Our second to last game for our campaign! I think this is game eight or nine of our Tour of Duty campaign. We’re rather far along, with an almost fully developed base and a fully built out team. This mission showed it.

What do I mean? Well, as you play through the campaign you get to upgrade your base. Each upgrade gives you bonuses in the form of either easier between-mission play or more options on tabletop.

Here’s a snapshot of half my base upgrades from my campaign tool I had GPT whip up. When I first looked these over, I dismissed a lot of them. But in the game we just played, I came to realize how useful they really are. That analyst cell? It allowed me to reveal a threat token at the start of the game, which, by chance, revealed the enemy leader. Bam, there’s one of our objectives. Another one, the Command and Control upgrade, allowed us to move two threat tokens. After revealing the leader, we moved his nearest tokens away.

Our objective for this mission was to rescue local operators in the central building on the map. Our secondary was to interrogate the enemy leader so we could collect our final piece of intel needed to unlock the final mission for the campaign. Our first stroke of luck was IDing the leader thanks to our Analyst Cell. Our second one? Our upgraded garage let us select from two INFIL options. We chose the one that placed us on the edge of the board in a truck, anywhere we wanted.

From there, we held position and my son came up with a great idea: what if actually bothered to use smoke? What a novel concept.

We were able to fend off the nearest enemies while leveraging smoke and suppressing fire to hold everyone else at bay. We were at the central building in short order.

And just like that, we were off the board. Now, I admit I’m streamlining here. These were the core important decisions. I didn’t mention the small things, like how I parked the truck such that the driver could make it through the hole in the wall there to get to the back door of the building. Or how we handled a machine gunner by calling in air support. Or the sniper we couldn’t solve with smoke, so we had to cleverly position ourselves to lob a grenade at him. Overall, it was a four turn game with no injuries. Clean. But that’s not to say simple or without thought.

As we come to the final game of the campaign, I’m looking back fondly on the experience overall. I’m about ready to be done with it, so the ten-ish game length for the campaign feels about right. That said, when my physical copy comes in I believe I’ll try out the narrative campaign included in the book. I can at least do the first third, which takes place in the Middle East.

Our next and final mission is Operation Domino:

It sounds like a fun final game. Narratively, it does feel a little weird to roll this up at the end. “Oh, right—we were here to find and destroy the IED factory. Good thing we figured that out!” In the future, I think I’d roll up the final mission first. There’s a way to look back and make it all make sense. It would have linked all the missions together into a narrative that felt a little better and more cohesive. Instead, this has admittedly felt rather random and hodgepodge. I knew going into this that it would be this way: after all, we’re just rolling on tables and drawing cards to setup scenarios. It has led to a varied campaign with a lot of small, fun narratives, and my son has really enjoyed putting the puzzle pieces together each time.

Deciding on driving the truck in felt like a small stroke of genius. It makes for a narratively simple game, but it also has a way of making sense. We managed to find our secondary target and he was right outside the safehouse. Of course we’d drive up to him if we could.

My opinion of the game has more-or-less taken shape. I think I feel safe to write a review after I wrap our final game. The short version is pretty obvious: it’s a fun time with a few bumps along the way, wrapped around a very simple core ruleset. Good and bad abound, but I think it comes out ahead in the wash. On sale for a reasonable price, I’d say it’s worth your money if you already have the stuff sitting around.

But man, it says something positive that I’m hoping to play the narrative campaign some day.

Anyway, back to work. We’ve got to plan out how to sack an IED Workshop this weekend! Totally normal dad stuff, right?