Review Summary: Quick-playing, engaging, cool WWII card mini game. Will it stand the test of time, or will it become as lame as its ‘historical’ references?
Blurb from the publisher: 'German occupied Poland, 1944. Beyond the reach of Allied intelligence and bomber commands, the Germans establish a secret facility, where a terrifying weapon is being tested. V-2, Hitler’s Wunderwaffe, a ballistic missile able to wipe London from the map and win the war, bringing Britain to her knees. But the deepest secrets of German war technology are revealed by the UK’s staunchest allies – the Poles. Will the Polish underground Home Army and elite ‘Unseen and Silent’ commandos save London, or will the Germans manage to complete their tests unhindered and launch the final offensive?
Write your own version of history and learn about men who succeeded in their game! Days of Honor is a fast-paced tactical card wargame. It tells the true and thrilling story of the Polish operation to uncover the secrets of the V-2 weapons. Guard the mysteries of the rocket base, or discover and steal its secrets, all to determine the outcome of World War II!'
What you get: Your EUR 14,99 or USD 14,99 or equivalent will buy you Czas Honoru: Operacja Most III / Days of Honor: Operation Wildhorn III, a mini card wargame for two people that lasts just under 30 minutes. The product is a combined English/Polish edition and proudly states only its Polish name on its cover. Do not be put off, this is the product that you are looking for; the in English rules are included. In addition to the English and Polish rulebook which can also be found at the company’s website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 23 German cards, 23 Polish cards, 5 Rocket cards, 3 Terrain cards, one player aid card (in English and Polish) 15 Black Rocket Fragment Cubes and 2 dice (one black, one red).
The game is language neutral; the cards have only pictographs, no text whatsoever. If you understand Polish or English, or if someone can explain the game to you, you are good to go.
Gameplay: The game is played in three zones, the Polish, the Neutral and the German one. In each round fragments of V-2 rockets will appear in the Neutral zone due to Germans experimenting with the weaponry; these will vary each round from one to five. Your objective is to collect and own the most fragments by the end of the fourth round. In case of a tie the German player wins.
Players start with three preset cards each in their hands. In a given round the players will first draw five cards from their deck and will then reveal a V-2 rocket and place the corresponding number of fragments in the Neutral zone. That’s when the round truly starts.
Starting from the Polish player, each player performs one action at a time out of the four options available. The first is to place a card into his Home Zone. That involves Units and Support cards. As an example I count 14 Units and Support for the Poles (10 and 4, respectively), of which 2 and 1 are included in the Polish starting hand. Each side has access to three types of Units: soldiers/partisans, recon and unseen and silent/SS. Each type is different, yet cards are identical per type across the two factions. The unseen and silent/SS are clearly better in fighting and amongst the best in searching for fragments, they will not however substitute other units in danger. The Poles are at a disadvantage by having one unseen and silent unit less than the Germans have SS, but that’s mitigated by having one more Action cards than the Germans (and a very powerful one at that).
The second option is to Activate one of the cards that are already on the board. All Units and Support have actions that can be undertaken. They can shoot other units, search for fragments, move between the zones and take the place of Units under attack. Each Unit is exhausted (turned vertically) when it gets used. Support cards can Refresh Units in the thick of the action, allow two actions instead of one and give pluses to die rolls when searching for fragments or fighting other units.
The third option is to play an Action card. This are cards that are usually, but not always, discarded, and produce an extraordinary effect. The Poles have three of them, one Refreshing a card, another hiding fragments from the Neutral Zone and making them inaccessible for the Round while the third one locks all the fragments that the Poles have recuperated so that the Germans can’t claim them back.
Finally, a player may simply Pass. If his opponent continues with another turn of his own, nothing prohibits a player that just passed to take a full turn again immediately afterwards. That initial pass might have been a faint!
Players will alternate until both Pass consecutively. At that point all exhausted Unit and Support cards will be refreshed and if necessary, a new round will begin.
In addition to these cards Immediate Cards also exist. These can be played at any point, timed to maximize the result that you wish to achieve and go immediately to the discard pile. The Poles have five of them: automatic success in firefights, bad luck (aimed to the Germans), good luck (aimed to themselves), automatic success in fragment search and Nurses (your unit does not die in a firefight, it returns exhausted in your Home Zone). Immediate effects that can be played at any point are also depicted on other kinds of cards. Should you activate them, of course, you exhaust the card. All in all, Units and Support Cards always depict three or four actions (you can undertake one only before exhausting the card), while the Action and Immediate Cards depict only one action. Choose wisely.
The middle spread of the rulebook is taken up by the credits and a small history of the Polish involvement in WWII and this operation in particular.
