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!

My favorite 2 player game that I've played so far. The game requires strategy with some luck because of the nature of drawing card style games. Each game only takes about 10-15 minutes so it's a time filler & encourages you to play a few times after your perfect strategy was thwarted by your opponent. Do you push for the "royal flush" or play it safe and try "3 of a kind"? There are 9 flags which you can start a new card set, so you can space out your cards depending on what your opponent does on the other side. You can claim a flag when both people have played their set or you can prove your opponent cannot beat your set. Once a flag is claimed it essentially locks those cards out of the game. The game requires 5 flags total or 3 in a row for victory so picking your spots is definitely important either to win or stop your opponent from winning. The game also features "Tactics" cards which put a great spin on the base game. Some tactic cards provide wild-cards while others manipulate the victory condition for a single set of cards. Such as wiping out all victory conditions on that flag except for the total number of card face points or requiring the flag to use 4 cards instead of 3. This can throw a monkey wrench into your opponents plans and make for a fun twist on the game. At any time you can only play up to 1 more than your opponent so it keeps it fair. The theme of the game definitely feels thrown on, it makes a bit of sense but is just there to add flavor. It feels much more like a regular card game than a Greek/Egyptian euro board game. It doesn't hinder the game at all. It's not really a knock on the game you will just know that you are playing a card game that kind of reminds you of hands of Poker. Really enjoy playing this and it's also one of my girlfriends favorite games, can't really go wrong with this one.

This is a fun game, but I was disappointed greatly in the stickiness of the cards. New, out of the box, they were very difficult for me to shuffle or deal. (Not as you get with any regular playing cards.) I tend to have dry skin, so I may be more sensitive to this than you might be. But before I could even play the game, I had to search online for a solution, powder each card with corn starch, then lightly dust the excess off. This took over an hour. Be prepared that you might need to to do the same if you buy this game.

I bought this a few months ago and it sat on the shelf with the other stack of unopened games. What a dork! This is a great game that needed to be opened sooner. Dice Tower has a very easy to follow review on youtube so I won't go into how to play the game. Some feedback. . . 1. Non-gamers can pick this up fast. We had a guest last night as a matter of fact that really sucks at games. She just doesn't get it. But she picked this up and won a round. 2. Yes, technically you can play with a simple deck of cards and some tokens that represent the flags, but get the actual set if you can. I got mine on Amazon for around $15 and it was well worth it. 3. Quality of the cards are nice and laminated and not too thin. 4. We choose to NOT play with the tactic cards. There is still so much going on with the base game that we don't need the added layer, plus I agree with Dice Tower that the tactic cards it comes with don't change the game that much. What they do provide is a little bit of variety. 5. Most of our games get down to the last hand and an empty draw pile. This is great and means we are loving the level of strategy. 6. LUCK is light as there is a randomness to which cards you draw. But since it's only a two player game, each player has a great chance of getting at least three winning hands and if you can win in a row, that's all you need! Our entire family of kids and adults (six of us ranging from ages 10+) love this game as a great skirmish battle.

This is such a fun two player game! It's essentially like capture the flag with poker hands. It's a compact game (you could even forgo the pawns/flags) so it's easy to take on the road. There's not many two-player card games, and this one is great! It takes a decent amount of strategy and flexibility. Lots of fun!