PACTS is an elegant and beautifully produced tiny wargame with breezily simple mechanics and deep strategy
PACTS is an elegant and beautifully produced tiny wargame with breezily simple mechanics that give way to a titanic depth of strategy. The game pits two players head-to-head across six rounds of classic cube-placing area control, magic powers and card play. Each player takes on the role of one of two fae courts vying for control of mythic Ireland.
If you have more of your cubes in an area at the end of the third and sixth round, you’ll gather points equal to that area’s points token. Your cards direct you to place your influence cubes in specific regions, move them to neighbouring ones or activate your faction powers.
So far, so simple. But PACTS is a game with an excruciating choice at its heart. Each turn five cards are drawn face up, one player splits these cards and adds the 2nd Player marker to one of the piles. The other player chooses which of the two piles to take.
Going second in any round is very attractive as you can react to a fixed board state. Much like how buying the Initiative token in War Chest becomes so obviously pivotal after a couple of games, so too does the value of the token and cards here. Faction powers are weighty, too. Converting cubes to your colour, removing all influence from a region or switching the location of points tokens between regions, for example, all make the activating cards much sought after.
Once both players start to understand the core value of each action and the weight of the 2nd Player token, the game takes on a new dimension. It’s a game that’s simple and readable enough to be able to make big gambles on what your opponent might be doing next. All the information – apart from their final choices – is available, which means a lot of the tension of the game comes down to that initial split-and-choose action.
If you know what would be best for your opponent to do, what can you offer them across these two piles of cards that will either force them to be inefficient, or drain them of actions? You are making a deal here from turn to turn as your understanding of the other side grows. Will they take a worse deal to secure that area with that one card they need? Will they give everything up for a use of their faction power?
At this point the game leaves the board and becomes a grapple between what you want to do, and what you think they want to do. It’s profoundly elegant, and the way it forms in the mind of players so quickly is impressive.
Everyone I played with wanted an immediate rematch – sometimes enjoying the swapping of powers around, testing out the wide variety of faction play – but sometimes just wanting to jump right back in. It’s a pure ‘dueller’ of a game, feeling sometimes like a sport for the fact that, very quickly, you want to be good at PACTS. The games are so quick that the strategies formed as you test your opponent can quickly be discarded or fruitfully folded into what we’ll call the PACTS ‘meta’ of your table.
All of this is happening with a handful of cards, a board the size of a handkerchief and a few dozen little cubes. Frankly, it’s brilliant.
Review by Christopher John Eggett
PACTS takes players from wanting a casual quick game to being the scheming Sun Tzu of mythic Ireland in about 20 minutes. Incredible.
The King is Dead Second Edition
If you’re a fan of a fast war that’s done in about 20 minutes, then PACTS scratches the same itch as The King Is Dead, but with a more expansive and open feeling.