Recently I expanded my gaming horizons to include wargames, something I had not really dealt with before. I’ve enjoyed playing Twilight Struggle, Crusader Rex, Here I Stand, and Nexus Ops, and felt it was time to take the next bold step: buying a wargame. After doing a lot of research, I finally decided on this game:

O Deadly Swarm is a wargame for two players, set in the future. One player is an animatronic version of General Robert E. Lee. The other player is Smallpox. Here’s a picture of the map during play (so far I have only played it solitaire to learn the rules.)

As you can see from the counter sheet, Robert E. Lee is vastly outnumbered:

(There is one Lee counter, 348 smallpox counters, and one blank one to replace a counter you might have lost.)

Robert E. Lee is vastly outnumbered, but he has three things going for him. First, he has military training. Second, he is a robot. Third, this strain of smallpox can be hit with rocks and killed.

On a given turn, the player playing Robert E. Lee has a hand of cards he can play:

which give him certain abilities for that turn, or which can instead be used for action points. Action points allow Lee to move, fight, and attempt to look for rocks to hit the smallpox with. When he wants to find a rock, he rolls on this table:

Each player has two ways to win. For Robert E. Lee, surviving until turn 12 gives that player a victory (it is assumed that the airstrike he calls for at the beginning of the game arrives at the end of turn 12.) In addition, there is a barber shop on the map, seen here:

If he can get into the barber shop, he can shut off the computer that is creating the smallpox and therefore win. (Supposedly this is the hardest way in the game to win, and some people have even suggested a few house rules to make this more of a feasible strategy.)

The smallpox player also has two routes to victory. The obvious one is killing Robert E. Lee. This isn’t easy, because of Lee’s titanium skeleton. The Lee player has a beautiful color sheet on which to mark damage sustained:

In addition, the smallpox player can spend his actions to work on the lighthouse that the smallpox are building. If all ten stages of lighthouse construction are completed, the smallpox player wins.

The standard game lasts about four to six hours, but the rulebook contains two scenarios for shorter games, and a set of campaign rules for longer, more detailed games (I haven’t read this part yet, so I’m not sure what that involves.)

Although there were a lot of comments on BoardGameGeek talking about how spouse-friendly O Deadly Swarm is, Becky has seemed uninterested so far, so I’ll have to get Matt or James or Al to play against me. I’m not sure whether I want to play Robert E. Lee or the Smallpox first, but I’m looking forward to my first game either way!