Pros

This War of Mine is an immediate fantastic depiction of a dark cruel world. Gritty, photographed survivors, have their own miniatures on the map. There’s plenty of chits and plastic pieces for supplies like canned food, guns, water, and wood. Even broken items, like a Broken Guitar, look physically broken with jagged cardboard edges.

Remember, survivors are just normal people. Not foot soldiers, generals, or Space Marines, rather they’re people with previous occupations that lean into their current survival strengths. One of the best is the Firefighter, Marko, who can use a hatchet to just break down doors, and others will be Garage Owners, Lawyers, Teachers, Students, etc. They all have their little quirks, sometimes with weaknesses, fleshing them out as people with lives before the war.

So now when actually playing This War of Mine, the game will suck you into its shattered world- it’ll feel big, resource-stricken, and unforgiving. The game isn’t overwhelming though, and can easily be broken down into two main parts that flow well: every day has a peaceful daytime, and then the scary nighttime. You’ll be laboring in your house during the day, and you can go outside if you really want to, but then you then run the risk of getting sniped. Then, at night, when its safer to go out, then you can go scavenge for much needed food and water, but “safer” doesn’t mean its truly safe- you can run into people you probably don’t want to.

Your survivors are ordinary humans, and they don’t always have the stomach to constantly work. This is reflected by their statuses, which are the conditions of ‘suck’, like Hunger, Misery, Fatigue, etc. This game has a desperate feeling of treading water to stay afloat— just keeping those conditions just controlled enough to get through the days.

Supplies also need to be kept high enough, and the game did not skim on diversity here. There’s Raw Food, Canned Food, Vegetables, and Water as basic sustenance. Scavenging to find these will fill your group with joy, as you have enough food to survive another day, yet you’ll want to wean off your dependence of scavenging by building out your house, eventually having ways to harvest Water, upgrade Food, or even grow your own Vegetables with a Garden.

This War of Mine just feels so real with parts of your survivors’ lives brought to the forefront. They’ll have to sleep every so often to reduce Fatigue, and maybe you’ll build some Beds to help them in so. You can save up Cigarettes or Jewelry to barter with Traders for weapons, ammunition, or food. Survivors can pass away, and new survivors can ask to join your group.

Night feels scary but simultaneously hopeful, as it can often be the hell-mary your team needs to get enough supplies to survive another day. Just pray that your scavengers don’t meet other people at night. It is terrifying to meet battle weary soldiers hoping to prey on innocent civilians. Maybe they’ll prey on another group of civilians, also scavenging like you, while you run away?

The ongoing misery of This War of Mine really gets cemented by a gigantic book of 2000 writing entries: The Book of Scripts. While playing, players will constant see blips of flavor text or short dialogue trees with this. There can be decisionmaking on what to say to strangers, then you flip through the book to see what happens. Stories range from from the mundane on the street to really grotesque. Sometimes it’ll even ask for your survivors’ names themselves, and will really flesh out their lives.

This War of Mine is a grueling path from start to finish, with games frequently ending early because your survivors just all pass away. And to that end, this game is HARD. It is not necessarily a game you go into, trying to win all the time, rather its a rich, dark story that is still filled with fantastic decisionmaking—but it is still war, and bad luck strikes hard. Players will agonize over how to build the 15 different, double-sided upgrades to their house, what foods to prioritize, if they should really risk scavenging a certain night, and so on. There is so much to manage that having a handful of players is definitely recommended.

The box just has so much content if you want to revisit the war, with there being such an abundance of flavor text and encounters that you typically don’t hit them again. There are stacks and stacks of decks and other randomizer systems that the game automatically randomizes the experience. There is even a back side to the board that is even harder, then 2 additional variants that change win conditions of the game.

Cons & Nitpicks

There is one really strange rule that we must warn about. To try to prevent alpha-gaming, the rulebook says that only the person holding the rulebook can touch the components, and then you pass around the rulebook in between phases or actions. That is highly not recommended, as it promotes disengagement. We recommend having your group assign players to specialize in different parts of the game.

We also do not suggest following the game’s recommended learn to play, in which you’re supposed to do no prior reading and have the game handhold you through the phases. While this slow start thematically works, as you feel like befuddled survivors waking up one day to find that you need to survive, it’s not a time efficient option if you just want to start the main experience.

Final Thoughts

In our sky-high recommendation, just remember that This War of Mine is not like your usual cooperative game—it is not really intended to be won. It’s not satisfying in the way most games are: it discourages adventure, your characters tend to decline over time, and the scarcity is so extreme its downright brutal.

You can find this game depressing. But you can also find it hopeful, as people actually had the willpower to survive such difficult circumstances. And for a board game to do that, this game goes above and beyond the scope of what many are used to in this medium.