This War of Mine: The Board Game

We played this once as a full four-player game and I don’t think we’ve touched it since, not because it’s bad, because it’s the kind of experience you need to be in the right headspace for, same as I don’t reread certain books back to back. It’s a survival game set in a besieged city, you’re managing a shelter of civilians, scavenging, rationing, deciding who sleeps and who stands watch, and the legacy-style permanence of some choices genuinely rattled me. One of our survivors got shot going for supplies and the campaign remembers that, there’s no undo button, and it sat with all of us at the table longer than I expected a board game to.

There’s a moment about halfway through a run where you’re deciding whether to take from an old couple who clearly have less than you do, and the game doesn’t moralize at you, it just lets the consequence land later, quieter than you’d think. I kept turning over whether I’d have made the same call in that situation, which isn’t a question most games make me ask.

It’s not fun in the traditional sense and I want to be honest about that before anyone buys it expecting a light night. Setup takes a while, the rulebook front-loads a lot of tone-setting text that some in my group found heavy-handed, and it is absolutely not a filler game, don’t bring this to fill twenty minutes before people leave. But as an emergent story generator, and as proof that a board game can carry real weight without cheapening the subject, it’s the best thing I’ve played. Five stars, rarely played, never forgotten.