Angola by Ragnar Brothers White Plains, March 24, 2007. Ken Dingley, Wray Ferrell, Matt Deaville and I gathered at GMT East in White Plains (the gaming and die rolling capital of the Lower Hudson) to play Angola, the well-regarded but rarely-seen game from Ragnar Brothers. Ragnar Brothers are known for interesting games on a wide range of topics. Their production values are somewhere between DTP and professional and they have famously used dish towels as maps in one or two games. Angola is a game for one to four players that simulates the beginning of the awful civil war in Angola following its independence from Portugal in the mid-seventies. Four players pair up in teams and victory is by team, not by player. I don't know how many copies of Angola were produced, but it probably isn't many. The game's CSW folder has under 50 posts as of this writing and there about 15 user comments on Boardgamegeek. (On the other hand, it is amusing to note that when I bought my copy a year or two ago direct from the company there were only two copies left, according to the website. I know at least two people who have obtained copies from Ragnar since then. Hey, scarcity has a quality all its own.) But the paucity of Angola players is matched by the high praise that the few of them have lavished on the game. Here's a sample (including some from veritable gods of the hobby; makers and breakers of games such as Barker, Vasey, and Winslow, to name but a few): - one of the best games ever made - excellent - highly recommended - this is a great game! - a lot of fun - one of the most fun 4-player games I've ever played - one of the most ingenious games ever developed - an excellent game with a unique and rather brilliant system which captures the gradual escalation of the conflict - a must for any wargamer - a great little gem - crackingly well designed and balanced game - clever game, some ingenious balancing items, lots of flavour The combination of low-profile and rave reviews make Angola a bit of a cult classic. So getting a few others to play it at the convention wasn't hard (and thanks as always to a gracious and gentlemanly Andy Lewis for suffering play of a non-GMT game). Although none of us had played before, Matt had read, and Ken had skimmed, the rules; Wray is a powerful quick study. Also, I had played a turn with Adam Starkweather the previous day to nail down the basic mechanics. That experience left me a little nervous: of the game's 19 or so pages of rules, about 8 cover the introduction and the movement, command and combat mechanics, another 5-6 cover important things like victory and reinforcements. That left about 5 pages covering special weapons and units, such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets, minefields, tanks and armored cars, and aircraft. I found myself thinking: 'Who needs all this chrome taking up over a quarter of an otherwise simple rulebook?' My other fear was that the game would be too long. CSW and BGG comments, in addition to some remarks made to me personally, led me to believe that the game might drag. When we all gathered, a little before 10 in the morning, it was agreed that we'd play to lunch and that everyone would have an option to move on at that point. Well, the first few turns did nothing to rid my fears that Angola was over-long and chrome-laden. We only knocked off about three turns by 1:30, much of the time spent slogging through the combat sequence over and over: first air-to-air combat (roll dice); next anti-aircraft (roll dice again); now ground support (roll more dice); now artillery (you guessed it); now anti-tank (more, more); any engineers to negate the minefield? (this is automatic, thank you, no dice at last). OK, that's the foreplay, now let's fight: figure the odds, figure out how many dice each side rolls (this is mostly terrain-driven); now figure die roll modifiers (tanks, armored cars, mercenaries). Finally, a result. So now you think we didn't like the game, broke for lunch and never came back. Nope. We all stood up from the table at lunchtime and said: 'See you back here in an hour.' And to that table we returned and there we sat until after 7:30 when the last die was rolled, victory was determined (by one point, thank you very much), and we sat back, a little dazed, and marveled at what a good time we had had (except Matt, who had left at 7 to join a tournament - Adam played out Matt's side for the last turn and a half). And if I had a dime for every guy who walked past us that day and said 'Are you guys still playing the same game??!!' Well, in the words of Slim Pickens, I'd have a 'shitload of dimes.' What was so great that none of us wanted to stop playing? At Angola's core are a number of wonderful, simple mechanics that can only bring a smile to your face if you are a gamer. The first one you encounter is the command and activation system that lies somewhere in the only partially-explored region between IGO-UGO and chit-pull. Each player puts his units on the map and then gets to designate one or more units in the same area (oh yeah, this is an area-move game) as a 'Column.' The columns are distinguished with lettered markers that sit on top of the combat units; so each player has his Column A, Column B and so on - usually up to D or E. Now each player gets a mess of activation cards which, when played, allow movement and