I play a lot of games solo, but I don’t play very many solitaire games. I’m not exactly sure why that is. I’ve had some of my best gaming experiences multi-handing a hex and counter game, but I’ve yet to find a dedicated solitaire game that has gripped me in the same way. As a result, I don’t play that many dedicated solitaire games, but I am also not beyond hope that I have simply not played the right one(s). With that in mind, I couldn’t help but notice the praise that has been heaped on both Petter Schanke Olsen’s Halls of Hegra (published by Tompet Games) and David Thompson’s Valiant Defense series (published by Dan Verssen Games) - in particular Lanzerath Ridge, a collaboration between Thompson and Nils Johansson. Both focus on lesser known actions in World War II where beleaguered defenders withstood ferocious Nazi onslaughts before eventually succumbing. While World War II is far from my favorite topic, I do enjoy killing the odd Nazi and I have something of a penchant for both niche topics and siege games. Since both games have a shared theme, I figured it might be interesting to review them together.
I want to put a caveat up front that I have not played either game to the point of expertise. Previously I have made sure to log a minimum of 3-5 plays for every solitaire game I review, but playing them that many times back to back has often had a deleterious effect on my enjoyment of the games in the long term. Since I’m hardly raking in the big dollars reviewing wargames online, I have decided to prioritize my own long term joy in this case and so I have only played these games a cursory number of times with the hope that this will encourage me to return to them again in the future and avoid any solitaire game burnout. If you wish you can consider this more of a “first impressions” than a full review.
I am also going to be covering these games from a more thematic and experiential perspective. I won’t completely neglect the game’s mechanisms, but if what you want is a detailed breakdown of how these games play I would recommend another review, or maybe just reading the manual.
Tompet Games and Dan Verssen Games kindly provided me with review copies of Halls of Hegra and Lanzerath Ridge
A Siege by Any Other Name
Halls of Hegra is about the Siege of Hegra during World War II. This 26-day siege saw Norwegian defenders in a (partially) repaired fortress that dated to before World War I holding off attacks from Nazi forces during the German invasion of Norway. While ultimately a Norwegian defeat, with the defenders forced to surrender when a lack of an Allied counteroffensive became apparent, their steadfast resistance to the Nazi invaders was widely praised and when Norway was ultimately liberated many of them were praised as heroes.
Players are tasked with managing the Norwegian defense. The game is split across three distinct phases. In the first you have to try and restore Hegra to a defensible status - the fortress was over thirty years old at the time and not in great repair. This requires digging out positions, sending out runners for supplies, recruiting more defenders, and unlocking technology upgrades. You will also shovel snow, possibly a lot of snow depending on the weather results you get. In the second phase you will undergo sustained assault by Nazi soldiers while also still needing to send runners through Nazi lines to find more supplies and continue repairing the fortress. In the final phase the Nazi’s settle into a more sustained siege with constant bombardments accompanying the attacks, likely devastating your morale and causing significant casualties to your exhausted defenders.
The first phase of Halls of Hegra, the board section in the bottom left shows your preparation while cardboard markers cover up several sections on the fortress that you will want to unlock. Top right is the supply minigame, and top left you can see the Nazi artillery and planes but they won’t come into play yet.
Halls of Hegra’s board is carved up into different sections for each aspect of the game, from the paths to supply sources to the changeable board that is swapped out for each phase of the Nazi attack. The main way you interact with this system is via worker placement - you draw workers blindly from a bag in a simple push your luck system and then place them on sections of the board to take specific actions. Different workers have benefits to taking certain actions and some actions are restricted to specific kinds of workers. Taking actions exhausts workers, who need to rest or be supplied to continue taking actions in the future. Managing your supply of workers so that you always have some for the next turn despite having so much you want to do right now is the core tension in Halls of Hegra.
The Valiant Defense series started back in 2018 with the widely loved Pavlov’s House, which looks like a very cool game, but I must confess to some shallowness and say that the early Valiant Defense games are too ugly for me to play. I’ve mentioned before that when playing a solitaire game I really need it to look nice, because it is taking all of my attention. I’m not distracted by chatting to my friend or any wider social elements beyond the game, I am instead locked in and staring at the board for hours on end so I want it to look nice. That means that the release of Lanzerath Ridge, with gorgeous art by the ever unique Nils Johansson, was the moment for me to jump in and try the series.
States of Siege never looked this good. You can see the tracks along the bottom of the board - the map is arranged so that you are looking from the Nazi perspective which creates this very odd experience of being simultaneously the attacker and the defender. It’s a bold choice, and one that creates an interesting sensation during play.
Lanzerath Ridge isn’t exactly on an obscure topic - the Battle of the Bulge is practically a meme for most covered wargaming topics - but it does choose a less widely covered action within that battle and with a distinct perspective. You control 18 members of the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon who delayed the advance of 1st SS Panzer Division for over 20 hours before being captured. Like with Halls of Hegra your odds of survival are very low and there is an inevitability to your defeat. It is rather a matter of how long can you hold out and keep your position against an overwhelming assault of over 500 German infantry.
