1975: White Christmas

No, we've not missed the boat with a seasonal game that should've been reviewed in the run up to 25 December. The White Christmas subtitle of this game from Looping Games is the classic Irving Berlin song, popularised by Bing Crosby, that was famously played on the radio on 29 April 1975 as the code signal to American personnel that they were being evacuated from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. 1975: White Christmas then is a board game about the evacuation from Saigon, where the 1-4 players are rescuing civilians from rooftops and transporting them to an aircraft carrier. The game is designed by Albert Reyes, with art by Pedro Soto, and is part of Looping Games' well-established 19XX series of meaty small-box games themed around events in a year in the 20th Century.

The game involves four rounds of card drafting and bidding. The cards you draft trigger actions based on the location from which they are drafted. Plus of course you then get to take the action indicated on the card. If, instead of drafting from the display, you choose to draw a card from the face-down draw pile, you get to peek at a staircase card so you'll know which personnel types will be able to get to that roof. You also get a victory point, so it may be better to take a chance than to draft a card you know you can't use effectively or where you can't make very productive use of the other location actions.

There's a blind bidding phase at the end of each round for a bonus card which immediately transfers personnel directly to your carrier. The radar tokens used for bidding tho' can alternatively be used as one of the ways of upgrading your carrier, so that you can move both your helicopters as an action rather than just one. In addition, this and other carrier upgrades gives you victory points and space to rescue more people. There's an end-game bonus too for the player with the highest value of radar tokens, so, again, there may be a reason to hang on to them.

Tho' each of the individual actions are straightforward, it's how well you coordinate and synergise them that determines how well you do in the game. 1975 is a game that offers players a lot of 50/50 choices but without, in our experience, triggering bouts of AP (Analysis Paralysis). There's a set collection element, in that having a particular combination of rescued personnel types can win you mission bonuses for having rescued a specific combination of civilians. These can make it worthwhile airlifting personnel that might individually be worth less than others you could rescue. Tho' you're not actually programming future actions, you need to have an eye to what actions are going to be available to you as, for example, you advance on the game's modular influence track, in order to make the most of the actions you take...

This is a well-designed and satisfying game to play, and it's impressive that there's so much game in such a modest-size box.

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