Search
Review of Milito
Blurb from the publisher: 'Milito is a card-based, diceless wargame by Martin Wallace, putting you at the head of an ancient army, making the key tactical decisions that will win or lose you the battle. Commanding a combination of troops unique to your own army you'll play unit cards to take control of the battlefield.
Skirmish with light troops to hold the enemy at bay, use your cavalry's maneuverability to your advantage, and advance your units of well-armoured infantry to drive the enemy away. Flank attacks and army-specific leaders provide further tactical depth. Choose the right moment to commit your best units into the battle line and capture three terrain areas to win the game.
Each card in your hand represents one of your army's units, which has the same strengths and weaknesses as its historical counterpart. Units are rated for speed, attack strength, defense strength, and other modifiers based on battlefield performance. Leader cards offer combat and placement bonuses and have their own special abilities - but be warned that not every leader card is an Alexander or Hannibal!
Milito includes a rulebook and 195 cards, featuring six armies of 31 cards each and a set of 9 terrain cards.'
What you get: Your GBP 27 or equivalent will buy you Milito (or Martin Wallace's Milito, if you prefer) an asymmetrical two-player, card-based, hand-management wargame that lasts just under one hour.
In addition to the 12-page A5 rulebook that can also be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: one Terrain Deck of nine cards (6 Plains, one Hill, one Rough, one Wood), and 6 Army Decks of 31 cards each, namely the Achaemenid Persians, the Alexandrian Macedonians, the Ancient British, the Carthaginians, the Imperial Romans and the Republican Romans.
Gameplay: Each battle is fought over five pieces of land. The ones on each side are the flanks; these are the most not to be Plains. The objective of the game is for a player to control three columns (i.e. more than half of the columns) at the beginning of his turn. Armies can be selected randomly or in ahistorical combinations, even though the game recommends three classic match-ups: Carthaginian vs Republican Romans, Achaemenid Persians vs Alexandrian Macedonians, and Imperial Romans vs Ancient British. The first match-up is the one recommended for starting players.
Each player starts with nine cards from his army in hand. Each army is different, very different even. As an example, Alexander fields amongst others Pikemen and a handful of slingers, while the Persians come to battle with card superiority over both cavalry and infantry. Each card has three ratings: speed, attack strength, defence strength, deploy penalty (the number of cards you have to discard in order to place the card from your card to the battlefield), and flank penalty (the additional cards, if any, to discard when placing that unit at a flank). Cards many also have a combine ability (whereupon they are placed along with other units), as well as attack and defence modifiers against certain types of units. As an example, Alexandrian Pikemen defend at a -3 when subjected to a flank attack, while light infantry get a staggering +4 vs Elephants and an equally strong +2 vs Cavalry.
The game is played in turns, with each player completing his before proceeding to his opponent. Each turn is divided in five phases.
The first phase is a Victory Check. Either you control three columns, a case in which the game ends in your favour, or you don't and the game goes on.
The Advance phase is when the players establish control over a column. This is a straightforward affair: if you have unopposed units in that column, you gain control of the column.
Flank Attacks are resolved before a player's other actions. They allow a player that has unopposed units in a column to attack an adjacent column, under the proviso that he also has units in that column. The attack is resolved as a standard attack with a +2 modifier.
Player Actions allow the player to place units and attack. A player can do any of those actions as many times and in any order he wishes. Placing units from your hand is a free action, unless it is placed on rough terrain, has a deploy penalty or a flank deploy penalty. In these cases you pay cumulatively for the privilege of fielding that card. Leaders cannot be placed in a column, they can however be used to pay for the placement of other units and can participate in battles as hidden cards. Each column can host up to two players units which should belong to the same type, even though the Combine ability creates exceptions. For units to attack, the attacker first declares the unit type in the column that does so. He also either chooses a card from his hand, or draws the top card from his deck without revealing it yet. The defender has the option of withdrawing all his units from the column at this point, provided they have a higher speed than the attacker. In such a case his units are discarded, as is the attacker's drawn card. If the defender does not withdraw, he has the option of choosing a card from his hand or draw a card from the top of his deck just like the attacker did. Players reveal their cards and compare the attack strength vs the defense strength of the known unit cards plus the newly revealed cards. The highest combat strength wins, and leads to the destruction of the defender's units, with the attacker gaining control of the terrain. Destruction does not mean 'discard'. These cards are now permanently out of the game. In case of a tie the column is not considered as controlled, while in case of a defender win the column's status depends on who held it before.
