Review #12: A Few Acres of Snow

# of Players: 2
Playtime: 2-3 Hours

Core Mechanic: Deck Building/Area Control

Theme: 18th Century North America
Type: War

Weight: Heavy

Year: 2011

Rating: 8*

After discovering how fantastic a two-player game could be with Twilight Struggle, I was in search of something similar.  Around this time, A Few Acres of Snow was released and had just made its way into the Top 50 on BGG.  There was a lot of hype surrounding this release and I gave in, especially as people were calling this Martin Wallace’s take on Dominion, which was a game that I really liked at the time.

Set in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries, one player is the British Empire while the other player is France.  The game is played over a map with each player building up a deck of cards consisting of either empire or location cards.  Location cards will be used to settle new villages, upgrade villages, build fortifications, and siege your opponent and whereas empire cards allow you special moves, such as fortifying, and give you military strength and settlers.  Location cards may also be used to meet resource requirements for other cards when doing certain actions, such as settling.

You add location cards to your deck by settling into the villages of the same name on the map or capturing them from your opponent while empire cards are either drafted or purchased.  The cards available to each player are different as the game plays asymmetrically.  Depending on your strategy, you will likely want to focus your deck on either expanding through settlements or through military might.  Eventually, like in all deckbuilding games, you may need to begin trimming down your deck as it becomes watered down with earlier cards that are no longer useful. This feels quite thematic as the more you stretch out your empire, the more spread out your resources become and the harder it is to draw what you need or your military is busy with a seige elsewhere on the map.

The game ends if particular locations are captured, awarding automatic victory to the player who captured the location.  Otherwise, if one player can capture a certain number of villages, towns, and fortifications from his or her opponent or if one player manages to place all of his or her villages and cubes, the game ends and victory points are tallied, which can be gained from settling certain locations and are modified by whether or not you have a town.

When I first got this game, I played it many times in a row.  However, during those plays it definitely did not give me the same feeling that Twilight Struggle had delivered.  Although it felt like there were a lot of interesting choices to make, towards the end game it felt like I was just drawing cards until I had what I needed, making the final moments drag out and feel quite anti-climactic.  Now, it has been quite some time since I last played it and maybe over the years as I have been exposed to more games I may appreciate the mechanics of this game more, but until it gets replayed, it sits quite far down in my rankings.

Then again, I don’t know when I will actually decide to play it again when there are so many other two-player games out there, both better ones that have become some of my favorites and new ones I really want to try. I recently found out that yucata.de has this available for play online and it might just be my best chance at getting to play it more. Until that happens however, I can't really say that this game stands out for me and unfortunately it will be the first game that does not make any collection.