Preview: Halls of Hegra: A Solitaire Tower Defense

A narrative so strong you’ll feel the cold in your bones

Background and Overview

Several months ago I happened to notice on Twitter a call for playtesting a solitaire game from Tompet Games called Halls of Hegra. The artwork stood out, as did an endorsement from one of my favorite designers, David Thompson. Designer Petter Schanke Olsen was very quick to respond and sent me the rule and files to test via Tabletop Simulator.

What I found was a solitaire wargame, with some very Euro-style mechanics, that was absolutely dripping with theme. I enjoyed the playtest so much that I followed Tompet’s progress on the game and when I saw it was getting ready to launch, I asked if I could do a preview of the game given how much I enjoyed my time with it.

For those that don’t know, Tompet Games is a Norwegian publisher of historical-based games. They have a handful of titles under their belt with Kill the King (2016) a 2 player medieval strategy game and Donning the Purple (2018) an asymmetrical worker placement game set in ancient Rome. What struck me about Halls of Hegra was that this felt like a much more personal game, one set on a battle of early World War II about Norwegian forces tried to hold back the Nazi war machine.

Battle of Hegra Fortress: 1940

I’m always on the lookout for a game that can open my eyes to a conflict that I might not have heard of before. The Battle of Hegra Fortress is definitely not something that I covered in school when discussing the Second World War. As a broad overview, in 1940 as Germany invaded Norway, a group of approximately 50 volunteer soldiers took refuge in an abandoned fort and began to recruit volunteers from local villages as well as raid the nearby German-controlled airfield for supplies. Eventually, a force of approximately 250 was able to secure and hold the fortress through snow and blizzard-like conditions from Mid April 1940 through early May before surrendering as supplies ran low and Allies retreated from southern Norway.

Halls of Hegra looks to recreate this battle by walking through the early phases of the battle where the defenders mobilized, recruited more soldiers, workers, and medics as well as sent scouts to nearby villages and airfields to gather supplies. Later phase of the game change into first an attack on the compound and later increasingly difficult sieges that look to break the will of the defenders. The goal of the game is for you as the player to survive 11 days until the end of the second siege and the historic end of the battle without losing too many forces or morale.

Game Overview

Turn Structure

One of the fascinating things about this game is how it changes as you play it. While each individual turn is broken into three phases: Event phase, Morning Phase, and Day Phase; the overall game has a story arc to it:

• Mobilisation (English spelling): Day 1-3
• First Attack: Day 4-6
• Siege 1: Day 7-8
• Siege 2: Day 9-11

Each period of the game has slightly different mechanics as the make up of your forces, resources as well as the enemy change over time.

Physical Board

The layout of the board is very very nice, even for a TTS representation. I can only imagine how great this game will look sitting on a table! The overall style is made to look much like the desk of the commander, with a map of the area, reports on the status of workers, and even shell casings, and a firearm for aesthetic touches.

The other part that is very neat is how the board state changes on how you defend the wall as the battle progresses. Not only do your turns have different actions based on what part of the battle you are in, but the board state will change as well.

For example, during Mobilisation your focus is on building the volunteers you’ll take with you into the later game. The Germans haven’t started coming at you and this is essentially the calm before the storm.

Attack 1 you’ll start to see Germans make their first few attacks towards you, but largely these will test your defenses but likely not break them, especially if you did well preparing in the early turns

By the time the Sieges start, however, you will be stretched, attacks come in stronger waves, your supplies will start dwindling, and your ability to keep all your stations staffed will start a snowball effect that you’ll find hard to contain as you’ll likely have many things you need to do, with too precious few actions to take.

Phases

Event Phase

Each turn starts with an event phase. During this phase, you draw a card from a deck that is unique to what part of the battle you are in as signified on the turn track. While there are some subtle differences based on the day and which part of the battle you are in there is some uniformity to the cards:

1. Each card will have a weather icon: Weather will control how many spaces on the map your runners can move, also on cards with a snow flake icon, the snow marker will move along its track to the right. If it ever gets past 5 then you draw a hit token from the hit bag (this is usually a bad thing you Do NOT want to do in the game).
2. An event text will appear on the card instructing you on action(s) to perform
3. Along the right hand side will be icons of each defender type. These are used if you have to take an injury, you would start at the icon at the top of the card and work down based on the number of injuries you must take
4. the bottom of the card will have icons that specify unique actions for that group of days corresponding the phase of the battle you are in. For example in Mobilisation and 1st Attack you will draw from the recruit bag which is how you build up your forces in the early turn and will eventually set on the make up of your defenders for the late game.

