EGO, Winter Rabbit, Task Force Faith, SILOS

Week of August 18th, 2025

EGO continues on its roll. The way in which it’s changed up the risk-reward calculus of its risk mechanic (vis-a-vis Beowulf) is totally fascinating and continues to give those of who are hard-core Beowulf veterans something to think about. One interesting side-effect is that the auctions tend to be sharper. In Beowulf, there are only consequences for risking when you ultimately fail. In EGO, it’s possible to be able to continue risking without consequence but it’s pretty unlikely (I haven’t done the exact math with the deck, but a “clean” successful risk is only 5%-ish). The downside is potentially much larger than it used to be. So now evaluating risks is more than just can I afford to risk now, it’s a question of how many times you think you have to successfully risk to make a difference and how much pressure you want to apply to the other players. Those factors mattered in Beowulf too, but they matter a lot more with EGO. This seems to mean people tend to drop earlier, there is less difference between the hidden and open auctions in terms of ultimate costs, and things resolve quicker. This isn’t always better — some of the most entertaining moments of Beowulf are the last two players standing slugging it out for one of the high-stakes events — but it feels like it’s traded some drama for a tighter experience.

Another nice thing about EGO is that there seems to be more ways to think about the risks. In Beowulf, I feel like we reached a point where to win you kind of needed to finish the game without any wounds. In EGO, I’ve seen people win with no offense tokens, or with 5 or 6. It feels like the straightforward penalty curve for offenses is a bit cleaner and easier to manage than the slightly complex way wounds and scratches work in Beowulf.

Lastly, the random board layout of EGO has been a major improvement, I feel. Again, don’t get me wrong, Beowulf is one of the all-time great eurogames and EGO doesn’t replace it. But the fixed timeline of Beowulf does have a specific ebb and flow and has patterns that you learn to internalize with experience. By breaking up those patterns, EGO forces both new and experienced players to look at the timeline and make serious evaluations, which is a nice leveler.

Of the three new games, I feel like SILOS has been the bigger winner in my circles because it feels new. Municipium turned a lot of people off and it never got traction, so it never made much of an impact. With the new colorful, goofy theme SILOS has been much more accessible and people are discovering it’s really good; and I think SILOS is a great game. Especially with the new mini-variants. But there is little question in my mind that EGO is the one that’s going to be coming off the shelf more regularly in 5 years (although I really hope both will be to some extent). The lack of the strong theme and narrative sense from Beowulf is very unfortunate, but EGO is tighter and more economical.

Winter Rabbit is a recent semi-cooperative game from new designer (to hobbyist tabletop games anyway) William Thompson and published by his Absurdist Production label. Like Molly House, this game has a connection to the Zenobia Award, where it came in 2nd in 2021. This is a little outside my usual comfort zone — I usually wait on new designers and new labels, they’re just not a percentages play for me — but I took a chance on this because William Thompson has native ancestry, and the design goal was to create a native counterpoint to traditional so-called 4X games. The 4X template is dumb, wildly overused, completely ahistorical, and a total construct of the computer game genre, so I’m always looking out for people trying a more interesting take.

The general idea is that Winter Rabbit is a worker placement game, but when you play a worker you will (usually) draw one from a bag randomly and place it hidden rather than just place one of your own. When a site has all of its worker slots filled it produces, and everyone will get resources but the players who did the work will get a little more. The wild card is that some of the workers are rabbits who will steal production. The gathered resources are used to fulfill tasks, which the players have to succeed in a certain number of to avoid collective loss. Players select a task from their hands to put in play each round, and while other players can fulfill the task you play, you cannot. When someone else fulfills your task, you get a small kickback. You can also build out a tableau with buildings with special powers, but these tend to be expensive-ish and provide few or no points. And, you can also tell stories which are cards with a short text of a Cherokee legend and which score some points (although not as many as fulfilling tasks) and gives the group an immediate or short-term advantage.

So mechanically, it’s all very oblique. The levers you use to improve your own position also help everyone else. The ways you can sabotage the other players (by placing a rabbit token if you draw it) also hurt you and the harm tends to be diffuse. It’s not miles different mechanically from a traditional worker-placement/resource-gathering/point-scoring game, but the competition is dialed way down and you’re fighting over small efficiencies. So the overall vibe is definitely different. It has a similar sense to Molly House or Beowulf — competition to excel as part of a team — but while Molly House brilliantly squares individual expression and collective good off against each other, Winter Rabbit is not really working in that arena. The actual incentives for solidarity (the need to complete tasks to survive the winter) are perfunctory, and the game never really tackles how traditional Cherokee society managed internal tensions, conflict, or ambition in radically different ways from Europeans. The social structure is taken as a given. So, unlike Molly House, where players with more Joy are actively encouraged to lift up their fellow players or face the consequences of a breakdown of group cohesion, it’s really unclear what to do with the threat of collective loss here. If you’re way behind on points for whatever reason, what are you supposed to do with that, as a player? The game doesn’t really give you anything.

