The year is 1940. You and your team have been training rigorously as members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a unit of elite soldiers tasked with conducting covert options and sabotage behind enemy lines. The location? France. The Mission? Classified. But rest assured, you will be pivotal to the war effort.
Intrigued? That’s the premise behind War Story: Occupied France. Designed by Dave Neale (Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars) and David Thompson (Undaunted: Normandy), War Story: Occupied France is a narrative-driven game for 1-6 players that takes place over 3 missions.
Gameplay Overview:
Each game will start with you choosing 4 operatives to bring on the mission. Every operative has a ranking (from 1-3) in 5 different skills: Firearms, Awareness, Influence, Stealth, and Technical. You’ll want to make up your team so you have all your bases covered (ideally). You’ll then gather some equipment, open your mission briefing, and decide where to go.
For the most part, you’ll be reading some narrative text in the mission book and then either making a decision (got to place A or Place B), or testing one of your skills. This is a diceless game, so any tests are strictly based on the ability of the operative(s) attempting it. The game does start you off with a few boost tokens to be used when you need a little extra effort, but once those are gone, you are on your own.
The game ends once you’ve completed your mission (or as much as possible) and extracted, or when your team has been defeated.
Game Experience:
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (SHCD) is one of the best narrative deduction games out there so I was curious as to what Davide Neale could do teaming up with an experienced WW2 board game designer in David Thompson. And I must say, War Story: Occupied France is certainly a unique game. It brings in the storytelling and decision-making from SHCD and marries it with some resource management.
Let me be frank, you will NEVER have enough skill points to accomplish your mission without risk or challenges. You start with about 4 skill tokens and 2 firearms boosts. And those can quickly be eaten up by skill checks. For example, if you are attempting to sneak past a German sentry, it may ask you to check your agents’ total stealth value: 1-2: turn to page XX, 3-5: turn to page YY, or 6+ turn to page ZZ. Higher is almost always better, so you need to decide just how important this check is for you. You may be at 5 and really want to succeed, so you burn a boost token to get to the next entry. Or perhaps you are at a 3 and you know it’s not worth spending 3 more to get to the next break point.
But for me at least, I burned through those tokens quite quickly. And while the story does occasionally dole out a few more to use, once they are gone you are on your own. That meant that most of my missions had casualties. Sometimes I felt like I was in Game of Thrones the way my agents were dropping. Alas poor Bernadette, I’ll miss your level 3 stealth skill.
I’m actually on the fence on if I would have preferred some sort of dice rolls vs the fixed number of skill tokens. On one hand, tests aren’t left to chance, you basically know how good you will be doing. Yet later in the mission when those tokens are gone, it can feel a little like fait accompli. Here are my numbers and there isn’t anything I can do to help that so just go ahead and shoot me Mr. soldier.
What I didn’t expect is how different the same mission can be. I played the first mission solo to get a feel for it, and then when one of my gaming buddies came over, I played it with him. I let him choose our egress into the mission (he chose the opposite one I did solo) and you know what, just about our entire path to the mission finale was completely different. I had no idea how each scenario was going to turn out until we got close to the end. That’s pretty impressive and gives the game more replay value than I expected.
Speaking of the finale, there are some combat scenes during the mission that change things up a little. You pull out a map that gives you a Birds Eye overview of the situation. It has strategic points where you can position your agents for various tactical advantages. So perhaps you put someone on overwatch, another on door breach, and a third to sneak around back. Your decisions here can affect the outcome of the battle (which, again is diceless). I really liked this aspect of the game as it added a bit of strategy I wasn’t expecting.
As far as things to be aware of, the first is that it’s really more story than game. Which is kind of to be expected with these “choose your own adventure” style games. The main driver is not simply which resource you are spending, but the decisions you are making and the story that goes along with it. And the story can get tense and gripping at times. You may think your 4 in Aweness was just fine, but turns out you really wanted that 6 to avoid that guard sneaking up behind you.
While I did enjoy the story, I think there was a bit too much page-turning for my liking. Go to this entry, then jump ahead 40 pages, then back 20 pages, then forward 10 pages, then back 30 pages. It got a bit much at times. And maybe this was just me, but there were a few times that I lost my place on the page after checking an agent’s stat sheet and had to try and figure out where I was. I had to try and remember the last entry number I used and then flip around until I found my place again.
Final Thoughts:
I enjoyed War Story: Occupied France more than I expected. Both the interesting story and the branching narrative were really engaging. That being said, I’m a little bit WW2’d out and would love to see this system in some other time and place. Either Modern Era or perhaps something more unique like Feudal Japan or Cold War Russia.
For a player count, I think 1-2 players is the sweet spot. 3 could also work, but although the game says it goes up to 6, that’s not really ideal for the game as you don’t control anyone. It’s more of a team making decisions and more players could just lead to more arguments about what path to take. But at the end of the day, Osprey Games took some risks with this one and I think it paid out.
Final Score: 4 Stars – A solid narrative with some tough decisions is an overall win in my book.
Hits:
• Good story with branching paths
• Some decent replay value mid-mission
• Combat is a nice change of pace
• Diceless stat checks avoid randomness
Misses:
• A bit too much page flipping and stinks when you lose your place
• Let’s move off WW2 for a bit
• Diceless stat checks and feel a little deterministic
