Sans Alliés Review

The wind was bitter, the snow endless. Men moved swiftly between tents, or huddled around fires, but not you. Ramrod straight, with coat flapping in the gale, your gaze returns as always to the mountains. A constant mocking presence, their every contour is burned into your memory from your daily pilgrimage to this lookout spot. Some days you imagine you can see the enemy crawling across and throughout, digging new tunnels, setting traps for your overstretched forces.

Yet there can be no retreat. Beyond these mountains lie the key resource centres in which, even now, the scientists of the enemy are fervently trying to build the ultimate weapon that will end this war permanently. Your hand clenches into a fist. You must not let this happen. Tearing your gaze away, you march back to the command tent, oblivious to the salutes of the personnel you pass. Soon. Soon it will be Spring. Soon the mountains will fall, and then, at last, you will bring this war to a close.

This grand, multi-coloured pyramid is Sans Alliés (in a prototype Print & Play form) and, as the name suggests, it’s all down to you. You. Alone. No phone a friend. No one to blame your errors on. Sans Alliés represents something of a departure from the games I usually play as it is both a solo game and a war game, so I do wish to preface this review with the fact that I don’t tend to solo play board games. I’ve always felt that the best part of board gaming is the interactivity between different players, but what Sans Alliés has shown me is that sometimes it makes sense to be on your own.

You see, Sans Alliés puts you in the steel toe-capped boots of a military general coordinating a grand invasion of a faceless enemy nation. Starting from the bottom of the pyramid of cards, you will send your troops to conquer territories in sequence, steadily revealing the cards behind them as you do so, allowing you to work your way up the pyramid until you can finally take the enemy capital and end the war. This makes perfect sense as a solo game. An army is not led by committee. The responsibility for the strategy of war, for ensuring victory, for the lives of the soldiers that will make up the front line falls squarely on the shoulders of the army’s commanding officer, and to share that responsibility out amongst multiple players would be meaningless.

Even more interestingly, a solo game truly pits you against an unknowable and unpredictable foe. There will be no smack talk coming across at you from the other side of the table, just remorseless silence and your own self-doubt. Sans Alliés helped me realise the fascinating potential of solo war games to simulate this unique experience.

It could well do this for you too as the games rules, although longer than those of a gateway level game, are thorough and simple enough to grasp after a few turns. The unknown enemy is simply modelled by a pair of dice, who ensure you never know quite how brutal a battle will be. Each row of the pyramid has a corresponding defence value, determining the minimum number of troops you must commit to take that territory, yet depending on how the dice fall you may overcome the resistance and see some of your troops return, or perhaps you’ll be forced to commit even more of your reserves to secure the area.

There is certainly the chance that you won’t like this luck element to the game. I mean, on the surface you just put your troops forward then roll, rinse and repeat. But here I feel that the luck is perfectly in line with your role in the game. As a supreme military commander you don’t have the ability to control the minutiae of the battlefield. You can only make the highest-level decisions, of where to fight and when, ensure you have sufficient reserves and then place trust in your junior officers and, ultimately, fate.

The progress of the enemy is also controlled by the dice. You will lose Sans Alliés if the enemy research token that is advancing up the right hand side of the pyramid passes the top, as they complete development of their ultimate weapon. So at the end of each turn you will roll a die to see if the marker moves up. This makes progress random, but, again, shouldn’t it be? This is scientific research after all. And except in the most extreme of circumstances, its advancement will be rapid enough to ensure you’ll feel the constant pressure to progress.

There is one area where the luck in this game does bug me a little bit, and that is in the game’s overall difficulty. For my first few games I didn’t lose. There were some real, hair raising tight points, but by pushing my luck just right I got through them to win. However, in my last play it happened that all the resource centres came out in the top 4 rows of the pyramid. Resource centres are key locations for you to hit, knocking back the enemies advance and allowing you to upgrade your units. I lost. The fact that this arrangement can happen randomly is a bit unfortunate, although there was nothing stopping me from just re-dealing the pyramid. Likewise, were they to all come out in the first row you would walk the game. Since you are free to control the games difficulty as you wish it isn’t a big issue, but something to watch out for in your first few games.

The key decisions in this game, as I alluded to earlier, are when and where to fight. Your army is reinforced from the troops deck at a fixed rate, 3 cards a turn until you start capturing the resource centre cards scattered randomly through the pyramid, and this fixed rate forces you into alternating between big offensives to gain territory and periods of respite where you build up your troops. Yet this is combined with the pressure of keeping enemy progress in check.

You want to try and pace out your conquest of the resource centres (since you can only cause a single set back in a turn), but you also want to gain their benefits. In the complete game (Total War, as opposed to the introductory scenario, Limited War) you can also utilise espionage to cause setbacks, but that requires you to roll less than your personnel’s current strength/moral, a value that increases for each successive victory before resetting in the next turn. So all moves to slow the enemy down require progress on the board, which in turn requires you to have sufficient troops, and forces you to really plan ahead.

The other element to the game is where to attack, and this is one of the most surprisingly satisfying parts of the game for me. Each territory either requires one or both corners to be uncovered before it can be attacked. This means you need to sit down and plan out your route to the capital. At the start this is the optimal route, but you must also factor in the location of the resource centres you’ll need to hit, and probably the POW camps that, when liberated, permanently boost your personnel. Plus this plan is always subject to your need to keep the enemy research in check. Perhaps you’ll need to hit a few lightly defended territories just to crank up your personnel strength ahead of an espionage attempt?

There are lots of other elements to this game too. The seasons change each turn, making it easier or harder to attack, an element I feel is more about theme than mechanics, and if I’m honest, encourages you to fight at a set pace rather than making the decision each turn whether you fight or hold, which is a bit of a shame. You have a range of different unit types that need to be balanced against the terrain types you need to conquer, and the upgrades for these units you unlock come with bonus actions, but you’ll probably never use them. These are all flavourful additions but don’t add as much to the decision space as they should.

Sans Alliés does a great job of bringing the feel of being a military commander to the tabletop, and it does so without requiring a huge amount of complexity. I really love planning my route through the terrain (does that make me weird?) but if you don’t like a fairly strong element of luck this game might not be for you. Normally this type of dice resolution might have bothered me too, but it works here on a thematic level. At least it certainly does for me! But there’s something more I want to discuss about this game before I leave. It’s an aside, so here, look, final comment: this is a game you should totally check out!

 

Rating: Commands Attention

 

Still here? Good. So as I sent wave after wave of troops out to concur territory after territory I started wondering, who is this enemy we face? They are an enemy who is virtually unable to fight back against your relentless onslaught, an enemy whose only hope is to slow you down long enough, sell their lives dearly enough, that they can buy time to develop an ultimate weapon. How is it that you seem to have limitless resources to throw at this enemy? Why do we have this enemy nation surrounded in a ring of steel that ever constricts until nothing is left? Why is it that we are without allies?

It is easy to assume that we, the players, must be the good guys, that our armies are protecting us from this ultimate weapon, that we are liberating the land. While the artwork and warfare is reminiscent of a WW2 setting, nowhere does Sans Alliés lay claim to this, nor do we know why this war must be fought. To stop an ultimate weapon apparently, yet the only side of this war we ever see deploy these weapons are us. See, I went into this game with the assumption that the right must be on my side, yet I don’t see anything in this game that supports that. The question Sans Alliés leaves open is whether it is the enemies that are the aggressors here, or whether we are… and it is all the stronger for it.

 

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This review is based on the Print & Play edition of the game. Sans Alliés is currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. Full disclosure: the creator contacted us requesting we featured this game on our site, but I took it upon myself to print and review the game.