HOGS OF WAR
Designer: Paul D Allen and James Faulkner | Publisher: Stone Sword Games
Back in the weird and wonderful days of the Playstation game designers were a little… strange. Humans were too difficult to depict with any reasonable quality and humour was more slapstick and crude. But as a child of the 1990s, these games will always hold a special place. Especially the World War II themed Hogs of War which has recently been revived as a card game and upcoming miniatures game. The name tells you essentially everything you need to know; there are pigs, they represent the different nations in World War II with the more questionable depictions left in the past where they belong, and it’s stuffed with puns and Dad’s Army style humour.
To get started players take one of the teams such as Tommy’s Trotters (Britain), Sow-A-Krauts (Germany), Piggystroika (Russia), or Uncle Ham’s Hogs (U.S.A) and randomly place their five pigs out on the field.
From here, the game is all about killing the other hogs using a wide variety of melee, guns, explosives, skills, and deployables which can be used in a surprisingly tactical way. Like mind controlling an enemy hog to cattle-prod them out of their safe little trench just to be shot by your sniper on the next turn. In a way it captures the feeling of a turn-based strategy game perfectly, the only thing missing is the anxiety inducing timer and janky PS1 controls.
Perhaps the highest endorsement of the quality and intuitiveness of the game design is that even after misplacing the reference cards and finding no explanation in the rulebook, we were able to interpret each of the icons with nary an argument. Which is no small feat in a competitive game where ten points of splash damage is the difference between victory and crushing defeat.
ANNA BLACKWELL