lead to casualties, and your gambles may not pay off. Not every game has to be cutesy dragons working in bakeries, or anthropomorphic mushrooms gathering pals to save the tree of life (or something). Give something different a try, and you might be surprised by how deeply you get sucked in. Once you become attuned to Verdun’s mechanics, there’s a real one-more-go feel to the game, a conviction that this time you’ll get the win if only you tweak your tactics just so.
Easy to learn, quick to set up, layered with deep strategies and a deeper thematic tension, this is a firm recommendation if you want to try a game with meaning.
The crowdfunding campaign will come to an end soon, and quite honestly for the price this has got to be worth a punt. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ddpgames/verdun-a-thematic-card-game-set-in-the-trenches-of-wwi/description