A Few Acres of Snow

Image via WikipediaCrabro and I played "A Few Acres of Snow", the Martin Wallace deck-building board game again today.

Once again I played the Redcoat side but this time with far less success, losing both games. Crabro went for a simple military strategy both times, having decided correctly that simply besieging Boston until it fell was all he needed to do to win. Accordingly he did not bother much with expansion or any other aspect but concentrated on the French ability to raise money from trapping etc and ploughed that cash into buying military assets.


In the first game I decided that if I expanded fast enough I could finish the game quickly with the points in my favour. Unfortunately, I had forgotten everything I learned last week and most times forgot to put the cards for the new acquisitions into the discard pile to feed the deck. For a while I was frustrated by the lack of opportunity to expand the network and with four villages to go I realised that a lot of this was my own fault. Having never amassed the kind of military might to contest what Crabro was doing he won the Boston siege about the same time. To be fair I had also forgotten that this was an end condition so I didn't try to defend.

In the second game I wanted to come up with another strategy in order to continue to expand my experience and knowledge of the game. I didn't really want to be pushed into simply defending against attack, being a little worried that we might turn a good game simply into the siege of Boston game and tire of it.

Not having much of a concrete idea of what to do I first tried to carry the fight to Crabro by sieging from the first turn. This turned into a defeat and set back my potential for a successful non-military strategy at the same time. I never really worked out what I was aiming for after than and consequently didn't seed the deck in any helpful way. Towards the end I had a number of almost useless hands and even resorted to paying to discard cards. Meanwhile, despite some setbacks from my ambushes, Crabro soldiered on to another one-sided battle at Boston.

Still a lot of fun but I fear that Crabro may be happy to continue to bash Boston unless I find a way of thwarting that strategy. Meanwhile after three games it might be time to swap sides for a while and see how it looks from a different viewpoint.

Although we only started at lunchtime today, owing to family commitments on Crabro's part, we still managed another scenario from Memoir '44 as well. This time a battle among the forests between two elite Panzer units (four tanks each) with their supporting infantry and a number of small (3 figures) but nimble French resistence units. As is often the case in Memoir, the tanks were more of a liability than an asset despite their speed and range. In this case not only were they up against severe penalties in firing into forest and town but were also a tempting target being worth two flags apiece. Crabro, realising this tried to keep them out of trouble as a win was only four flags in this scenario. Nevertheless I attacked them from the air at the beginning and then managed to get a unit "behind the lines" for a useful hit and run. The depleted unit was eventually finished off by infantry in forest at close range. The remaining two flags were picked up from infantry units.

Having found it reasonably easy to win as the French I was not expecting to have a good time of it as the Germans and was relieved to gain one flag so I knew it would not be a whitewash. In the event though I was unable to keep the Panzers back owing to having exclusively right flank cards for some time but through some lucky rolls and successful infantry attacks as well I got the upper hand and won again.

A very pleasant day's gaming with overall honours even again. I must come up with a way of thwarting the siege of Boston however.