Purple Haze Review

[Music] Hey everybody, welcome to Drive-Through Review 811. Today we're going to take a look at Purple Haze. Uh, this has recently come out from Failins Games. And what this game is is a Vietnam era war game/narrative game slash roleplaying game. Uh, it plays one to four players. Now, I've not played it with more than one.

I've only played it solo and it's kind of buil pretty much as a solo game even in some of the literature in the different rule books and the campaign books and so on. But what you're going to be doing in this is going through nine missions. I know you can get more with expansions, but you will be taking a squad of six soldiers and be going through all kinds of different missions and things like that.

So, what's going to happen is you're going to play through a mission book. You're going to open it up and it's going to give you some kind of like narrative backstory. And then you'll be playing on a map of uh Vietnam, either north or south, kind of depending on the side of the board you flip it on.

So you have that map piece of it. And so you've been moving tokens around there, kind of like your squad going through the jungle and whatnot. And that map jungle phase is kind of one part of it where you'll be uh using up stamina, using up time, trying to beat the clock in a lot of ways. So that's one of the three facets of the game.

The other facet is in one of those campaign books cuz for each mission there's a se separate book and there'll be narrative events and things like that that will be triggered from the map into the book and you'll be making decisions there. And then once in a while you'll get to the third and final part of the game which is the combat.

There's another separate board for kind of the tactical uh gridbased combat there. And then you'll come back to base or come back to town. Uh some of your soldiers may be go to the hospital. Some of them may have been eliminated. Some of them may experience like, you know, severe mental stress and fatigue and so on.

You'll play through all nine uh missions. There's no like win or lose necessarily. Uh but your your soldiers will sort of like level up in a way and get experience and get different conditions and things like that. And uh the most important part of it which I'll mention now and then I'll mention at the end in the review section cuz it's it's not really like part of the rules but this is how you sort of like win the game is the in the game you take the persona of the squad leader.

And so even if that squad leader is killed in action, uh you know, you'll generate a new one, but you still if you want you can you'll keep the same sort of mentality, the same sort of goal. So you pick one of three goals and then you're going to score at the end of the game based on that how that is.

So maybe you're a guy that's like out for promotion and you just want to see, you know, mission success and that's all it is because you want to move up the ranks of the military. That could be one sort of like attitude or goal that you have. Another one is you want to leave no man left behind. You want to make sure that you know you all of your soldiers in your company, you you have their best interest at heart and you're sort of protective of them.

And then I can't remember what the third one is off the top of my head, but there's a third one. It's kind of like in between that sort of. And so depending on which goal you pick at the beginning of the campaign, you're going to score different things. So, if you're being a protective uh sergeant that is, you know, taking care of the of of the squad, then you're going to keep track of, you know, those that are killed in action or and and that kind of thing and those that have maybe been left behind and so on.

So, you're going to score those at the end of the game, and that's going to show you how well you did. And uh and so that's kind of your win or loss thing that's going to happen at the very very very end. But it also acts as a lens and a way to kind kind of inform your decisions because I'll just kind of say this part up front and then we'll get to the mechanics of it.

There is replayability here. So there is there's a narrative thread that goes through all of it. But there are choices that you make. Like I said, the the books will present a narrative. And so you say, okay, well, how how am I going to react to this? Because sometimes the decision is not just, you know, they're not obvious decisions sometimes.

And you're going to say, what do I do here? What do I do here? My squad's really beat up. What do we do? You know, we've only got so much time left. They're, you know, they're they're exhausted. Uh, one of them, you know, we're carrying because he's walking wounded. And so, what do we do? Should we just hight tail it back to the base?

Should we try to see the mission through? You know, how do you react in those type of situations? So, you set up yourself a goal. If you choose to adhere to it, then, you know, you kind of can go either way. But then you've got to take into stock. You know, how well are we doing? are we going to be all killed at the end of this if I don't, you know, make the right decision?

Uh, so it's interesting and the rule book does give you some things to sort of say, you know, hey, you could change your mind. Um, and there's some rules for that. Exactly. If you want to kind of change that and then change how the scoring works, but it does it in such a way, I think, presents it in such a nice way in this regard where it makes sense.

it kind of makes logical sense and that can be part of the story where it's like you know I started off with these intentions but the intentions have shifted so maybe my score at the end won't be what I want it to be but it will make narrative sense and I think the reward of having played the game will still be there because you will see the dichotomy you'll see the contrast and the shift in the characters frankly arc over the course of the campaign so anyway that I wanted to set that with those three things uh that kind of inform your lens and then we'll get into kind of the nitty-gritty here.

We'll go down the table and I kind of give you what I think on the back end even though I kind of already did a little bit. So, let's take a look. Okay, so here I've got this set up. Uh I just kind of rearranged some stuff after the last mission that I've played. Uh but this is kind of what your table's going to look like.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, you have your overworld map here. You're going to be moving this figure around, this token, and that's going to be represent your squad over here. We'll take a look there. So, that's really a main part of the game. And then in the middle here, you've got some different decks of cards.

