Ruins, Shards of Infinity, Molly House, Mannerheim Cross, and a deep dive on Alliance

Week of June 9th, 2025

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Ruins is the latest small-box John D Clair game from AllPlay. I did find myself wondering if the only new games I buy these days are from Reiner Knizia, Cole Wehrle, Friedemann Friese, and John D Clair. It turns out that is definitely not true, but there are times when it feels like it. Anyway, this is a rebuild of the older and out-of-print Custom Heroes, which I think is a terrific and hugely entertaining spin on traditional climbing/shedding games. I was surprised that Ruins turns out to be different enough that it’s almost a whole new game: it’s been shortened to at most 5 rounds, the card upgrades have been significantly simplified, card upgrades are bought from a market during play instead of dealt out randomly, there is no more power economy, you can now claim ownership of a card twice a game, the super-trumps are gone, and it maxes out at 5 players. There is nothing hidden behind shields anymore so that bit of friction is gone. It’s far more likely to go a final winner-takes-all showdown between two players, which obviously has some disadvantages but the showdown is short and it’s a unique and very entertaining flavor which I enjoyed even though I didn’t make it. It also comes in an admirably small box (thanks AllPlay!) and very reasonable price point. So it actually feels quite different in play — for me, slicker and tighter and faster and shorter but somewhat less bonkers. Still pretty bonkers. But definitely less.

I do miss the graphics from the original though. In the place of characters, the new game cards and upgrades are all just ruins and traps and treasures and whatever. Typefaces are small, and the general clarity of game information isn’t awful but it could be better. The Custom Heroes graphics have both clearer usability and are more engaging and fun. I’d be shocked if there wasn’t some cultural issue with a US company using the “big in Japan” framing and maybe that’s why the original fell out of print? Or maybe it just never caught on? For a game that’s as good as it is the BGG forums are pretty dead. Anyway, I don’t really know anything, but the aggressively bland Ruins framing was not, in my opinion, the best choice. Games about people are always more interesting.

Still, despite the relatively generic setting, I quite enjoyed it and am glad that it supplements Custom Heroes rather than replacing it. They’re probably similar enough that if you’re not a connoisseur of card-crafting games you can just look at the one that’s more to your tastes (or just check out Ruins since it’s actually in print), but personally I’m glad to have both now.

I’ve been really glad to be able to get the new edition of Shards of Infinity a bit of play recently. I am of course a big fan of all things Ascension, and Shards is quite closely-related. The problem with Ascension, such as it is, is that I’ve played it a ton and have a pretty decent mastery level on most of the sets so it’s hard for me to bring new local players online. I have very little experience with Shards, and definitely nothing beyond the old (fairly small) core set, so it’s a game I can introduce people to and not feel like I’m waiting for them to catch up. While I am also a fan of the very similar Star Wars deckbuilding games, Shards is just crisper, a lot more tightly-executed, better balanced, and has deeper gameplay with an essentially identical complexity. Although admittedly no lightsabers. Plus of course Shards has boss, cooperative, and multiplayer modes which are all pretty good (although the “real” game is clearly the 1:1 duel). So it’s an excellent, proven, versatile game that I can start learning with new opponents.

We’ve been continuing to explore Mannerheim Cross, Bounding Fire’s ASL module for the Finns, with BFP-155 Leningrad Reds. The Winter War is a tough topic for many games to come to grips with; I wrote a little bit about it last time I looked at this pack. The bottom line is that ASL has this weird, two-track system now: the Finns from 1985’s Beyond Valor (a very lightly revised version of 1979’s Crescendo of Doom), which is very much vibes-based, and then the Finns from Hakkaa Päälle, based on actual research. This scenario uses Finns from the 1985 track, and wow, they are brutal, especially when they have two -1 leaders. It’s arguably historically defensible, but when you’re down in the trenches actually playing the game it does feel a bit over the top.