Ultimately the system is so damped that it’s hard to get too far ahead or behind, but this is where I feel like the building cards may not be serving the game. Some of the buildings — especially the ones that give you a lot of extra storage area — seem very strong and can potentially give a player a big production advantage if they get it early in the game. Production means points, and it’s very hard to do any kind of table-balancing. This feels a little off to me, like it at the very least strains the concept and context of the game.

The other major native game I’ve put time into in recent years was the Coyote & Crow RPG. That was a totally wonderful high concept, an America where a meteor hits Europe or something and so colonization never occurred and native culture survives into a contemporary technology level. I so wanted that game to be good, to be something that could go into the RPG rotation. And it did have many worthy aspects; if my primary hobby was roleplaying and I played once or twice a week instead of occasionally I might still play it from time to time. However, I felt that ultimately it just lacked the courage of its convictions. It was too much a traditional d20 game that tried to do too much of the heavy lifting with the setting, and couldn’t overcome being tightly tied to traditional European fantasy RPG mechanics. I get a similar feeling here. There’s so much wonderful detail, from the Cherokee scripts to the authentic stories and illustrations. But I didn’t feel like it could transcend being a fundamentally a traditional worker placement point-scoring euro — certainly not in the way Molly House did. The fiddly economics don’t do enough on their own.

It did end up sending me down a rabbit hole of reading on pre-contact Cherokee and Iroquois culture, which I found utterly fascinating. It’s especially interesting to compare to the English settler communities because of the similarities of their situations but the dramatic differences in their cultures. Both were marginal survival communities where social order and cohesion were paramount and strictly maintained, but the way the social hierarchies were structured and supported were radically different. It’s hard not to feel like the Cherokee and Iroquois had much better answers to a lot of questions, but it’s also hard not to feel like they could never scale — certainly not at the time. Anyway, I would encourage you to go down this rabbit hole as well. You can start on the Wikipedia pages for the Cherokee and Iroquois. It’s totally worth it and as it’s becoming increasingly clear that US culture and politics doesn’t have many real answers to the social challenges of the 21st century (yet), it’s good to try to understand how other cultures thought about community, wealth, and family and see what insight we can gain.

As for the game, I’ll play it again; I found it intriguing and I need to keep pushing on it to see how people respond to it and to its structure, so that I can understand it. I think there is something here, I’m just not sure what. Playing it back-to-back with Molly House though, it’s just not in that league or at that level of ambition.

One of our friends is a train gamer, so we played some Free Ride USA. I’ll be honest here: I would be fine never playing this again. I like the Free Ride system and would play the original. The US geography just doesn’t work very well and there are too few legitimate ways to approach it for a game with as much chaos as it has. Just draw good tickets.

The Trials of Task Force Faith is Le Franc Tireur’s recent module on the Korean War. It’s set during the UN’s 1950 winter retreat, although the module is surprisingly light on describing the historical context. I had to go over to Wikipedia to figure out what Task Force Faith’s deal was. It’s part of the now-legendary retreat of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir, although it was an attached US Army Unit (Regimental Combat Team 31). The product is a scenario pack with a large historical map and no campaign game.

Andrew Hershey is the prime mover behind the pack — he’s one of the designers of The Forgotten War module itself — and I’ve ended up being a bit leery of his work. My first exposure to him was in LFT’s Operation Chariot, and I’ve also played his Fight for Seoul and The Shield of Cholm. His products with LFT are always really interesting but undone by a truly excessive amount of rules writing and rewriting. The amount of detail on motor boats (among other things) in Operation Chariot is bonkers. Fight for Seoul included a lengthy and kind of insane rules section allowing USMC squads to break down into 3 “half-squads” that mainly served to demonstrate why the designers of ASL didn’t do it in Gung Ho (they thought about it; see footnote 43 in Chapter G). Although the Forgotten War core module itself is better than LFT products, it definitely shows the same pattern of over-design — even by comparison to some of the nastier sections of the PTO stuff in Chapter G.

Task Force Faith does seem, fortunately, to avoid the worst of these tendencies. There are a few grudge rules, but not too many. The CPVA has a new disability (looting), because their baroque movement restrictions don’t hose them enough already. There are some slightly odd rules for harassing fire which is essentially a rules-light OBA module; they’re fine but too complicated for their very limited impact. So yes, there are nits to pick. But the overall rules load still isn’t terrible for historical ASL.