Where Halls of Hegra adapted worker placement to the role of managing a siege, Lanzerath Ridge traces its roots back to the States of Siege system with tracks for enemies to attack along and decks of cards that determine where the attacks come from and what form they take. You will take actions with your soldiers, rolling dice to resolve attacks, managing ammunition for your precious machine guns, and exhausting your pieces in the process. Like with Halls of Hegra there is a balance to maintaining your morale and supply of ready workers, but there is also more of a geographical distribution to your soldiers and fewer options to refresh during a round - instead of managing a team it can feel more like you’re just trying to cling on for another few turns before the lull in attacks where you can fully recover. Halls of Hegra has a long, slow build to its pressure where Lanzerath Ridge is about accelerating tension with moments of release before another acceleration.
Best Men for the Job
Worker placement is not my favorite board game mechanic. While I don’t hate it, it also doesn’t get my blood going. Weirdly, the small extra layer of randomization added by dice placement (where you roll a die and the result is placed like a worker but the result either restricts or modifies the action) is one of my favorite mechanisms, go figure. With that caveat noted, the worker placement in Halls of Hegra is very well done. There are multiple different kinds of workers to consider and workers can become exhausted or even wounded which makes them feel more like workers and less like abstract pieces in a board game. You do feel like you are managing a team of humans in an impossible situation, even if you also feel a bit like God rather than one of the participants yourself - but that may be unavoidable unless you commit to having a friend lob ordnance at you while you play.
The one critique I would have of the worker placement aspect is that the generic types lose some of the intimacy compared to if each worker represented an actual person. I know the designer has said that he was not comfortable using representing real people in the game, and that’s perfectly understandable, but at the same time when playing Lanzerath Ridge, where each Allied defender is named after a real life participant, I found myself far more invested in the fate of my pieces than I did in Halls of Hegra. I related much more to those portraits and was much more anxious about them every time a mortar exploded overhead or a machine gun lit up the section of woods they were in.
The three squads that make up your team in Lanzerath Ridge. It’s a little shallow but I did relate more to the ones who had portraits, but I suspect the difference is primarily the result of limited sources - if there was an available contemporary photo for each of them they would all have portraits. Still, the inclusion of names makes me care about them quite a lot.
Both games abstract away the Nazis, in a good way. In Halls of Hegra all the Nazis are identical and faceless pieces that march inexorably towards your position unless you can gun them down first, while in Lanzerath Ridge there are different kinds of Nazi but they are represented by abstract symbols of helmets and weapons. There is no effort to humanize the inhumane genocidal attackers, and that is absolutely the right decision. These are games about the defenders and their resistance to overwhelming inhumanity, and through art and mechanisms both games focus on that resistance.
Playing a losing defense
Rather than any shared mechanism, the element that links Lanzerath Ridge and Halls of Hegra is that both games are about desperate defenses that withstood attacks against the odds before ultimately being defeated. There is an inevitability to the end - you will not win this battle, but you must hold out for as long as possible, either to allow for your friends to prepare themselves for the next attack or just to show your defiance against conquering fascists.
Both games effectively evoke the desperation of your situation, but in slightly different ways. Halls of Hegra does a better job at conjuring a sense of desperation and claustrophobia. The different phases of the game make you feel the tightening noose of the Nazi attack, and when the artillery bombardments begin during the final phase the game becomes actively stressful. You can feel the worsening situation as the game progresses and it does it with remarkably little rules overhead which is quite the achievement.
The final phase of Halls of Hegra, note the swarm of Nazis on the bottom left (this did not go well for me), but also see the artillery pieces and Nazi insignia on the top right - where once I was sending out runners for supplies, now there are just Nazi guns and encroaching positions. The difference between phase three and phase one is palpable.
In contrast, while Lanzerath Ridge’s individual phase decks do convey the different tactics employed by the SS - frontal assaults, mortar bombardments, or finally an attack on the flanks - the shared mechanisms between each phase make them feel pretty similar. It doesn’t have Halls of Hegra’s modular board where aspects of the game are discarded as you play. It tells an interesting story, but it is a slightly more static one - but then to be fair Lanzerath Ridge is the story of a single day while Halls of Hegra covers nearly a month.
What Lanzerath Ridge has is the touch of the personal. I already mentioned the individual portraits on each counter, but on top of that the game really emphasizes the importance of casualties. You only have five morale points and if you run out you lose the game. Every time one of your men is injured at the end of the turn, that costs you a morale, and if they die (which happens after only two hits), you lose a morale. You get an immediate sense of how bad a single death will affect the situation with the soldiers. They are in a desperate situation and things could spiral very quickly. Where Halls of Hegra tells a story of a desperate situation, Lanzerath Ridge is the story of desperate people. In that way the two games manage to tell similar stories without feeling redundant.
