Below you will find the sixth in a series of After Action Report articles written by players participating in The Last Hundred Yards ladder play on BGG. You can find the first five articles in this series here. If you would like to participate in the LHY ladder play, please contact Mark Buetow through the LHY Facebook page or on BGG. Enjoy!
Let’s begin with a school question: when did WWII start? The generally acknowledged answer is September 1, 1939. But if we define war as a state of actual armed hostilities, regardless of a formal declaration of war, we may find that the answer is not so simple. During the Munich Crisis of 1938 (and here we are talking about the time before the Munich Agreement was signed), paramilitary groups of Sudeten Germans trained and armed in Germany, with headquarters near Bayreuth, were operating within Czechoslovak territory. Small numbers of SS and Wehrmacht personnel (usually company-sized units) even crossed the border to fight there too, carrying out raids and kidnapping hundreds of Czechoslovaks, many of whom would later die in German concentration camps. The Bell of Treason may focus on the conflict of ideas between conceding the Sudetenland or standing up against Germany, but during the same period terror and killing had already started in the Sudetenland. In this article we will look at how the game depicts Germans in two different ways: political and military.
As I’ve explained to you all numerous times before (ad nauseum, to be honest), each player involved in The Plum Island Horror will be controlling one of the six available factions. These factions represent groups of people who are associated with one another for one reason or another … work, recreation, favorite bourbons, culinary tastes, blood types – that kind of thing. We’ve done extensive research, analysis of personnel records, combing of social media, hacking of phones and whatever else we could think of to bring as accurate a portrayal of these loosely-bound groups of individuals as possible. The factions each have their own particular personality and flavor, reflecting the general skills, tendencies and behavior of these hapless, cobbled-together groups of individuals who are desperately trying to save their home island – and probably all of humanity as well. No pressure at all. Here is a brief synopsis of what you can expect from each of these factions, which of course will always result in you losing the game regardless. But hey – you will be defeated in uniquely entertaining ways each time, so there’s that to look forward to.
