Let me talk a little bit about
Navajo Wars, a great game that just recently came back in print, which you might have missed in between all the KS fluff.
What is it?
Navajo Wars is a solo game (with a 2p variant) that retells the history of the struggle of the Navajo people (also known as the Diné) to defend their land and culture against colonizing forces of Spain, Mexico, and the United States. You can play various scenarios against any one of those empires, including a long scenario against all three in succession.
Is it a wargame? And why should I care if I don't like wargames?
While this game does have a number of elements commonly found in wargames (such as rolling and modifying dice rolls for certain battle outcomes), it combines them with more strategic resource management you might find in a eurogame. In fact, you spend a bulk of this game managing more of the familial, cultural aspects of your people - expanding families, holding positions on the land, maintaining animals, and growing crops. There is a light and quiet "eurogame" facet to this game of just living your life and slowly building stuff up. It's when the enemy raids come that the game dramatically shifts into more of a tactical one, and tests your planning and resolve to fend off and avoid devastation.
This blend of mechanics really rounds out the experience for me as a great entry point into war and history-based games in general. It's a game where every action in the game has some thematic element to it, there is a fair mix of strategy and luck, and it doesn't over-indulge on war as a means to an end.
How does it play?
First of all, I should mention that the rulebook is really good, and comes with an excellent tutorial book that walks you through several turns, asking you at key points to go read a relevant passage or two from the rulebook to understand what is happening. This was really well-done, and it's like having the designer personally teach you the game.
I think a good point of comparison for this game is
Spirit Island, not just because of the similar theme (although you actually play as the natives here, not an intermediary). Spirit Island's enemy is driven by a conveyer belt of cards that tells you where they're going and what they're going to do. This game has that on steroids.
The enemy here works through a conveyer belt of instructions that it can execute if its built up enough AP (you can see this on the board, the bottom right). This gives you an overview of the next 2-4 turns for the enemy, but these counters can flip or swap with the row of inactive counters next to it, meaning you can't exactly predict what's going to happen. The best way to push back on this is to try to slow down how many AP the enemy can get, but its a matter of holding back the dam before it bursts (and you better be ready for it when it does).
It's this mix of strategy and luck that really exemplifies the mood of the entire game. You have ample room to plan, but you need to stay flexible enough to react to these fake-outs.
The board mostly consists of this map with different territories (it's presented as a makeshift map using a leather cloth and colored stones), and the enemy will work its way down these paths, setting up missions and forts that slowly sap your culture away. Along the bottom is your family display, where each family can have a man, woman and child (and these get added/taken away as stuff happens in the game).
One of the interesting mechanics of the game is the "Passage of Time". In a typical eurogame, you expect that at the end of each turn, you will do administrative things like feed your people, breed animals, etc. This game makes it optional - you burn an entire turn to add new family members, breed animals, and feed everybody. Do it too soon, and you will reap little to no benefit, but timed just right will give you a huge boost. It's cool that this game has managed to turn a rather boring feature in most games into a meaningful decision with somewhat of a push-your-luck aspect to it.
There's quite a bit of stuff to do in the box
I tend to not focus too much on "content" in the box, because my favorite games are highly replayable through randomization, rather than a bunch of one-time use scenarios and such. With that said, this game offers a lot with a relatively small set of components (it's gotta be under 100 counters in the game, and about 80 cards total).
I just recently managed to beat the easiest scenario in this game (a shortened version of the Spanish scenario), and I noticed around my 4th game that they had all played out pretty differently, because of how much variety gets generated through the enemy instruction thing, and how the deck comes out and what you decide to do with it. And I still have the longer scenario just for Spain. Mexico and the US come with their own separate instruction counters and slightly rules tweaks that will change this game even more.
Should you buy this game?
I wont pretend that this game is for everyone. But as far as I've played, this game excels in the categories it belongs to.
As a solo game, it's a big, full board game with interesting decisions and a good amount of complexity. It's also not hard to run the AI at all, and it is one of the best solo systems I've seen in the number of solo games I've played.
As a historical wargame, the topic is a lot more human and interesting than a big conventional war, and it's got more of a well-rounded "sim" focus than just battling (I haven't even mentioned that this game has a little tech tree system in it).
I recommend this game if you're curious about wargames in general, but are intimidated by the more complex stuff or find straightforward war, as a theme, to be boring. This game's theme comes alive in its mechanics and it's about growing and surviving and pushing back on colonial invasion.
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