This scenario is fine. It’s a set-piece with some trenches, but the terrain is interesting. The Soviets are trying to hang on to a road in the face of a powerful Finnish attack. There are some odd special rules for determining which segment of the road count for victory that are probably more trouble than they’re worth. Plus, wow, I had forgotten how much I hate the time-wasting light mortars in this system. Thankfully virtually all scenario designers have done away with these things now, confining them to the same purgatory as the destabilizing 10-3 leaders, but the Soviets get a couple here which have some potential to be effective due to airbursts in the woods. Even in this, the best case scenario for these weapons, you still spend a ton of time rolling dice for no effect. They’re the Gold Mine of ASL. Since jokes are always better when you have to explain them, let me know if you got that.

I know Molly House has become a fixture here of late, but it continues to be a fascinating game to think and talk about. I’ve been happy with how well it’s been received, and how well folks around here have been engaged by it. I was really struck by our last game at the Guildhouse, which I can only describe as a joyful event. When I first started introducing the game to people I was pretty careful about who I would show it to, given its subject matter. Now that it’s been pretty universally well-received by people I’ve taught it to, I let me guard down a bit and I think there was a tinge of discomfort in one of the guys who played this time (although he handled it gracefully). At some level, the metatext of Molly House is about getting past insecurity or discomfort. Or it is for me anyway, as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s in a more conservative area of the US. Perhaps for younger, more cosmopolitan gamers it’s just Wednesday. John Company 2nd wisely came with a trigger warning. Molly House is not in that category, but I need to remember that it’s a game that is worth being mindful of and getting clear buy-in. It’s more intense than most euros.

Alliance

After making a bunch of truly classic games in the ‘70s through the ‘90s, Columbia Games has, unfortunately, become a wildly uneven label for me over the past 20 years. Of their games from recent years, I still really like Wizard Kings 2nd, Pacific Victory 2nd, Napoleon 4th, and Julius Caesar. Unfortunately others — Combat Infantry, Victory in Europe, Borodino, Athens & Sparta — have ranged from having some significant problems to being deeply flawed. After being a loyal customer for decades, Alliance became the first Columbia game in a very long time that I took a wait-and-see approach to.

Playing it for the first time with the context of Weimar, Arcs, and Hegemony, was interesting. Alliance falls into that same category of games where the players are expected to maintain game balance as a group — what we’re now calling “table balancing” and which I’ve been talking a lot about recently. The way the games approach this problem look wildly and interestingly different, but at the core they’re all dealing with a problem of the same shape and same fundamental properties.

If you’re familiar with any Columbia games at all Alliance is about 5 minutes to learn, 10 tops. The combat system is the one we all know and love, cardplay dictates order of activation (although every card gives you the same number of action points, which can now be banked and spent later), we’ve got border limits and naval units and invasions all of which work exactly the same way they do in Julius Caesar. Every nation now has a single leader which gives some advantages on offense in a somewhat similar way to Shiloh or the Front games. And there is an extremely simple diplomacy system (just modified dice-offs) for controlling non-player neutral countries.

The crazy dynamic is that there are now 7 nations (the ones from Empires in Arms: France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, Spain, the Ottomans) which support up to 7 players. I think you’d have to be pretty nuts to play with 7, it feels like the play time would bloat out of control and some of the smaller nations — mainly Prussia — do not pack a lot of punch and are at the whims of their much stronger neighbors to an unhealthy degree. But 3-5 players (France, Britain, Russia, plus in order Austria and either Spain or the Ottomans) seems reasonable.

Like Empires in Arms, the diplomatic situation is totally flexible. Prussia can sell out Austria and ally with France. France can team up with Austria and Prussia to go after Russia. Spain plays a dangerous balancing game between Britain and France. Most games on this period do not allow France and Britain to go into alliance, but here even that’s not off the table — although what kind of deal they could make in practice is unclear to me. This is what makes the game appealing since it opens up an apparently huge range of possibilities, but also treacherous.

So now we come to the interesting question. The game is won by having the most victory points at the end — which are just control of a handful of economic centers on land and sea. Why would we go into coalition with any one player and not another? Is it arbitrary, like it sometimes seems in Diplomacy? Do we just look around for whoever has the most victory points, and hammer away at them until someone else has the most victory points?

