Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I first played The Grizzled about ten years ago with the guys that make up my Wednesday night gaming group. I remember feeling a real sense of grief each time it hit the table—the game’s setting is World War I, and the playable characters are all drawn with a look of pain and sadness by the artist Tignous.
At its core, The Grizzled is a cooperative, limited communication hand management game. Players use their hand of cards to ensure they can escape the round by NOT playing three of the same card type to the middle of the table, be it symbols at the tops of each card or the landscape portrayed in each card’s imagery.
The limited deck made each play a little more tense, with dread setting in thanks to the game’s rules on how cards are distributed between missions as players try to deplete their hands before the deck runs out. The Grizzled: Armistice Edition adds a number of new mini-modules over a nine-game campaign, and through three plays, I’ll share some thoughts on the first third of that campaign in this spoiler-free review.
“My Friends, Join Me in Adding Flavor Text Here”
The Grizzled: Armistice Edition is a campaign game for 1-4 players, based on 2015’s The Grizzled. Although it is primarily marketed as a campaign experience, The Grizzled: Armistice Edition can be played just like a normal game of The Grizzled without any progression, and each chapter’s extras can be added into any normal, “one-shot” play.
Be it ten years ago, or with the fresh plays I conducted for this review, The Grizzled’s best gameplay asset is creating darkness out of its ruleset. I’ve never played a hand of The Grizzled that lacked drama. With a small hand that might be just three cards per player, I am always amazed (amused?) how often I look at the shared play area, known as No Man’s Land, and realize that I probably can’t play a card from my hand because it will lead to the current mission’s instant defeat.
On a turn, players can take one action from a very limited pool. Usually, they will play a card from hand into No Man’s Land. There are six different threats on most Trials cards. Three are symbols at the tops of cards—bullets, whistles, and gas masks. The other three threats are difficult terrain—snow, rain, and night time. Each card has at least one terrain and at least one item pictured, with some having two or even three of each type.
The first turn of a round is vanilla ice cream, since any card can be played into No Man’s Land. But then, other considerations have to be measured. Some Trials cards are known as “Hard Knocks”, conditions that must be attached to their soldier’s player card. Some of these Hard Knocks have one of the threat symbols, and those count towards the three-threat defeat condition. So, instead of playing a card to No Man’s Land, the player could choose to play a Hard Knock from their hand onto their character.
But then there’s another problem—four Hard Knocks at the end of the mission, across all players, also leads to instant defeat.
The Grizzled (both the original version and the campaign version) is all about managing the best of bad situations. That’s not going to be fun for some people. While I enjoy the challenge that this puzzle presents as a single-play experience, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do NINE STRAIGHT GAMES (and that is at least nine, because losing usually means trying again to beat the game clean) of getting punched in the face by the mental and physical challenges of guiding a soldier through the horrors of World War I.
The Grizzled, for The Grizzled
That left me in an interesting place. I liked what each new chapter added, with very small tweaks to the formula slowly inserted game to game. (Experienced players should skip the prologue mission and go straight to Chapter One.) In Chapter Two, a new deck, the Order of the Day, is introduced to change how a particular Chapter’s rules will play out. Recruits are added in Chapter Three, which essentially adds an AI player to the game that has to be managed by the table. That bot’s hand is displayed face-up, so it’s easy to manage what they probably should or should not pick. But Hard Knocks are assigned to the Mission Leader each round, which can spike bad news quickly!
The Grizzled: Armistice Edition is, in many ways, for the video game player who thought Dark Souls was not quite dark or hard enough, sending them to seek out more games in the same series. I love that it exists in a world where it feels like some board games, particularly co-op games like The Grizzled, have gotten a hair too easy over time. It’s a game that literally has a Morale Drop phase, which helps new players prepare for the kind of experience they are signing up for. (It is satisfying to survive a Chapter, but The Grizzled is never a feel-good experience.)
The illustrations by Tignous are still the best thing about The Grizzled. The Grizzled: Armistice Edition comes with one nice change-up: there are exceptionally well-made miniatures representing the six playable soldiers included in the box. No—I don’t know why minis are here, since the pieces are never really needed for gameplay purposes. (You can slide your mini into No Man’s Land to represent the fact that you are still in the mission for that round, then slide it back to your play area when you have withdrawn. Voila!!) Of course, The Grizzled: Armistice Edition is a CMON product, which likely explains the reasoning behind the minis. Completely unnecessary, but the minis do provide a nice visual punch to the table presence.
The Grizzled system has aged well, but it’s a game I am happy to respect from afar and not engage with moving forward. It’s a filler-length card game that is easy to teach; those are the positives. I have lost more games of The Grizzled than I have won, and it is not “fun” in the traditional sense when it comes to most of the other cooperative and competitive card games in my collection. It’s for a certain kind of player, and I think that player is no longer me!
The Grizzled: Armistice Edition details
- Designer: Fabien Riffaud, Juan Rodriguez
- Artists: Tignous
- Publishers: CMON Global Limited, Edge Entertainment, Galápagos Jogos, Group SNE, Ludonova
- Release Date: 2018
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Communication Limits, Cooperative Game, Hand Management, Move Through Deck, Push Your Luck, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.68279 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about The Grizzled: Armistice Edition.
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