There's wound cards, boon cards, condition cards, and stuff like that. Here is an encounter deck. So, this will have different events that might get generated by moving around out here. And you'll shuffle those up based on the mission. So, you can see like here's some mission one cards and so on. And then in the back here, you got some general cards.

So, you take all of the cards that are encounters for that mission and then shuffle in a couple of uh general cards. If you've run through that deck, you'll just pull a general card at random there. And then you've got this time track here in the middle, which we'll look at. So, this will track your squad stamina, what time of day it is, cuz certain actions and stuff like that, moving around on the map or coming out of one of the campaign books, which I'll show you, will spend time and stamina.

And then you'll need to rest to recover that stamina and but it'll also waste time. And then finally over on the side here we have kind of the tactical u battle map. So when you have a firefight uh that's where you'll be. And then down here we've got our six squad members here. So if we take a look I'm not going to touch these but you have these various personalities.

And there's there's quite a lot of these here. And uh you can see they all have like different sort of traits and stats here. You can see on the sides, um, you know, you've got just all kinds of cool nicknames and everything. All types of people. So, each time that you play this, you can see there's a bunch of these.

You know, in this case, I have Poster Boy, and he's a corsman, like a medic. And I have Blackjack Ray here. He's the the uh the leader, squad leader. You know, next time I play, maybe those I reverse those characters. We see how they do. So you can see each the main thing is each of these guys has a different special ability and their stats a little bit different.

And these stats come into play when you do a test. It'll say test your you know your conversation ability, your charisma so to speak or your strength or your intelligence or your perception, that kind of thing. So that's what this is going to be about. And then you're going to assign. Now these are like the level three cards here.

So you can be infantry level three. Level four. it'll go up to level four. Right now down here, all these guys are actually level two, about to be level three, some of them. And so, as you get experience points, you'll level up when you go do RNR uh back at the base. And the first mission, actually, it tells you what supplies that you have in terms of guns and ammo and first aid kits because, and this is not really a spoiler cuz it's the very first one.

Basically, you have a crashlanded helicopter. you've got to make your way back to base there. So, the equipment that you get, you're able to rummage up, which is very nice because the it can be very daunting because at the beginning of each mission, you just lay out your equipment configuration however you want it.

Now, again, there's rules for, you know, what people can carry, like can they take basic equipment or some specialist kind of equipment, how many first a kits, how many little extra sets of ammo, uh flack jackets, extra rations. So that's a lot to take in, especially if you're just sitting down and play the game.

So it's nice that the game in the first scenario says, "Here's your subset of equipment. Take this, distribute it how you've got it." And then at the beginning of each other mission, you can just, you know, distribute it how you want cuz the arm is giving it to you. You don't have to pay for it. And then that's how it works.

And you're always going to have one of these six uh disciplines in here. So you got a squad leader, radio operator, infantryman, corpseman, engineer, and scout. You're always going to have those. And so you can see I've got the the character cards here. And then each of them's got their equipment underneath them.

Maybe some special things like this one in my last mission. He got a critical wound. So you can see this is a little sign here that says you actually get some experience from it, but he's got to sit out the next mission. So you can see the little bed there. That means you got to sit out a mission. If you get like a flesh wound, this will be like a little bed with zero.

Means you don't have to sit out. You already did your hospital time at the RNR. And so what's going to happen is since this guy has to sit out, I've got to go find me another engineer. And that engineer will be level one and then I'll just go and pull a random I think the rules say draw three random characters and then pick one and then put it there.

And then this one will come back cuz this one was leveled up to level two. It's going to have more special abilities cuz as you level up these cards, you're going to add start to add special abilities on these cards here. So, that's kind of a general layout of how things are. Now, the game comes with a lot of material here.

Lots of books. You can see all these books, and this is just the base game. There's no like Kickstarter bonuses or anything. This is the retail copy. Uh, so, and I'll just say up front, it's very well produced. Nice. Lots of player aids. And you can kind of live in here once you get through the rules, which are a lot, but they're not bad.

You can just live in here, and you'll be good to go. Then you have a log book, which you can photocopy. This actually folds out to an 8x10. So you can just photocopy this and then print out as many of these as you want to maybe run different campaigns. And you can just kind of fold it in half and you got a little log book there.

There you will keep track of, you know, experience points. Um, as you shuffle everything back into the box, you can just write the names of them down, what kind of, you know, skill set they had, experience points, maybe any conditions that they have. Because as you can see these wounds, you'll get them and if they don't kill your soldier then these are going to go away after some time.

