I enjoy co-op campaign games. As a result, after finishing up Arkham Horror, I was looking for something new. It was then that I saw a writeup from Dan Thurot on War Story: Occupied France. Sure, a World War Two choose your own adventure sort of thing is a bit out of the usual wheelhouse, but it seemed like it would be worth giving a shot.
On the whole, I have quite mixed feelings on War Story. I think I can explain them (and the rest of the game) best by first pulling the box quote from BGG.
Through three replayable story missions, you must exploit the specialties of your chosen agents to uncover information, enlist allies, and obtain weaponry. Engage occupying forces on tactical encounter maps where careless positioning could cost your agents’ lives. Remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy…and time is running out.
Let’s start with those “three replayable story missions.” Yes, there are three of them. Yes, they are missions. Are they replayable?
I would not call them that. As the box also says, much of what we spent our time doing was simply gathering information. Playing again while knowing what and where the Nazi forces are up to feels like it would somewhat defeat the point. After all, it is a choose your own adventure booklet.
Perhaps the game has an elaborate branching path system, but by the time we finished mission 3, we had a pretty good sense of all three ways we COULD have finished our objective, even if we did only focus on one of them.
That said, the general missions and choices they present are fun, tense and exciting.
I would not say the same about the tactical encounter maps.
I’m going to be honest: the gunfights feel like a crapshoot, and there were at least two instances where we got absolutely screwed by the system. That’s not to say there aren’t choices, but often the choices boil down to trying to read the game text about the tactical maps for clues.
And many times, it just feels like those clues aren’t there. A choice with no information is the same as a random selection, and random selection isn’t agency. To the quote the box for a final time “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and no, our plans did not. Instead, the gunfights feel like a matter of asking “Are you willing to spend gun tokens to avoid the worst case outcome on this check?” twelve or so times in a row.
Either way, I don’t think it’s something that would have annoyed me if it wasn’t for a larger problem I have with tone.
Now this might just be a me problem. My friend didn’t have it, and I believe Dan Thurot had a sort of opposite experience to mine. But it’s my writeup, so I’m going to talk about it here.
To me it feels like there are two very different types of story trying to co-exist in War Story. The first is a sort of grim, intense insurgency narrative, with all the things associated with said narrative.
Life is cheap, the enemy is endless, and while your actions are impactful in the grand scheme of things, they will also lead to death and torture for others around you. There are morally grey choices, and whether you are a terrorist or freedom fighter is ultimately going to be decided by if your side wins.
This attempts to sit side by side with a sort of heroic myth thing. The primary enemy is a literal cigar smoking Kriminalkommissar Nazi, who the first two acts spend significant time building up. There is extended narrative time spent on a few “Face” characters who show up, but don’t actually spend much time as part of the story, like the albino toymaker.
Perhaps this is just the result of it being a choose your adventure story. Dan was darkly delighted at a moment when he was confronted with a treacherous informant, and given the choice of killing this person, lying to them, or trying to buy them off. I was equally frustrated when upon encountering a child of a German soldier or potentially SS Officer, I was not given the option to shoot the child.
This was not a choice I was enthusiastic about, but it did feel like a key moment where I would be confronted with the fact that in order to reach my objectives, I would have to make some heinous choices. Instead, we just distracted him and he ran off.
It was an oddly dissonant feeling, and one that has stuck with me since then.
It’s an interesting experience, but playing it by the book it felt frustrating at times, and frankly I don’t see how it could possibly be replayable. Would I play another game in the series? Maybe, but only if someone else was footing the bill.
I don’t really recommend or not recommend War Story. If someone told me they were thinking about playing it, I think the first thing I would say is that I’d love to hear their thoughts after they finish.
The second would be to ask if they wanted to buy my copy.
