Quebec 1759

 

A boardgame evening this week, playing a vintage copy of the boardgame Quebec 1759, originally produced in 1972.

This is a nice, simple game with only 3 pages of rules... definitely my kind of game!!  It uses blocks to represent regiments and, as you can guess from the title, is all about Wolfe's attack on Quebec.  As its such a  short game we played it twice in the evening, swapping sides.

Movement is limited and players can only move one group to an adjacent zone each turn which makes for some tricky decisions and a lot of the skill lies in trying to outguess where your opponent will manoeuvre, with some dummy blocks adding to the Fog of War 

I played the French in the 1st game and quickly found myself on the back foot.  The British have to make amphibious landings across the river and should take a hammering in doing so but they made it relatively unscathed.  I dithered a lot and found myself under pressure on 2 sides.  As zones are captured the French have to lose a militia unit (to represent locals drifting away back to their farms) and once the supply area of Cap Rouge is taken by the British the French lose another unit every turn as well.  My army began to melt away without much of a fight and Qubec eventually fell with a whimper rather than a bang.

In our 2nd game I'd had a chance to work out what was going on... I'm a bit like that with boardgames, it always takes me at least a couple of games to get my head round the mechanics and tactics.  I concentrated most of my forces on seizing Cap Rouge and wearing the French down.  Andrew wasn't going to let me away with that though and concentrated most of his troops into one powerful army and attacked, leading to an apocalyptic and lengthy fight at Cap Rouge.  Thanks to some very unlucky dice, the French wore themselves out but at a huge cost to the British... I was only 2 points away from a British defeat when the French ran out of steam.

It's a nice, simple game with some lovely components... the map is really pretty and I do like games with blocks.  It is very similar in style to Wilderness Empires which I've played a few times (here  and here )  It does feel quite weighted towards the British but, as Andrew nearly proved, its not all one sided.