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Arctic Armies

Designed and illustrated by Garrett Yonkers, Arctic Armies is a light combat game where the two players are pitting their army of penguins against each other. You don't, of course, find penguins in the Arctic; they have evolved at the South rather than North Pole, so pedants will gripe that this game should really be titled Antarctic Armies, but we're guessing the publishers Magic Beasts Board Game Design will argue the premise that it was a war between penguin armies that resulted in the penguins' Arctic absence :-)



In any event, this is of course a light-hearted game. Each player's 16 penguin tokens has a value 1-3 on the reverse (you have eight value 1 penguins, four value 2 and four value 3). You lay these out in a 4 x 4 grid as you choose. The grids are deemed to initially have two spaces between them (ie: each player's first row of penguins are three spaces away from the other). Players have a hand of cards that show numbers used in melee and the snowballs and/or fire snowballs that are thrown for ranged hits. You choose a card, play it face down and, for ranged combat, you announce whether you propose to Move or Stand. If you Stand, all the snowballs on your card count as ranged hits; if you Move, you are deemed to have reduced the space between the armies but only the fire snowballs count as hits. For melee attacks, you add the numbers on the cards to the previously concealed numbers on your front line of troops and compare the total with the other side to determine the winner in each column. In addition, there are special cards that can be played to modify combat results.



The upshot is a quick, lively easy-to-play mini-wargame. There's a small element of tactics and bluff in how you choose to set up your army grid, tho' we almost always placed our value 3 units in the back row where they were less likely to be taken out early by ranged attacks, but you shouldn't expect deep strategy in what is primarily a fun filler-length game that plays comfortably in no more than 15 minutes.


Arctic Armies is designed to be a highly portable game and it comes in a slim pocket-sized box. Unfortunately, it's a rather flimsy tuckbox that doesn't stand up to much wear and which doesn't reliably hold all the loose penguin tokens once you've punched them out. We recommend you bag the penguins rather than risk losing any, but bagged you'll probably need to find a substitute for the tuckbox.


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