Armchair Dragoons Reviews Brief Border Wars II

Brant Guillory, 1 April 2026

There have been a variety of threads in a variety of places asking the public “What’s a topic you wish there were more wargames about?” and then the endless one-upmanship of “haha, here’s a war you’ve never heard of” unfolds. Inevitably, there’s always at least one smart-ass that chimes with The Great Emu War, without bothering to check that there’s already a half-dozen games on that one. While Brief Border Wars II has been completed and on pre-order for several years just waiting for a release date, you don’t have to squint hard to imagine Brian Train flipping through those threads and thinking “challenge accepted!”

We’ve covered Train’s first foray into this space when the original Brief Border Wars was released, and the new quad sticks close to the formula: conflict you probably haven’t heard of; largely undecided battles that return to the status quo ante; and enough variations on the theme that each battle still feels original even with the same underlying engine driving them. In fact, the game sticks so closely to the original engine that you can use the decks of cards from 1 & 2 interchangeably.

What’s in the box?

Much like the original quad, you get 4 games in the box. There’s a common set of series rules (functionally identical to the first one, but some verbiage cleaned up); 4 sets of game-specific rules with setup info, unique random events, and rules specific to that conflict; 4 separate maps – nothing 2-sided here! – with some key info around the margins; a deck of cards; a sheet of counters; and (thankfully) enough dice to actually complete most combat rounds in a single roll.

click images to enlarge

The maps are area movement, controlled by the cards. Terrain is indicated with the symbology in the middle of the spaces. Roads & rivers are noted where relevant, as are some national boundaries.

Units are rated for their combat value (no movement factors as they’re controlled by the cards), and the symbols are relevant to certain unit effects depending on the specific scenario. Aviation units have silhouettes but they’re decorative; it’s the “B” or “F” or “R” initial on the counter that matters. There are some scenario-specific counters that we’ll talk about game-by-game, below.

All-in-all, this is exactly what you’d expect from a quad sequel to another quad that was designed from the ground up to bring back the fast-playing, low-density, shared-rules afternoon wargame.

 

So what are the “brief border wars”?

We had a longer discussion with Brian Train about this on our podcast where he laid out his criteria for the kids of short, sharp conflicts that fit into the brief border war model. As noted above, the majority of these conflicts went nowhere. There was a bunch of shooting across the border, with almost no change in the situation on the ground once the shooting was done. Most of them lasted days; almost none lasted multiple months. The forces involved were not high-quality troops that were waiting for the right blitzkrieg to unleash their inner competence. And for the wargamer, they make for interesting tactical challenges without a big overhead of rules or setup.

Whereas the original quad included 4 fights that were all post-WW2 (3 from the Cold War years, 1 from the 2000s) the new one is 2 games that are pre-WW2 and 2 games that are in 1940, which is barely into WW2.. Grouping them even more tightly, everything but Nonmonham overlaps the Balkans! This leads to a lot of hills & trees out there on the maps, resulting in battles where the defenders almost always get some extra dice.

 

The Game Model

Players alternate card play to drive the action in this game, with buckets-o’-dice combat, and easy-to-count victory conditions. Games typically last 7 turns, which is based primarily on the size of the card deck, but could be shortened by random events.

Card play

The key mechanic driving the game is the sort-of-shared deck of cards that gets dealt at the start of each turn. Six total cards are dealt at the start of each turn, but the distribution might not be an even 3-3 split. Each card has either a gray or white stripe on the back, with each player getting one or the other. Some turns you get that perfect 3-3 split. Other turns it might go 5-1. Now the overall deck is perfectly balanced, so if the dreaded 5-1 turn comes up early, there’s now a significantly-unbalanced number of cards left in the stack for the other player.

