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Review
Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review
Played: 4/7/26
Playtime: 1hr, 2 playthroughs (including 15 min background reading!)
The words in my head are so completely unfair, I am ashamed I thought them, ashamed I open this review acknowledging them, and ashamed I am incapable of balling this up and starting over. The words in my head rhyme with “Skiminishing Glitterns”
For context, know that I absolutely ADORE this game system, especially as encapsulated in the previous two games. The first involved pre-Nazi Germany, attempting to hold together a political coalition strong enough to stave off the greatest Evil in the last century. That feels pretty generally relevant, no? The second somehow spun directly into my fascination with pre-Communist Russia, where gameplay was attempting to hold together a fragile political alliance in the face of the Communist Revolution. The gameplay in both was balancing inter-faction politics with external events, and y’know running a country, and doing your damnedest to pull the populace back from the precipice of extremism. The mechanics are a card-driven paradigm, where each card presents options you might pursue either to mitigate events or try and further your goals. There are different decks for party v governing v events, and your task is to balance your hand to maneuver things about.
Both games are ALSO characterized by limited feedback on the efficacy of your efforts, until it is too late. There are paradoxically reams of data available to you, too much to digest really, but few clues on cause and effect. This is more feature than bug in those earlier games, where the uncertainty in your actions is very much part of the delicious tension. This is a rock solid game design, thematically tight to its historical inspiration.
This time around, you are attempting to hold together a fragile coalition in pre-war France, with the shadow of fascism creeping over the continent. Unlike the previous two, I had no prior exposure to France’s politics and pressures, and if I’m honest no seeds of interest either. That’s technically ok, at one point in my life I knew nothing about pre-Communist Russia, yet I’m all in on that now. But it does mean this game doesn’t automatically get me on its side like the other two did.
Like its immediate predecessor it tweaks the formula a bit: it opens a few months before an election in which your faction will be ushered to power. This is a really clever improvement on the previous games, essentially giving you a few game-months of ‘training’ on the game’s moving parts before the first election… and also showcasing the election mechanic that you will need to manage deeper into the game. This iteration further seemed to provide more ‘actions’ per turn than previous, while also tightening limits on your governing figures’ special powers, as well as allowing you to run a budget deficit (which I’m sure will not come back to bite later!). Even with these interesting tweaks this iteration did not quite capture my imagination the way the previous ones did.
I think there were two factors for this: 1) the stakes just felt lower. Yes, fascism was a looming threat everywhere, but especially early on it was relatively remote and gameplay centered around my (in)ability to maintain a governing coalition. It felt more like ‘clinging to power’ than the huge levers of history you were pulling in those other games. 2) This system has always felt a little opaque in cause and effect, this is actually one of its defining features. Even with that presupposition, this felt MORE so. Specifically, in a runthrough where I very deliberately prioritized ALL my socialist campaign promises, arguably to the exclusion of other events, I nevertheless was treated to “populace dissatisfied” outcomes, sometimes with identical text to when I focused on foreign affairs. Further, even though I played on ‘easy’ level I was booted from office in less than 6 months both times! It FELT less responsive to play.
Now in its third iteration, I think I feel about this system the way I do about GMT’s COIN series of games (Counter Insurgency). This is a series of board games with a very flexible asymmetric warfare focus. It is a core set of rules and mechanics that are applied to a series of different world scenarios: Castro’s Cuban insurgency, Afghanistan, Somali Piracy, Columbian drug trafficking, building the Cross Bronx Expressway(!), many many more. The foundational mechanics are interesting, fun and robust. But it is the scenarios to which they are applied (and the rules tweaks customized for each of them) that bring each specific one alive. Choosing which COIN game to play, then, becomes an exercise in “which conflict holds the most fascination for you?”
For me, for Autumn’s amazing system, I think I’ll go back to the other two? They just fire more endorphins for me.
Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: COIN III
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For this iteration especially, I think I would focus on sharpening the feedback loop - why actions generated results. Unlike its predecessors where the scenarios themselves provided some soft nudging, this felt more impenetrable to me due to my unfamiliarity with the scenario.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
