THE GAMEIn Soviet Dawn you play the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution during the Russian civil war. Moscow sits at the center of the board; radiating out from it are five tracks with four or five boxes on them. At the far end of these tracks sit counters representing the Eastern and Southern Whites, the Finns, Poles, the Baltic states, and the Allies. The Finnish and Baltic (German) tracks converge at Petrograd, the last step before reaching Moscow. If any front reaches Moscow, you lose. The fronts can switch between active and inactive during the course of the game, and some can eventually be removed from play entirely. There is also a political track numbered from 0 to 10. It starts at 1.
The game can end in four ways: political collapse, represented by the political level falling to 0; political victory, attained when the political level rises to 9; military defeat, which occurs when an enemy front reaches the Moscow space on the board; and finally military victory, triggered by the depletion of the deck.
Each turn, the player draws an event card representing historical events during the war. These control the advance and retreat of enemy fronts, can alter the political track (by die roll or otherwise), and provide bonuses or penalties to player actions during the turn. Enemies reaching certain spots on the board can also trigger a loss of political points. It's quite a flexible system for being so simple and easily managed. The cards are broken up into three eras; the later two eras are shuffled into the draw pile as dictated by card text.
The player then takes his actions for the turn, the number of which is determined by the card draw. The player can attack an enemy front, try to improve his political situation, or attempt to reorganize the Red Army.
Battle is resolved by a roll of the die; if the modified die roll exceeds the battle rating on the front's counter, you succeed and push it back a space. To advance on the political track, you must beat a certain number on a die roll; this number increases the closer you get to victory. A successful Red Army reorganization will confer benefits on the player--some possibilities include modifiers to battle rolls, the ability to shuffle a bad draw back into the deck, or the ability to act before the enemy fronts are advanced. These can give the player a huge advantage during the game, but they're hard to attain--a roll of 6 is required to gain one, and a further die roll determines which benefit is received.
The player is also provided with a limited number of markers that represent "free" offensives and political rolls that can be spent during any action phase that does not specifically prohibit them.
One counterfactual is included: rather than withdrawing from the Great War by accepting the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia can opt to stay in the war. This will have ramifications later in the game as certain card outcomes are altered by the player's choice.
Play time runs from about 5-30 minutes, depending on how well you do.
The map and rules are online at the Victory Point Games website; check them out if you want further info. (The rules are formatted for printing and folding rather than for on-screen reading, so don't be surprised if you open the pdf and find yourself staring at page 8.)
THE RULESThe rules are very well-written and quite functional. They're written in section/subsection format, which personally I prefer as it makes it simple to reference and cross-reference rules. The 8-page rulebook is very easy to digest; I only had to read it once to understand how to play. So far every gameplay question I have had has been answered by the rules.
Everything is well-organized. There are color illustrations throughout and excellent use is made of color to distinguish rules text, commentary, examples, and important points. The example of play covers an entire game, fully annotated.
Designer's notes are included on the back of the cover sheet.
THE COMPONENTSPhysically, the components are pretty crappy. According to the Victory Point Games website the games are desktop-published on a "made-to-order" basis. This shows--nobody's going to confuse this with a professionally-printed game. You get an 11x17" map, a rulebook, a countersheet, a piece of paper apologizing for the quality of the components, some cards, and a miniscule die, packaged in a ziplock baggie. You also get a small baggie to store the punched counters. I am always happy when publishers provide these and I don't have to supply my own.
My map is beginning to show some wear from being inserted into the baggie; it's a tight fit so the edges catch on the bag.
The cards are plain unlaminated cardstock, which makes them difficult to shuffle--they don't slide against each other and friction holds them together. They bow easily when riffle-shuffled. Normally I point and laugh at people who sleeve cards, but I am tempted to sleeve these to improve durability and make them easier to shuffle.
Functionally and artistically, the components fare much better. The board is attractive, with a portrait of Lenin and Soviet propaganda posters to add to the theme. Unfortunately, the board uses Cyrillic letters to represent Latin letters ('ya' for a capital R, for instance, or 'de' for a capital A) in an attempt to give the game that Russian feel. This annoyed the snot out of me at first, and in fact I had passed on buying the game for quite some time because of it, but eventually it faded into the background.
The board has spots to hold all in-play and out-of-play counters, and all the charts you need are printed on it. Functionality win. The counters are well-done. The various event and Red Army upgrade markers have text on the reverse explaining their use in the game, which saves a trip to the rulebook. The cards unambigously tell you what to do in each phase, and contain a paragraph of flavor text explaining the historical background of the event.
