1212 Las Navas de Tolosa is immediately visually arresting with a fabulous aesthetic inspired by medieval manuscript art. This aesthetic alone was enough to make me look twice but what really got my attention is how the game is powered by a deck of only nine cards. I love games with small decks - I’m a huge fan of the ever popular Japanese microgame Love Letter - and I was really interested to see how the principles of a small deck could be applied to a fairly abstract wargame. I’m also always on the lookout for short games, especially ones I can either carry around with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love an all day gaming session but these days I rarely have the time or energy for that. Great aesthetics, interesting mechanism, and a short playtime was a trifecta I just knew I had to get to the table. Despite it’s short playtime it took me a while to get it to the table as real life got in the way of in person gaming, but I finally played it and I had a really great time. As usual, I have a few thoughts.
Publisher Draco Ideas provided me with a complimentary review copy of this game.
1212 Las Navas de Tolosa all set up before the first turn. Units are all of equal strength but symbols indicate if they are regular troops, archers, or cavalry - the latter two have special actions available only to locations where they are present. The positioning of the deck and various card piles is also fairly essential to play.
1212 Las Navas de Tolosa (1212 from here on out) is a relatively simple game about a famous battle in Iberia where the Christian kings of Navarre, Aragon, and Castile allied together to attack the Muslim Almohads who ruled much of southern half of the peninsula. The decisive Christian victory broke Almohad power, and while it would take almost another three hundred years before Christians conquered the rest of Iberia it did represent a significant shift in the politics of the region. The representation of the battle in 1212 is quite abstract but it does capture some of this historical flavour as well as emphasising the dramatic charges that were central to Christian strategy at the time.
The game is played on a three by six grid which is split into two three by three halves - one each for the Christians and Muslims. Each round players each draw three cards and then use one to bid for initiative - keeping the other two for their actions. Each card has two values, one for the Muslims and one for the Christians. You use the value that aligns with the side you are playing, and on your turn you use that value to take actions such as moving units, rallying, or making one of three types of attacks: standard, archery, and charge. Each action has a cost and there are some general restrictions on what units can take certain actions. Players are also restricted in the number and type of attacks they can make each turn. Tracking these nuances is easier than it may sound and they tend to only come into play on the rare turns when you can play your six value card - with only three or four action points you won’t have the luxury of being hindered by these restrictions!
I won initiative and chose to charge down the middle - a respectable combat card saw me wipe out the units in front of me which for the Christians (when cavalry charging) causes the entire column to shift up one space.
The game is highly asymmetric though with lots of little tweaks to distinguish the sides. For example, Christians can only move up and down in their respective columns, each of which is aligned with one of the three kings, while Muslims can move (and attack) in any direction. Christian archery costs fewer action points but does less damage. To make up for that, Christians have greater bonuses on their melee attacks, with the Muslims even suffering a penalty to their Standard Attack action. Muslims can counterpunch the Christians quite brutally if they get over-eager on their charges, though, which makes being too aggressive risky. For a game that’s quite simple and plays very quickly there is a large amount of decision space and you could definitely get lost in its systems if you allow yourself to.
A few turns later and my attacks have been repulsed with significant casualties on both sides. Victory is determined by control of spaces on the board and it costs the Christians more movement points to enter the Muslim side - unless you can do so via dramatic charge like I did on the first turn.
Let’s talk about melee combat, probably the best thing in the whole game. In melee combat you pick a location to attack an adjacent location from. You then total the strength of the units in both locations and add any modifiers to the attacker based on the type of attack. All units have the same strength value, initially two but as they take damage they can be flipped to their reduced side which is strength one. This default symmetry of strength means that combat tends to favour the attacker as, excluding Muslim Standard Attack, they will get a benefit to the result. Once you’ve calculated the initial strength difference things get interesting - the attacker flips the top card of the deck and adds the values on that card to the respective strengths of both sides. This can have no impact on the result as some cards have equal values but it can also result in a difference of five strength, which is quite a lot when the maximum strength that can be in any location is only six.
Where things get really interesting is when you factor in how small the deck is. Remember, there are only nine cards in the deck. At the start of the round six of those cards were dealt to the players, so only three cards remain in the combat deck. At the start of the round the first player knows what four of those cards are - the two in their hand and the two initiative cards. This gives you some information on what might be in the combat deck, but it is far from complete.
A successful charge on the left flank eliminates one block of units only for a Muslim counterattack to nearly eliminate the charging knights!
Here’s where things can get extra interesting though! You can make at most two attacks per turn and you will each play two turns before reshuffling the cards and dealing new hands (except your Initiative card which returns to your hand). That could potentially be eight combats if you both do nothing but attack and there are only three cards in the deck. As you play cards they are added to the discard and if the combat deck is empty and you need to resolve a fight, you flip the deck over without shuffling it and draw from it again. This means that if you’re having a particularly violent round, by the second turn you could know the order of the combat deck - and how does that affect the decisions you make? You can’t look through the discard at any point so you better have remembered it correctly before you hinge your strategy on that card order. This is also something you need to think about when you choose your cards. Maybe don’t play that card with a high value for your opponent first because you don’t want it to end up in the combat deck.
You could get completely lost in this system, particularly if you’re not very good at remembering cards (like me), but in our game we largely played it with our gut and had a blast. We recognised the danger in trying to count cards too much and just played the best we could without getting too lost in our own minds. In particular, because you’re alternating play and the deck is shared you can’t totally control the outcome so placing all your faith in a strategy around cycling the deck can be very risky. I may eventually figure this mechanic out sufficiently that it loses some of its charm, but for the moment I am enthralled by it and I cannot wait to get 1212 out and obsess over this tiny handful of cards again.
Final game state - a Christian victory. I won by spreading my troops out to claim more territory on the board, which felt a little game-y and a bit anticlimactic. That said, it also helped the game come to an end at a reasonable time without dragging things out longer than necessary.
Beyond its mechanisms the aesthetics of 1212 are also deeply appealing. I love the medieval style art and I appreciate that there are a variety of unit types depicted on the counters even if most of them are functionally interchangeable. Its nice when publishers make the extra effort to evoke the flavour of the period even if it’s not strictly mechanically necessary. There are also some very nice little aesthetic touches that help with the flow of play. For example, each of the cards is associated with a specific Christian king and the Christians get a +1 combat modifier if they play a card to initiate a combat in the column matching that King’s symbol. The artist has very helpfully aligned the king’s symbol with their column on the card, so the king in the left-most column has his symbol on the left side of the cards, the one in the center has his symbol in the center, etc. It’s a nice touch that shows that playability was a factor in the art direction as well as aesthetic appeal. I also adore the tiny box it comes in - one of my greatest pet peeves is boxes that are too big for the games they contain and it fills me with delight that 1212’s box is the perfect size for the game it contains.
After only one play of 1212 I’m not confident drawing any conclusions about how long I’ll want to play it. There is an advanced variant that adds some extra cards that can be used for one time special powers which might extend the game’s shelf life, but I won’t be using them any time soon. For the moment I really enjoyed my first play of 1212 and I cannot wait to get it back on the table. This is a great little gem and I’m so glad I have it in my collection.