A few months ago, we were contacted by 2d6.EE Games (well, actually it was Miss Katie Aidley from Katie’s Game Corner on behalf of 2d6.EE Games), a game company that hails from Estonia, about trying out one of their new and upcoming games called 1918: Death on the Rails. After some challenges with shipping the prototype across the pond (the game actually sat in New Jersey for nearly a month), we got the game and finally were able to play a few scenarios and shoot a video review. 1918: Death on the Rails is an interesting, fast playing scenario based block wargame for two players that reflects the struggle between the Estonian and the Russian SFSR units during the Estonian War of Independence.

Death on the Rails 1
Russian units defending an objective in scenario #1. The unit with the question mark is a dummy unit but when the enemy fires into that hex, they must choose a target. If they choose the dummy unit, their attack is wasted and the dummy unit is removed.

 

In the game, you maneuver your hidden block units on a hex map, trying to be the first to achieve the different scenario goals that are randomly drawn from a pool. The system used for the game is an alternating action point allowance system based on card draws. The really neat trick with this is that you don’t know how many activations you will have each round as your opponent will draw a card from the deck and simply track your activations telling you when you are done. You will always have between 2-4 activations but not knowing how many adds an element of prioritization to your actions as you must accomplish what you really have to first before you run out of activations.

Death on the Rails 2
An example of a fire combat. Simple dice system where you roll the amount of dice as identified by your firing unit (my Russian machine gun unit fires with 4 dice) and compare the results RISK style and count the hits. In this example, I hit 4 times which reduces the enemy unit twice killing it.

 

The game is currently up for pre-order and is expected to ship at the end of April 2018. You can secure a copy at the following link for €65: http://2d6.ee/portaal/en/our-games/1918-death-on-the-rails

Thanks to 2d6.EE Games for providing us with a prototype copy to play and to Katie Aidley for thinking of us.

-Grant