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The Middle East has long been a hobgoblin for foreign powers and, as much as Afghanistan, also a graveyard of empires. Sitting squarely astride ancient trade routes and with the added impetus of the world's addiction to oil, the area has been a hot spot for centuries. Now, with the old regime teetering and losing its grip, Iran makes a bid for forcing the West to recognize its complete sovereignty and control over its own affairs by striking at the one thing they care about: the flow of oil. Mining the Straits of Hormuz and declaring it closed to all traffic, Iran defies the world. The US, and perhaps some of its allies, takes action to re-open the straits and get the black gold flowing to the world again.
Next War: Iran is the sixth game in the Next War series. It is unique in the series in that the Allied player has to do the attacking while the non-Allied player attempts to defend its territory against neo-imperial oppression. With a long logistical tail, few true allies in the region, and the menace of Iran's A2AD capabilities, re-opening the Straits is a tall order.
—description from the publisher
- Medium level complexity with an advanced version available
- Very high solitaire rating
- Potential future conflict between Iran and the United States
- Middle East
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Series — This is the sixth game in the Next War series, exploring hypothetical conflicts.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- this G I will say this is a this is a type of game that immediately captures my attention
- it's got everything in here and if we look at the uh rule book here and let's just move this up a little bit to get a better look at it here if we dig into the rule book um it's 22 pages long which is not very long I mean the text is kind of small I was expecting it to be bigger but looking through it we can again see a lot of the elements of gameplay that are the things that I would be looking for to see so it's checking off all the buttons right
- this looks really cool I I'm very curious I will also it's again it's not to me it's a genre that I think has really struggled to capture the essence so while there has been often games that have had this Vision I think there's been very few games that have come close to pulling it off to capture that magic especially in a soliter format of letting you live the pirates life I hope golden age of piracy is that game
- this I now I don't know the original 2014 game that this was based on but basically it seems like they've taken every taken everything from Imperial stars that this two and built it into the game thrown all the uh the expansions in as well and and in essence what you've got here is a two-player head to-head game of space combat in the year of 4096 or something like that it's an epic 4X game
- these uh these Maps here look fantastic the counters look really sharp as well we've got updated cards it looks like there is event driven elements that are going to kind of change the nature of this head-to-head combat that you're facing
- I really like the potential and I think there's still a lot of untapped potential for space hex to heex hex encounters Space games and board games that take the combination of space and war game basically let's put it simply in there I think there's a ton of potential here to kind of expand off of this so when I see these colorful maps and see all these spaceships flying around I think oh this looks really this looks pretty juicy
- I'm working on a video called the 10 tabletop war games with the best Art and Design basically the 10 most beautiful tabletop war games and I've if you're familiar with the channel you know that I was gone from tabletop War gaming for over 20 years I've been back for 3 years so I'm catching up on a lot of stuff right I'm trying to catch up on 30 years worth of War games and the time that I've got left and so uh I I there's gaps and those gaps are things that I don't know and so I'm curious what you as a viewer would consider your most beautiful war games