FRONT LINE NO KOMRADES Review: A Whimsical Yet Cutthroat Card Game

Review copy provided by Anvil 8 Games

Front Line No Komrades is a fast-paced card game from Anvil 8 Games, a group of board game designers most known for the tabletop miniatures game Aetherium. GameTyrant will be reviewing that game in the future, but for now, we are exploring the comical yet treacherous world of the frontlines, where soldiers are shipping out to war and there is only one objective for these military conscripts—stay alive.

The card game supports 2-8 players, and it will take 20 minutes (or longer, depending on the player count). Winning in Front Line No Komrades (FLNK) means surviving… or dying last. It’s unclear which is happening. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is outlasting the other soldiers. But your komrades will stop at nothing to make sure you take the brunt of the enemy attacks.

Is it something you’ll want to pick up? Let’s investigate what Anvil 8 Games does right in FLNK.

STORY

You have one imperative. Stay alive. Keep staying alive... for as long as it takes us all to achieve our destiny. We must endure. We must strive. We must continue ever forward... or until the next batch of recruits arrives, whichever.

Now snap to it! And remember, the Kommissar is not your Komrade!

The Kommissar is a dispassionate man. He sends the troops into war with the knowledge that most of them won’t come back. And he brutally inches forward as the numbers dwindle to force the troops to the frontline.

I’m reminded of the scene from Enemy at the Gates, when Jude Law must join other Soviet soldiers, who run in pairs while only one carries a rifle. It’s a horrifying prospect, and it underscores how limited the resources were initially when the Soviet army repelled the Germans.

Of course, that movie is a sobering look at WWII, and FLNK is a humorous card game, but it still comes to mind.

But in the card game, the soldiers are not military-age males. They are a hodgepodge of colorful characters. Dominika the babushka. Yuri the veteran. Boris the butcher. Oxna the bear. Molly the Tov. And several others. So the frontlines are filled with more of an eccentric militia than a military-age male army.

It’s all silly. And deadly, as war is and will always be.

GAMEPLAY

Front Line No Komrades will be familiar to gamers that have tried player-elimination games. Like Guillotine with more cards, like King of Tokyo without dice, this is an experience that will have players fighting to keep their health while throwing their “komrades” into the path of bullets, mortar fire, gas, and all the other injurious objects that will tear through, blast over, and smash up humans.

Every player gets a starting health number and a handful of cards.

Then, taking turns via an initiative card, players will draw an Incoming! damage card and everyone will place an action card facedown on the table. Those cards will be resolved in order; at any time, though, players can, once per round, play an event card that disrupts the order of play and can augment a player’s move or interfere with another player’s actions.

And this process continues until only one player is left alive.

FLNK doesn’t possess revelatory mechanics that distinguish it mightily from other games, but the characters, the interplay of card abilities, and the game’s humor-drenched setting make it an enjoyable experience.

VISUALS

The artwork in Front Line No Komrades strikes me as an absurd marriage between the memorable characters from Studio Ghibli and the visual aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

Incoming! cards have hilarious battlefield representations of the negative effects. A card wipes out every soldier’s equipment? Cue the speeding bullet that pierces every helmet on the battlefield. And there is clever and humorous artwork for every other kind of card.

FLNK possesses the hand-drawn animations of a YouTube series designed to engage kids and teenagers with history, and it works.

I like the art. I like the goofiness. It’s got charm.

REPLAYABILITY

There are currently two expansions to FLNK. That means for relatively little you can have a deeper sense of replayability with new characters, cards, and abilities that will affect the base game.

Oxna Bears All introduces 54 cards, including ones that fit within the mechanics of FLNK and those that create scenarios for a campaign and cooperative play. That development alone expands the possibilities in FLNK.

The Kameradenschweine expansion contains another 54 cards, with a new Kommandant and Conscripts, as well as Incoming!, Equipment, Maneuver, Event, and Scenario cards.

But there are players who might not be willing to pay for the expansions and just want to evaluate FLNK on the merits of the original game. And that’s fair.

Front Line No Komrades will appeal to many gamers, but the frequency of play will depend on individual preference. It’s a light-hearted card game with some exciting twists as players can interfere with and actively threaten the safety of other players. It’s devious, but it’s not burdensome. It’s casual, but it’s got some depth.

Some players will enjoy bringing it out for those friends that don’t play games often while others will delight in seeing how the game changes when trying out the variable player numbers. Others will only want to play it occasionally as a brief interlude between bigger box games.

Ultimately, it’s up to you, but I think the expansions breathe new life into the game and make sure that it won’t get stale for a long time.

WHAT IT COULD HAVE DONE BETTER

FLNK does suffer from a pretty vague level of interpretation sometimes. There were moments when I wondered how rules would take effect in a game, and the FAQ document doesn’t address as many of the puzzling circumstances. With a card game that has so many different card abilities, spontaneous events, and conflicting changes, sometimes there are questions as to what happens first or if one card is influenced or affected by another. It’s relatively simple to come up with a consistent interpretation to use across the board, but it’s also reassuring—for a rule junkie like me—to have clarity and rigid order of operations for card abilities.

There were also some misspellings and other grammatical mistakes that I noted every now and then, but those were rare occurrences and they didn’t detract from the gameplay.

VERDICT

Front Line No Komrades is a stupendously stupid card game, and I mean that with the warmest affection.

Some games last a little too long, but for the most part, it’s an amusing foray into a fantasy world where everyone is a warrior, and there is enough strategy or tactical maneuvering to entice the everyday gamer.

Come for the wildly unpredictable games. Stay for the wildly unpredictable babushka.