Colonial 1700-1800

Colonial 1700-1800 is one of those small boxes that somehow puts an entire, slightly crooked world on the table. Cards move over other cards, dice start falling, and the colonial conflict comes through with plenty of flavour without collapsing under too much detail.

At its core, you move your unit cards across the card-map and try to get the better of the other players. Contact becomes a dice battle, and there is no safety net here: combat is death. You will build a sensible position, roll badly, and suddenly look across the table as though the other player did it to you personally.

The event/action deck keeps things moving, though not always kindly. A card can be irrelevant or lethal at exactly the right moment, so players are not merely fighting over the map; they are also waiting to see who gets hit next by the deck. The rules require a little patience — the rulebook gets a “pass, with comments” — and the fact that dead units never become available again makes sense for elite English riflemen, but is much harder to swallow for the Indians.

So yes, it can be deflating, especially when the dice and deck decide to stamp on you together, but there is real meat on it. With an expansion, particularly at three players, it looks capable of becoming considerably spicier. It is not the clean, fair wargame I would recommend to everyone; it is, however, a strange and hard little game worth having if you want conflict to bite.