If they get a condition that's going to stay. So like this guy here has a moderate condition. This is kind of like mental stress and fatigue. This you will write down in your log book. And if you get enough of these um then your soldier is going to basically want to go home and they're going to go home and they're no longer going to be in your squad.

you'll have to roll up a new character and the same if they get killed. Obviously, you'll have to roll up a new uh character for that skill set. Roll. By roll up, I mean draw three and pick one. And then they'll start at level one. No big deal. It's not like you're going to you're not trying to win or lose a war, especially this one.

And so that's the idea is the journey and sort of the of your party or your squad uh as you go through it. And that that's really what it's about. So that's that's how that's going to work. And you're going to write that kind of stuff down on the squad, but you don't have to write down the equipment and everything because you can just reit every time that you you roll up a new mission.

This guy though, he has a dog. Bingo the dog. So, this is his companion. This this offers some stress relief. Uh at the end of each mission, you can remove two stress. So, you want to write stuff like that down as well. So, let's just go through these books quickly. So, first off, I'm going to say give kudos for this because there is a marine handbook.

This gives you a quick start guide, little boot camp and background resources. This is very nice. It's not like a playbook where you might think of like a GMT game where it like plays through some turns, but it's close to that. Like it gives you some examples of things that happen. It doesn't say like, oh, set it up and then this let's play through your first scenario for you or something like that, but it gives you a general idea of what's going on.

And this is the kind of thing and it presents it in such a So if you are playing at multiplayer, one of the players can kind of act as the GM or the dungeon master read the rule book and have the in-depth knowledge and then kind of present this in such a way so players kind of have a general gist of what's going on and it works out very very well.

So it explains again kind of what happens when you travel. You're going to be using stamina, you're going to be using time, you're going to be generating events, and then you're going to be generating narrative things that happen. What are you going to do in the narrative? you're going to be doing taking tests and stuff like that, making decisions like a choose your own adventure.

And then you're going to go here to the tactical squad, tactical board rather, and then you know fight that out. And this gives you a general idea of like how the dice system works, which is really neat and some other things like that and some like reasons and things like that. And then so it also gives you in the back here some extra literature to go on.

Also some playlists, some musical playlists and stuff like that and some other websites, a podcast about this. Um, so there's been some extra care put involved uh because you know it is war and is a sensitive subject as it should be. U so there's some some good sort of stuff to kind of round out your experience here which I think is very nice.

And just so I mean just so you know, I have this is my little old iPad here and I usually set this up sometimes when I'm soloing and I just play my YouTube playlists and I definitely uh took their advice there and put some music on. Not their playlist, but I have my own playlist for this kind of thing.

And uh yeah, I think it really really helps. So here's the rule book. No big deal. I will say it's about 50 pages or so. There's some extra pages with glossery and couple house rules and things like that. Very well laid out. It is a lot. I would say, you know, sit with it over maybe a couple of evenings and get into it.

But I think it is very well presented and does a really good job. And it is not small type, right? It's it's big type. There's pictures, there's illustrations, there's examples. So, it's it's really well done. This is not your t typical, you know, GMT style rule book. I'm not bashing on them. I like plenty of GMT games.

But if you're looking to get into this, you like like you know, you like the idea, but you're not a war game person, then um you know, it's nice. And then you here have nine mission books. And let's just grab the first one. Hang on. There we go. So here's the first one. Like you can see it's a helicopter crash.

And then you'll move on to patrol, another patrol, and then search and so on and all the way down here to finally uh the Tet offensive. Okay. So, these are all going to be kind of laid out the same. And it's funny because it it says it presents things in a realistic way, but also in a cinematic way, in a way.

And it kind of kind of says like, you know, for somebody's tour of duty, say for a year or so, they're not going to have nine things like this happen to them while they're there, maybe two of them. uh because you know I can imagine over the course of you know 12 months or 18 months whatever the case may be would be kind of a lot for somebody and uh so way the way these work here is you're going to open this up that's going to give you some narrative stuff here to to read not too much but it's very flavorful uh it's full of I think appropriately crass language um I don't imagine anybody that would want to play this game would have a problem with that, but I think it's it it makes sense and it uses not just curse words, but like also like the lingo and stuff like that.

So, it's a good kind of engrossing thing with terms of the role playing part of it. And then it gives you some outlines here. Here's where it gives you your three sort of things. Getting payback, keeping your men safe or advancing your career, getting your payback was the one I forgot. And it gives you kind of the layout here.

In this case, like I said, the first mission tells you what you can take, and then it's going to give you different entries here. So, you entry one, two, and so during the course of the the game, you might flip over different tokens and say, "Oh, go read entry seven, make a choice, maybe do a test, and so on.

And then you're going to get to the point here where it's going to give you a combat layout thing." And you can see it's very iconographic, but it's very, very simple. And I'll kind of get into it a little bit there as we go through it. You're going to just play through this and then you'll get to the end.

And on the back of these, I should say, it has a nice little summary of what you're supposed to be doing on the mission. And then in the end, here is the back. So, this is kind of like your summary. You get awarded some experience points and some other things. You might have unlocked some keywords by different things that you do in there.