In the Draw Cards phase the active player draws three cards from his deck if he hasn't already reshuffled it. If he has done so already, he draws four cards. There is a permanent limit of nine cards in hand which can never be surpassed.
The strong points: Milito is deceptively simple, yet its fundamentals are all there. It bases itself in a very obvious premise: only units that lose battles are permanently out of the game. Those who run away without a battle might concede a small something to the opponent, yet they will live to fight another day, and another, and another. This is a dance of death, a persistent struggle for positioning where patience (and the understanding of your opponent's deck) will be ultimately rewarded. Sun Tzu's aphorism about battles being won before they are even fought is 100% valid. Feints and bluffs are not a luxury; they are imperative in order to win you column control. The discard pile is a setback, yet ultimately these cards will find their way back to your hand. The destroyed cards won't. Lose a few powerful units and a couple of versatile leaders and you will immediately start seeing the fortunes of war turn against you. It is thus imperative to carefully choose the battles you commit into. Tricking your opponent into thinking that he has the upper hand only for him to find out otherwise is a very satisfying feeling.
I enjoyed the asymmetry between the armies, they truly play differently even within the game's abstracted concept. Depending on the ebbs and flows of each game, you might feel like the king of the world in one turn and a total loser in another. Don't despair, it's totally normal. If this game teaches anything, that's patience. It also teaches subterfuge. It's like poker in many ways; if you attack with overwhelming force, the opponent will fold / run away. For you to actually win the battle, you have to make the opponent believe that he can also win it. It sounds easy, until you lose the battles you thought you were sure to win.
The artwork is very well done. The pictographs, the numbers, and all the game-related information are big, intuitive and easy to understand from either side. The box is much sturdier than I expected it to be.
The weak points: Don't buy Milito expecting it to represent a particular historical battle. It is an abstract experience that condenses an ancient battlefield into a few underlining principles. If you play it only once or twice you might be perplexed by how unbalanced the units might feel like, and how easily one unit can route another. In all honesty, they are not. Only a moronic opponent will allow you to trash his units in an easy to predict battle. If you can't win, run away.
There are obvious limitations in Milito's design. The constant struggle for positioning means that the game can outstay its welcome at times. Experienced players will try to minimize risks, yet that can degrade into playing too careful a game. The only thing that can mitigate this is the players realizing on their own that they aren't really accomplishing anything.
I can also easily envisage a situation where a game is decided by sheer damn luck on the umpteenth round, because of the players having had almost all their unit cards destroyed and keep on recycling the same units without anybody making a final stand. I am not even certain if such a game could be forced to end, since there is no limit on the number of rounds to be played nor on which cards can be used. If this sounds conspicuously close to that annoying chess tactic where a tie is forced due to repeated identical moves, that's because they are one and the same thing. In a small but statistically existent number of situations a player can effectively force a tie on his opponent by not allowing a game to end. Playing an abstract two-player one-hour game for a tie of this kind does not qualify as a modern design.
The game deserves expansions, and sooner is better than later. I am not suggesting that it should degrade into Romans vs Ninjas vs Cthulhu, yet the interaction merits for even more options.
The sturdy box is marred by an insert that will not fit the game's cards if you bother to sleeve them. The first thing I had to do while formatting the game for playtests was to retire it. This should have been handled differently.
Conclusion: Milito is a clever little filler of the 3,5 / 3,5 grade, an abstraction of the concept of a historical battle with a thoughtful design and high replayability. It could have used further development in order to reward aggressiveness, to behave more predictably time-wise and eliminate the possibility of a tie, yet ultimately it does not disappoint for what it is.
For more info on Milito visit The Plastic Soldier Company, aka PSC Games at http://theplasticsoldiercompany.co.uk.
Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of Milito that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.net for the time being), and to better keep track of my reviews, subscribe to my Antonios S facebook and twitter page.
