[elliott20]

Info about the game

About a year ago, I bought this board game called "war on terror" from a hobby shop prior to moving to Jakarta. I've been meaning to play it for quite some time but due to a lack of board gamers in Jakarta who is also proficient in both American culture and the English language, it's been pretty much collecting dust.

That is, until I managed to convince a number of people at the embassy to give it a roll.

The premise of the game is quite simple. Each player is a world empire whose goal is global domination. You do so by occupying countries, and the entire war effort is fueled by the oil that each country has. With it is a bunch of tongue-in-cheek stabs at the Bush administration and it copies the rhetoric you hear in the media pretty closely.

From the general game play perspective, the game actually is very reminiscent of Risk. You occupy countries, and try to expand your influence by taking over neighboring countries. (each country has an oil counter which shows it's oil mining potential for you to exploit) The thing that makes this different is that there are no armies to command in this game. Rather, you fight wars by playing war cards.

This, of course, is not the ONLY way to fight a war. You can fight a war of proxy by raising terrorist cells in the countries you want to attack. Once a terrorist cell is raised, you can activate it and have it attack by using a terrorist attack card. And since terrorist attack cards outnumber war cards by about 4:1, terrorism is pretty much the cheapest and easiest way to fight another empire.

The problem comes is what happens AFTER you've created the terrorists. You see, these guys are not actually under your control... once they are on the board, they can be used by ANYBODY. Which means, you guessed it, a terrorist cell can be used to against you. The tag line of the game itself is "fight terrorists, raise terrorists, fight terrorists you've raised!"

the game then takes on another layer of strategy that you don't see in risk, where the moment you start buying and training new terrorists, everyone gets nervous and starts trying to think of ways of stopping yuo from raising terrorism in their developed countries.

It kind of became how WMDs are supposed to protect you. They protect by the fear of mutual destruction through WMDs... which by the way, you can play with those too in this game.

Oh yeah, another interesting twist to the game is that a nation can become a terrorist nation, if doing so becomes strategically more viable. (which is different from being the Evil Nation of the week, where a player can play both sides of the fence, but still be a world power)

Anyway, it's quite an interesting game, with a very slight learning curve.

I fully recommend this game to anyone just wants to burn a couple hours with friends and family, and all the while get a couple cheap laughs.

[sarabethv]

*sigh* I so want to make a comment about you playing this game and the recent terrorist bombing in Jakarta..........oh wait, I just did.



P.S. Glad you and your ladies are well and presumably safe.

[elliott20]

yeah, the bombing definitely gave us a good scare. Though, I must say, the locals here seem pretty quick to get back to business as usual afterward