So, that's all going to be in there. And then, as I said, they also got these player. And we're just going to work through these really, really quickly here. And because this is where you're going to live. So, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to take actions here up here on your map.

And this token kind of represents your squad. You might have different goals here. So, in your mission book, it'll say when you get to there, you'll look at the beginning, it'll say for number one, read entry 16 or something. And then this maybe is a base. You might have a crashed helicopter. Other things out here, this might be sort of signifying, you know, enemy presence or what you think is enemy presence.

Some of these may be face down. So when you encounter them, you won't know what they are. That will trigger different events and entries in there. So what you do on your turn, a basic turn, is you're going to move your squad a space and you can just move to any adjacent space or you can bivowwac or rest.

And so you're basically going to be just be doing that. You might be calling for an evac, you might be calling for a helicopter, that kind of thing as well. So you can see here if we just zoom in a little tighter and we're zoomed in on all mountains but you can see the mountain terrain there but you can see here in the middle of the time track you can see okay if you move into sort of grasslands you're going to use one stamina whereas mountains is four stamina.

So here you've got the stamina track and so you're going to move this thing down however much you know based on the the amount of endurance you need to kind of hike that terrain and then also you're going to eat up a certain amount of time. So this will take 15 minutes to go through a little patch of grass land whereas it takes an hour to go go around this mountain.

And so you're going to move this little token up here. So for every 15 minutes whenever you loop around you're going to bump the hour up and so on. And that top row from 0600 to 1700 is day and then from 18 basically 6:00 to 5:00 in the morning is going to be uh night time. And so during night, it will affect uh your tests and your dice rolls, whether it's a test in the campaign book or in combat.

And it also affect the enemy's uh dice rolls as well. So that's how that's going to work. You're going to move around and do that. And then you're going to roll a threat die. The game comes with a couple of threat die cuz sometimes you might roll more than one. So if you roll a yellow or a red, you're going to trigger an event and you're going to trigger an encounter draw off the deck.

You're also going to adjust your threat. Now, if you roll a green, you're going to reduce your threat by one. If you roll a gray, it's going to stay still. If you roll a yellow, it's going to go up by one. A red, it's going to go up by two. And again, if it's yellow or red, you're going to flip a card off the encounter deck.

It's going to give you like just a little bit of a narrative thing to read. It may interact a little bit with the mission book if it's one of the mission encounters. And that's it. So, just move, adjust this, and then roll for threat. Now, if you get down here to where you are running out of stamina, you're going to want to start to rest.

Now, if you take actions that cost stamina, you're going to roll 2d6 for each extra stamina that you would have to spend. So, let's just roll 2d6 there. So, it's a four and a six. Now, you assign at the beginning these little dice markers here to each of your characters. So that means in this case, the character with the four and the six would then have to take uh some damage cuz they're going to take a little bit of extra fatigue and and body breaking uh from pushing them too far.

And that's how things are going to work. So each of these six squad members has a dice face assigned to it. Now, sometimes when you lose a member, you're going to have to reassign this. So that means it's going to put extra stress on one of your other uh crew in there. But yeah, that's how this kind of stamina works.

And then when you take a rest action, you're going to spend for every 15 minutes, you're going to gain one stamina back up. And then every time that this thing loops back to the double O and we get a new hour, then you're going to roll uh for threat and then possibly trigger an event. So that's the way that you do that.

It works slightly differently with uh in in the night. And also if you are next to what we call an enemy zone of control here, uh that will also increase the threat that generates uh during a rest time during a bivowwac. But that's pretty much how that works. Now the other part of this, like I said, there's three parts.

There's the move around the map part, which we just kind of talked about, and then when you have to do a test here, I'll just pull a random one here. So this says if you choose option A, the point man will test kind of there. I don't know what that actually stands for. Like they're camping with a difficulty of two.

Success, then this happens. Failure, this happens there. So, one thing that I didn't mention, I'm not going to mention all the rules, but you can see I assigned this guy the point man, and you can change that as you as you take a march action to move around. But then you're going to test, you know, one of his stats here.

And I'll just grab this other guy just so I have to mess up my board there. So, you can see, okay, I would test this here. If I was testing that, I'd roll three dice. If I was testing perception, I'd roll four. and so on. So, the way that a test works, and this goes for pretty much all tests, but a basic test is you're going to roll three purple dice and then let's say we had what do we have?

Three on that for the other thing. So, three of the kind of skill dice cuz he had a level three. So, you're going to roll all these together. And then, so these are sort of your target numbers, right? So, I need a three, a five, and a six. So, I got a three there, which is one success. Remember that was difficulty two.

Now, the nice thing is if you roll extras here, they can kind of match against themselves. So, this now effectively becomes a purple diet, a target, and this will count as a success. So, that's two successes. Now, if I had in some cases rolled this, this will this counts as two by itself cuz it's a critical dice.