combat operations by one column. So when you play your 'Column A' activation card, you get to move and fight your Column A. Play then passes to the next player who plays an activation card. The turn ends when everyone has played their cards. There are a few twists to this. First, you can only choose a limited number of your activation cards to play each turn (4 in the early turns increasing up to 7 in the later turns). Second, no column has more than two activation cards (and some only have one activation card). Third, there are only a limited number of times you are allowed to alter the makeup of a column or swap column markers. (Oh, your massive Column A with all the cool Cuban rockets just got surrounded and wiped out before you could even play its two activation cards this turn? Too bad.) And fourth, you have to arrange your activation cards in the order you want to play them that turn. Once arranged, they must remain in that order and no one - you included - can look at them until they are played (do I need to add how many times we were all unpleasantly surprised in the heat of battle by our own choices?). One of us, inevitably, placed his cards in the reverse order he intended and had to endure something of a backwards turn. There are also activation cards that allow movement (but not combat) by units that are not in a column. There is a card that allows you to switch column markers on two columns that have not yet moved. And finally there is the ominously blank activation card that you must place in your deck each turn; this card is essentially a forced pass of your activation round. So a whole lot of deep thinking, guessing and second-guessing goes into picking and ordering your activation cards each turn. So many choices: Do I activate my most powerful units first to seize the initiative, or do I bide my time and wait to see what my enemies do before I pounce? When do I play my blank? Do I forgo moving and attacking with a column to move some unattached units to a key location? My columns are spread out and I'm not sure where my enemy will focus his efforts this turn; do I concentrate on a 'fire brigade' column and risk exposing an area; or do I spread my efforts and risk lots of wasted activations in quiet sectors? The system is less random than a straight chit-pull activation system where, perhaps, you can choose your chits but not the order they are played. One the other hand, your control is limited because your opponents will always have something to say about whether the choices you made were the right ones for that turn. It often happened in our game that someone simply declined to move an activated column when its card was turned because the right moment had come and gone or because circumstances had simply intervened. I had my enemy beat me to the unoccupied town just up the road more times than I care to remember, rendering my activation pointless. I've noticed that when gamers like a new system or game mechanic you often see a lot of smiles and grins and shaking heads around the table as people wrap their minds around the various permutations and start to 'grok' the possibilities open to them and the limitations hindering their desires. There was quite a bit of smiling and head shaking from us all as we parsed and planned and played our activation cards. Another neat-o set of game mechanics revolves around the reinforcement system. First, and easiest, you get to recruit more troops if you capture towns. Although these troops are crappy conscripts, every army needs cannon-fodder to soak up losses. A column without those peasants to support the Cubans and their fancy tanks and rockets can be surprisingly brittle. So the pressure is on to conquer. But you don't want poorly-trained conscripts; you want well-equipped professionals. Turns out the only place to get those guys is from your friends at the KGB and CIA, from the Cubans and South Africans, and from your pals in Zaire. But it seems that, Cold War politics being what they are, those foreign dudes don't want to help you unless you are losing the war (why waste men and materiel on a winning effort?). That's right, the heavy foreign aid only arrives after you've started to get your ass kicked a little bit. Of course, after the aid arrives and you start kicking some ass, well, your enemy suddenly shows up at the next battle with some fancy tanks and rockets and jet aircraft of his own. And so it goes, back and forth - but only to a point. And that point is when you've managed to lose so much that your foreign benefactors tell you that you are on your own and the Cubans or South Africans pack their bags and catch the next plane, truck or boat for home. In game terms this is a low roll on the dreaded 'Crisis Table' and, trust me, you don't want any part of that. In addition to beautifully modeling foreign military aid, this mechanic acts as a wonderful game balancer. The more you lose, the stronger you get (at least for a time). This neatly avoids that awful rich-get-richer aspect of all too many multi-player games and keeps Angola tight, tense and competitive throughout. The final reinforcement mechanic is perhaps the most fiendish. At the end of the turn the players secretly bid for foreign military equipment (AT and AA rockets, mines, tanks, artillery, armored cars and aircraft). Everyone always gets as much as he bid