I’m beaver him, beaver! – a review of the game “Dispute over Bor 2. March to the dam!”

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about which games appeal to me best. These are certainly titles that work well in a two-player game (sometimes it’s hard to find more co-players), lasting up to an hour and elegant mechanics. It will be a slight spoiler if I write that we are dealing with such a title here.

 

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The creator of the game is Reiner Knizia, who has over 600 titles in his CV. Next to Feld or Rosenberg – a true legend of the German board game scene. Looking through the list of his games, I got a slight shock. It turns out that although I’ve heard about many titles (e.g. recently released The Witcher’s Rock ), I haven’t had the pleasure of playing any of them before.

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The basic information is that Spór o bor 2 is actually a 1:1 reimplementation of Schotten totten 2 , with a changed graphic layer of the title. I’m not sure why such a rebranding was decided, although I guess it’s probably related to licensing issues. I checked the previous art style – it was loose and quite suited to me. Muduko Publishing House, meanwhile, to create the visual layer – as in Spora o bór – engaged Piotr Sokołowski (including Dwergar ) and I must say that he did a really great job. In my opinion, each card is simply a separate work of art. The graphic style reminds me a lot of Łąkiand just like there, I had to pick my teeth off the floor – this is how it is, in my opinion, only slightly worse. The anthropomorphization of animals always hits my sweet spot and I was hit here too, Mr. Piotr.

The second basic information is that the game is not strictly a continuation of the first part. It is a very similar title mechanically, with a few twists. If you liked one of them – you’ll like the other too, although reading their instructions, I wouldn’t necessarily insist on having both.

March there

Mechanically, the game is based on hand management and collecting collections. One of the players is the aggressor here and will try to recapture the titular dam from the hands of the defender, who will try to prevent him from doing so.

The basic game is based on a common deck of 60 cards – 12 cards (from 0 to 11) in 5 suits. 9 dam tiles are placed on the table, each of which defines the requirements that must be met in order to take control of it. It is always a certain number of cards (from 2 to 4), sometimes enriched with a specific condition (e.g. the lowest possible sum of points on the cards).

A player’s turn consists of:

– preparations – optional – the defender can now use 1 of the 3 logs to get rid of the earliest placed card in any of the opponent’s rows; the aggressor may remove all his cards in any row;

– playing a card in any row – obligatory – the aggressor can declare control over the tile at this moment – ​​if both players have laid down the required set of cards, they are compared, if only the aggressor has laid them down, then on the basis of previously discarded cards he must prove that he will not be able to be pierced there;

– card drawing – mandatory.

The game ends when the deck runs out of cards (the defender wins) or when the attacker destroys 1 dam or damages 4 of them. The win-setting mechanics are based on poker: the highest is the actions of “x” consecutive cards in a given suit, and the lowest is a similar hand without a suit. This solution is very common and makes the gameplay very intuitive, although at times it can overheat the scrolls. I would not classify this title as light, easy and pleasant.

There is also a second game mode with tactics cards – they are drawn from a separate pile and they have a significant impact on the gameplay. Each of them, except for the “joker”, occurs only once and you can’t have one more than your opponent played at a time, which I really liked. In my opinion, the advanced mode is even more interesting and I won’t go back to the basic one myself.

To the shore

Randomness has a very large impact on the final victory here – if someone was hoping for a pure duel of minds, this is not the place. However, this certainly affects the replayability of the title, which is very high. In our case, the first few games were won by the attacker and I wanted to get a little bit of it, but the next two games were won by the defender. However, this does not change the fact that, in my opinion, the attacker has it a little easier. Overall, it’s a very solid title. I also want to commend the idea of ​​using a real ecosystem and animals that live in wetlands.