Morning Phase

The morning phase is all about reading your defenders and placing them in the spaces where they will take action this turn. This is the one phase that is universal across all days and sections of the battle. Essentially it works in this sequence:

1. Move any defenders from the Rest area of your supply to Ready. These units will be available this turn)
2. Spend supplies/Morale to move defenders from Tired to Ready. You can spend resources to get extra units this turn, however supplies are hard to get, and the number of units you refresh per supply will drop as the battle wears on and supplies run thin
3. Move two defenders from Tired to Rest. These defenders will be moved to ready next turn
4. Move Defenders from Ready to Action Spaces

Day Phase

This phase is broken down into many steps, Some are unique to which section of days you are in, such as during Mobilisation, you won’t fire at troops, but will open supply routes, and negotiate to remove both fear and doubt. That said, most of the actions are available throughout all days/turns of the game such as:

Fire Artillery:

This action requires two soldiers but allows you to either fire on infantry advancing on your position, remove patrols or artillery from the map, or in the late game hit Værnes Airfield giving you a choice of bonus actions, however depending on where you shoot you must roll to see if your gun jams, requiring repair action to free that section again

Supply Runs and Patrols:

This action allows you to send out runners to gather supplies and bring them back to your base, however, German patrols can stop your progress, you can choose to try to sneak past, or if you have a solider, attack the patrol, however, this can cause your suspicion level to rise or defenders to get injured giving a push your luck mechanic to the game.

Fortress Maintenance

There are several action sunder this section that do things to improve your base:

A. Shovel Snow: To try and prepare the fortress for assault it was critical to assign people to shovel out sections of the base. To do this assign workers to this action, for each worker (double for hunters) you move the snow marker two spaces to the left, if it ever passes 1 you reveal a snow card, this represents digging out supplies or new rooms in the fortress out.

B. Repair: This action is vital, many areas of the base have damage tokens, or may take damage tokens through gameplay. This action allows you to remove the damage or in the case of jammed guns, unjam the gun readying it for the next attack.

C. Bolster: This action allows you to add a Miss Tile to the hit bag. Very important as artillery will have you pulling from this bag in the late game, and miss tiles effectively cancel an otherwise bad effect. Also they allow you to raise your overall defense level, which is critical to defending against infantry attacks

D. Promote: Brining any defender here along with an officer will allow you to change a volunteer or hunter to a solider

E. Inspire: this action will raise your overall morale

Infirmary

As defenders get injured they will take up a bed space one by one for 3 total. You can assign workers to treat wounded defenders moving them up to the top of the column will then move them back to the tired section of your supply. however for each defender injured without bed space they must go into the waiting area, at the end of each turn each bed space will improve one spot, while each token in waiting will degrade, if they reach the bottom the defender is killed and placed in the morgue.

Morale

The last step of the Day phase is the morale check. There are several negative modifiers as well as hit bag draws and events that might have already affected the morale. After modifiers are applied draw cards from either High or Low morale which give benefits or penalties and change based on what day your turn is in currently.

Lastly, check for patrols to be added as well as some special events: Coup, Retreat, and Last stand then advance the turn marker and start a new turn unless you are on turn 11 then pull the last stand card resolve and do a victory check.

Gameplay:

I’ve played Halls of Hegra now a handful of times. While I’m not a huge fan of TTS, even with the fiddly nature of the medium I still have a blast with each playthrough. This is a game that has really thoughtfully represented and abstracted a lot of elements from this battle.

Recruit Bag Building

In the Mobilisation phase you add doubt markers equal to your doubt track to the recruit bag. This represents the local volunteer’s doubt in their abilities to defend themselves. Then you make a choice to draw up to 4 discs from the bag. If you draw four volunteers they all move to ready, however if you draw a doubt marker all previous tokens are removed to the reserve and the doubt place back in the bag. This bag building and push your luck mechanism is really clever for a war game. It shows that doubt is such a psychological factor that it can cause your stream of recruits to vanish, not even back for a draw next turn but removed from the bag altogether.

Though you don’t add more doubt during the 1st attack, you will continue to draw in those turns, but by Siege 1, whatever forces you have assembled will be the forces you have for the remainder of the game. Pushing your luck is an element that is required to make the long game here.

Attacks and Defending

During the 1st attack and Siege 1 you see infantry start to appear. The game uses a very abstract but cool method to show the zones of approach to the fortress. The enemies will spawn into the lowest sector and any overflow move to the next closest. then they all attack with a D6 rolled for each un-suppressed attacker. After each result you move a solider into the corresponding action box in that sector, once all sectors have been rolled for you resolve each action box in a column. Grenades will degrade defenses for 2+, soldiers in hit, will hit defenders with each level of defense blocking one hit. And the move action will move those solders up to the next sector.

