Shrapnel Games Blog

It’s always nice to come home to a box on your porch. Those boxes contain many things: promises, acquisitions, that forgotten feeling of a December morning in your youth. Even though you know what’s in the box—you are the one who set the wheels in motion to have it delivered to your door, after all—the thrill of cracking it open is one of life’s simple pleasures.

Today the box held Field Commander: Rommel and Growing Hunger, the expansion for one of my favorite games last year, Last Night On Earth. Very initial impressions follow.

Field Commander: Rommel is the first in a series of solitaire games from Dan Verssen, best known for all his card games over the years (and apparently almost killing GMT with Flagship, a game that I thought was actually fairly good). Covering three campaigns (France, North Africa, Normandy) the player controls the Germans and the system the Allies.

Upon opening the box I was almost knocked cold by the stench emanating. If you thought Duel in the Dark had a bad odor, you ain’t smelled anything yet! Apparently the print ship where it was printed also doubles as a chemical warfare plant. I have no idea if it’s the glue or ink, but wow, talk about an offensive smell!

The components are decent, although the maps border on DTP quality and the counters have a gloss coat to them. It’s almost as if they were laminated, but not really.

I won’t get a chance to give her a test spin until sometime later and will try to post some impressions then on actual gameplay. You can find the rules online. They’re fairly short and easy enough to digest without having the actual game handy.

Growing Hunger hits all the marks an expansion should hit. More characters, more scenarios, more cards, more pieces, more, more, more.

Everything has the same high quality production values as seen in the base game (and unfortunately the expansion costs almost as much). I won’t get to put it into use until the weekend, but from looking it over the expansion avoids messing anything up while adding quite a few cool new things (some of the new cards for use by the zombie player are particularly nasty). If you own LNOE the expansion is a no-brainer.

Mmmm…brrraaaaiiinnnssss…

Yeah, that wasn’t an obvious way to go…