Quartermaster General WW2 Review
Axis and Allies Food Edition, fueled by cards.
Players control Axis, or Allies in up to a 3v3 to win WW2, all in 2 hours! Extremely streamlined gameplay comes with unique decks for each country, while you remember to feed your soldiers.
Video published March 4th, 2021
Completely card based gameplay, no dice.
Play as the Axis to conquer the world quickly, or the Allies who favor time.
Up to 3v3 gameplay, in 2 hours!
This is a sponsored review.
Overview & How to Play
WW2 is back on the menu! With very few pieces, no dice, but instead decks for each country!
Just like the theme reflects, Quartermaster General’s goal is to destroy your enemies: Team Axis kills Allies, or vice-versa. Just capture 2 enemy capitals and instantly win, like the Germans capturing Moscow. Or, players need to capture as many star areas as possible, like Ukraine and Western Europe featured in the photo, providing more points each round.
This game is actually like a proxy war though, because while players are placing what looks like tanks and ships, you’re not doing war in a traditional sense at all. The ‘quartermaster’ general part of this game means that its all about supplying your armies with food.
On the map, units can only maintain positions if they’re connected by other units to a supply station with a big golden star, like your home base, or a major region. If your supply line gets cut, and you can’t fix the hole at the end of your turn, all of your unsupplied units will disappear.
Turn to turn, players will use a hand of cards that they draw, and replenish from their nation’s deck. On a turn, just one card is played, and it does its thing right away, like building an army unit, fighting, to using all sorts of special cards unique to your nation.
Building is dead simple, just plop a unit down next to your armies. Fighting? Just destroy a unit in the type of region that matches your card, like a land or sea battle. Just make sure you have a unit adjacent to that space.
Players play 20 rounds of each nation performing a turn and checking for supply, then getting points from their gold stars. If 2 capitals have not been captured by the end of this, whoever has more points wins.
Pros
Quartermaster General WW2 is accessible as heck. Wooden pieces look and feel great, with ultra-fast setup mainly consisting of dealing out faction decks that are filled with plenty of bright, thick cards.
These faction decks get into how awesome asymmetric countries feel. Like, Germans use superior planning cards, that are permanent abilities to use Blitzkrieg or Dive Bombers to get multiple attacks a turn. Their Eastern buddies, the Japanese, like to set a lot of traps in their spread across the Pacific. For the Allies, the Soviet Union has access to near unlimited ground soldiers, to hold their ground against the German assault. Then the Americans and British have all sorts of naval cards to start maintaining footholds in Europe and the Pacific islands.
While this asymmetry seems intimidating, the game still keeps to its super simple core of just playing one card. Even combat is just playing one card, and a unit dies right away. This makes Quartermaster General move at a brisk pace, while still being easy to teach and learn, which is really amazing for a WW2 themed game that spans across the world.
Players will be tasked with managing their hands carefully, as their decks are essentially their nation’s war resources, and when that runs out, countries can essentially get knocked out for the game. There’s only so many copies of fighting cards, building cards, and special faction abilities, meaning that you may need to do some very careful planning. Because decks are so integrated into your country’s possibilities, the capacity to start discarding cards from your opponents’ decks via Bombing abilities is thematic and intuitive.
The decking out possibilities means you have to work extremely closely with your team, where communication is paramount to executing planned assaults. After all, your teammates only have so many resources, with hidden hands and traps. If one teammate is going to deck out soon, maybe it’s time to for a massive frontal assault while they’re still in the game.
Quartermaster General WW2 is able to discuss so many fronts of the war, with little stories popping up everywhere. Americans launch bombing raids on Germany to push them out of the war. The Soviets are locked into a brutal fight with the Germans on the Eastern front. Japan can choose to expand into China, India, while seeking to protect Iwo Jima from American fleets. There’s even canals, like the Suez canal to fight over! As cards get played, opportunities can open up on the map for each country, as new fronts start, and players choose how to devote their energy to fighting each of them.
Cons & Nitpicks
But for such a game reliant on card play, we really wish they included a player aid (outside the rulebook) about the number of each type of card. This would serve as a fantastic reminder to newcomers that they need to be mindful of playing any card, since you can’t get spent cards back. The game can feel like a cycle of take-that without full comprehensive of what cards mean in the zoomed out scale of this game.
We also really encourage allowing mulligan-ing early game to prevent bad hands, because the possibility of a bad hand just throws country’s openings down the toilet. The game also suffers from some pacing issues, but hey, WW2’s theme almost lends into this. This war wasn’t supposed to be a scaling, super smooth adventure anyways. Sometimes it just feels very clear on which side is going to win, as players get eliminated, and there’s no catchup mechanics. When players get eliminated, it can be quite a bit of sitting around.