You then get a chance during the day phase to attack back from your defense positions, but only soldiers have the maximum range to hit attackers at long distances, showing their skill as trained combatants, Hunters can hit at medium range due to proficiency in firearms even if not in combat, and volunteers can only hit up close. The nice thing here is that all die rolls hit, but 1-3 only suppress attackers, and 4-6 remove them. You’ll find in the late stages 5-6 defenders are added routinely so other actions such as machine gun, artillery or even reckless defense can be used to take out multiple defenders, but these will eat up your precious actions in the late game.

Seiges

The final difficulty comes in the last five turns during the Sieges. These rounds will place artillery onto the map as well as air strike tokens into the hit bag. Each turn will start with draws from the hit bag equal to the number on the artillery track. Further artillery tokens drawn will increase this level, and air strike tokens have damage effects such as loss of morale or injured defenders. During these turns managing misses, attacking artillery, and the airfield to remove air tokens prior to being added to the bag is key to victory.

Victory conditions

The point of the game is to survive, though during the morale check at the end of each turn there are several conditions that might drop your surrender marker. If this marker ever reaches unconditional surrender, you lose immediately. If not, and you survive through the end of turn 11 and through the last stand card you must have at least the number of surviving defenders as marked by your position on the surrender track to win.

While this sounds easy, I’ll also say other things will drop your surrender marker, such as having to draw a hit from the hit bag and the bag being empty, or drawing an artillery tile but not having a token left to place. That is to say that managing your surrender track is vital. It starts on honorable surrender so you only have a couple spots to sacrifice if you do nothing to improve this early on.

Impressions

As you might have noticed I am a big fan of this game. It has a lot of things I look for in a historical game:

1. A topic I knew nothing about before and a chance to learn about
2. Emerging narrative gameplay: you really feel for your forces and the struggle as you build up only to be whittled back down by the German war machine
3. Brutally difficult solo game: I don’t want my solo game to be too easy, this one will be tough, I’ve played three times and made it to turn 11 once, but forced to unconditional surrender before the end of the turn
4. Innovative mechanics: bag building and worker placement aren’t the first things you think of for solo wargames, so this grabbed my attention right away with that.

The artwork is also fantastic for this game. Again, I’ve only seen this on TTS, but the final art is very nice! It’s thematic and really gets you into the game. You feel the brutal cold as defenders work tirelessly to dig out their fortress to prepare for a tough fight.

The other thing I love about the game is how the turns change. You won’t be doing the same thing but creating this nice arc each game of building your forces, skirmishing the Germans, falling back, and trying desperately to hold through a long siege. The way the board changes with the phases of the battle is really neat as well, adding to the visual part of the game. The other very narrative element is the fact that the fortress was largely abandoned and had to be mobilized very quickly. This is shown by most rooms and positions starting with damage. A lot of early actions will be digging snow to try and find extra rooms in the snow deck as well as repair actions to free up spaces. This adds to that element of defenders digging in and prepping for a hard battle.

I also want to take time to talk about the use of abstraction in the game. I think the use of bag building to create the doubt push your luck mechanic and having to recruit your forces early and hope you got enough to last the end game is really neat. The idea that doubt might cause your potential volunteers to abandon your cause is brutal in the game mechanically and from a morale standpoint. I envision these regular townspeople, farmers, hunter, looking around and thinking the task was too big and deserting. The way this mechanism shows this is very neat and clever and unique for a wargame.

If I were to put some negatives on the game, first off the rule book, while not hard, isn’t laid out the best. Mostly this is due to the nature of how different elements pop up based on the turn and what phase of the battle you are in. With that small things like, where do I find an infantry attack, or how do I injury a defender were buried inside of different phases and not as clear to find. That said the player aid that shows the break down is very helpful with page numbers to the rules pointing out where to look.

The other negative is that the game might be a little fiddly with all the tokens, bags, card decks dice rolling, etc. I don’t mind it in a bigger game like this, but some folks like a more minimalist design, this might not be what you are looking for.

Final thoughts

Hopefully, by the time you read this, the Kickstarter will have launched and if you like what you read I really hope you back it. This is a game that deserves to hit tables. I’ve seen comparisons to Robinson Crusoe and in a way it reminds me of Valiant Defense games by David Thompson. That said this is something very cool and very narrative. If I had any complaints or cautions, there are a lot of cards, tokens, and fiddly bits to this one. I’ve only played on TTS, but I suspect this will take up some space and take a bit to set up and run through as the board changes and new elements are added through the game. That won’t be for everyone, as will the story as some folks might not want to play a game based on WW2. That said I know I’m excited for this one, and can’t wait to finally see this in person!

*No review copy was provided for this one, I reached out and asked the designer if I could do a preview based on my own playtesting experience