YORKTON - EDITOR's NOTE: The Meeple Guild is providing additional reviews over this holiday week, so check back daily for new game reviews.
Print and Play games are interesting in what they can provide with one just needing to get the files – low cost or often free – and some printer ink.
Granted you won’t find the next Frostpunk but then again you will often want lighter fare anyway, so a few printed options are never a bad idea – we have a book where such games are stored.
Now in the case of The Meeple Guild we tend to look for straight forward PnP games, a few pages of rules, and some pages or maps or play boards, avoiding those that have smaller chits to cut out and mount in some fashion.
A typical choice is something like Mission Recon from designer Chris James.
This is a quick print, which is a bonus because using less ink is a good thing – admittedly here colour is the choice even when black and white files are an option.
So what is Mission Recon?
Well, it’s a two-player ‘search and write’ game – a variation of roll and writes.
A player is a soldier conducting reconnaissance to map out your enemy's base. Gather intel one square at a time and use logic to complete the map before your enemy does.
This is very much a variant of the classic Battleship. Here you draw building on your grid which remains hidden from the opponent. Through the game you try to figure out the exact lay out of the opponent’s camp.
At the start of the game, players draw six different structures on their own base map. Then they take turns calling out squares on the enemy map. The other player indicates whether this square is confirmed as part of a structure.
“With Recon Mission, I really wanted to capture the puzzle aspects of both Battleship and Minesweeper, adding an original twist and using the simplest possible rule set,” offered James via email. “My goal was to shrink the game down into a single sheet for each player -- due to space and budget requirements for a printed magazine. I also wanted to include the fewest components possible -- all you need is a pen or pencil and a game sheet.
“But, most of all, it needed to be fun.”
In drawing on a couple of classics James said “players can expect familiar game play that is both more strategic and more interactive than the games that inspired it.
The game though came about for a slightly different reason than most do.
“I am the publisher and editor-in-chief for the quarterly board gaming magazine Casual Game Insider, which has been in print since 2012,” offered James. “In early 2019, I designed and debuted a simple roll-and-write game called Torpedo Dice in the magazine to supplement an article on roll-and-write games -- it went on to be licensed to a traditional game publisher.
“Soon thereafter, our team decided we wanted to include a print-and-play style game in each new issue of the magazine. Many talented game designers contributed their games for us to share with our readers, but this also opened more opportunities for me to design and publish more games that would be a good fit for this format.
“I have always kept a log of different game ideas that have come to mind, and the ideas really started flowing at this point in time. Sometimes I would dream about a game, or an idea would just hit me out of nowhere. Recon Mission was just one of these many ideas that I decided to flesh out into a playable game that was later published in our Winter 2020 issue.
“It was born out of my love of two different grid-base games, Battleship and Minesweeper. Merging these two concepts together made perfect sense to me.”
This is really a fine little game that can be played on a slow family holiday visit, rainy day at the lake, or coffee break. Mission Recon isn’t massively deep but with that nostalgic Battleship feel, it is a low-cost blast.