Well, sort of. Alliance is interesting because it has no nationality-specific rules. Everything is in the powers’ different unit mixes and geography. France has the largest and most potent army, Britain has a small army but a large and powerful navy, Russia has a large army with good artillery but overall weaker infantry, and so on. Britain is an island, Spain is a peninsula with a powerful neighbor but a strong terrain barrier, Prussia is a weak land power surrounded by dangerous neighbors.

So you have to read the table and your geographic position. To win with a major power, you’ll probably need to gain about 5 points — the equivalent of conquering a major power, although picking up a bunch of minor states will be easier. Small countries like Austria or Prussia get a bonus, and just maintaining their territorial integrity might be enough for them although they’ll probably need a minor or two. I think a lot of people whose experience with this sort of game comes from a background of Diplomacy or Cosmic Encounter may not recognize the importance of geography and balance-of-power politics in a highly asymmetric situation like this and as a result may look at the board and pursue outré alliances like Spain with the Ottomans to carve up Italy because it looks like fun and has some potential and who you choose to ally with doesn’t make a huge difference, it’s just how you play that situation out and what you can talk your neighbors into or out of through force of argument or personality.

But that’s not how this situation works. Take the situation of Prussia. There is a huge temptation for Prussia (or Austria) to sell out to their stronger neighbor (usually the more threatening France) and carve up their weaker neighbor (Austria or Prussia). And sure, sometimes you can do that and it may work, but it flies in the face of reality. Austria and Prussia have to hang together, or they will hang separately. France is far more powerful than either. Selling out to a much more powerful neighbor instead of seeking a balance of power in solidarity simply ensures that you become a vassal state that survives on sufferance. Only as a team can Austria and Prussia survive being sandwiched between two superpowers, as it took almost a decade and a world of hurt for them to figure out historically. The power balance in Central Europe is very lopsided and if players are reading the board correctly the results should be within reasonable historical constraints: Austria and Prussia have to figure out how to manage a dangerous France. This was, broadly speaking the situation in 1805; the geopolitical forces that erupted into the War of the Third Coalition are complex and fascinating, but it wasn’t a war of naked aggression on the part of Napoleon. Both sides felt deeply threatened. There are some other options to expand on the historical response of course, with the Spanish and Ottomans available to work the edges and with Britain able to play an extremely flexible role with their rapid deployment capability and a dumptruck full of cash. There are a lot of details to be filled in, and that’s fun. In broad strokes though, the geopolitical reality is that 1804 is about France’s neighbors (Britain, Austria, and Prussia) figuring out how to deal with the radical power shift created by a dangerous upstart. Many games of Empires in Arms have gone completely off the rails when players can’t correctly identify these political realities. At least for Alliance, you only have 3 hours of your life at stake in the game instead of 100.

And so we come to the issue of table-balancing. I was playing a different game recently, and I had a feeling I have not had for a while: it was right at the midpoint of the game, and I felt completely adrift. I had no idea how to approach it or how to make my position better. It was unsettling. It was clear that one player just had a really bad table read, and once that happens — once one of your players isn’t really playing to the victory conditions anymore — games like this can go south, and do it very, very hard. Anyone who has played them will inevitably know what I’m talking about when I say it can easily devolve into competitive whining. Don’t attack me, he’s clearly ahead, my position is actually really weak, etc., where most of the arguing is both negative and in bad faith and the main technique is just to flood the zone. Different strokes for different folks of course, some people enjoy this stuff, but for me it’s profoundly unpleasant. I know part of this is just that by brain is wired differently from most people who may just find it annoying or unsatisfying rather than fundamentally disconcerting. But wherever you are on this continuum, it just seems like a category error. It’s not what virtually every game of this type is trying to accomplish. If you want this kind of badgering economy, just play Werewolf. It’s a lot simpler and shorter and gets you to the same place. What I want is something that evokes real politics, which means skill in managing power balances and political stakes.

