Battle Card from Postmark Games: Six Tidy and Clever WW2 Battles

This is adapted from the script of Episode 99, Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”

When the Imperial Japanese Army hit Malaya, British Commonwealth forces — including Indian and Malayan troops — got rolled up like a taco. The Allies blew up something like 100 bridges as they fled south and the Japanese still ran them down in just over two months.

So here I sit in front of the first of six campaigns of Battle Card, a collection of WWII print-and-play titles from Postmark Games. It takes about five minutes of setup to see where the design logic and the historical situation come together on my little map, upon which sit a bunch of six-sided dice that portray the strength and position of the forces: a string of two-strength Allied units against two max-strength Japanese units. 

One sheet of rules and dice that you supply get you off and running (for your life) in The Malayan Campaign, one of six WW2 “battles in a bottle” that come with Postmark Games’ Battle Card print-and-play solo game.

Looking from the Allied seat, you’re supposed to craft a successful fighting retreat — one that comes out better on your table than it did for the Brits and their cohort in real life —  by rolling back down two main roads and combining strength until you find the right space to gamble on making a stand. 

You want accessible? I picked up the rules in earnest for the first time last Sunday morning and logged 20 games before the day was over. Including an 11-game test because I thought I’d found an exploit where you could easily win at far north of 50%. I was wrong. I barely won the 11th-game tiebreaker.

I think it was fitting that the only colored d6s I had to use for the Japanese units were massive red novelty craps dice, because it really brought home the feeling of a massive and implacable opponent bearing down on your house of toothpicks.

You’ll soon be hauling ass down one of the two Malayan roads where the pursuing Japanese always catch up with you, forcing you into binary defend-or-counterrattack rolls. 

There’s just two ways to succeed: Get one of your seven die down the road to Singapore while it’s at three strength or better, or destroy one of the two six-strength Japanese forces. None of your dice have more than two value except for one; it’s designed to be a running beatdown where you have a couple of windows to win.

The Allies have another consideration: Halfway down one of the two roads in a place called Endau. If you get booted out of there, you lose regardless. For a brief time you’ve got air cover that lets you bomb one of the IJA’s dice and reduce it by one, but I can’t envision any way you can hold it longer than a turn, so that air support has to be in the right place.

It reminds me of the fight scenes from 1974’s Chinatown. There’s no seesaw battle where one guy has some stage blood trickling from one corner of his mouth after 15 seconds of boxing. It’s a broken nose, it’s a knee to the crotch, and it’s over. Sometimes I couldn’t believe how short the games were. The Allies also forfeit if you run out of turns, but I don’t think I ever had one go past four.

On my last try of the night, I abandoned my 50/50 success rate strategy of squaring off with the Japanese at Kampar on the Trunk Road and tried the “haul ass to Singapore” gambit instead, winning narrowly on my first try.

Experienced wargamers may find this a passing novelty, but this is a quick-punchout puzzle that could serve as a great entry point for the kind of person who thought they’d never pick up a wargame. 

Students of the era will appreciate touches like seeing the Australian and Indonesian outfits IDed on the map; people who just want a lighting-round puzzle will get it, because it’s over in sometimes two or three moves if you don’t. The Malayan Campaign feels like it can easily serve either kind of player.

The next day I moved on to the second of the six maps: Market Garden, depicting the massive Allied airdrop into Holland that didn’t quite go well. Can I make it come out better? Yes. Unless I got a rule wrong, I had the smoothest command debut in the history of warfare. I rolled the American 30 Corps from Eindhoven to the critical bridge at Arnhem in a silky five turns.

Battle Card Market Garden scenario: Get outta the way losers, 30 Corps’ coming through

Sometimes these matches feel so slight that they evade coming into being, but these are billed as microgames after all.

This one has a variable setup, because the Allied forces at each of the four towns along the route were airdropped in, so the first step is finding out just how many men you have after the chaos of their parachute rides. These units have to get control of their drop sites so the 30 Corps can roll on through. Hold a town long enough for them to get there? The Germans get crushed when 30 Corps shows up. 

But there’s a ticking clock and no room for snags. If you haven’t seized the bridge at Arnhem in six or fewer turns OR you lose any of your airborne elements in combat, it’s lights out, you’ve lost the initiative and the ability to control the route. The German dice start out weak but gradually reinforce if you don’t keep a foot on their neck.

