The Grizzled is a hand management, press your luck game, set in a World War I theme. The focus is not on fighting and battling, however, the focus is how soldiers can work together to survive the dangers of war. The game asks the question: "Can friendship be stronger than war?"The game has two decks. The threat deck is the deck that you want to get rid of. You get rid of it by playing cards during the missions you go on. The more cards you can play in a mission, the more you can get rid of from the threat deck. When this deck is empty, you win!
The second deck is the morale deck. After each mission, cards move from the morale deck to the threat deck. You want to try and deplete this deck as slowly as possible. When this deck is empty, you lose!
During a mission you try to play cards from your hand. There are two types of cards: threats and hard knocks. The threats have a combination of six types of threats on them: snow, rain, darkness, bullets, gas masks, and whistles (for calling soldiers into battle). When THREE of this threats are played (in No Man's Land), you lose the mission. This is where the push your luck aspect comes in. You want to try and play as many cards as possible, but you don't want to fail the mission. Each of the six characters has a special power (a good luck charm) they can use to discard a certain type of threat card from No Man's Land, allowing you to play more cards.
The hard knock cards are ones that attach to your character. The have negative effects such as causing your character to fail if there are two cards of the same threat on the table or hindering how you are able to withdraw. If you have four hard knock cards after the support phase, you die.
When you can no longer play cards, you withdraw. When everyone has withdrawn and you haven't failed the mission, you have succeeded! Players then play their support tokens secretly. They go to the players to the left and to the right. When the tokens are revealed, if anyone has a majority, they can heal two hard knocks or get their lucky charm back.
That's basically it. The expansion, At Your Orders!, comes with solo rules and alternate two player rules. It also comes with mission cards (which I have barely used).
So, can friendship be stronger than war?
Total Plays: 3 solo, 10 cooperative
COMPONENTS
One of the first things that drew me to this game was the artwork. It's cartoony, but not at all disrespectful to the serious content of the game. I feel like the art softens the theme and focuses on the friendship/cooperative aspect, but still allows you to think respectfully about the theme. The standees and bits all look great and keep you within the theme of the game. 5/5
RULES
The basic premise of the game is quite simple, but there really are quite a lot of little rules. Buying the expansion (At Your Orders!) give a solo mode but also adds an alternative two-player mode and new mission cards, further confusing things. The rule book is small, but still a little difficult to navigate and find answers to specific questions. 3/5
GAMEPLAY
There is a nice tension when you're choosing how many cards you're going to take for a new mission (this is the base game, without the mission cards). You know that you need to get rid of the cards in the threat pile before your morale pile empties out, but if you fail a mission you're in trouble. How many cards will you take?!? In the solo game, you choose to take more cards after each time you play a card and you feel this same tension. The mechanics of the game are simple, yet force you to make big-feeling decisions. 4/5
REPLAYABILITY
There are a few different ways to play game, different players with slightly different player-powers, and lots of shuffled cards that are different each time. Since each little battle is only a few cards at a time, it really is quite random/variable what you're going to encounter. The hard knocks you have at the time change things a lot too. For a small card game, there is enough replayability to bring you back and want you to play a few rounds in a row as well. 4/5
FUN
This is a good game. The rules could use some work but the artwork, theme, and basic mechanics are really solid. I don't get the greatest feel of FUN when I play it, though. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just not the game I keep going back to. There are many other games I feel drawn to, probably because I prefer other themes (fantasy usually) and mechanics (dungeon crawls and deck builders). Still, a really good game. 6/10
TOTAL SCORE: 22/30
I think this is a really good game to have in your collection. I prefer cooperative to solo because you miss out on the player interaction (or lack thereof) that comes with other players. Before playing this game, I thought it was on it's way out of my collection, but I think it fits a particular niche and will stay put on my shelf.
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