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

Finland in 1917-18 was not a subject that particularly drew me in, yet All Bridges Burning makes a clear effort to place its history at the centre and to treat it with balance. I would not presume to audit every event card without a proper historian at the table, but the representation feels considered rather than merely thematic wallpaper.

The map is compact and the deck modest, but this is among the most strategically dense COIN designs. The first play can overload the system: most cells need to be revealed before they can do anything, while ordinary troops arrive through the unusual foreign vassalage mechanism. The interesting decision is when to expose and activate your position, and when to accept that you are laying groundwork for a later turn.

Everyone acts every round, unlike in much of the series, and that alters both tempo and planning. There is plenty of scope to shape the late game, and negotiation has real weight without becoming the rather performative version found in A Distant Plain. It can be static, though not quite Cuba Libre-static, and a few positions invite analysis paralysis; the third faction can become an immensely powerful playmaker, but has less to do directly on the map.

Gandhi had cooled my enthusiasm for COIN a little; All Bridges Burning restored it. For an experienced four-player COIN group it is a very fair nine out of ten, but as a first encounter it may hurt enough to leave entirely the wrong impression.