Table Battles

Game design: Tom RussellHex number: 18Duration: 20 minutesPlayers: 2Solitaire Suitability: HighTheme: All of human historyMSRP: $35.00  Here is something new and exciting, something completely unlike any other game on your table. Table Battles is a thinky filler, a light dice game that nevertheless will have you scratching your chin and agonizing over your decisions. It reduces armed conflict to its essentials, to the absolute universal truths behind all battles: the threat of force and its application. It's about leverage, about feints and counterfeints, threats and counterthreats, about creating openings and then going for the jugular, about leaving openings and springing a trap. Players roll and allocate dice to Formation cards, with each card accepting specific die results or dice combinations. On a later turn, those dice are removed to activate the formation, attacking a specific enemy formation, with hits resolved by removing wooden pieces assigned to each formation. But the enem