Now, let’s first say: no game can both do this and produce a satisfying game 100% of the time when played by real humans. Since I do enjoy this kind of game, this is a fact I need to learn to live with better myself. Real foreign ministers and politicians with large staffs and life-or-death stakes routinely live in states of denial, screwing up basic things with some regularity and creating a great deal of misery for their neighbors (not least, the Prussians in 1804-1805). It’s unreasonable to expect these things not to go off the rails occasionally as the price of an authentic game. Still, games can manager it well or badly. For example, I ultimately had to give up on Fire in the Lake — even though it’s the one COIN game that I found at least somewhat enjoyable — because of a combination of the fact that it was just not legible enough, and that it was extremely sensitive to this sort of misread. It happened far too often that the ARVN player couldn’t figure out what the game was telling them to do (in fairness, because it was highly specific, not all that interesting, and somewhat ahistorical) and if the ARVN player stopped playing for their actual victory conditions in even a small way, the game was still so strictly structured that it became very frustrating very rapidly. Small deviations could became big problems.

All of Arcs, Weimar, and Hegemony successfully deal with this core problem in different but related ways. In Arcs, you have a combination of a complex and nuanced game state that is hard to read, and delays between when you decide to change plans and when you can effectuate that change because of the constraints of the card-driven engine. It’s pretty clear you have to clip anyone who is pulling away, but who that is and how to do it is not obvious and usually you can’t do it without laying some groundwork. At the same time, it’s not hyper-sensitive to misjudgment. Everyone is playing fundamentally the same game, so when someone starts to really pull away people will know. It’s not like if the US player doesn’t understand the complex and finicky Train action in Fire in the Lake (which does a lot more than just training) you’re totally hosed as a table. Plus, by the standards of these things Arcs (the non-campaign anyway) is short. Weimar by contrast gives you reasonably clear game states to evaluate, but also highly legible and individualized player motivations in the context of real history that the players should know (or should be playing this game to learn). It’s just not rocket science that the DNVP and Communists hate each other, or that the SPD needs to watch the DNVP more closely than they do the Communists; the coding is there on the scoring table and not subtle. There is a ton of wonderful nuance in the game, which is what makes it great and not obvious how to play since different players can win in different ways; but the structure and clear goals gives a framework to engage productively with the politics of the game. This is a case where I think the game does its job as well as can be expected and to the extent there is instability in the system it’s directly evocative of the period, but it is a game that requires clear positional evaluation or it won’t work. In Hegemony, you have 4 different factions who have directly conflicting but very clear, highly legible motivations and a simple victory point track. Each of the classes does have an interestingly different pacing though: Working Class is steady, the Capitalist Class tends to have a huge hockey stick, and the Government is in fits and starts and requires more groundwork, so evaluating where everyone is isn’t quite as easy as it might look. Interestingly, I think that Hegemony is actually very sensitive to the Middle Class player’s reading of the situation; which side they thrown in with more often politically — the Working or Capitalist classes — will tend to win. Not 100%, the game has enough going on, but it matters a lot. But it’s very indirect. Everyone always has stuff to do, ways to make progress, and if you’re the Working Class it doesn’t feel like the Capitalists are coming directly over and stepping on your throat. Plus it also feels like a political shift could be just a turn away. So the game can remain emotionally satisfying, and the game state and motivations tend to be too obvious for things to go too far off the rails for too long. Meanwhile the levers the players have access to are not direct or immediate enough to trigger the dreaded competitive whining.

The thing to watch for I think is a combination of high transparency and immediacy of action; that combination seems to be a big problem. Some other games: Root works for me because while legibility is quite high, the cards and the faction power curves do offer some constraint and most action requires buildup, so immediacy isn’t total; plus the 90 minute playing time is a huge win. Oath works for me despite having high legibility and immediacy because it’s short, it puts the players in the general spot of having one shot per game and timing that shot is interesting, and because it’s delivering something else really unique — the sense of the narrative over multiple games. Dune works great by virtue of its strict alliance rules, which can severely restrict your freedom of action at crucial times.