I want to stake out a (potentially) controversial stance here, though. Both games are about desperate defenses where everyone involved was ultimately either killed or captured, but it is possible for you to “win” both games. Halls of Hegra has a static victory condition - you win if you can survive to the end - while Lanzerath Ridge has a score if you make it to the end, and even a mechanism (radioing intelligence reports) that serves to boost your score should you win. These are games, so it’s not surprising that they have a way to win, but I also have to wonder if I wouldn’t like these games more if they just didn’t have victory conditions. I can’t take much credit for this notion, Amabel Holland’s recent solitaire game Endurance discards the notion of victory conditions entirely and she has written a video essay discussing whether victory conditions are necessary.
While certainly not for everyone, as someone who is playing these games for the narrative first I wonder if I wouldn’t be more invested in them if they were purely stories without any specified victory (or even necessarily loss) conditions. I’m honestly not sure, I haven’t played Endurance so maybe I should refrain from suggesting that other games about desperate situations follow its lead, but it is a notion that I can’t quite shake.
Playing on My Own
Ultimately, while I am incredibly impressed with the design of Halls of Hegra and I enjoyed my game of it, I didn’t rush to set it up again. I slightly preferred my time with Lanzerath Ridge, but I also did not immediately set it up for a second attempt. I think this speaks to some degree to my relationship with solitaire games, especially solitaire historical games.
The element of these games that I most enjoy is the story they tell. In exploring their story and experiencing this historical event from a new lens (potentially even the first time for me) I find myself fully engaged. The games are designed with randomization to ensure that no two games play exactly the same, but they are still restricted to a specific story. The necessity of a game that can be efficiently played by one person places restrictions on how broad the game can go. I will always be attacked by the Nazis with increasing furiosity, and after that first play I will begin to learn the patterns of those attacks - they won’t surprise me the same way.
There is the risk that the more I play these games the more the mechanism overrides the story. I learn the patterns of the card decks and push myself more towards system mastery, resulting in the slow erasure of the story and the people from my mind. Rather than thinking about what a card or action means in the story, I proceed through the steps of play as if it were the latest Stefan Feld game (no disrespect intended, I do love me a mid-weight Eurogame).
None of this is meant as a criticism exactly, I’m happy for people who engage with these games as what they are - games - but rather to describe my own difficult relationship with solitaire only games. I think for me playing a solitaire game is more akin to reading a book. I rarely re-read books. When I do re-read a book it is often years after I last read it, when my memory of the story has faded. I don’t mind this, there are so many books to read and I’m happy for old favorites to sit on my shelf and only be revisited every 3-5 years. I think dedicated solitaire games may be in a similar situation.
As to why I prefer multi-handed solo play, I think that is because those games are usually not trying to tell so narrow a story (or at least the ones I love aren’t). Most historical wargames are counterfactual machines, paper tools for generating alternative history. Solitaire games are also generating counterfactuals, but within a narrower band because one side must be completely automated, and so I think repetition is less interesting to me. It is also worth noting that I don’t often play my 2+ player wargames solitaire that many times unless they have multiple very distinct scenarios - instead I play them by myself once or twice and then either stick them back on the shelf for a while or seek out an opponent to play with. So maybe I just only play games solitaire once every few years, and the variable scenarios and option for multiplayer is the only thing that keeps me coming back to those other games.
Conclusion
Both of these games are incredible designs, and ones that fans of solitaire games especially should seek out and try. Just because I personally have struggled to find enthusiasm to play them on repeat for weeks on end does not diminish the fact that I enjoyed them both immensely and I have found myself thinking about them often since.
I should also say that both games are gorgeous - beautiful art and excellent use of graphic design to make a wonderful collection of cardboard to spend an evening with. The rulebooks for both games are great (although Lanzerath Ridge’s play aids are a bit lackluster) and I didn’t struggle to learn and play either game. As examples of the modern wargaming hobby these are both excellent ambassadors and the wide praise they have received is certainly warranted.
That all having been said, I don’t know that either game will make my favorite games I played this year list, nor can I swear that they will have spaces on my shelves forever. I can say that I am glad I played them and I am doubly glad they exist as both games serve to enrich the hobby. I think Halls of Hegra, by integrating worker placement into wargaming and in its representation of siege warfare, feels like the more innovative game but Lanzerath Ridge brings bold aesthetics and a new perspective to a widely tread subject and was overall the game I enjoyed more. Halls of Hegra is a more involved game, both in terms of set up and systems, and I preferred the way that I was able to jump into Lanzerath Ridge with relative ease - possibly reflective of how what I want out of these games is the narrative first and less so the mechanisms. As the reviewer I should probably know, but if I’m honest I’m still working it out for myself.
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