Hogging the table
HOGS OF WAR
Designer: Paul D Allen & James Faulkner | Publisher: Stone Sword Games
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 96 Miniatures
◗ 270 Cards
◗ Campaign book
◗ First player token
◗ 4 Plane screens
◗ 24 Custom dice
◗ 30 Terrain pieces
◗ 4 Base tiles
◗ 68 Building tiles
◗ 4 Mega buildings
◗ 28 Deployables
◗ 7 Refineries
◗ 4 Solo spawns
◗ 136 Tokens
◗ 24 Flight indicators
◗ 24 Damage cubes
◗ Pigeon!
Hogs of War, as some of you might remember, was a turnbased strategy game for the PS1 that let you control a squad of bipedal pigs in World War I. It was silly, satirical, and actually loads of fun, though some of its humour maybe hasn’t aged all that well. And while the original videogame may have been left behind, poking its little curly tail up on eBay every now and then to the tune of £30 (to £200+!), it lives on in the most unlikely and yet most fitting way: as a miniature wargame.
Stonesword Games, the erstwhile guardians of the Hogs of War license, have brought the porcine soldiers to the table before in the excellent Hogs of War Cardgame but where that was a chipolata, this is the full bratwurst.
Each campaign is played across a hex based battle map where players deploy troops, tanks, armoured cars, aquatanks, planes, airships, and construct deployables like minefields, bunkers, AA guns, trenches, and so on. So far, so familiar. Each piggy has a set Initiative that determines when they activate during the Air or Ground phases and each campaign has some goal variant of: capture and hold, destroy the enemy base, retrieve the pigeon, etc. And if that’s all Hogs of War: The Miniatures Game was, then that would be good enough... but we’ve still got a whole other table’s worth of stuff to cover. See, just off to the side of the battle map is your base map to which you add Buildings during each round’s Build Phase. Some Buildings unlock units for you to recruit and deploy, others unlock upgrade options, and others increase the amount of Swill you generate – your de facto in-game universal currency. Each Building has a unique tetronimo style shape that requires you to plan out how you want to expand your base and can trip you up if you’re not careful with your placement or if an enemy bombs something vital.
Then, to the side of that board are your Troops and Vehicles which you can upgrade with a number of upgrades brought forward from the videogame like the Super Shotgun and Jetpacks (a staple in both this and Code17’s Worms series). Then, even more to the side, are your aircraft which are hidden behind a handy screen with info on how planes and airships (and some of the deployables) work. Then even further to the side is your airship which is made up of three parts that you purchase from the airship parts deck.
All of that is to say you’re going to need a bigger table. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it is worth it. The sheer variety in approach mixed with the mostly straight forward rules of a boardgame means that Hogs of War, once you play a few rounds, works very elegantly.
There are of course a few niggly bits and some of the fat could perhaps be trimmed off but for fans of the series, this provides so much to do that any issues we could raise about rules being scattered about or set up taking ages pale in comparison to the fun to be had. And we haven’t even mentioned the mega buildings which include the infamous train cannon or the solo mode which we sadly didn’t get a chance to try out.
ANNA BLACKWELL
PLAY IF YOU LIKED MEMOIR 44…
If a sillier approach to war, with a little more crunch, Hogs of War might be the pork scratching for this particular itch.