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Lincoln is a fast-paced, light, two-player, card-driven strategic level board-wargame set in the American Civil War that allows you to re-fight the entire American Civil War in under two hours.
Game play uses point-to-point movement and area control, hidden army strengths, and decks of cards providing the command choices and luck; there are no dice. The Union and Confederate players each have their own card decks, reflecting the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides. The Union player must do all the running to win the game by the time they have cycled through the Union card deck for the third time, having accumulated the required amount of victory points by capturing Confederate controlled areas, as well as squeezing the Confederate player with a naval blockade. The Confederate player must hold on and thwart the North's victory ambitions to win!
Each time the decks are cycled, the Union player adds some better quality cards, becoming stronger as the game progresses, where as the Confederate player adds lower quality cards, becoming weaker. The underlying game mechanism is one of "deck destruction" rather than the more normal deck-building.
Cards have multiple uses and can be recycled if used one way but during the course of the game you have to decide which cards are going to be permanently sacrificed from your deck cycle to allow you to build units.
- Clever design.
- Elegant mechanics.
- Well-executed push-your-luck aspect.
- Math-focused gameplay.
- Good card stock.
- Offsetting luck of the draw.
- Can run long.
- The font on the cards is terrible.
- The interaction can be confusing.
- The card art is described as weird.
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- bidding — Players bid on the number of tricks they will win as they go, and cannot decrease their bid. Bidding zero is an option.
- Card Cycling — When a player wins a trick, they discard a number of cards based on the trick's value, effectively recycling cards into their hand. The number of discards depends on the trick's value and the cards played.
- hand management — Players manage their hand by discarding cards gained from winning tricks, with the goal of managing their score.
- special card abilities — Cards with a value of four or six count as two tricks. Zeroes beat tens if played in the same trick.
- Trick-taking — A must-follow trick-taking game with no trump suit initially, but off-suits become trump. The goal is to end as close to zero as possible.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Actually designed this game out of spite of trick taking games.
- if two players play the same number, they knock each other out, which is so fun and chaotic and I love it so much.
- Bidcoin. One of my favorite trick-taking games of recent.
- The goal of the game, it's one hand is to survive.
- It is the weirdest. It's a standard trick taking game in a sense that for the f until people start recycling their hands because then you can't track what cards have left the game coupled with who has won what cards.
- The overwhelming majority of tricktaking games are mid or bad.
References (from this video)
- well-regarded for its historical flavor and approachable rules
- educational on Civil War political dynamics
- some players find it less accessible than lighter gatekeepers
- political maneuvering, leadership and strategic decisions
- American Civil War era
- historical narrative through card-driven play
- Gettysburg
- Fort Sumter
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- card_driven — cards drive actions and district control decisions
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the number one game on BGG was Twilight Struggle
- 13 Days which is based on the Cuban Missile Crisis and it's like a trimmed down version of Twilight Struggle
- Memoir 44 is a classic one to get into
- Watergate… very easy to learn