Each card has 2 values on it: combat & movement. For movement, the card determines the total number of unit-spaces you can move. With a “Movement 6” card you can move different 6 units one space, from anywhere on the map; you can move them again with another card in the same turn, though. With no stacking limits (unless a specific scenario specifies otherwise) you can pile up large numbers of counters in a single space but without a card to drive them, they’re just all camping at the same trailhead. Units may move into, and jointly occupy, spaces with enemy units. If those enemy units are disrupted, you may continue to move through those spaces, but even a single undisrupted enemy unit is enough to make the space “sticky” and force you to stop, even if no one engaged in subsequent combat.

 

For combat, the number determines the number of units that may attack when you play the card, but that total number does not need to all be in the same battle. You can turn a “Combat 6” card into 6 different 1-unit battles if you’re so inclined (hint: that’s a bad idea).

There are 2 additional types of cards: random events, and special actions.

There are 2 random event cards in the deck, one of each color. When they are dealt out at the start of each turn, they are resolved immediately using a simple die roll table in each set of scenario-specific rules. Random events could range from bad weather that grounds aircraft to supply issues that limit how many units the cards can move to potentially shortening the game by a turn. And if you read back a couple of paragraphs, it’s possible for you to be on the wrong end of a 5-1 card-deal split, and the one card you get is a random event, leaving you largely helpless for a turn. War is rarely fair.

Each player receives 6 special action cards at the start of the game. These are not shuffled into the deck and are not distributed at random. You can access your 6 random event cards at any time during the card play in the turn. Regardless of the specific scenario being played, these special action cards can be used to recover damaged or disrupted units, or for a special defensive reinforcement maneuver. When it’s your turn for playing a card, you simply declare you’re using a special action card instead of a card from your hand, and execute that action (the defensive reinforcement happens at a specific point in combat instead). Using a special action card does not cost the player one of the cards in-hand; these are played in addition to the cards dealt out at the start of the turn.

The timing of the special action cards being played during the turn is important. There is an admin/bookkeeping “final phase” once all card play is complete during which players will roll to recover damaged or disrupted units, and most players will chance the dice first before deciding whether or not to use a special action card as an “automatic” recovery. The mistake that players will make is rolling to recover 4 disrupted units in a space, failing at all of them, then playing a special action card to recover them all automatically. However, players will try to play this card during the final phase, when no card play occurs. Instead, you have to remember to do this at the start of the next turn, during which your opponent is also playing cards and might get the opportunity to pre-empt your card play, such as attacking your disrupted units before you get the opportunity to ‘undisrupt’ them.

Combat

Each unit has a combat factor, and at its most basic level, the combat model is: roll a number of dice equal to all attacking combat factors and apply hits to the designated defenders, while the defender rolls a number of dice equal to all defending combat factors plus the terrain and apply hits to the designated attackers. Whoever rolled the dice decides where the hits are applied. Hits are scored on a 5-6 on a d6.

 

Now, there are nuances to this, of course. Disrupted units cannot attack, but may defend. Units must be in the same space as the defending unit in order to attack them (so it takes a “movement” card to get into the space and then a separate “combat” card for the battle). Attackers will designate all attacking and defending units in the space, and it need not include everything. Certain units may not be able to fight in certain terrain. A defender’s special action card played to reinforce a defense might add units from the same space, or even bring them in from adjacent spaces. Finally, aircraft (if present in the game) might be added to the battle space, which could necessitate air-to-air combat before they can reinforce any ground combat.

 

Combat tends to push and poke and move some counters around the map, but it is not particularly bloody. Disrupted units stay on the map. Most damaged units are returned to a rear area on the map where they are able to be reconstituted. It’s rare for units to be completely removed from the game, but that’s in line with the underlying schtick of most of these conflicts – there were very few decisive results out of any of them.

 

Maps & Geography

Knut Grunitz’s maps are visually appealing, and can feel a little dense until you get used to the fact that you can ignore a lot of the ‘bottom’ layer in the artwork and focus on the area boundaries, the terrain circles in the middle of the spaces, and the roads. The boundaries and/or rivers all have slightly different effects depending on the specific scenario being played, but the other features are all consistent.

