Purple Haze, Fate of the Fellowship, Burning Banners, Ascension Tactics: Inferno, Pax Hispanica

Week of May 19th, 2025

A friend and I are now 6 missions into the core Purple Haze campaign, playing 2-player cooperative. It’s been fun. Missions are taking us about 3 hours to get through at this point which is pretty reasonable, although setup and teardown adds at least half an hour. After 6 missions our squad is getting pretty beat up; Sgt “Wonder” Woodburn and PFC “Paparazzi” Iowa are both carrying around some serious trauma. We’ve had two soldiers KIA and several more seriously wounded so I think the squad is about half replacements now. We’ve started to have both more generally successful missions and also more casualties as we’ve decided to be more aggressive. Two of the recent missions I probably would have bailed on if we had been playing more “realistically”, but the game isn’t that interesting to play if you just try to keep your soldiers alive, so here we are.

I’ve been enjoying the game and I think we’ll get through the 9-mission campaign pretty easily. I can see playing through one of the expansion 3-mission mini-campaigns (probably Tunnel Rats just due to the obscure and extreme topic) but I’d be surprised if it had much play value after that. It’s just a bit repetitive, and for me a lot of the fun is just playing a 2-player co-op and playing in this very evocative sandbox. Maybe in a couple years I could pick it up again. I don’t think I’d buy it personally but I’ve been quite enjoying playing on my friend’s copy.

One of the ways these historical games can be valuable is the way they can spark curiosity. Purple Haze is interesting and evocative enough that I find myself wondering about facets of the game, what the real story was and how faithful it is to the history, and doing research as a result. Last time I talked about how the system of “hit points” didn’t really work for me as a way to portray physical damage; bullets don’t generally chip away at your wound total until it manifests as a flesh wound or a severe wound or the rare KIA. It’s fine but it does bug me a bit. But now let’s look at the system Purple Haze uses for psychological trauma. It originally struck me as equally problematic from a realism standpoint, but after diving into it perhaps I was wrong!

Psychic injury in Purple Haze works exactly the same way as physical injury: soldiers have a resilience threshold, and once stress crosses that point they get a “condition” (minor, moderate, or severe). Once that happens to them three times, they become a psych casualty and leave the game. Stress comes from a bunch of places — being injured, a squad member getting KIA’d, and a bunch of the story events which generally represent more run-of-the-mill stuff. Stress doesn’t get removed very often, and psychological injuries aren’t treated in the same way physical injuries are. Psychological stress is a ticking clock. By the nature of the game, everyone is going to become a psych casualty, it’s just a question of whether the bullets will get them first or if the game will end.

This is actually pretty reasonable. Stress really does accumulate until people break, although not quite in the way that the game portrays. Background stress makes you vulnerable to major shocks, and it’s the major shocks which then break you. Background stress does severely degrade your ability to function though, which the game doesn’t portray. In the game psychological damage goes more or less untreated, which turns out to be realistic. PTSD would finally be recognized as a condition in 1980, but in the meantime soldiers in Vietnam were arguably treated worse than soldiers during WWII. In WWII you were there for the duration so soldiers suffering from PTSD (“shell shock” at the time) could at least be removed from action for a while if their commanders were any good. In Vietnam you were only there for a 12 month rotation (13 months for the Marines) so you tended to get some sedatives or something and then be sent back. Plus you’ve got soldiers deployed as individuals rather than units and people constantly coming and going from the squad when their terms expired so you didn’t have a stable support group. It’s like the military forgot everything everyone had ever learned about unit cohesion. It really was breathtakingly reckless, and the game isn’t wrong about how rough things were.

Knowing exactly how prevalent PTSD is among Vietnam veterans turns out to be difficult. Symptoms vary and our understanding is still evolving; now we know chronic stress can be traumatic in similar ways to acute stress. It seems obvious but it’s only been acknowledged in the last decade. But one thing seems to be true: while combat exacts a huge toll and many suffer serious psychological damage, most Vietnam veterans — even most Vietnam combat veterans — seem to be healthy. Trauma is not the inevitability that Purple Haze portrays it as. Soldiers are resilient. But the things that make soldiers resilient, that are truly protective — unit cohesion, support networks, ethical structures — are not in the game. Nor are the many, many bad choices that the military command structure made that led to Vietnam having much higher PTSD rates than other conflicts to which US soldiers were deployed.