This is spiced up by the fact that outside of the 30 Corps rolling through town, there’s pretty much zero help coming for the 101st in Einhoven, the 82nd in Grave or the 1st Airborne in Arnhem. Each have to attack enough to generate a table result that flips their assigned town to U.S. control. The 30 Corps can’t get in otherwise. 

There’s one opportunity for the First Airborne over at the Arnhem bridgehead to reinforce, but other than that, none of the German garrisons you attack in any of the four towns can be totally removed by your airdropped forces. Each turn, the German die regrow a HP, reminding you to keep this thing moving at all costs.

There’s also an interesting wrinkle in the town of Nijmegen — the last stop on the road before the climactic bridge. You have no forces there. If the 30 Corps stalls on the road because the advance forces couldn’t control a town, it looks like you’ll have to waste a precious turn shifting your other airborne forces down the road to hit Nijmegen while the 30 Corps sits in their own exhaust fumes wondering what the hell the holdup is.

This didn’t happen to me my first two tries because my setup rolls and repeated attacking favored me, so I’m curious to see what happens the day my early luck runs out and I have to sweat out a time-costly move to secure Nijmegen while the clock ticks.

I’ve got four more Battle Card scenarios in the wings waiting to be tried: Operation Brevity, The Battle of Moro River, Operation Eidelweiss, and The Battle of Mortain, all of which promise to throw more curves and puzzles that are thoughtfully meshed with the inflection points of the actual battles. I’ll be adding those playthroughs on the blog throughout the fall.

Here’s my read on this series so far: This is an elegant and approachable path to a historical game that works just as well for somebody who doesn’t care about wargames but who will be lured in by the promise of a well-designed map, some dice, and a story-based spatial puzzle with some luck built in to evoke the abstracted battlefield. I could feel the trumpet of relief pierce the fog in the Dutch countryside every time I got to push my plain white die, representing 30 Corps, one town closer to the objective and remove a German die from the map. It felt more satisfying than it had a right to.

In terms of making high-value eye candy with jump-in-and-drive rulesets, Postmark Games seem like they have it totally dialed in. And speaking of design, I need to circle back and correct an omission in my Episode 98 preview: Postmark Games consists of Matthew Dunston and Rory Muldoon, who bring years of game and visual design expertise to bear on these affordable diversions. In addition, Nils Johansson gets graphic designer and co-game designer billing for the Battle Card series along with David Thompson. Strong work, gents.

Next episode the Fall Indie Game Haul continues with play notes and impressions on what’s in this little Pyrotechnics box from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird team.

52 Realms Adventures: The Ayahuasca Method

A Note from the Editor: I turned former Donnybrook Writing Academy colleague Fritz Godard loose on a solo dungeoncrawler to see how a guy with a well-developed sense of fun, but no experience in playing this type of game, would respond. This is his story.

Solitaire, sudoku, a dice-based version of Catan my ex-wife stuffed in my stocking, and pocket pool are the only non-virtual games I have ever played by myself.

Before taking a look at Postmark Games’ 52 Realms: Adventures — Map 1, “Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul” — I assumed a “dungeon crawler” was what they called the Roomba at an S&M club. I never would have assumed it could be a solo game where all I needed was a standard deck of cards, two markers, a map, and a character sheet.

I was out of my element from the beginning of the assignment. The photo on the page to download the map and directions had cards spread across the table as if someone was trying to cheat at solitaire.

I’m supposed to negotiate a dungeon by stocking an inventory of Equipment, Items and Loot from drawn cards, and then draw more cards to determine who I’m doing battle with and what they are doing in the battle. So many gaming questions would have been answered once I printed the instructions; instead the printed instructions sat menacingly on my desk for weeks.

I even asked myself if reading is really all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe I should settle into the new world and let the YouTube algorithm create my personality and control my destiny. This was the size of my apprehension. Then I got the courage up to finally peek at the game, saw the five pages of horizontally printed instructions, and set it down for another two weeks. The hardest part of the game was starting it.

Or maybe it was after my first few plays, when I fled to Colombia.

My First Wight

It was nearly the end of January before the guilt of disappointing Breakup Gaming Society’s 3.5 average daily listeners got me back to the table. The first thing I had to do was choose a character: Seer or Barbarian. I decided to go with a Seer because it was blue and the face on the card looked like something straight from Jim Henson’s nightmare-inducing ‘80s workshop. 