The entire module has the Chinese CPVA facing off against Americans. This is interesting because as-designed in The Forgotten War, the CPVA has some issues. Their Infantry Platoon Movement restrictions are bad, and they’re kind of a one-note army: run at the enemy and hope enough squads survive to destroy them at extremely close range. This is obviously highly questionable in both historical and gameplay terms. I really wish the system had done something more interesting. The Chinese were known for stealth, infiltration, fieldcraft, and endurance, as well as their unusual command structures at the tactical level. I would have liked to have seen more of all that and less of the rigidity and extreme fanaticism, which is problematic on so many levels.

Anyway, many post-The Forgotten War products have tried to massage the Chinese IPM rules in small ways to make them more workable. Task Force Faith does this by introducing a variety of additional IPM “target points”. In the couple scenarios I’ve played this does make the IPM rules feel less onerous. They’re still a disaster though, with a weight and complexity far, far out of line with any gaming or historical interest.

We’ve played two of the scenarios: Growing Pains and Bridges of Sorrow. The former is just bad; I feel like there must be some errata. Bridges of Sorrow is fine but it’s mostly CPVA attackers just doing their usual headlong charge thing and hoping not to die, which is neither that tactically interesting nor that exciting. It was fine. The historical map is always fun to play on.

With the CPVA, I am mindful of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I do like many aspects of The Forgotten War module, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed many of the scenarios involving the NKPA, ROK, US, and UN forces. The ROK particularly is still a wide-open field for scenario designers, as scenarios so far have focused on the European nations in the UN coalition almost (but not quite) to the exclusion of the ROKA. Read into that what you will. The CPVA design may not be ideal, but they’re the CPVA we have. If you check out my wildly meandering BGG comment on the module, you can see I’ve found exploring them interesting and they do at least provide a very different gaming flavor — they’re the Imperial Japanese Army, but even more wildly extreme. I have enjoyed playing them from time to time, it’s prodded me to understand the Korean War better, and there are fun elements to this module. But even after all this time, I cannot convince myself that the CPVA design is anything other than bad and usable only when scenario designers deploy it with a great deal of thought and care. There was a real possibility of doing something far more interesting here, something that would have been evocative and true to the humane Squad Leader aesthetic and less cringe-y, but now we’re stuck with the CPVA we have. I’ll still enjoy playing them from time to time, but I am haunted by what could have been — which now we’ll never get.

We started into the SILOS mini-expansions with the Crop Circles module. It’s very minor, but it does affect the game in some interesting ways. You lose the Bus Station (by default) which means it’s a bit harder to reorganize your meeples. But, on balance, you can add Crop Circles which are essentially just immobile meeples. This gives you another way to build up your board presence in a way that’s lower-impact than the University but still significant and less disruptive. It’s not going to set your world alight, most likely, but it does change the balance of the game in significant ways which will help change it up as you continue to play. It felt right to me, an only minor rules modification that (like the random ordering of the board tiles in EGO) doesn’t fundamentally alter the game, but changes up the balances enough that you have to approach it in meaningfully different ways.

Coda

After the workshops I did this summer, I found myself looking back at how I fell in love with playing the clarinet and how I became immersed in “classical” music. With boardgaming, I have an origin story I tell myself: it was playing a game of Arab-Israeli Wars at a friend’s house in maybe 1980. I still remember it and how it grabbed me. With music, it’s not really clear. It was a process maybe? But as soon as I watched this video and Nahre mentioned how many musicians have been brought into classical music by John Williams’ film scores I realized yep, that was it. Star Wars hit me at a very impressionable age, and John Williams’ music was (and remains) more than half the reason I love those movies.

I am a huge fan of Nahre Sol. Her clear communication style, keen insight, earnestness, and deep curiosity make it totally compelling to watch her explore various genres. This dive into the music of John Williams is slightly technical at times but terrific and features a great interview with legendary German violinist Ann-Sophie Mutter.

I mention all this in this context because it’s been surprising to me how much my music has informed how I think about games, and there are so many echos of that in this little explainer. Sure, it’s hard to translate technical nuts-and-bolts stuff like chromatic mediants into a gaming context, but when Ann-Sophie Mutter talks about the false dichotomy between “fun” and “serious” music and how John Williams’ music will hopefully erase it, or Williams talks about simplicity, or Nahre talks about being direct and evoking character and genre mixing, there’s just so much overlap. You have to get a bit immersed in both sides to get there, but it’s been key for me in unlocking a lot of ways of thinking. If you want to understand music and music genres better, from K-pop to tango to Studio Ghibli, you could do a lot worse than to let Nahre be your guide.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!