The bottom line here is, I think, that you have to respect Purple Haze for making soldier’s psychological resilience and trauma part of the game. It’s a desperately needed addition to the toolbox for this sort of game. But it’s also very much a first try and there is plenty that can be done to improve how games do this.

Through secret means I was able to get my hands on an early copy of Fate of the Fellowship, the latest Pandemic system game from Z-Man and Matt Leacock. I’m not exactly an unbiased source here, we have credits on Pandemic games going back to 2008, and the core “themed” Pandemics — Rising Tide, Fall of Rome, Iberia — are my favorites in the line. Even Clone Wars, not particularly strong from a design perspective, is still fun. I wasn’t heavily involved in Fate of the Fellowship, just some early playtesting and feedback, but when I later playtested a near-final version about a year and a half ago I realized wow, this is coming together really well. And I tend to be pretty critical of Lord of the Rings products because I know Tolkien’s works so well and the novels have been so important to me personally.

Fate of the Fellowship is more gamerly than many other games that have adapted the system. It borrows from Fall of Rome for the invading armies of the Shadow, but there are a lot more invasion routes and so the risks are very tricky to judge, much moreso than other games in the series. You have to be very active in managing your defense. Like Rising Tide, you’ll have to tackle a number of objectives. You always need to dispose of the Ring of course, but you may also need to secure Rohan, topple Saruman, neutralize the Balrog, liberate Umbar, or help Eowyn slay some Nazgûl. None of these are easy and getting everything done is likely to be a difficult balancing act — my suggestion would be that even veteran co-op players should not advance too quickly to higher difficulty levels. The combination of characters and objectives gives the game a huge amount of range, much bigger than any previous game.

While the game takes a bit of inspiration from War of the Ring, just being cooperative gives it the freedom to be much truer to the spirit of the books. The sense of the Nazgûl closing in, the need to distract Sauron from the Ringbearer with shows of power, the struggle against time and the Enemy, and the sense of fellowship. Not only are the screws much tighter on this mechanically, it’s just a much more authentic experience.

One of my metrics for cooperative games is, is it still satisfying even when we lose? For me, often with easier or less engaging co-ops there is a sense that we should be able to win and so losing can be frustrating. As much as I love Spirit Island for example, I tend to enjoy it most when we can manage the difficulty closely enough that things come down to the wire but we usually win. Fate of the Fellowship has been the first co-op in a while where losing just motivates me to break it out again.

I haven’t really had a multiplayer cooperative staple for a while, so I’m excited to get my own copy of this in the next couple months. The classic Knizia Lord of the Rings is still terrific but difficult to play since we’ve played it so much but most of the people we play it with these days are new; Spirit Island is terrific but the complexity and bias for a lower player count makes it more niche in our circles; the Forbidden games are still great but a little on the light side for a gamerly crowd; the co-op modes of Ascension Tactics and Unstoppable are decent but these are not really co-op-first games; Molly House is fantastic but it isn’t the same thing. I’m hopeful Fate of the Fellowship will fill a niche that’s been empty for us for quite a while.

I’ve played two Burning Banners scenarios recently, Campaign 10 (Last Stand in the East) and 11 (Across the Oskolton). Both were good! 10 is definitely a slugfest as the Invaders have to capture two cities to win, and cities are extremely strong defensive positions so taking them is a job of work. The Orcs are potent on offense, so a lot of the Oathborn and Eastern Empires defense is trying to spread them out by letting the cities hold, Stalingrad-style, while more mobile forces work the flanks. 11 is interesting because the Goblins are playing defense, a task to which they are monumentally ill-suited, so the Army of the Night has to pick up the slack.

