It is a bitter cold New Year’s Eve. The people of France, having suffered two years under Nazi control, still have reason for hope.
In safe houses across the country, members of the French Resistance raise a glass and share meager rations. The Allies have liberated Algiers, the Soviets are fighting back at Stalingrad, and brave men and women join their ranks every day. The struggle is far from over, but every act of resistance brings them one step closer to their own liberation.
(from In the Shadows: Resistance in France 1943 – 1944 rulebook)
In the Shadows: Resistance in France 1943 – 1944 is a small footprint, lightweight, card driven game from designers Dan Bullock (1978: Revolution in Iran) and Joe Schmidt (The Landing: Gallipoli 1915).
The game is marketed as both solitaire and two-player. The versions share mechanics but are, rather uniquely, two distinct flavours. I like this approach. This is a true solitaire game. Yes, there’s a bot but you don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out what the bot says. Instead, you can concentrate on your strategy and tactics.
I’ve only played the solitaire version which I found a challenge and enjoyable. I’m equally looking forward to playing the two-player version.
As the French Resistance in 1943-44, your role is to disrupt the occupying Nazis and their heinous collaborators through sabotage and ambush. You need to recruit to replace captured comrades but, beware, there may be informants in your midst.
Play is fairly straightforward. In setup you draw two cards, select one, carry out the event then use the action points shown on the card to take a number of actions. The German bot is pretty simple: it seeks to find, uncover and arrest resistance cells or Maquis. The Germans draw one card per turn.
Each card is marked with a suit that corresponds to one of three zones on the map. Most actions cost one action point if the suits match with a penalty for unmatched suits. Events have either a red (Resistance benefit) or grey (occupation benefit) but you must play the event. This does mean that it sometimes benefits you to go second in the round.
No dice! Draw from a resolution deck to resolve each action.
The solitaire version adds four persona cards that you can choose yourself or randomly. These grant extra benefits but impose additional winning conditions. The primary winning condition is to have more units on the board at the end of turn nine than the number indicated on the Authority track. You reduce the Authority track through your operations – once around the operations roundel reduces the marker on the Authority track.
As you’d expect from GMT, it’s a well presented package with a mounted board, rounded counters, and wooden cubes and discs. The rulebook is more narrative than the usual case system text but it’s a fairly light rules overhead so no problems there.
The box, however, is a bit over the top for the component count. For comparison, look at the box size for Endurance. Maybe it’s not a heinous as Twilight Struggle Horn of Africa but I can’t help think you could shave 10 to 15% off costs (and environmental impact) with a smaller box.
Despite what the game blurb says, I didn’t get much of a narrative arc from the solitaire game. I usually look for some narrative or persona immersion in a solo game. The persona card – more or less just an abstract secondary winning condition – didn’t provide it. I’ll return to In the Shadows but it’s probably not going to be a go-to solitaire fix. For that, I’ll stick to games like The Hunters or Cruel Necessity.
That said, it’s a nice solitaire option.