The Grizzled

In The Grizzled the players are French servicemen caught up in the trauma of the First World War. Based on real people from the time, you promise each other you’ll all make it home again – but of course, war isn’t like that…

Each player is dealt a hand of 3 cards by the starting player (the mission leader) and the remainder are split into two piles, representing trials – the trials of war – and morale. Your job is to to empty the trials deck – surviving the war – before the morale runs out.

At the start of the game two cards are laid face-up on the table. Cards will show certain types of threat: bullets, gas, snow, night… and so on. Some cards have more than one threat present on them, so your first mission begins with at least two threats – the threat representing how the current mission may fail. On your turn you have two choices – play a card from your hand, or back out of the mission. If a third threat of the same type ever gets played, the mission is a failure, and however many cards players have left in their hands will be added from the morale deck to the threat deck… this is bad!

If however all players have passed, the mission is considered a success. Any leftover cards still mean cards moving over from the morale deck, but at least there shouldn’t be too many of them. The mission leader changes and the new mission leader chooses how many cards to deal to everyone; 1, 2 or 3. More is better for getting through the trials deck, but less is better for getting through the mission and minimising the effect on morale!

As well as playing threat cards, players may also play Hard Knock cards which are played to themselves instead of the central area – these do a variety of debilitating things, and if any player receives a fourth hard knock, they die and the players collectively fail!

At the end of each mission, players can play support tokens to help rid their companions of hard knock cards. Everyone beings with a left and right token and also one random token. Tokens are played face-down and simultaneously revealed – the player who gets the most support gets rid of two hard knock cards, and all players receive the support tokens that were played ‘for’ them – they’ll now have plenty of options for whom to support after the next mission…

After you’ve played a couple of times you may want to introduce the ‘trap‘ rule – where cards with traps on them mean adding another threat card from the trials pile. This can mean even the best laid plan goes awry, in a game that is brutal enough already!