Strike is a game about Lech Wałęsa – a Polish electrician who became a trade-union activist, co-founded Solidarity (the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union) and eventually went on to become President of Poland.  The game focuses on the Polish strikes of 1980 and the agreement reached between the workers and the government. (Yes, really.)

This theme may sound unusual even compared to some other board games, but the historical Polish theme is more understandable when you know the game is by Karol Madaj the designer of Kolejka (Queue) – one of my favourite games ever – who designs games for Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.  One of their goals is to mark important moments in Polish history.

Theme-aside, Strajk is fundamentally a deck-building game mechanic but with a board and a bit if a difference too.  (If you’re not familiar with deck-building games such as Dominion, players each have their own deck and play cards to add better cards to their deck, take special actions, remove weaker cards from their deck, etc.  Whenever their deck is empty, they shuffle their discard pile and start drawing from it again so their deck builds as they play.)   Read the rest of this entry »

Strike is a game about Lech Wałęsa – a Polish electrician who became a trade-union activist, co-founded Solidarity (the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union) and even became President of Poland.  The game focuses on the Polish strikes of 1980 and the agreement reached between the workers and the government.

The game is by the designer of Kolejka (Queue) which is one of my favourite games and which also has a historical Polish theme.  The game itself has a deck-building game mechanic at its centre but the game has a difference.

On their turn, a player uses their cards to move Lech Wałęsa around the board and gain better cards by using cards in their hand.  The first player to gain 2 agreement cards wins (in the real events, 21 demands were made of the government by the workers and these cards represent agreement to these demands).

The reason this seems a bit different is because there is only one Lech Wałęsa on the board and each player continues moving them from wherever they have been left by the previous player.

Read the rest of this entry »