So, sometimes you'll get abilities and things like that, which allow you to add a critical die, yellow dye, to the pool. Sometimes you get abilities to add extra dice here. So, we got that there, which would be useless cuz it doesn't match with anything, right? And then maybe you add extra purple dice.

So it gives you extra targets there. So in this case now, anytime you roll the six, this will actually count as two successes. But if you didn't roll any sixes outside of the purple, those are useless. Or if I rolled this here, that would actually be four successes cuz it's two each. So that's what you do.

You have a difficulty number target. You roll these and then you try to hit it. Now in nighttime, you're going to remove instead of starting with three purple dye, you're going to start with two. And there'll be other abilities and things that will, you know, miss mess with your dice pool there. So, that's how the testing works.

Now, the last part of the game is the combat. And there you can see the combat board. I just kind of set some things up randomly. You always have again tokens matching your different skill sets there. So, again, that's the dice, the target dice number that the enemy is looking for to get hits on you.

And then this is the enemy here, which I'll just show you has this dice, which is the number of hit points. This is how much soft cover it comes in with. And then this is some special abilities or dice that it will add to the pool. And so you're going to go back and forth. You can see here's an initiative track here.

And the rules will tell you where to put that initiative track. And that's going to be based on a lot of things. Maybe you come in, you were surprised you're ambushed. So the initiative is going to be on the enemy side. Maybe you got the drop on them. It's going to be on your side. Maybe it says, "Hey, do you have this keyword?" Cuz maybe that means you had foreign knowledge.

And so it's going to adjust there. Now, not only is the campaign book going to, you know, have an entry or two, tell you how to set this up in terms of the initiative, but also maybe adds or subtracts different enemies that are available there and so on. So, it's all going to be kind of set up like that.

Now, soft cover is these little tokens up there. You can see there's a whole pile of those little little one pip tokens. Okay. Now, your guys also can come in with soft cover and this will be based on their skill set. So this is an infantryman here and he comes with two soft cover. So when you deploy him, you'll put two of those tokens underneath his tokens.

And what soft cover does is it absorbs hits. So if you get a hit on a guy, it's going to decrease the soft cover. Now there's also hard cover, which are these red things here. And these consider the rules say to kind of consider it as like, you know, sandbags or some kind of fortification. So that these will always absorb one hit while your guys are there.

So, if this guy were to get three hits and he had one soft cover, one hit would be absorbed by the hard cover, the other hit would remove the soft cover, and the next hit would actually damage him, and then we'd put one of these little red dice on him to start counting down uh his hit points. So, that's how that works.

And same for the uh soldiers there, except there's little hit point tokens there that you will stack onto one of your soldiers there. And so you're going to take stress and hit points. And you can see here this guy, oop, too much in there. You can see he can take up to eight stress or six damage. And as soon as you hit or go above that, uh, then you're going to discard all of it and then draw either a wound card, which I show you, or condition card, which I show you, and that can trigger other things.

So depending on who has the initiative here, uh, you're going to activate. So if the enemy has the initiative, a couple things will happen. one. See this little track here? Depending on the setup, you may have placed or drawn randomly tokens from this little pile. And these are cool little special abilities.

They're not good for you. And they're going to do different things in the first couple of rounds of combat. And so it's going to give the enemy just little special things like, I don't know, sniper fire, artillery fire. Maybe it's negative for the enemy. It's like they there's one called fooar where they kind of mess things up.

So it kind of decreases their or increases the initiative that they spend. So the first couple rounds sometimes you'll draw ones off of here. Some other tokens will maybe add little things in there. It's like little special abilities, you know, for the enemy. And then what you're going to do is you're going to draw out of this bag.

And a bag is not provided. So you can just shuffle these up or draw from a cup. And this is going to tell you what the enem is kind of like fire action is their main action. So we can look here. This say, okay, this is going to cost the enemy six initiative. It's going to add a purple and the yellow dye.

And there's always instead of three dice, there's a minimum or there's a starting value of two purple dice. Unless it's night time, there's only one dice. So, let's say it's daytime. It's going to add two purple dice plus this one for three plus a crit dye. And this little symbol means one of them will go hide and cover.

It's not that important, but it's going to cost six initiatives. So, it's going to move back down to you. So, next action will be on your side. And then what you're going to do is you're going to look at all the dice values here in addition to that token I just drew and then add up all the dice of all the soldiers and then you know add all the white or purple or gold dice to the pool.

So let's just take this example here. We'll roll these up. Pretend it's daytime. So the enemy there is trying to hit two and five. So we got a hit on five. Six is going to get peppered, right? cuz we got six that acts as the target number. Uh one and four don't match anything. So these are useless. So then again, you're going to look at your soldiers here that have the little dice thing.

