Picked this up, but not yet played. Great art and component quality, as usual for Worthington. Consise and useful book: David Sibley, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China.
I like the game a lot. Very thematic supporterd by the super artwork. Played it 4x so far, lost all of them :-) Especially getting forward on the relief board is very tough my impression
For me the side track really detracts from an otherwise really good game. The main board has a lot of fun, interesting, tactical decisions to make and the side board just doesn’t. It reduces your win condition to an at best 50/50 dice roll. I even found the cards to be pretty pointless. I see what they were going for thematically and historically, but it’s just not fun from a gameplay perspective. It also telegraphs a loss later in the game because you can see by the number of cards left whether you even have a shot at winning. I’m really not a fan of that either. Overall I like the states of siege system, but I can’t help but feel that other games in this line will be better because they don’t have the side board.
I got this. It's okay but I thought you would be the Boxers NOT the International forces. Machine gunning down the unarmed Chinese who were justifiably trying to stop the invasion and exploitation of their Country left me with a bad taste in my mouth. 1/10