BGG says I’m up to 15 plays on this now, which seems right, and I am finally getting the hang of it. Mastering this thing has been elusive for me! But the conclusion I came to is that managing and breaking sieges is the critical tactical technique I didn’t properly grasp. Sieges are important for isolating strongpoints so they can be cracked. It seems obvious in retrospect, but the Spells, Blessings, and Treasures are the flashy part of the design and I find card flow management interesting so I got really focussed on those elements. But sieges are the fundamental tool the game gives you for controlling territory so you have to intuitively grasp them. Now that I’m seeing them more clearly I’m finally feeling more competent at the game.

Ascension Tactics: Inferno has been continuing on its roll. I’m an Ascension partisan of course, but still this is shockingly good. I’m even breaking out some modern fast painting techniques to do up the miniatures, which has been fun for me. I’m starting with the figures from the original set.

A friend who I introduced this to commented that he was never really sold by deck and tableau builders like Race for the Galaxy or Ascension because they felt very solitaire-y to him. I found that a really interesting comment, because of course being way too solitaire-y is a huge criticism I have of a lot of contemporary euros but I do find both Ascension and Race for the Galaxy fairly interactive. In Ascension your card acquisition strategy is always influenced by what your opponent is doing; to take a super-obvious example, if your opponent is going hard after Lifebound cards and their powerful Unite effects you’ve got to try to front-run that and break it up. There are lots of other little examples here. Race is more obvious; an absolutely critical skill for that game is anticipating fellow-players’ role selection and maintaining flexibility so you can take advantage of as many phases as possible (for multiplayer; the 2-player version where you care somewhat less about what your opponent is doing does feel a bit solitaire-y too me). Having said all this though, I can see the argument. Even in Inferno, which is incredibly interactive by the standards of deckbuilding games, there is still a bit of solitire-y action in managing your deck and executing your turns which can get fairly intricate. It’s not like Up Front, Shards of Infinity, Rommel in the Desert, or Burning Banners where you really are just going at each other. There is an interesting level of disintermediation.

However, I didn’t end up thinking this framing was convincing. I think Inferno is a fantastic blend of things: direct interaction, risk management, deck building style resource management, tactics. But it did help me look at this broad category of games from a different point of view.

My enthusiasm for Sierra Madre’s games has been fading considerably over the last 5 years or so. I burned out pretty hard on Pax Renaissance faster than I expected, and Pax Transhumanity and Pax Emancipation I found super-interesting but ultimately too unhinged to be worth the effort. I didn’t think I was quite done yet though, so I was still interested in trying Pax Hispanica.

Pax Hispanica is reminiscent of Pax Renaissance structurally. It’s got the abstract map. It’s got a very thin market (just 4 cards) within a large gamespace, which often leaves you very much desperately trying to piece together anything you can with whatever random junk is available. You end up trying to go in one direction and then the cards supporting it disappear and pivoting is very difficult so you’re just kind of stuck. Pax Renaissance’s huge redeeming virtue was always that it was short, comfortably under two hours (usually) even with the full complement of 4 players (although even then you could get wiped out before it was half done). I think Pax Hispanica could theoretically play fairly quickly, but the startup costs seem very high. With 5 players our game took over 4 hours which was too long by a factor of 2; I had no real hope of winning or even any way to make meaningful progress after the first hour. We did struggle mightily with the rules because that’s what you do with a Sierra Madre game, so I expect you could bring that down significantly, but now that my enthusiasm for these designs has waned my willingness to fight a war of attrition with their rules is, uh, limited.

What even to say about the game? Let’s start with the history since that’s always been the way Sierra Madre’s games have been framed, as attempts to do serious history, even if that is true only to a limited extent. So let’s talk about the actual history here. European colonialism in the Caribbean in the 1600s was a brutal, exploitative, extractive business all the way down. Whether it was the legendarily nightmarish silver mines of Pitosí or plantations on Jamaica, slaves (primarily) and other coerced or exploited workers powered essentially everything. It was 400 years ago and historical records are spotty and often biased so there is dispute about the scale of the nightmare, but not about the fact that it was a nightmare — even by the standards of the time. Yes, there were examples of colonies like the Puritans on Providence Island or Dutch Jewish refugees on Suriname, but they were tiny and either died out or were destroyed or ended up using slaves or some combination of all three. The only real non-exploitative communities were the Maroons … and they are explicitly not part of the game. White people have become much more attuned to the humanitarian catastrophe that was European colonialism in recent years, but what happened in the Caribbean still probably exceeds most of our imaginations.

