Base price: $18.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Critters at War: Flies, Lies, and Supplies was provided by Arcane Wonders.

Alright, wrapping up a long weekend and, as always, I’m a bit behind. Sitting out at a friend’s board game night to take some time to write isn’t my favorite way to be social, but it’s always a nice way to just take a break and reassess what’s going on within the game that folks are playing. They’re playing The Crew, right now, which only seats five, anyways, so I’m happy to watch and play a bit of The Crew on Board Game Arena at the same time. We live our best lives. For this review, though, let’s focus the player count down a bit to two players and check out a sequel to Critters at War: Flies, Lies and Supplies!

In Flies, Lies, and Supplies, new theaters of war have opened up to you: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and Economics. With new theaters of war come new ways to make an impression and take control of those theaters for your side. Manipulate, target, and even assassinate your way to the top by playing cards to each theater to slowly weight that side towards you. With new Supply Tokens, you don’t even need to necessarily play cards to control a theater! You can instead place Supply Tokens on your side of the board with certain card effects. Beyond that, you can even engage further by combining Flies, Lies, and Supplies with the original Critters at War: you can use any combination of three theaters and their relevant cards, for instance, or you can play an epic game with five theaters in play. Which way will the winds of combat blow?

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I think Critters at War: Flies, Lies, and Supplies is a lot of fun! It’s definitely doing the heavy lifting as both a sequel and an expansion, but I think it does a great job with both. For one, the cards are a different style of interest and intrigue from the original game. I particularly like how plenty of the cards ask you to reveal cards in your hand, and then one card lets you eliminate a particular card from your opponent’s hand if you know what it is. For Critters at War, generally, the first couple games we play without looking at the cards, so you can imagine our surprise when that became a playable option. There are some holdovers from the original game, card-wise, and I appreciate that the rules are largely the same. It lets you focus on the new cards and the new strategies that emerge if you’re not working on figuring out new gameplay rules every time. There are cards that let you draw additional cards, have “when another card is played” response effects, or occasionally let you duplicate another card’s effect. I like them all. The one very thing that the game does add is Supply Tokens, and I particularly like them; they give players a way to bolster their hold over a theater without necessarily having the cards to back that up (or playing cards face-down).

The place that I didn’t spend more time with the game was in the expanded four-player mode; generally speaking, when a game offers to increase its player count, I haven’t usually been particularly impressed. While I like the game quite a bit at two players and I appreciate the expanded rules, I tend to look elsewhere for four-player experiences. No complaints, just not something I felt an overwhelming desire to check out.

Critters at War, as a game, does have one issue that I think pops up a lot, which is just that if a knowledge gap (of the cards) exists between two players, the player who knows more of the cards will have a distinct advantage. While you can have the newer player read the cards before playing, there are interactions and strategies that largely only emerge with experience, and a player with more experience just tends to have an advantage. Not all’s fair in war, I suppose, but it’s hard to argue that there should be a fix for that specific thing. It’s barely even a problem; it’s just something worth acknowledging before you start playing. The Critters at War retheme remains a fun spin on the Air, Land, and Sea franchise, though, so I think you’ll have luck getting players more engaged if they’re looking for fun animal games. It’s not exactly a silly game, per se, but you’ll still find a good amount of serious strategy and serious gameplay. If you’re looking for another great two-player experience, you enjoy the back-and-forth of area control and intrigue, or you’re just a fan of the Critters at War franchise, you’ll definitely enjoy Flies, Lies, and Supplies! I’ve liked it a lot.

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