My first battle I fought something called a Wight. Is a Wight something known in the gaming world? It sounds vaguely intimidating, but also slightly sexy.

My first battle I fought something called a Wight. Is a Wight something known in the gaming world? It sounds vaguely intimidating, but also slightly sexy. Will I get seduced by the Wight unless I pack my ears with wax? While trying to decipher the enemy’s essence and actions, I realized that it was best not to risk trying a new endeavor on an empty stomach. So I quit to go get myself a chicken sandwich for a couple of weeks.

[Ref’s Whistle] Illegal Potion, 10 Yards, Loss of Down

Weeks later, while on some down time from my brewery shift during the Viking Bluegrass Festival in Golden, CO, I decided to play again. In honor of all the braided hair, Grateful Dead tattoos and refillable leather-crafted beer steins at the event, I chose to be a Barbarian. 

I struggled to grasp the numbers and baddies before the rooms, but once I did, I was good to go. I defeated my first Goblin, then merked a Ghoul. I drew my first Curse of the game, but luckily I illegally used a Health Potion to get rid of it. REMINDER: A Health Potion doesn’t work on Curses.

I got to face my first B-level baddie: With the miracle of more inadvertent cheating, I defeated the B-level Lizard. On to the Lizard’s Lair: I drew three cards to keep two, but gained another Curse.

ACES ARE BAD IN THIS GAME: So bad, that I now hate aces and if I encounter you in public and tell you “You’re aces!” it is an insult and I hope your life gets as fucked up as my game did when I drew this ace. I drew the ace of spades (Motorhead now sucks, too) and had to take a fatal wound.

Trying a Different Kind of Cheating

I tried again, aiming to collect maximal Equipment, Items and Loot to assure my victory. Eventually I got all the way to the Boss, loaded to the teeth with all the necessary cards to defeat it. I lasted one round because I exhausted the deck, and therefore myself, and died. 

Even my subconscious mastery of accidental cheating could not overcome No Cards. I was smoked, and this was without following the clearly labeled instructions: “At the start of each round, exhaust 1 EQUIP,” a rule I would forget to follow for my next handful of plays. 

Intermission: Flee to Colombia for an Ayahuasca Refresher

I give the instructions another thorough reread and discover that my equipment stockpiling was illegal. REMINDER: You can’t go back through a door once you’ve passed through it.

Realizing I neglected to play by the rules made me doubt myself. Instead of starting another game, I let it sit for two weeks. By week three I figured I better start looking for burnt-out buildings where I could leave my dental records. The Colonel surely wouldn’t expect a review if I am burned to death in a fire, right? 

Instead of faking my own death, I pawned enough of my uncle’s coin collection to get a one-way ticket to Medellín. Why use the Get Out of Jail Free card on a fake death when I could just as easily flee the country? 

On my fourth night in Colombia a nebbishy guy with Birkenstocks and a Guinness harp tattoo sat in a VIP booth next to mine. When I heard him order a bottle in English, I invited myself to his table for a nip and to chop it up in a familiar tongue.

Please do not ask the guides anymore questions about Wights, every asshole from the U.S. wants to know about Wights.

Turns out the guy had just come from an ayahuasca retreat in the valley between the Andes and the Amazon. He told tales of visiting infinity and being shown the secret to the universe. If this ayahuasca can show the secrets of the universe, it will surely know what a Wight is and how I can win the prize at the end of Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul. Instead of paying my tab, I snuck out to find the retreat before any of the BJJ-trained security guards found me. 

The retreat with the most positive Google reviews was only a 40-minute bus ride from my Colombian den of sin. I sat through word circles where everyone from backpackers on a gap year to grizzled boat captains went on about the intentions and exceptions for their encounter with “the medicine,” as we were asked to call it. 

None of their trauma or insights compared to my noble pursuit to master this indie dungeoncrawler. By the time I took my second cup at the ayahuasca ceremony, I was well on my way to answers.

I saw a room full of stacks of paper, each sheet with a thousand lines on it. When I asked my spirit guide what it was, they replied, “All the ways you have played the game wrong and the countless number of outcomes if you play the game right.” 

“Ok, cool. But do I have to read all of these? I was hoping to just get some quick answers here.”

Then I saw a guitar with a plastic tube that collected all of the tears produced by the songs played on the guitar. How was this going to help me beat the game, though?