So that's the soldier that's getting hit. If I look at this, so the number two soldier is getting two hits on them. So again, it might remove soft cover, get absorbed by hard cover. So you're going to start to apply damage. Number five is going to get one hit. Number six is going to get two. That's it.

You're just going to distribute the hits to your soldiers that way. And there you go. Then it's going to be your turn. And then we'll just use this guy here as an example. Um they get somewhat, you know, different than this, but this is kind of the general gist here. So if I'm going to use this machine gun, right?

So I can see here this is going to cost me six initiative. I'm going to roll eight white dice, two yellow dice, so 10 dice plus probably the two purple dice to start with. And then it's going to cost me ammo for this case. So I need to use this. I need to spend an ammo or discard the ammo. Not all the weapons do that.

So this guy's got, you know, M14. There's no ammo spend there. But you can see this one allows you to do an aim shot. And aim shot is going to cost you extra uh initiative, but you can add another purple die in there. But this one doesn't allow. This says no aim shot. So you can't do that. And then this basically says depending on how far away it was, you may add or remove a purple dice.

So if it was two spaces away, and by spaces I just mean rows. So this guy could shooting to this. That's one, two, you skip over the middle, three, four. And sometimes you can pop smoke and stuff like that here. That'll impede line of sight. And the hard cover doesn't impede line of sight. You basically draw from the center to your other guy.

And then you'll take line of sight penalties for any person that's in the way there or smoke. Then basically that is just removing purple dye. So the targeting dye goes away. So this is let's say there was no line of sight blocking. Let's say it was three spaces away. So instead of two purple dye, that would give me the b benefit of that.

If I could have aimed, which I can't with this gun, I could add another purple dye. And then so I would roll eight of these and all that. So you can do all that. And then so this is also if you see that that's like splash damage. So you can distribute jam damage adjacent to that target. You target a specific soldier and then but the way that works is you can apply that but you can't apply more damage to anybody adjacent than you do to the target.

And this has another special ability. So if you trigger so either an increased die or increased dy splash it will automatically remove three soft cover. So before you apply any damage, three soft cover goes away and then you start to apply damage where if it gets too far away, this is five away. Actually, you're going to lose a purple die.

So you just roll these up and it's very same as a test for the the human player. So you got a three and a four. There's a four. There's a four. There's a three. And these these are useless here cuz they don't match anything. So I just have applied whoever I was targeting. I have 1 2 3 four hits. Okay.

And again, you remove soft cover, you know, delete it for hard cover and then start to apply damage. And that's pretty much what it is there. As you start to remove enemy soldiers, you start to put them on this line here. And you can see the little initiative thing. So that means when they take actions, it's going to cost them more initiative to do it.

So if the action said, you know, six initiative, and if you, you know, killed this many, then it was going to increase the cost there. And then you basically play until either you've wiped them out, they've retreated, which is basically the instant that you have one more than half of the initial setup here, you'll make a die roll, see if it's higher than what's left.

If it is, they retreat. And so you've basically won the battle. So that will end it. Or if you get to where you've activated, and when you activate these, you flip them over to show they have activated. So I basically activate each of them once. There is one character that will activate. can activate twice.

Um, but then it'll be over. You'll just, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to slog it out and kill all of them or wait for all your guys to be killed. Although, if you get down to less than three, then it'll also end. And you get some experience. You might get some boon cards here, which you can then get to spend for like a quick special ability, uh, you know, during that particular mission.

or you can save these and convert them to boon points which could be spent for RNR. And so that's the gist there. So move around here, generate encounters, read events, do tests, trigger combats, have the combats, try to survive. Uh certain other things will happen so that you might get some soldiers that get a condition or something like that or pick up other soldiers that will add to your times, your travel time.

If you're carrying somebody, every every action you do is going to be an extra 15 minutes or an extra 30 minutes in a stamina. And that you'll just put that on this board here to indicate that that's happened. And there's a couple other little tokens and things like that laying around. When you get back to the end of the mission, you're going to have RNR and kind of depending on how well you do, you might have town daang or the base.

You roll dice here on this table to see kind of like in between games what happens. That's where you can spend your boon points to make those not bad um or better. And then yeah, you're just going to play through all nine missions. Like I said, you're going to swap these out. Some guys might stay in the hospital.

You might lose guys. And you're going to play through all the all the ways. And then you're going to finally, let's just take a look here at what you might score. So getting payback, keep track of the number of enemies you eliminate in combat. Okay, that's pretty straightforward. Keeping your men safe.

Keep track of the number of Marines killed in action or breakdown over the campaign. In advancing your career, keep track of the number of experience points the squad leader receives for completing objectives over the course of the campaign. So that's you're going to choose the beginning how to score your campaign and then at the end, you know, you'll resolve that by how what you did.

But like you said, if your squad leader dies, you can just keep the reason that you chose, maybe switch it up and just kind of play it narratively how you like. Okay, so that was Purple Haze. I will jump into my three pillars of review. The first couple don't make a ton of sense. Uh, usually I talk about player count.

