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This War of Mine (the video game) is a game about living hand to mouth and making hard decisions. Even when it's going well, it manages to maintain this terrible, gnawing sense of anxiety; your survivors may want for nothing, but the next catastrophe is just around the corner. Each playthrough is a nerve-wracking mix of anxiety, sacrifice, luck and misery; one that makes you feel uneasy at the best of times and utterly wretched at the worst. It's poignant, yes, but it's not something I'd necessarily describe as a Nice Time. For that exact reason, it strikes me as a somewhat shaky foundation for a board game. When I play tabletop games, I do so to unwind and have a laugh with friends. I'm no stranger to a good nail-biter, of course - Pandemic, Darkness Comes Rattling, Eldritch Horror and Doomtown: Reloaded can all be heart-pounding experiences - but the object of the exercise is always to have fun. A Nice Time, in other words. But, where Pandemic gives such an expanded view as to deal in abstraction, This War of Mine: The Board Game zooms right in on the people you're trying to keep alive, right down to telling you who smokes, who can carry the most weight, or who has the best chance of surviving a fight to the death. Like the video game on which it's based, This War of Mine is grave and earnest through and through. Put simply, can a board game designed to reflect the civilian cost of war fulfil that aim and still provide a good social experience?
For the most part the answer is yes, mainly down to the fact This War of Mine sticks to its guns. While it introduces its mechanics gradually, it's uncompromising from the very beginning. During my first playthrough a friend and I took in a wounded stranger, earning ourselves an extra pair of hands on the assumption we'd be able to patch him up before things got too serious. We were wrong; he died of his wounds that night, causing misery to sweep through the ranks of our four remaining characters. While moments like that are frequent and challenging in This War of Mine: The Board Game, they also bring you closer to the characters. Their successes become your successes; their defeats your defeats. As you get into the rhythm of the game's unrelenting day/night cycle, you start committing the same people to different tasks, building a surprisingly vivid sense of character out of what is effectively a straightforward meeple or action point placement system.
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