Battle Line

My husband and I both enjoy games: video games, card games, board games and we're on the hunt for games with an easy set-up, short game time but still with an engrossing experience. We enjoy games like Risk and Ticket to Ride but have been finding that we lack the time to put in daily gaming time with the set-up or playtime required with these types of board games. Luckily, Battle Line fits a lot of our requirements: short, easy to set-up and very engrossing. Battle Line is a blends some poker and rummy with capture the flag. You need need to create formations on one side of the flag that will overpower your opponents formation on the other. Claim three adjacent or five total flags, and you win. The rules are simple and easy to learn. Tactic cards are available and can throw an unexpected spin a turn but I find that they aren't necessary to win but nor do they ruin the overall experience. The game can move rather quickly though there are moments of analysis paralysis when a player agonizes over the decision of when and where to place a troop card and if you're opponent has a clue on what your strategy is and is purposely withholding information from you. I wasn't totally sold on the theme at first, but it fits pretty well (you feel like a general assigning incoming troops to different parts of a battlefield), If ancient battallion formations do not interest you, the theme can be ignored and we typically use usual vocabulary like "straight flush" rather than a "Wedge". The game, at 70 cards and 9 red pawn markers travels pretty well. We sleeved our set and store them in an Ultra Pro Deck Box (probably not necessary for most). The pawn markers stay home and we usually use coins, bits of paper or even sugar packets as flags when we play at cafes or restaurants. Highly recommended for two-player gamers!

I can see why this is a couple's game many have returned to over and over again throughout the years. It's difficult to find fun, replayable games designed specifically for two people, or games that just play well repeatedly over a long period of time with only two people. Me and my wife love games, but we're always stuck playing with just the two of us, so this will be a fine addition to our collection, though I don't think anything is going to replace Patchwork, The Duke, Kingdomino, Santorini, or 7 Wonders Duel anytime soon. If you already have all of those, and you and your regular gaming partner are in need of something new, Battle Line will do just fine. Edit: It's been approximately six months since I wrote the review above. I wrote that review after me and my wife had played only three games, and I had originally only given it four stars. Now that we have 18 games logged, I'm coming back to give it five stars. And I should mention that me and my wife have a lot of games in our collection, and we cycle through them regularly to avoid anything we play feeling redundant or boring, so 18 play throughs of a single game throughout the course of six months is a lot for us. Battle Line is an excellent game. It's simple, yet devilishly challenging. This is a quietly thrilling game. You won't have any big eruptive moments, like I've experienced during other tabletop games, but that doesn't mean it isn't a game filled with painful and risky decision making, that almost always either leads to elated payoff or regret. Figuring out how long to hold onto cards, and when to finally let them go, and what position to drop them in, is way more exciting than you might ever expect it to be within your first few games. At first I thought Battle Line would simply be a fun little diversion my wife and I would bring out occasionally if we felt in the mood for it, but now I think it's going to be in our core rotation for a very long time.

Easy to learn. Fun two player game. Played it at a friend's house and enjoyed playing it so much I end up buying it for myself. I have gifted it to others.

I knew what I was buying before I got this, so it came as no surprise to me that Battle Line was as deep and strategic of a two-player card game that I have ever played. Combining the classic poker elements of bluffing and gambling with some simple 'game' mechanics, this is an easy game to teach that quickly proves itself to be quite the thinker. The concept is to get three-card hands - sequential, suited, three of a kind etc. The familiarity to poker is immediate, and the special leader cards provide for the game mechanics to add flavor to this game and make it a bit deeper than taking the ruleset and running with a standard Bicycle playing deck. You're also playing heads up against your opponent, and so the turn-by-turn play where you alternate and build up hands against one another makes for a good, chatty discussion with plenty of strategic depth. It's unfortunate that the thematic setting is so niche. The historical context of the Macedonian phalanx is used to great effect and both the standard cards and the special cards really lend the theme a good flavor, but it also makes the game unreachable to less 'board gamey' crowds. This is also a fairly lengthy game, easily taking 30-45 minutes for two players to resolve. All in all, a serious game for two serious players. Hope you find a good opponent!