I've only played this solo. I think the game is really designed to be solo. Although, I will say I could see a group having a good time with this. And um, you know, it's there's enough going on and you know, players can control multiple maybe squad members and that kind of thing. Um, I will say it is a little bit overwhelming at first with all of the special abilities you get cuz each of your six guys will have their own sort of personality trait for the character, the named person that you that you pick, but then they each are a specialist specialization and that will have either one or two special abilities there.

So you're looking at like 18 special abilities out the gate and the specialists are always the same. But the six characters and humans, those are going to be different. So as a first time game, it's quite overwhelming from that regard. It's like, oh, I should have did this special ability or I got to remember to do that.

Whereas if you had more players at the table, you know, it' be a little bit easier that way for people to keep track of. That's really the only I think complexity of the game. Although I said the game is moderately complex, but once you kind of get into it, you get into the player aids, everything kind of drives itself, then you know it's it's uh it's not so bad.

Um, now play time was my other one. I was trying to think of my other pillar. The rules the box is like 90, what's it say? 90 to 720 minutes. And when they say that, I think they mean if you were to play all nine campaigns in a row, I would say the 90 seems about right. The first uh mission that I played was a probably 3 hours, but like I said, I was getting to know the rules, trying to get to know all the stuff.

I I did not go through an exhaustive rules overview there. Um trying to get to know all the special abilities, all that stuff. So, it took about 3 hours. The next two missions was probably 90 minutes. It was very quick. Once you get the hang of it, once you get the hang of the dice system, that kind of stuff, it's very snappy.

You move your little guy, you take some time off, you take some stamina off, you roll to see if there's an event. If there is, you draw the card and do what it says. If you trigger something in the mission book, you read read the entry and do what it says. You get to the combat and then, you know, you activate back and forth.

It's a chit pull for the enemy and it's simply just act picking one of your guys and you you get two actions. I didn't say it in the walkthrough. You get two actions. So you can fire and do something else. Um you can never repeat the action, but uh you could build up cover, you could, you know, uh you can do a couple different things there that you've got the radio guy in the first mission.

It's nice cuz you don't have the radio, so you can't call in their artillery. That's like just a slightly more little complex step to do that. um you have um there's a there's a mortar thing that you can set up, but that's only some missions, that kind of thing. So, it's very simple and straightforward, but there is a little bit of like what they used to call in the old days like chrome and extra little stuff on the rules, which makes it nice from a war game perspective.

Um but yeah, so it's not so bad in terms of play time. Now, my last pillar is usually, you know, what is this game like? And it's not like a war game really. I mean, it very much is. It 100% is. And I'm going to assume it's more like a old game like Ambush, which I've not played, but it feels like it would be something like that.

Now, I would kind of say it's kind of like a game, which I have and still have and still love, Phantom Leader. So, it's kind of like one of those old leader games. And in those games, and all those leader games, they're usually, you know, like jets or helicopters or something else. Um, and there is some personality in there because you do have like little pilots that you keep track of their stress and all that thing.

And so having that kind of control over here and sort of managing uh and dealing with your squad is very similar to that. But this has a cool like narrative campaign that will, you know, go over the course of, you know, nine games basically. Whereas in those are a little bit more procedurally generated and stuff like that.

And I can kind of go back and forth. I kind of am more of a procedurally generated guy. If you've watched the channel at all, not at all. If you've watched it extensively, you will know that, but I mention that quite a bit. And that sounds so glib saying it that way. Um, if you've watched the channel a lot, you'll understand that I like procedur stuff, but I really do like this because I think, as I said at the beginning, there is replayability here.

And I've seen that through the missions that I've played where I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. I could have gone and done this other thing and it would have worked out a little differently. You get a little bit of variety and spice with some of the encounter cards. You know, you can pick the different guys.

There's a lot of different characters that you can put in here. Um, you know, there's a little bit of kind of personality to some of their special abilities. And it's kind of very interesting to kind of imagine and see like, you know, what about if this guy was the leader or what if this guy was the scout?

You know, how that kind of interaction works. And that's pretty dang cool. And I like how that works. Um, yeah. So, it is kind of in the vein of that, but in terms of like how it's presented, it is so much better presented than any game like that. And I like I really like this Leader Games. I think they're fine and they do a great job with what they do.

But the level of presentation and production in this thing is really top-notch. It is excellent. Above way above the board. um all the things that it add and it's just really to the to the quite a bit of detail. You know, at the beginning I showed you the the marine handbook and I think I said army earlier.

It's a marine handbook and the way it gets you into the game there is really cool because it is you open crack open that 50 55 page rule book and it's like hey holy cow. Um, but that gets you into it. And I like how it presents other ways of kind of looking at the war. It doesn't take a dogmatic approach to it at all.