MY OPINIONSSome of the comments for Soviet Dawn complain about the luck factor. I think that luck is necessary in a solitaire game--without luck, you don't really have a game at all, you have a puzzle. The game has a bit of a
Twilight Struggle feel--you know awful things are going to happen, but you're not sure when, so you either have to dilute your efforts by pushing back on all fronts, or concentrate on whatever's most pressing at the time, hoping that choice won't bite you in the butt later.
The more you play it, the less luck-driven Soviet Dawn feels. The strategy really opens out once you start learning the cards. The first few times I played, it felt like I won or lost based on the roll of the dice. No longer. Once you learn the cards and have a few winning games under your belt, you'll realize that most of your losses can be traced back to your poor choices a few turns back. ("Why did I waste time trying to score some political points when I could have pushed back on the southern front?") Granted, you can still be defeated by a long run of bad draws and rolls, but it's pretty rare for luck alone to sink you.
Occasionally the game will hand you poop on a platter--if the Finnish civil war breaks out in the first couple of turns you're probably hosed. While I expect a loss if that happens, I've come to enjoy seeing how long I can hold out.
I particularly enjoy the pacing of the game. I'm a retrogamer, and it reminds me of a lot of the classic CRPGs of the Bard's Tale, Wizardry and Alternate Reality varieties. Namely, it's sometimes hard to get started and you will play a number of games that you lose within a couple of minutes. You will feel besieged from all sides. But then one game will start to come together and you'll enjoy the feeling of gradually getting the situation under control as you beat back the wolves at the door. By the end game, as enemy fronts start getting removed, you'll feel like you're on easy street as things finally start going your way. (Although, with that in mind, I've yet to score a military victory--by this point I go for the political win.)
In the early game, as the enemy advances inexorably towards Moscow and you're on the brink of political collapse, I find myself sympathizing with the Bolsheviks and the precariousness of their position. There are few games that make me consider what the people represented by the counters might have been thinking when the events depicted in the game were actually occurring. This is one,
Twilight Struggle is another. That's pretty cool, actually.
Soviet Dawn is designed for solitaire play from the get-go. Unlike many solitaire versions of primarily multiplayer games, it feels like a complete game, not a timewaster for when you can't get a group together. Solitaire
Race for the Galaxy, for instance, is decent, but it's a pale shadow of the multiplayer version, and solitaire
Agricola feels more like work than a game, as you seem to spend 90% of your time fiddling with bits and restocking rather than making choices. Soviet Dawn has none of these problems.
It is also mercifully quick to set up, tear down, and reset between plays. I love
Fields of Fire, but between refreshing myself on the rules, setup and gameplay, I'm looking at a six hour time commitment. So it rarely hits the table. Soviet Dawn is much more likely to get played because I can go from "game in baggie" to "playing" in about a minute and a half, I know I'll be finished within half an hour, and if I have more time the game encourages multiple plays in a single sitting with minimal effort required to reset the game.
Non-wargamers take note: Soviet Dawn is not just for grognards. Euro players looking for a solitaire fix would do well to check it out, especially fans of the "stop bad things happening" games like
Pandemic,
Notre Dame (the rat track) and
In the Year of the Dragon. I am not much into Ameritrash games so I can't say how it will fare with that crowd; it might appeal to
Arkham Horror players looking for a game that plays faster than solitaire Arkham.
Replayability seems to be excellent; after 30 games I'm eager for more. The game gets deeper rather than shallower with repeated plays. It's thoroughly addictive, tense and fun. Value for money is high.
Not only has Soviet Dawn sold me on the game, it's sold me on the designer, game series ("States of Siege"), and publisher. I've already purchased the Soviet Dawn expansion and the rest of the games in the series, as well as a few other unrelated games from Victory Point Games.
I'm sold on the theme as well. I had no prior interest in the theme, but now I'm going to read a book on the Russian civil war so I have a better idea of what the cards represent. (So, having come to the game with no real knowledge of the subject, I feel like I know about a number of major events that influenced the course of the war--I just don't know what order they occurred in historically because I've been drawing them randomly from a deck!) I'm probably also going to get
Triumph of Chaos, which will sit on my shelf unplayed for months or years while I desperately try to convince my friends to play it, whereas Soviet Dawn will be played regularly during that time.
In some ways I feel like I've failed as a reviewer. When I read a review, I like to look at the negatives. What the reviewer doesn't like often tells me more about the game than what he or she likes. Components aside, Soviet Dawn just doesn't have any negatives for me. The game clicks with me from beginning to end.
So if you're looking for some fast-playing solitaire gaming goodness, you're not allergic to dice and you can overlook the suboptimal components, crank up the
Internationale on the mp3 player and give Soviet Dawn a try.
Posted Sun Aug 16, 2009 9:58 pm
)