The strong points: Sometimes a great product lies hidden behind an indecipherable title... if you don’t speak Polish, that is. Light, short, tight, extremely easy to teach, Days of Honour (or should I say Czas Honoru?) surprised me extremely positively with what it does and how it does it. It is squarely a wargame, yet the objective is not to randomly kill everybody. To attain your objective you must maximize the number of your Actions through the cleverest possible use of cards. When it comes to this aspect the game is directly comparable to many other cardgames in the market (including the incredible LCG Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn), yet with Czas Honoru you only need a single low-priced box and nothing else. Play that Support to gain two actions and the other Support to reactivate the previous Support to have more actions again, because in the previous round you put down too many units in the battlefield and wisely Passed on what was an obvious bluff Pass by your opponent, forcing the end of the round. That’s what, amongst others, what this game is about. You have to think what you are doing, as well as have an understanding of what your opponent can do with his deployed cards, be them unused or Exhausted. Bluffing in passes, be it for better positioning or because you wish to bring the round to an end, is an integral part of the tactics.
Tactically speaking options are aplenty. I enjoyed the fact that your first hand is semi-random. Three cards are preset and rightfully so; if you started without Units or Support you would have very small chances of victory.
Games play tight and are full of adrenaline. I am always amazed how games create such a tense environment with only so few elements. I am positively surprised by the mechanic used in relation to the number of cards. Seeing how you have three cards at the beginning and you draw five at the beginning of each round irrespective of your hand’s size, you will get to have all your cards in your hand in every single game. No card will be omitted; all might be played one way or another. I admit this is the first time I see something like this and I would like to examine it further. Seeing how it could need a few dozen more games, this review could as well come out in 2018. I have some reservations, my initial reaction however is positive: you know what you have, and you know that you will get it at some point no matter what. Are you good enough in managing it, no matter when it appears?
As much as it states 30 minutes as its duration, If found the game to usually last less than that. I am not suggesting that it will not last longer (it will at times). If you have 20 minutes at your disposal however and you crave for war, you can semi-safely give it a go depending on how fast your are.
The cards are very well done, even though the irrelevant parts (the imagery without game effects) makes them rather busy. The pictographs are many and you need to know all of them from the beginning, they are however extremely easy to understand and remember. Actually, this is some of the best pictograph design I have seen (and we are talking about two or three step actions in some cases). Each card also depicts its number out of how many identical cards exist in the game. Why don’t others do this? Even more so, the pictographs are big and can be seen easily not only by you but also by your opponent. This is essential for tactical play. Very well done, Phalanx Games!
The price is unbeatable. LCGs or CCGs have booster compilations that cost more than that. These EUR 15 can get you a looooooooong way.
The weak points: As easy at the game might be, it has a lot of pictographs to learn when you first approach it; by a lot I mean eighteen. Don’t scare the newbies; play an open hand game at the beginning in order to gain familiarity with the game. It will be very rewarding.
As I mentioned in the game’s strengths under the point relating to the number of cards, there are some who might feel that using all the cards in every game takes away some of the randomness. I do not agree, but then I have around ten games under my belt, not hundreds. Its focus is different; randomness is about when you will get a card, not if you will get a card. As such, I think it works great. Will it work as great after a hundred plays? Or will it by then become an orchestrated exercise for players of equal skill, practically decided by the draws and dice rolls? This, I cannot answer.
The rulebook is well-written and easy to understand, yet I would have wished for two additional separate sheets for each player to consult depicting both opposing forces. One can always print the rulebook from the website, however the rulebook as is does not contain this information. It contains analytical (and well-written) explanations of every single pictograph, but not a complete summary table with the number of each card along with their pictographs. That could have really helped the most dedicated of us to decipher the game faster and play more tactically from the beginning. In that sense, and seeing how such a sheet does not exist, a newbie will have some trouble against a more experienced player that plays to win; the latter will know both factions’ cards, and can plan his plays better.
What I would have also enjoyed would be a timed variant, be it per move or per player. Nothing shouts louder WWII covert ops than a timer running backwards! In the midst of war, and especially behind enemy line you cannot plan and double-check everything. That having been said, the game is tense already; this comment says more about me and less about the game. If however you are like me and enjoy speedy reactions in tactical games, you might want to try it out. If you do it on a per move principle, I suggest 20 seconds for your first game. When you become as good as to play the game in 5 second turns, drop me a line. The adrenaline rush is enormous.
I understand that the game is published with the collaboration of Telewizja Polska, Poland’s public TV broadcaster. As much as I don’t mind a couple of historical references in games and even though everybody overstates the importance of his participation in the war, this here is rife with populist nationalistic undertones. If you want to mention WWII, I’d expect a mention of Nazis and the Nazi regime. Not in this rulebook. This all about the Germans. The Germans! THE GERMANS!!! There are around twenty references to Germans and Germany and zero to Nazis or the Nazi regime in this otherwise ‘educational’ one and a half-page text. Good grief. Who wrote that text? Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers?
Conclusion: Forget the awkward name (in any other language than Polish): Czas Honoru deserves a place in your collection. It will easily deceive you: it looks like you are buying a great filler; but then, why do you play it so often as a main attraction?
For more info on Phalanx Games visit its website at http://www.phalanxgames.pl/en/.
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