So how does Pax Hispanica portray the labor market here? When a colony is founded, it requires labor. That is not imported from Europe but always drawn from local indigenous communities. Initially, you’ll press-gang them into working for you and then they’ll die when you produce goods. So far, more or less how it worked. But things rapidly become unhinged. You create free labor by building churches in indigenous communities. Once the church is developed, it’ll turn the indigenous people into a reliable source of loyal citizens who will work for wages. What about all those indigenous communities you murdered? To replenish them, you’ll need to take the slave trade action, or do some voodoo (I kid you not). You don’t ever actually buy slaves and your colonies never interact with the slave trade, new meeples are just kind of dropped randomly into indigenous villages when icons are executed on cards and anyone can then hire/kidnap them to their colonies for free. But once you’ve converted these apparently indigenous meeples into loyal citizens through religious literacy, you can form a polity of free peoples loyal to the crown who can then have a tax revolt and become a new nation.

This is all completely preposterous and bears absolutely no relationship to what was happening historically. I get that you don’t always model economies literally, design for effect and all that, but this is just weirdly random. It really was not a complicated system. Colonies were founded and labor was either enslaved locally, bought from the slave trade from Africa, or occasionally indentured. The number of workers who were paid wages was, for all intents and purposes, zero. The bizarre system of having indigenous villages randomly repopulated and then having churches convert them into free but loyal labor is designed not to evoke history but, as far as I can tell, to deliberately obfuscate it.

Phil is famously a libertarian, and it seems that in trying to portray the economy of the Caribbean in a way consistent with the ideology that economic freedom is the only freedom that matters, he’s created a truly odd fantasy world. What really happened here was that capitalists in this time and place were living in as close to a true libertarian paradise as has ever existed: no government, no health and safety regulations, no environmental regulations, in fact no regulations of any kind, no labor unions, no accountability. They did generally have to pay significant taxes, so that was a bummer; and they lived in a mercantilist system which cut down on their ability to sell to whoever they wanted, but there was a large, totally unregulated black market. Locally, for all intents and purposes, government didn’t exist. So what did they do? They immediately colluded with other capitalists to construct a local government that would protect their own rights while ensuring nobody else had any, and then proceeded to commit atrocities on an epic scale. Notably, they did not generally decide to pay fair market wages. The thing that these designs seem voluntarily blind to is that many of history’s worst crimes against humanity have not been committed by governments, but by corporations. The British East India Company, Dutch East India Company, the North Atlantic Slave Trade, Jamaican sugar plantations, the United Fruit Company, Hawaiian sugar planter cartels, Shell and Chevron in the Niger Delta, Nestle, Union Carbide. The list goes on. Massacres, coups, genocide, slavery, and of course economic exploitation. The only thing standing between any given corporation and casual manslaughter is a well-functioning democracy that can regulate them and hold then accountable.

For the moment, I still enjoy Pax Porfiriana, Greenland, and some of the Bios games. But overall, the Sierra Madre Pax series, I’m done with it. Now that we have John Company 2nd, Weimar: The Fight for Democracy, Conquest of Paradise, Watergate, and Conquest & Consequence, and spinoffs like Pax Pamir 2nd or Pax Viking, there isn’t any real need to deal with the original stuff anymore.

Coda

One of the orchestras I play with, the Palo Alto Philharmonic, has a yearly concerto competition for students to come in and perform a movement with us. The kids this year were crazy impressive, both extremely skilled as musicians and very personable as people. They also tackled bonkers repertoire for high school kids. Or so I thought anyway from my days as a student musician, although I know pedagogy is lightyears better today than what it was back then. Anyway, this was one of the pieces. I knew absolutely nothing about it before this, but it suckered me in with its fun and prominent bass clarinet part (of course) and then totally won me over.

That’s it! See you next week!