Before I get into This War of Mine, let me tell you of an infamous game. Designed in 2009 by Brenda Romero simply titled “Train.” To play, players are given model train cars on railroad tracks and little yellow pawns. Simple in its mechanics, the goal is to put the pawn people in the train and get them to the location.
As the game progresses, the player eventually flips over a card that says “Auschwitz”. At that moment, they are meant to figure out that they have not been loading willing passengers on a vacation. They are instead participating in the transportation of victims of the Holocaust, including all the pawns they had sent before.
The game is specifically designed for that shock. This makes it more of an art piece than an actual game. It forces people to question themselves and the decisions that they have made.
Unlike “Train,” players go into “This War of Mine” (designed by Michal Oracle and Jakub Wisniewski) knowingly. But the game is still able to elicit those same strong emotions. It makes you question everything that you take for granted and ponder what you would do if ever horrifically faced with devastating choices.
And it is a masterpiece for it.
Setting the Scene
Set in the fictional country of Pogoren, you are cooperatively playing as a group of ordinary civilians trapped in a civil war. The building that you are in is barely standing, with locked doors and heaps of trash to dig through. You are hungry, there isn’t enough water and the cold is threatening to come in and freeze you all.
Players are directed to make a decision for all of the characters and draw cards to propel the narrative of the game forward. While technically split into 7 different phases, it’s really two – a day phase and a night phase.
During the day, players dig around their shelled-out building looking for meager supplies. At the same time, they are also toying with the idea that they could possibly, maybe, build a chair to lift some of the misery.
I’m not being metaphorical. Different states of health and emotional wellness determine how many actions you can take a turn. As things get worse, the less the characters are able to do.
During the night phase, players decide which characters go out into one of three locations. The others stay at the house either to rest or to guard the few precious resources.
It’s here, where the simultaneous narratives don’t interact with each other, that part of the emotional narration really starts to comes through. Up to this point, the game has been a tight squeeze on resources and health stats. Tense for sure, but standard fare. The diverging narratives then come back together. And here a simple decision becomes crucial. Like whether the lone weapon should go with the scavengers or if it should stay at the house. But you don’t know until the night phase is done.
It is so easy to imagine. An elated scavenger party comes home, rich in bounty. Meanwhile, everything has been stolen and Marcel is severely wounded.
Or the exact opposit. It’s a quiet night at home. But a gang attacks the search party and they barely come back in one piece.
You question everything that you take for granted and ponder what you would do if ever horrifically faced with devastating choices.
And it is a masterpiece for it.
Two mediums control the vast array of narration and decision points. There’s the board, with its many stacks of cards representing rubble, characters and goals. And then there is The Book of Scripts, the main story force adding flavor to the resolutions of those decisions made on the board.
This Hope of Mine
There’s something oddly refreshing about “This War of Mine’s” lack of lofty goals like stopping the war, repairing the house or rebuilding a functioning mini-society. This War of Mine’s main goal is to simply survive.
I should be more specific: This War of Mine’s winning condition is to have at least one member of your original party survive to the end with all of their stats above a 2 in a 4 point scale.
Even with that very low bar, I have yet to win a game.
But in this case, not winning is not an issue.
One of many smart decisions the game designers Michal Oracle and Jakub Wisniewski made is to not have individual players control individual characters. Instead, the players make all decisions for the characters as a whole, before passing the rule book along to the next player for the next round of decisions.
This does two things. One is that it makes the game solo-able, a style I highly recommend. But more importantly, it turns the players into the audience. They are still making decisions, they still have agency, but instead of only looking out for #1, the worry has now become that of the entire group.
You don’t know how this disparate group of people came together. It is just understood. The life they had before – a professor, a TV Host, a cat burglar – that life is over now. They have found themselves in this situation and they must do everything they can do, to survive, but not so much to get out. There is no “out”.
There is only through.
What Would You Do
In a box full of amazing design decisions that serve both game play and emotional investment, “This War of Mine” smartly has the player jump in and start playing the game immediately upon set-up. There is no quiet night with a glass of wine and a rule book. You are thrust into the game and told, “Here are the characters, here are some immediate and long term goals, and here are some basic rules. You’ll learn more later. Make a decision.”
The game first asks “Do you know what to do?”
And then you spend the rest of the game asking yourself “Are you sure?”
The vast majority of people would be completely ignorant of what to do if they found themselves in a war torn country. By having a player make a decision in the dark, only to find out a few turns later that it was a bad choice, creates the atmosphere of futilely trying to make split decisions in a chaotic world. With everything against you, all you can do is roll the dice and pray.
This, of course, makes every move, every decision a fearful one. And it starts getting in your head. The need to grab and hoard. And also the need to avoid anyone that is not part of your group. For who knows what they will do to you.
The Moment It Hit Me
I was playing one game where the group had met a child begging for help for his family that lived right down the street.
I hesitated.
Does this family really exist?
Will helping them get me something?
Or is this a trap?
Is this leading my group to a gang that wants to beat and steal?
I was unsure and I was scared.
And it was in that moment, when I questioned whether to help a child that didn’t even exist, that the emotional wallop came through.
If you strip away everything that makes you you, if you take away the comfort and the safety and the trust, that is when you really start to answer the hardest question of all:
When faced with all of this, do you still have hope?
(If you’ve enjoyed this review and what I’m doing on Cardboard Reflection, please consider helping the website by donating a cup of Ko-fi.)