For those interested in Hitler’s Reich gameplay, here is an article from Chris (Marlowespade on BGG) originally posted on BoardGameGeek. Enjoy! -Rachel

1) Hitler’s Reich (the boardgame) needs a new name. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

Side Note: I’m going to abbreviate the title as HR, except now I kind of want a game about managing the Human Resources department for a company that’s secretly a front for Lovecraftian cultists).

So the setup for HR is extremely simple, because the initial state of Europe circa 1941 is already printed on the board. Toss in a few informational markers, and Bob’s your aunt’s husband:

This is what it looks like when you’re ready to begin. There’s some deck preparation for both sides, but it’s basically a very quick shuffle and a couple of random draws.

You’ll notice that for a game about the biggest armed conflict of the 20th century there’s a surprising lack of armies on the board, and that’s because in HR there are no units. No charts, no DRM tables, no unit types, none of that. It’s not about killing counters, it’s about controlling territory. If you want to attack somewhere, literally all you need is an adjacent territory you already control, and then it’s game on.

And this is something that, while painfully obvious staring at the board, kind of sneaks up on you during the game: you are vulnerable literally anywhere that’s next to the enemy. And sometimes, if they’re holding a Paratrooper or Landing Craft or Higgins Boats card, they’ll strike at you from afar.

2) The heart of the game is hand management. You have a deck of Conflict cards, numbered 1-13 in two suits (Western and Soviet for the Allies, German and Italian for the Axis). Your hand size is important, because A) if it gets to zero then you lose, and B) every conflict in the game – either an attack, or trying to acquire an Event card – is decided by playing a single Conflict card from your hand. You play one, the other guy plays one, then you both throw some dice to add to the total. Tot up any rerolls or other effects from the card you played or any Event card you might have played alongside it, and the higher number wins.

It’s a chromed-up version of War, only in this version playing a “1” Saboteur also drops the value of the other guy’s card to a “1”, you sneaky bastard. Playing a “13” Supreme Commander gives you the ability to reroll three of your dice. Oh, and the suit of the card matters. It matters quite a lot, actually.

“But what if you’re tied?” I hear someone saying. Well, cleverly, that’s baked into the game. Of the Axis suits, Germans always win ties, and Italians always lose them, which is both hilarious and brilliant.

Also brilliant is the Allied problem of divided forces. If the territory under attack is Soviet, then you MUST play a Soviet-suited card from your hand if you have one. So it’s not enough to just pick the highest number to play each time, you have to be conscious of whether you might need that higher card for the inevitable counterattack next turn, unless you want your “2” Corporal Soontobedeadsky responsible for the defense of Kharkov.

The end of the 1941 turn. I managed to pull Turkey into the Allied side of the war, and Vichy finally got off the fencepost and declared sides. Operation Barbarossa went STUNNINGLY poorly for the Axis, but nevertheless they’ve captured Production Centers in Kharkov, Leningrad, and Iraq. I spent a couple turns putting Fleets in the North and Irish seas to be on guard against Axis tomfoolery there as well – they don’t give me control, but they’ll add a die to the conflict roll should a fight break out.

There are barrels printed on the map in certain territories which represent Production Centers. Lose one of those territories and your hand size goes down by the number of barrels on the space. Ergo, those spaces are quite valuable.

Win an Attack, and you plop down one of your Control markers on your shiny new piece of real estate, hopefully snagging a barrel or two. And so you advance, ever forward trying to get to the other guy’s capital(s) and drive down his hand of cards.

3) So far, so cut-and-dried, right? Play numeric cards to put more nondescript Euro wood chips down on a board, hope you don’t run out of cards before the opponent. No, it doesn’t sound particularly exciting to me either.

This is where the Event cards come into play. Because they’re the key to winning, and they’re also where all the theme comes from in the game. Each side has their own deck of Event cards, and there’s also a shared deck of Events that EITHER side could potentially acquire.

Some of these are immediate effects, like increasing your hand size via Convoys, or Spain declaring for the Axis. Others you’ll hold in hand until you play them in a conflict, like Guderian or Patton or any other number of Generals. They’ll give you extra dice, or rerolls, or let you turn a die to a specific number. V-Rockets and Wolfpack events will savage the Allied hand size, the Bismarck will give the Axis a leg up in naval conflicts, and Mustangs will let the Allies hold off the aforementioned V-Rockets. What I’m saying is that Events are fun, and necessary if you want to win the game, and it’s just as important to build your Event stockpile as it is to attack.

The end of 1942. Doesn’t look like much has changed, does it? Believe you me, that Axis control marker in the seas off Sicily represents a freaking GRAVEYARD of sailors – lots of action there with me trying to get an Italian offensive going, and quite a bit of back and forth in the Middle East, with the Axis making a push West. Once you recapture your own territory, it goes back to being just a blank space on the map, which is why the board can seem a little static. Also, much of the year was spent trying (and failing) to acquire Event cards instead of attacking.

