Customer Reviews

Britannia: Strive to Become King of England in This Battle Game for Control of Britain [BOX SET]

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This classic AVALON HILL game, in truth, is still in print, because Fantasy Flight Game has republished it, of course with new cover, new design, better rule book, etc, but all of this approved the author of the game himself, who explains the little differences between Avalon Hill's version and Fantasy Flight version. They are very few.

BRITANNIA is, indeed, a difficult game to play. But that does not mean the experience will not be a pleasant one.

The dificulty arises from the fact that there are a lot of exceptions and foot notes to the rules of the game. These exceptions were clearley designed to portray history in a more accurate way and add to the flavour of the game. It works, but as a collateral effect I'd say it's almost impossible to play BRITTANIA, at least the first two or three times, without making totally inadvertent rules errors while playing.

The game was really designed with four players in mind, with three or five player it gets clearly unbalanced.Maybe it was pressure form the publisher to try to sell to a broader audience, I don't know. Anyway, this ia a personal opinion, maybe people playing with other number thatn four players will find it efficient also.

It's indeed a time consuming game. Rarely it ends before fours hours playing.

The game components are totally adequate, nothing fancy, but fundamentally operational. Game board very beautiful. Rule book is well designed and with good examples.

This is a war game through and through, but with clever and fast combat resolution mechanics (based in D6 dice) and without thousands of complicated playing pieces that keep stacking upon each other in a hexagonal board. Of course, since there are dice involved, luck plays a big part, and a whole carefully planned strategy may be destroyed by a sequence of two or three bad luck dice rolling. But you can easily regain it by good dice rolling when defending... What I say is: with a lot of battles solely resolved by dice rolling, no matter how good a strategist or historian you are, luck is a strong factor in BRITANNIA.

In general, it's no wonder it's one of the few out of print Avalon Hill games that managed to get new life with another publisher. It's exciting, gorgeous to look at and informative.