Board Game: Watergate

Michelle and I are road-tripping this month, so we took a couple of two-player games along. So here's one!

The Game: Watergate
The Publisher: Capstone Games
Time: 15 minutes or so
Players: Me and Michelle

And we were actually playing in a hotel, how meta

Game Play: As mentioned, it's a two-player game. One player plays the evil Nixon Administration, the other plays the heroic Washington Post. The game board is basically a big murder-board:

The object, for the Administration, is to build up five points of "momentum" and get to the next election, while for the Post, it's to uncover enough evidence to force impeachment. That's accomplished by marking pieces of the evidence in the appropriate colors from informants (the photos at the margins of the board) to Nixon. 

Every round, you play cards to move tokens - the white initiative token, the red momentum, and the evidence tokens - up and down the research track. The round goes until both players are out of cards (one starts the round with 5, the other with 4, depending who has initiative that round). At that point, you collect anything on your side of 0, while anything still on 0 is discarded. If you get the momentum token, you add it to your momentum card (which for the Post has knock-on effects after two points, but really the best effect is that if you've got it, Nixon doesn't). If you get the initiative token, you get initiative the next round.

Michelle-Nixon ponders her options

Evidence tokens get added to the board as evidence (if you're the Post) or face-down as blockers (if you're Nixon). It's possible to flip them or move them after they're placed, too. What that means, then, is that you've playing Nixon your focus needs to be on getting momentum, but also blocking the Post from using evidence effectively. If you're the Post, vice versa - you need to open up informants and link them to Nixon, but you can't ignore momentum or you'll lose in five rounds.

Journalism in progress

Opinions: I like this game! It's a fun two-player game, which is handy, and it's got enough moving parts to feel interesting to play but it's not so complex that you have to devote a long time to setup or game play (once we knew how to play, setting it up took all of a minute). It's got some nice strategic elements, the production designs are solid, and of course if you're playing Nixon you can go "ARRRROOOO" like Billy West playing him on Furturama. 

NIXON ALWAYS WINS!

Keep? Yep.