Then I saw God. A giant H.R. Giger machine, a trillion years old, broadcasting consciousness to create the vastness of the universe. 

I asked God who made them. And they replied, “I made myself.” Pretty tight. 

“What is a Wight?” The question caught it off guard. If God didn’t know what a Wight was, then this motherfucker wasn’t God. I grew 10,000 feet tall and began stomping on the machine that claimed to create the universe. 

The next morning I was on a bus to the Medellín Airport before anyone could drag me to another word circle. Back stateside, I needed a few weeks to fully integrate back to a realm that hasn’t touched the infinity of pure bliss only produced by locally-sourced fake tits chased with ayahuasca. When I felt properly balanced, I returned to the game. 

The Acolyte Returns to the Dudgeon

My sixth playthrough clicked. The instructions sounded like poetry. The cards and the markers danced across the map with ease. I won the first battle in two moves, taking the baddie’s character card per the Barbarian’s skills. 

Second battle: Equally as swift, doubling a spade attack from a 10 to a 20. I only encountered one Curse before I got to the boss. I won. I beat the boss, in shock that it fell with such ease. Mother Ayah must have guided me. Then I look back and realize that a) my doubling attack doesn’t work on the Boss b) I forgot to exhaust an equipment card prior to each turn. Still, I sensed an honest victory in my future. 

I entered the dungeon again the next day, determined to remember all the rules and give it my best shot. I got extremely lucky with my equipment cards. In the initial draw I received a King of Hearts and Jack of Spades. As a Barbarian, the Jack of Spades let me defeat nearly all of the early baddies in two turns and — another Barbarian perk — allowed me to take the character card as a reward. I had a stacked hand of equipment and items by the time I got to the Boss. 

I was sure that I would win, even without the doubled attacks. But when I drew a Wight, my confidence wavered. Using the Deadly Riposte ability, I slightly damaged the Boss Wight on the first turn with a block, moving two down on the health bar and landing on a two-card refresh spot. After three more turns my collection of equipment was diminished and it looked like Boss Wight would be my demise again. But I used a Strength potion and refreshed all of my equipment. Two more rounds and I was victorious, for real. I had won the game and defeated my self-doubt. Suck it, Boss Wight!

52 Realms: Adventures - Map 1 “Tomb of the Ever-Wandering Soul” proved I can learn a new skill and even have a little bit of success with it in time. Now that I know the world of tabletop gaming isn’t as impenetrable as I once thought, I’m looking forward to learning my next game, and maybe even getting the second map for 52 Realms: Adventures.

52 Realms Adventures: It’s Indie Dungeoncrawl Time Again

I’ve watched the fellas at Postmark Games pivot over the last few years to affordable, visually irresistible print-and-play titles and knew I was overdue to try one, especially as I seem unable to keep myself from snapping up a dungeoncrawler at least once a year. (I am actively hostile toward D&D, but love the proposition of a light scramble through a puzzle with some combat, goodies, and a distinct mechanical twist on the setting.)

52 Realms Adventures: Just gimme the loot, I don’t care what your character’s backstory is. Look at this map. Tell me you don’t want to play around on this map. This is candy.

I spent quite a bit of time with A Couple of Drakes’ Dead Belt, even more time with Grey Gnome Game’s Tin Helm, and really liked Grumpy Spider’s Pocket Book Adventures.

Now I’m ready to see how Postmark’s application of standard playing cards tastes in 52 Realms Adventures, where drawn suits and values provide the beats of a story, the stats, and inform how you manage the fortunes of the Barbarian or Seer that came with the Kickstarted files I bought a few weeks ago. The game has more dungeons and characters and is for sale now on Postmark’s website. Add to cart.

This kind of game ends up on my table a lot when I’m hypnotized by good breakbeats, have a few in me, am too faded to set up Star Wars: Outer Rim or Thunderbolt Apache Leader, but I need something more rousing and vivid than my abstract solo quick-players and tile-layers. I want to kill stuff, feel the contained danger of being killed by stuff, and the titillation of seeing what’s around in a corner, what’s in a room, what baubles are to be had.

Right now I’m hip-deep in a bunch of chewy empire- and war-themed titles from major publishers, but stay tuned here, because this thing is getting printed, played and reviewed in 2025. Stay tuned for a report and a review.

UPDATE: My friend Fritz Godard played this game, sucked at it, fled to Colombia to take ayahuasca, then came back and was good at the game. His story here.