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A bit ago I finally pulled a box off my shelf of shame and played Hands in the Sea, a game about the first punic war. I kickstarted it forever ago, then kickstarted the second edition upgrade kit, then I moved, then I lost touch with the friends I usually played those sorts of games with. I marked this game as received on Kickstarter in October of 2016, and it finally hit my table July of 2025. Jeeze.
I originally took an interest in the game because a respected wargame youtuber, I think Judd Vance, was going around saying it was one of the best games he'd ever played during playtesting with the designer. It takes the deck building system from A Few Acres of Snow, widely but perhaps unfairly panned for having an unfixable OP strategy, and fixes that as well as improving on it in nearly every way. I never played A Few Acres of Snow on account of it's poor reputation, so I can't attest to that personally. However, I did greatly enjoy it.
If you've played a deck building game, the central mechanic might not be alien to you. You have a starting deck of cards, you draw five, and you get to take two actions. Where it gets wargamey is that the actions are all printed on a player aid, there are about a dozen of them, you can pick any action you want, and the cards mostly provide resources to accomplish them. Broadly there are two types of cards also, territories which you either start with or conquer, and then also personnel like legions, commanders, traders, etc. I won't bore you with a detailed rules breakdown, but generally you'll be conquering territory, trying to fuck up each others lines of supply through naval fuckery, and racing towards a set of military and economic victory conditions.
I played the game with my brother who is back in state. It went well, and I couldn't help notice how differently we try to learn a game. He wanted to try each different action and learn how it worked. I just learned a subset of them that I thought would make a good strategy, and clobbered him. He kept trying, and failing, to ask AI rule questions, I looked them up on BoardGameGeek. That said, it probably would have been a close game if the random events didn't hand me several absolute coups.
Yes there are random events. You roll a dice to see which player they effect, and some are weighted more towards Carthage or more towards Rome. Unfortunately this provided no assistance, and my brother playing Carthage just got absolutely hammered. The first few random events cost me some money and cards. Then for the rest of the game my brother ate shit. He lost his entire fleet to a storm, losing his singular advantage over me that he was really beginning to punish me with. Then he lost a heavily fortified town that was holding the line in Sicily to a rebellion. A town I quickly scooped up before he could react.
He tried to pull his game out of the tailspin it was in. But curiously enough, the game's length is determined by how many times Carthage goes through their deck. So the more he tried to optimize his deck to combat my strategy, the quicker he was running out of time to execute, as the game can only go 12 turns. Also, I was scoring way more points than him during the scoring phase of each turn, which was pushing me faster and faster to an absolute victory. In a way, it was a mercy killing the way that accelerated his loss.
So, all in all, I really enjoyed the experience. But I did win a crushing victory, so of course I would.
Well, that was fast.
I got a second game of Hands in the Sea in last night! We switched sides with me playing Carthage. I came out the gate swinging, cut off Roman supply out of Italy using my starting fleet of warships, recruited some cavalry to raze their colonies while I had them bottled up, and just generally kept the pressure on while I leisurely expanded. Won in 4 turns with an automatic victory based on being more than 25 VPs ahead during the scoring phase of a turn.
Rome's biggest problem was with supply being cut off, they could start a battle with Syracuse (which is a vital supply point in Sicily), but they couldn't reinforce the battle to win it which requires supply lines, until they disrupted my naval blockade. They wouldn't need to destroy my fleet, they'd only need to build at least one warship, and then contest control of the blockade. That's enough to re-establish supply for reinforcing a land battle. After they take Syracuse, they'd have a local supply point on Sicily and could have ground me down with their legions. Unfortunately, Rome was caught flat footed by the dire consequences of being out of supply, and instead of building a fleet and contesting control of the waters, spent time recruiting legions they couldn't send, and pursuing deck optimizations that lacked actual bite in the conflict. There was an attempt to finally break my blockade, and it bought Rome a single turn of supply in Sicily. But it was insufficient, and I sank their fleet in short order. By the end of the game Rome was drawing their entire deck into their hand every turn... without having valid or meaningful actions they could use all those cards on. Alas.
We're already planning another rematch, where I will probably take Rome again and need to resist the strategy I just absolutely dominated with. Wish me luck.
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