Not tonight, Josephine, let’s finish the game first
1815: SCUM OF THE EARTH
Designer: Tristan Hall | Publisher: Hall or Nothing Productions
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 169 Cards
◗ 120 Wooden teardrop tokens
◗ 36 Cardboard tokens
◗ 1 fFrst-player token
◗ 2 Rulebooks
◗ 1 Solo player aid card
◗ 1 Solo play resource dial
If you’ve avoided historical wargames for fear of punching out a thousand cardboard squares or trying to wrap your head around titanic rulebooks, it’s worth knowing that they’re not all hex-and-counter affairs.1815: Scum of the Earth is living proof.
If the game’s combination of “Year + Odd Title” seems familiar, that’s because designer Tristan Hall previously unleashed the Must-Play hits 1066: Tears to Many Mothers and 1565: St Elmo’s Pay on the world. 250 years have passed since the last game (in historical terms at least), with 1815 picking up the baton and keeping the high pace.
The basic premise remains unchanged: Build a hand of cards from your personal deck (this is the Battle of Waterloo, so you’ll be playing as either the French or British), pay the costs to add cards to the play area and use those cards to duff-up your opponent. As with the previous games in the series, there are three Frontiers (lanes) to add your cards to, with the aim of the game to be to either destroy the opposition Leader card, or to destroy two of those three Frontiers.
The beating heart beneath 1815’s tunic is its multi-use card system. Cards are not only the soldiers you deploy to the battlefield, but also the means for paying for them. If a card costs four resources to put into play, most of that cost is funded by discarding cards from your hand. Your deck is never recycled, so when a card is gone, it’s gone for the remainder of the game. It leads to some really difficult, juicy decisions to have to make, as the effectiveness of your tableau becomes a geometric puzzle, especially as some cards have bonuses for being in a certain row, or when your powerful Tactics cards come into play through managing to line up specific units in a set pattern.
While all this posturing and planning is going on, your opponent is slowly chipping away at your army, making it harder to end each round with enough strength to defeat the top card in your personal Objective deck. Working through your objectives is how you get to The Battle of Waterloo, as well as how you’ll likely destroy frontiers. This all results in a game which feels like a race as much as it does an exercise in tactical planning, which is something that thankfully works in its favour, rather than against it.
You’ll rattle through a game of 1815 in an hour or less, each time learning a bit more about the contents of each deck, knowing which cards that work well together and the ones you’ll convert into pocket change to save up for something better. It’s tense, it’s very easy to read the game state at a glance and, most importantly, it’s a lot of fun.
As with the other Hall or Nothing games, the artwork in 1815 is incredible. The cards are works of art, supported with plenty of historical flavour text. You’ll catch yourself flicking through your hand looking at the pictures, like a child in the ‘80s admiring their Garbage Pail Kids collection.
The theme isn’t going to appeal to everyone, which is a shame, because beneath its Napoleonic finery, 1815: Scum of the Earth is a brilliant duelling card game. If the cards didn’t have the likes of Robert Edward Henry -Duke of Somerset and instead had Pikachu, people would go nuts for it. C’est la vie. For the rest of us, it’s a tense, abstracted wargame dressedup as a LCG that’s an absolute blast.
ADAM RICHARDS
WE SAY
The Battle of Waterloo for two players in under an hour without not a hexagon in sight. Historical card game goodness once again from Hall or Nothing Productions.
TRY IF YOU LIKED AIR, LAND & SEA...
Not only are both games great for the military minded, but they also share the same intense moment of second-guessing and outwitting as you outscore your opponent in two of the three frontiers.