I think it's very fairly even-handed and, you know, gives you music and stuff like that. It puts you in the perspective and and it doesn't it doesn't shy away from the fact that it's from the American perspective and it doesn't like overromanticize it or anything dumb like that. But it it does it it grounds you and it grounds you in the setting.

So I really appreciate the way it does that and even that sort of you know dovetales through the little narrative sections that are in the mission book and the like I was saying the language that they use and the lingo and all that and the way that things kind of unfold. You know, it does feel cinematic for sure, but it does pull you into certainly like a role playing kind of aspect, and that's where it kind of like sets itself apart from maybe some more traditional war games, although they do a pretty good job of it, too, let's be honest.

But it really kind of steeps you in the role playing side of it, which is really neat. Um, and it kind of feels more like some of these, you know, kind of story driven Euro games and stuff that have been coming out like Sleeping Gods or some of those other kind of games that are more storybook euros.

This is like a storybook war game. And I think it does a really good job of keeping you and sort of like pulling you through it because of those three things that you pick at the beginning. that gives you a grounded sort of avatar sense of like who you are and what you're doing and what you're starting to sort of try to play out uh as as things are going along.

It's not just because if you didn't have that kind of grounding in it and then all this other grounding that I'm talking about with the coloring up and the the playlist and the you know all these different things and some of the ways things are presented it would become number crunchy. it would become static and dry and strategic, which it still kind of is, you know, to a degree, but if it didn't have that, it would it would be heartless and emotionless.

And that that is not the case in this by far. So, it's really really cool in the way that it presents that. And it's one of the best games that I've seen, regardless of if it's a war game or not, with how it presents you and leads you through the story, but still makes it feel, like I said, almost procedural.

It feels like you're you're playing through a game system in that case. You're not just being told a narrative and that I think it actually kind of does better than some of these other games like even Sleeping Gods or Osworn and stuff like that that I enjoy. Um because it feels very choice. I mean there's choice here.

Like a lot of times it's the illusion of choice. And now is it going to affect the game? No, because you keep moving through the campaign. But because again, you chose that goal at the at the beginning of how you're going to deal with things. And sometimes that when you make your choices, you can't just be dogmatically committed to this is my goal.

I'm always going to do things this way because the the state of things in the field is going to change how you deal with it. Uh and so because of that, because you have that initial thrust, all of your choices matter. It doesn't matter. You're not going to win. You know, it's not like a fantasy game where you're going to win.

Do we beat the dragon or no? Do we rescue the princess or no? It's it's not something as so I don't know what the word is. So dumb as that. I mean, I'm not saying it's dumb cuz I love that stuff, but it's it it matters because you're you're in the context of like what Okay, what does it matter to these people and what they care about?

Because maybe they don't want to be there. Maybe they want to be there. You know what I mean? And like you know what I mean? Like things aren't always just cut and dry. You know, there's a lot of times when Froto and Bilbo were taking the Bilbo Frootto and Sam were taking the uh thing to Mount Doom and they didn't want to go.

You know what I mean? Like there that's part of the story, right? A lot of times in these fantasy games, it's like, "Oh, no. We're going 100% all the way through." Like in their points where they like say, "Nah, I'm just going to go home." That's what's going on here. And that's important because that's part of this deal.

And so that's not shied away from here. And it makes it I think it just makes it a richer storytelling experience by far. Um and so when you say does the choice matter this or that? Yeah. Because it's not going to affect the plot because the plot's not important. Who cares about the plot? It's the character what's what's happening to the character that's important.

So that's why the choice is there and it's real. I mean what happens to them is real in the in the within the scope of the game. So that to me is really cool. Now I'm just going to wrap up with this. Having said all that, I think the system would be really cool in a fantasy setting. You know, it would be neat to play like an RPG type of thing where these missions and then now is it going to have the same weight and sort of gravitas and impact and, you know, momentum that this theme would have?

No. Maybe. I mean, you could do it right. I mean, if they just phoned it in, it would be terrible. But, you know what I'm saying? So you could have this sort of implication of like how you choose your outcome, how you choose your your goal system, how you're going to score it, what the all various factors are because, you know, there's parts in here where you're like negotiating with a villager for example, and you don't know if you can trust them.

You don't know if you can get the information. You don't know if they're lying to you. And so you do these little checks and things to do that. and they're going to tell you, "Oh, there's well, I don't want to spoil anything, but you know, there's different things that could be happening that the villager is trying to communicate to you." So, it's not that is so different.

That is so different than like, you know, where's the orc camp? You know what I mean? I'm just totally bashing on fantasy games. That's not what I mean. But I'm trying to illustrate the dichotomy there between the two. And uh yeah, because of that kind of thing and the momentousness of it, the the impact and the heaviness of the decisions, it all works well.

It all just syncs up perfectly. So anyway, high recommendation, uh, Purple A's, definitely take a look at it. Uh, yeah, thanks. [Music] Yeah. [Music]