‘Halls of Hegra’ Board Game Review
I must admit that whilst I play relatively few solo games, when I do play them, I tend to get quite into them. This can depend on the subject matter, but where Halls of Hegra is concerned, subject matter is not a problem. In this specifically solo game (no cooperative or competitive modes), the player will lead a group of Norwegian soldiers and volunteers in a makeshift defence of the ancient fortress of Hegra – inspired by a true battle that lasted roughly 25 days with a pyrrhic victory for the German army.
Halls of Hegra is a desperately tough game, with the battle represented in five increasingly dire stages. During the first stage, Mobilisation, the player recruits volunteers, attempts to set up supply routes and repairs the fortress. During the First Attack, this continues to some extent, except that German forces will make harrying charges against the walls. During the First and Second Sieges and the Last Stand, massed German forces will throw themselves against the walls, whilst artillery and airstrikes will take a steady toll on the defenders.
Somehow, the design of Halls of Hegra does a fantastic job of representing the relative losses exceptionally well, whilst maintaining a sense of desperate realism at all times. The player must manage doubt, morale, supplies and casualties, and every defender counts – whether officers, regular soldiers, medics or volunteers taken from the local populace. Losing just a handful of troops (which you certainly will) can have a devastating effect on morale (as well as your combat effectiveness) however the German troops will keep coming in droves just as it seems they must have in real life.
In terms of mechanisms, Halls of Hegra is relatively complex because of how much there is to manage, but thankfully designer Petter Schanke Olsen has used common ideas across a number of different areas on the board to help simplify, and each in-game round (which represents a day of the battle) is broken down into logical, numbered phases. The rounds (or days, I’ll use these terms interchangeably) differ slightly as the battle progresses, and during mobilisation and the first attack, you’ll use an overlay board that is eventually removed when the main siege begins. Whilst this is a bit daunting at first, as with other mechanisms in Halls of Hegra it works well.
Whilst all of the phases (mobilisation, attack, siege and last stand) involve different cards and in some cases different tracks or locations on the board (bearing in mind the mobilisation overlay flips to the first attack, and is then removed for the 1st siege and beyond), the systems across the entire game are common. During mobilisation, you will draw a card each day, resolve some text (perhaps increasing doubt, or maybe injuring a defender) and then manage tracks accordingly.
You’ll then add doubt tokens (based on the position of your doubt track) into a recruit bag and draw from it. As the days go on, more doubt will be added to the bag and if you draw one, you must stop recruiting. On day one, it’s not uncommon to draw four recruits (the maximum), but by the first day of the attack phase, you’ll be lucky to draw more than one (the minimum.) Recruits are added to your ready pool, and after this you can spend supplies (based on your number of supplies and their value on the supply track) to refresh troops that were tired the previous day.
Next, you’ll assign troops, volunteers, hunters, medics and officers from your ready pool to do different tasks. These include firing the guns (once repaired), digging snow to reveal and add new rooms or items to the fortress, repairing damage (to guns, rooms and the walls), establishing supply runs (during mobilisation only), going out for supplies and then a number of other increasingly niche actions. During mobilisation, you’ll have a couple of days where you feel that you have just enough men to do what you need to, and priority asks include repairing the walls, repairing the gun and ideally, digging out one or two of the key rooms (including a second gun.) That said, if you don’t also establish supply routes and get at least some supplies, you won’t be able to later!
When the first attack begins, you’ll be committing men to the wall and the gun(s) almost every turn, and you may also have enough casualties to need to use your medic (if you’ve been able to recruit one) to healing. From this point in the game onwards, Halls of Hegra just feels desperately hard, and yet it can be extremely satisfying to get through the day sometimes. More event cards will come with every day, more casualties will mount up, supplies will dwindle and morale will drop. When this happens, you’ll need to draw and resolve low morale cards during the morale step, and these can cause casualties, desertion or for despair cards to be added to the high morale deck (which typically provides bonuses, should you ever have high enough morale to draw from it.)
By the later stages of the siege, you will be exercising every cell in your brain just to stay in the game. Your men will be dead and dying, your guns will be jammed or destroyed, the rooms you dug out will have been hit and you’ll be facing overwhelming German forces marching towards your now barely defended walls. I’m happy to admit that I’ve never won a game of Halls of Hegra, but in order to win you simply need to survive to the end and keep your tracker away from the “Unconditional Surrender” box. If it finishes anywhere else, then at the very least, you forced the German’s to a standstill and, just as they did in real life, the German army will allow the Norwegian force to surrender with honour.
The look and feel of Halls of Hegra is just fantastic – it is as authentic as it could possibly be when it comes to representing a terrible battle through cardboard and wooden tokens. As a solo game, it offers variability in almost every way possible except for its core systems, which lends itself perfectly to being a game that you can play over and over again, learn intimately and still be surprised by. As an example, you may have a game where almost all the card draws and chit pulls (recruiting, German patrols, German bombardments) go your way, and whilst it will still be tough, at least you have a chance of winning. Alternatively, you might have the opposite, and an experienced player would still have a chance to triumph even if it were not the perfect outcome.
As solo games go, Halls of Hegra is among the best (of admittedly quite few) that I have played. The production is excellent, the instructions are very well done and the mechanical flow of the game is very logical and methodical. Most of the weight here is in the decision space, and high randomness in the right places makes for a very challenging, enjoyable and replayable experience. If you have an interest in solo games, the lesser told stories of World War II or just WWII in general, I highly recommend Halls of Hegra.
