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On first inspection, Cry Havoc looks like any number of similarly grim and gritty science fiction board games. It comes with a stash of plastic soldiers, robots, and aliens, and its artwork paints a world in tones of mud, fire, and gun metal. But if you’re expecting a quick fix of hectic, dice-chucking combat, you’re going to be disappointed, because Cry Havoc offers a much more thoughtful take on the concept of planetary conquest.

Cry Havoc hands players command of rival factions competing to colonize a newly discovered world. Playing as aggressive and expansionist humans, merciless and powerful machines, or elusive and enigmatic aliens known as the Pilgrims, you attempt to claim victory by seizing control of territories and exploiting them for their resources (in the form of shiny plastic crystals).

Each faction feels different to play, but everyone starts on an equal footing, with a single HQ territory, a small group of units, and a hand of action cards drawn from a personal deck. These cards are critical to your strategy, because they determine what you’ll be able to do on each of your turns. Each card shows a number of symbols representing the options available to you: Move troops across the board, deploy new units to your HQ, or build structures which grant a variety of special abilities.

You can play as many cards as you like on your turn, but you have to play them all toward a single type of action. Playing cards for their movement icons, for instance, means any building or deployment symbols are wasted. You have to think carefully about the most effective way to use the cards available to you at any given moment, planning around what you’re able to do rather than what you’d ideally like to do.

Forward to battle

This process of spending cards to maneuver, grow, and strengthen your forces is the mechanical core of Cry Havoc. But what really gives the game its character is the plethora of sub-systems and faction-specific abilities attached to the basic action.

Game details Designer: Grant Rodiek, Michał Oracz, Michał Walczak

Publisher: Portal Games

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Playing time: 90-120 minutes

Price: $50 ( Grant Rodiek, Michał Oracz, Michał WalczakPortal Games2-410+90-120 minutes: $50 ( Amazon ) / ~£50 ( Amazon UK

The most striking of these is the combat system. Move your units into a space already occupied by an enemy and you trigger a battle in the form of a mini-game played out on a separate board. You and your opponent deploy troops toward three separate battle objectives, each of which is resolved as a contest in its own right—and each of which grants a different reward to the victor.

There’s a fight for territorial control, in which the winner claims dominance of the contested region; it's vital for scoring points towards victory. There’s the struggle to capture enemy units, where the winner claims some of their opponents’ troops, forcing them to pay victory points as ransom if they want the troops back. Finally, there’s a bloody battle of attrition, where both players can attempt to harm their opponent by simply cutting down their troops in a hail of gunfire, removing them from the board.

With a limited number of troops at your disposal, you’re forced to decide whether to fight for territory or simply hammer your opponent. And while that choice can be tricky enough on its own, it’s complicated by the fact that you can also use your action cards to affect the outcome of a battle. Different cards allow you to add units to the fray or shuffle them between objectives on the battle board. What looks at first like an easy fight can suddenly be turned on its head. The system can give players reservations about launching attacks, even against apparently weaker foes.

The trouble with Trogs

While combat plays a huge part in Cry Havoc, you won’t just be fighting your opponents’ forces. The planet you’re battling over is already occupied, and the locals don’t take kindly to outsiders.

The indigenous Trogs are a vaguely reptilian species, and, before a game begins, you distribute tokens representing their nests across different regions of the board. Move your troops into one of these strongholds and the Trogs will instantly kill one of your units before engaging the survivors in battle, with one of your opponents controlling the Trog actions during the fight. (In a four-player game, one player commands the Trogs as a separate faction with their own abilities and victory conditions.)

This is a marked contrast with other games themed around colonialism. Think of Catan, in which players establish their empires over a land remarkably devoid of native inhabitants, or Small World, where indigenous tribes serve only as an early-game roadblock, designed to be bulldozed out of the way as players expand across the board. Cry Havoc’s Trogs couldn’t be more different. They present a real and constant threat to players, and they can completely derail your plans and wipe out multiple units that stray into their territory.

Trogs also prevent much in the way of direct player-on-player violence by forming a strong buffer between the factions. That might seem like an odd design decision in what presents itself as an intense battle game, but it means that actual combat between player factions tends to take place in the final few turns. The fact that you’ve had to work so hard to be able to attack your rivals makes those final battles feel dramatic and genuinely important.