War Story: Occupied France Review

boardgamequest.com:

The year is 1940. You and your team have been training rigorously as members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a unit of elite soldiers tasked with conducting covert options and sabotage behind enemy lines. The location? France. The Mission? Classified. But rest assured, you will be pivotal to the war effort.

Intrigued? That’s the premise behind War Story: Occupied France. Designed by Dave Neale (Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars) and David Thompson (Undaunted: Normandy), War Story: Occupied France is a narrative-driven game for 1-6 players that takes place over 3 missions.

Each game will start with you choosing 4 operatives to bring on the mission. Every operative has a ranking (from 1-3) in 5 different skills: Firearms, Awareness, Influence, Stealth, and Technical. You’ll want to make up your team, so you have all your bases covered (ideally). You’ll then gather some equipment, open your mission briefing, and decide where to go.

For the most part, you’ll be reading some narrative text in the mission book and then either making a decision (got to place A or Place B) or testing one of your skills. This is a diceless game, so any tests are strictly based on the ability of the operative(s) attempting it. The game does start you off with a few boost tokens to be used when you need a little extra effort, but once those are gone, you are on your own.

The game ends once you’ve completed your mission (or as much as possible) and extracted, or when your team has been defeated.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (SHCD) is one of the best narrative deduction games out there so I was curious as to what Davide Neale could do teaming up with an experienced WW2 board game designer in David Thompson. And I must say, War Story: Occupied France is certainly a unique game. It brings in the storytelling and decision-making from SHCD and marries it with some resource management.

Let me be frank, you will NEVER have enough skill points to