for. The problem is that if you bid more than your enemies, they win a propaganda victory, which translates in game terms into a victory point. So every turn the players engage in a nasty little guessing game with each other. There's no real good answer. If you bid very high you will get a lot of military toys, but you may give up a precious VP (no small thing - our game probably turned on this). Bid low and you may get the VP but you risk being out gunned this turn. Or maybe you should hedge a little and bid in the middle. If your opponent bids high you get only a few less toys then he does and you get the VP; but, of course, if your enemy bids lower then you lost the VP and you didn't even get as many toys as you could have. Now you feel really stupid. As I said, this bidding is nasty. And we just kept laughing and shaking our heads every time we did it. The final major mechanic that left us nodding in respect for the design team was the victory track, which allows for victory at the end of any turn but which makes early victories very unlikely. Late-game auto victories only become more likely if your side has had success during the game, but this is not a zero sum game of points given and taken away. You don't backslide away from a more likely auto victory if your opponent is successful - instead both you and your opponent are now more likely to be able to win outright. Thus both sides remain in the hunt even after serious reversals and the game becomes more and more tense as it progresses and each side has a quick victory within reach. The terrain rules mesh simply and elegantly with the movement rules to ensure that military activity over this inhospitable, hilly, wooded and jungle-covered country is channeled onto the roads and through towns. This gives cagey players all sorts of opportunities for using small, cheap units to block and delay the advance of powerful enemy columns (with their precious few activations). Angola also nicely models the incredible (and ultimately fruitless and destructive) escalation of the war. If not for the Cold War, this conflict might have stayed low-tech and perhaps less bloody (but see Rwanda). But thanks to superpower rivalry both sides in Angola were given all sorts of deadly toys to play with. At the beginning of the game these toys are all off map, beckoning to the players. 'Deploy me and scatter your enemies' they say to you. And you deploy them and the map fills with soldiers and ordnance but somehow your enemy remains as tenacious as ever, except that more people are now dying. As for the overall picture, the game beautifully depicts this chaotic and ever-shifting war with no stable fronts, towns changing sides multiple times, and armored columns surging and receding all over the map. There is narrative that unfolds and makes you want to stick around to see what happens. It is tense. There is little downtime between your moves (the card activation system sees to that). It seems to be very well balanced. I'm not sure what more one could want. This is such a well-thought out game. So is there a downside? Well, that combat system is a bit overwrought and does add significantly to play time. You roll dice and roll dice and deploy all your hardware, but the net result never seems to be more than a die roll modifier here or there. Of course, that's when both sides have hardware. When one side has hardware and the other doesn't, then woe to the lone infantry. We saw small forces with lots of air, armor and artillery wiping out much larger ones of pure infantry (and that's how it should be, isn't it?). Having said all that, we did grok the combat by the third turn and moved along at a much quicker clip after we did. And we did love that hardware. I've mentioned Ragnar's production quality; Angola is no exception, being just a bit better than DTP (actually, I've seen better DTP games). While I totally disagree with the whining Euroclowns who piss and moan about paper maps and cardboard counters (they can stick those plastic pieces where the sun don't shine; oh, and the wood blocks, too), Angola is a game that could stand production improvement. The main issue is that the map areas were way to small for the oversized counters. Either a bigger map or player cards to arrange units off map would help (you could easily make the latter yourself). Yeah, the counters are flimsy and the map is ugly, but hey, the game play is great and that's what counts. Solve the map congestion and it's fine. And of course, there is that playtime. We were at it for close to 10 hours. Take out an hour for lunch and hour and a half for learning the game and another half hour for bathroom breaks and fielding questions from passersby and maybe you are down to 6-7 hours. I'll note that all four of us were fast with our moves - no 'analysis paralysis' types. So where does that leave you? As my friend Adam points out: 'If what you are doing is fun, why do you care how long it takes?' On the other hand, 7 hours is a long time to have your fanny parked in a seat. On the other, other hand, not once was I bored or uninterested. Rather, I was always interested and engaged and waiting to see what would happen next. I think everyone else felt the same way. We had four experienced gamers (including a publisher and a designer) and no one wanted to leave that table. You can't say much more than that.