Hearts of Iron: The Board Game is a game of grand strategy warfare, tactical battles, and shrewd diplomatic choices based on the Hearts of Iron video game franchise released on PC by Paradox Interactive.
In the game, you lead one of five nations — United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, or the German Reich — during World War II, but will you re-enact history as it happened...or play out an alternative timeline, leading your nation down a new path? During set-up, you pair your nation with one of a suite of ideologies. You might choose, for example, to enact real history by playing the German Reich under fascism — or you could return the Kaiser to power and play the German Reich under monarchism. Each ideology has access to different focus decks, which will affect your resources and your routes to victory; these cards are played turn to turn and can influence everything from scoring victory points, to making lucrative trade agreements or declarations of war.
Each board game nation has its own player boards, ideologies, cards, tokens, and minis. Each player's tracker board shows their current supply levels of vital resources, such as political power, stability, production, and manpower.
At the start of each round, you receive resources based on how many territories you control with resource icons and factories. (You also gain resources during the game for trade agreements and engine cards that grant bonus resources.) You must pay to upkeep your stability, or pay even more to improve it. High stability grants bonuses to your nation, but with a high cost — although possibly not higher than letting your stability plummet.
You have a political board that shows all playable and non-playable nations, and you use it to manage who you're allied with, who you're at war with, and everything in between. During the political phase, you can spend political power to adjust your alliances and conflicts; for each point you spend, you move one of your flag tokens, changing your political stance with one other nation. Changing your stance aggressively will eventually lead to a state of war, whereas changing your stance peacefully will lead to forming an alliance — and the more your ideologies match, the less political power you need.
While at war with another nation, when your units move into their territory, you'll start combat. If you win, you'll conquer and take control of that territory, which is the fastest way to gain more resources. While in an alliance with another nation, you can move your units through their territory without starting a fight. You can also deploy units in your allies' territory! By forming an alliance, you can send units across the board to invade a distant nation.
The game lasts six rounds, covering 1939-1944, and you need the most points to win.
Territory Building, Video Game Theme, Wargame, World War II · Area Majority / Influence, Campaign / Battle Card Driven, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Dice Rolling, Worker Placement
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