Each player has a ‘rear area’ that is largely out of range for their opponent (occasional air raids notwithstanding). This area is the marshalling yard for units entering or returning to the battlefield, as well the wellspring to which all supply need to be traced. Depending on the specific scenario, that might involve roads, or simply a chain of spaces without undisrupted enemy units.

The terrain circles will specify if the space contains forests, hills (or both), and/or an urban space, as well as any victory points gained for holding that space. Of all of these nuggets of info, the one that seems to get lost the most is the “urban” terrain indicator (black vs white half-circle on top of the other terrain). Fortunately, in Brief Border Wars II, there’s not a whole lot of those.

 

The Individual Games

This quad contains 4 games that are all WW2-and-earlier, which is one reason you’ve got rifles instead of AK-47s on the card artwork. All four games do share a similarity with their vol 1 brethren – each game is essentially a single scenario. There might be some variability in the unit setup, and they all have some optional rules that can be used, but there is basically one battle in each. Compare that to the venerable SPI Quads, where each individual game had anywhere from 3-7 scenarios in the game-specific rules. Now, some might argue that it’s not completely fair to hold up something like the WestWall quad against the Brief Border Wars series, where you’re comparing full campaigns against weeks-long “wars” that were ultimately unentschieden. But Brian Train is also a scholar of the quads and fully understands the form factor he’s playing with here.

Of the four games in Brief Border Wars II, each offers some slight variations on the common themes of the system.

Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol has the easier map of the four, as there’s virtually no terrain out there aside from a few spaces with hills. There is a river that offers complications for crossing, as well as acting as a maneuver control feature for aircraft. What this game does offer is a twist on the special action cards. The Japanese player can conduct a night attack with dismounted infantry without fear of return fire; the Soviet player has artillery bombardments that can significantly impact defending forces. It’s a perfect example of how to build scenario-specific chrome into a basic game engine.

 

Second Balkan War has the Bulgarians facing off with the Serbians & Greeks, but also has other European powers represented in a political mechanism that can add/subtract victory points at the end of the game regardless of the state of forces on the ground. This one also features a bifurcated side (not unlike the split between Chinese forces in the Third Indochina War game in the first quad) as the Serbian & Greek forces don’t cross their own borders. The random events in this game can shorten the overall scenario; rolling that event twice makes this impossible for the Bulgarians.

 

The Seven-Day War/Teschen rolls out two new features of the game system. First, there are some specific locations on the map (mines) that are bonus VPs but only if they can snag them all. Second, this game introduces some asset markers – machine gun units, armored trains, and cavalry – that were forces too small to stay on the map with their own counters, but still impactful enough to be present in battle. Players gain asset chits at the start of a turn and can commit them to any battle without moving the counters around on the map.

 

The Italo-Greek War is pretty ‘wide open’ in the constraints on the players, but absolutely not in the terrain over which they’re fighting. Expect that any defender is going to rolling 2 additional dice in every combat from the terrain and just factor that into your plans for the entire game. This one is also the game where the counter contrast with the underlying map is one of the easier to see during gameplay.

 

A Note on Dice

It’s not uncommon for combat in this game for players to roll 11 dice vs 8 dice.  The original game shipped with . . .  two 😑

Thankfully, this one shipped with a dozen.  But it also ships with a cheat sheet that gives you a method of rolling buckets of dice with just those 2 dice.  That would’ve been much more useful in the first game, but per Brian Train, he didn’t learn about it until after the first game was released.

 

Final Assessment

Ultimately, there are some minor nits to pick with the games, but that is true of virtually every game on the market. This quad is a perfect follow-up to the first one. It maintains the core underlying system that can be taught in about 20 minutes, and augments that core with interesting – and scenario-appropriate – twists in each individual game. From the Japanese infantry infiltrations under cover of darkness to the Great Power disapproval of yet another Balkan war, the chrome offers good player options without burdening them with an excess of rules.

It’s a fine extension of an excellent game engine into some new conflicts that you didn’t know anything about, giving an opportunity to learn something new and play a fun game while doing so.

 

 

You can chat about this game in the Modern World section of our discussion forums

---

Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.