Which leads me to this conclusion: You must get familiar with what events are available in both decks to play this game well. Knowing what’s available, what’s been used, and whether there’s a potentially killer combo available in the decks is going to be paramount to a cohesive strategy on both offense and defense. Learning these cards is the most important thing you’ll need to do to have fun with this game, especially because YOU have to pick what Events you want to go after – they’re all potentially available for you to go after, none of this “here, have some random Stukas out of nowhere” nonsense.

Which is why, of course, you don’t get them for free. You have to fight a Conflict – just like you do in an attack – to even get the card. And although at first I was incredibly skeptical about justifying this narratively (why am I playing soldiers just to get a card instead of attacking a territory?), it turns out it works brilliantly on a theme level every time. Fighting to get a Convoy through or having Monty emerge as a brilliant leader from a scrap, or battling it out to ensure that flight of B-17s can carry out the Strategic Bombing… it just works, man. Like I said, all the theme in the game comes from both the acquisition and play of the Event cards, and they’re all in service to those two things I mentioned earlier: hand management, and winning Conflicts.

4) The Axis bot works really, really well at simulating a human opponent, foibles and all. There’s a decision tree that decides what action it’ll take based on things like whether there’s a Production Center in attack range, or if you’re threatening Italy, or if there’s an unfortified center or Capital nearby, and it’s spiced up with the addition of key randomizers sprinkled here and there. It’s two pages long, but gets easier to parse the more you use it, and both the decision matrix and the flow for determining which card it will play makes sense (especially the Conflict card decision tree – that thing is super easy to remember, which is good because you’re doing it ALL THE TIME).

I had a few questions around how the bot conducts its bonus actions in the context of an Operation, but ultimately I puzzled it out. The designers are active on the forums, which is nice. But most importantly, at no point did I look at a decision the bot had made and think, “That’s stupid. Clearly they should do this other thing instead.” Good enough for me! The bot only ever plays the Axis, which I understand because there’s just too many possible approaches for the Allied side to try to codify into anything resembling a smart decision tree.

End of 1943. I’ve reinforced the Channel, and was able to wrest control of Finland and Romania from the Nazis thanks to an Event card that invoked a Soviet uprising. Sadly, Romania was quickly taken back by the Nazi yobbos, who knew a hot streak when they saw one and cashed in their “Yugoslavia” chips. Fascist jerks in Spain also struck at Gibraltar when I wasn’t paying attention looking.

Along with the bot are a couple of helpful player aids detailing what kinds of bonus actions can be taken and a VERY useful listing of ALL the Event cards and their effects. Two thumbs up from me for the bot. There’s also a solo mode that lets you play both sides with just a random card draw, but that took about three turns before I decided it just wasn’t as much fun as playing against an AI who at least tries to weight the card selections properly via die roll.

5) We need to talk about the rules. Because there aren’t a lot of them, but they’re more confusing than they needed to be. The gray areas for me almost uniformly have to do with the word “bonus”, and whether or not it’s capitalized in any given context. There’s also some timing wonkiness with Blitzkrieg actions and the bot, especially in Operations – and even though I ended up making it more confusing than it really was, I did so because the rules weren’t clear. It’s not a dumpster fire on the level of the original printed manual for B-17 Leader, but until you sit down to actually work through a few turns, you won’t be able to learn the game.

(Side Note: Pro-tip: There’s a key omission in that the rules never actually come right out and say, “DRAW A NEW CARD AFTER YOU’VE PLAYED YOUR CONFLICT CARD.” This is mentioned offhandedly in a play example in the playbook, and it’s prettttttty damned important.)

Note from Rachel: For more clarification on the rules omission, etc. see the Hitler’s Reich: The Gist of the Game InsideGMT article posted last week.

After reading the forums and replies by the designers, I’ve come to the conclusion that the simplest interpretation is always the right one. Luckily, the mechanics themselves are so simple that it’s pretty easy to parse what should happen in any given situation without feeling like you’re violating the intent of the design.

After playing two aborted learning games and one full “short” intro game which I lost, I’m convinced that this is a good game, and one that I’m glad to see has a good mix of strategy and luck. The dice will kill you sometimes, yes, but they’ll also save you when you least expect it. The freedom of approach, the long-term planning required to stockpile the right Event cards for something like D-Day to have a fighting chance versus ones that are more tactically useful or needed to keep your hand size above water – these are all real decisions, and fun ones. No, the board isn’t much to look at, but it doesn’t need to be given how the game actually plays. And an AI that doesn’t require a Master’s degree to parse and actually cares about the overall board state and their own hand management is really cleverly done.

It’s a strange design, one that probably shouldn’t work, but the somehow it all comes together for me to provide an engrossing, sometimes frustrating but always interesting take on the ETO. I’m not quite at the point where I can get through a full game in 2 hours, but it’s getting there quickly. And I would absolutely LOVE to be able to play this with another human, because the bluffing and feinting of the Conflict card play is naturally lost when playing against the AI, of course.

Author: Chris Holly