All Bridges Burning: Red Revolt and White Guard in Finland, 1917-1918

The historical subject of All Bridges Burning: Red Revolt and White Guard in Finland, 1917-1918 was fairly uninteresting to me, but the game does a serious job, as usual, of putting you in the period and presenting the events in a balanced way. I would have liked to have the more historically well-read members of our group there to judge what the cards are really saying and whether anything is being whitewashed; on the other hand, their absence let us focus fully on the game.

Despite the small map and relatively few cards, this struck me as perhaps one of the most complex COIN games. A first encounter can easily overload you: cells work according to an inverted logic, since most of them need to be revealed before they can do anything, while getting proper troops onto the map requires going through the distinctive foreign vassalage mechanism. It is not simply a smaller COIN; it is a game that asks you to reconnect quite a few familiar components in a different way.

Most importantly, everyone plays every round, which noticeably changes the pace compared with other games in the series. There are plenty of moves that can affect the late game, and the negotiation is honest—not the strange theatre I felt in A Distant Plain. In our game I took the Red Revolution and, after learning the hard way that you do not send bandits to eat German regular troops, I snatched the win with the “dirty Depon” method: it did not succeed; it just happened.

After Gandhi, which had left me somewhat cold, this game restored my opinion of COIN. It has a more appropriate running time, roughly an hour shorter than other entries in the series, and enough depth to build a real plan. It is not flawless, though: it is a little static, without reaching Cuba Libre levels, it has some AP-prone moments, and the third player—the ham in the sandwich—can be tremendously strong and decisive without always having enough to do on the board. For me, it is an honest 9 out of 10, but I would not recommend it as a first COIN for a group that simply struggles to gather four people. Go for a more approachable four-player title with bots instead: this first encounter may hurt and leave you with a completely wrong impression of the series.