Tannhauser, from Fantasy Flight Games, is a an alternative World War II (Weird War II) board game that pits an American elite team against a supernatural band of Nazis (including demonically possessed fighters and zombie troopers amongst others).
Jeff bought Tannhauser when it was first released in 2007. We played it once or twice and were generally very disappointed. Firstly the artwork, although generally gorgeous, was very dark and made the various routes through the board very difficult to work out and it became a real eye strain in less than perfect light! After we got over that there was the game play, which seemed less than fantastic. We played a straight scenario with each team out to destroy the other team, and I think that this may well have been the main problem!
Last night Jeff brought Tannhauser over again, so that we could give it one last try before he consigned it to Ebay! This time we used a scenario where each team was out to retrieve 2 (or possibly 3) objectives. You score victory points for taking out opposing forces and also for collecting the objectives. The game ends when one of the teams gets it’s second primary objective, and then the victory points are totalled up.
Using the scenario made a huge difference to the enjoyment of the game. Taking the primary focus away from killing enemy forces and on to protecting your main figures while they retrieve the objectives made the game far more fun and left us all feeling that we wanted to play it again, probably in the near future.
So, the evenings discussions slowly evolved from how much should it be listed on Ebay for, around to what new expansion packs have been released for the game and would picking up the new Russian troops be worthwhile. All in all a successful evenings gaming!
The game itself is not perfect and certainly needs some commitment from the player to get to grips with the system. Grenades for example seem very weak and difficult to use.
However, we decided to try it again in the near future and re all looking forward to playing it!
Thank you for this review. It was a game I looked at when it first came out, but thought was a bit expensive to take a punt on when I knew nothing about it!
ReplyDeleteI might wait for it to appear on eBay ;-)