So after a possibly excessive amount of context, how does Alliance deal with all this? It is a straight points game, and everyone’s score is quickly and easily checked. However the geography and historical balance of power on the continent are nicely and cleanly presented, and they create a very strong incentive for all the nations — as discussed. These strongly push the game in sensible directions, although players have to recognize them. I think one crucial thing that may not be obvious on initial inspection, is that armies in the game are a lot more sluggish than they appear. Concentrating forces over long distances is slow, and if as France you make a force commitment to Prussia it’s very hard to pivot to Spain or even Austria on reasonable timeframes. Combat wears down forces very quickly, far faster than they can be built up. So campaigns develop as they did historically: building up reserves for a major campaign, burning through those resources at an alarming rate, and then consolidating. Realistically, you just can’t pivot immediately to go after whoever you want. Our game did end up coming down to some last-turn-VP counting, which wasn’t ideal, but that was a result of game-long decisions so it felt workable. Finally, and crucially, a four-year scenario is only about 3-4 hours to play and that helps a lot. That’s about half the time of Weimar, shorter than Hegemony, and only a bit longer than Arcs (or a third the length of an Arcs campaign. Now, Where I end up, I think, is with a game that has legibility that is tricky in a way that might be a problem, but that is balanced by a reasonable playing time, good pacing, and interesting power dynamics.

So that’s been a ton of talk about structure, but I do think the structure here is fundamentally good and has hit a good spot for what the game is trying to do — just be a lightweight, short-ish, high-level portrayal of the period. However, we can’t get out of here without talking details. And there are some problems. First are (ironically) the alliance rules. You can see they wanted to do something super-clean and easy, but there are too many dangling edge cases. For example, if I’m France and allied with Austria, and Austria is allied with Russia, can Russia use Austrian blocks as human shields? What happens if we all meet in Vienna? You can easily do something sensible (French and Russians fight while the Austrians watch) but the rules don’t really cover it. I remember The Napoleonic Wars had this same problem initially. Among players of good faith I think you can work it, but the alliance rules are clearly very incomplete.

The other potential problem for me is the diplomacy rules for non-player nations. This is essentially a dice-off with a fee for entry, with the current controlling player (if any) getting bonuses. It works fine for small entities like Naples or Hannover or Portugal where the stakes are meaningful but low. But once you’re talking Prussia, the Ottomans, or Spain, things get dicier. Because you just get VPs for cities you control, these diplomacy results can generate huge swings and people just start rolling for every country every chance they get because there is no easier way to get 2-3VPs plus an entire national army.

I get what they were going for, but there is the fact that everything should be as simple as possible — but no simpler. These two systems really had to have a handful more rules. The possible house rules are pretty obvious — perhaps no major country will switch sides on the last year of a scenario — and I think players who want to like the game will quickly come up with something? But more really needed to be in the box.

Ultimately I’m still not quite sure where I land on this one. I enjoyed it, I can see the politics being entertaining in a short game, and I can also see the potential for nuance and range. I like what it’s trying to do. But in a world where Weimar and Arcs and Conquest of Paradise exist, this feels not quite finished, as so many of Columbia’s games have of late. Alliance is obviously lighter than Weimar and approaching history quite differently, but the rules still need to be complete — which, unfortunately, they just are not. So that leaves me in a bit of a tough spot: I can clearly see the outlines of a game I like, which might or might not be there. Do I want to do the work?

Coda

I have a couple friends who I am prepping this piece with, for a concert in August:

This is a fun performance because all three of those clarinets are unusual: a soprano in Eb (slightly unusual), alto in Eb (severely endangered for complicated reasons), and contra-alto in Eb (rare). The piece is originally scored for 3 standard Bb clarinets, but it’s often played on 2 Bb plus a bass, which is what we’ll be doing. As long as all three instruments are in the same key, you can just read the original Bb parts and it all works out. The contra-alto and especially the alto are surprisingly challenging instruments, so it’s fun to see a group like this playing them really well.

Substack Addenda

I am aware that Substack platforms a variety of the worst people on the internet and helps to feed various toxic echo chambers. It also hosts a lot of people doing really positive and powerful work and it’s a good platform for getting ideas out there. I’ll be happy to write a longer piece on the tradeoffs involved here if there is real interest, but it’s complicated and messy and a bit tedious, and the bottom line is just that it’s 2025 on the internet and most of us are just trying to do the best we can.