Pax Pamir Second Edition Review – A Beautiful Game That’s Hard to Love

Pax Pamir Second Edition is a board game that explores the power struggles of the “The Great Game“. A 19th-century period of distrust, diplomatic intrigue, and regional wars within Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. Even though it never eventuated into a full-scale war, Russia and Britain skirmished over the region looking to win a strategic foothold within central Asia.

That’s as deep as I’m going into the reality of Pax Pamir Second Edition. Because my Australian education stopped teaching history around 1901 and only included Britain, America, and Australia.

Now, before continuing, it’s important to acknowledge that although this board game is a lot of fun. The impact of the events depicted was severe, and their reverberations are still felt today. We’re not going to dwell on that, but it’s an important note nevertheless.

In Pax Pamir Second Edition, Central Asia finds itself in a conflict between three rival coalitions: Russia, Britain, and Afghan. As an Afghani leader trying to forge a new state, you must ally and manipulate these coalitions in order to thrive.

From the beginning of the game, you choose one of the three coalitions to align with. Then Pax Pamir Second Edition becomes both a standard tableau-builder and anything but. On your turn, you have two actions to perform, and most of the time you draw cards from the market and play them to your court (a row of cards in front of you). Activating the card’s abilities as you do.

These include:

• Building armies for your coalition, or roads for these armies to travel along.
• Placing spies on player cards and setting up a betrayal (where you remove the spy and the card).
• Leveraging the bank for more money.
• Putting tribes on the map, letting you own a region and tax anyone else in the area.

Cards may also have ongoing action spaces that can be used on future turns such as:

• Moving spies, and armies.
• Starting a conflict between armies, tribes, or spies.
• Buying gifts for influence with your current coalition.
• Building roads and armies for your coalition in a region you own.

From here, it gets difficult to explain, and to go in-depth would take up the rest of the review. So, at a high level, you want your coalition to own the most roads and armies of any coalition. Four more in fact. If you manage that by the time a Dominance card is revealed and activated, then your coalition is dominant and you score points based on who has the most influence with that coalition.

On the other hand, if no coalition is dominant, then whoever is most active within the game gets the most points. Determined by how many spies, tribes, and gifts a player has placed.

These Dominance cards are spread evenly throughout the market during setup, and after four are drawn, the game ends. At that point, whoever has the most points wins. However, in one final twist, if a player gets four points ahead of everyone else at any point throughout the game. The game immediately ends with them being declared the winner.

Welcome to The Great Game

As a designer, Cole Wehrle doesn’t design games so much as new ways to play. We’ve seen this with Root and Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile, and it’s in full swing again in Pax Pamir Second Edition. As much as this makes his games exciting to play, it makes them tough to learn. Requiring you to reconfigure your brain just to make sense of how to play.

Pax Pamir Second Edition is no exception. Catching my gaming group off-guard with its complex rules, and their desire to build a nice tableau of cards and call it a day. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Pax Pamir Second Edition, it’s that you can’t shy away from the game board.

If the coalition you’re backing isn’t dominant, then it doesn’t matter what else you do, you’re not getting points. Well, except in the case where no coalitions are dominant. Then you better start planting spies, gifts and tribes to secure your path to victory.

Either way, you need to be laser-focused on the map and adjust to what’s happening. This is easier said than done. With everyone reading and manipulating the same board, it becomes impossible to see the future. Leaving you to plan, scheme, and cross your fingers hoping for the best.

It’s this uncertainty that brings a lot of the fun of Pax Pamir Second Edition. Because instead of us players being powerful, it’s the three coalitions who hold all of the power in the game. Therefore, you’re not only trying to make your coalition more powerful, but also looking for opportunities to swap coalitions if it appears yours isn’t up to scratch.

In one game, all four players ended up backing the Afghan coalition because it was clear they were going to win. While in another, I joined the Russian forces to secure a temporary alliance with another player to topple the incumbent British coalition. Only to have them switch allegiances one turn later.

Once you’ve settled on a coalition to back, you then need to turn your attention to influence. Whoever has the most will earn the most points come Dominance. However, this becomes a battle on two fronts. First is trying to keep your coalition in power, then secondly you’re trying to earn more influence than anyone else. With the already tight action economy of Pax Pamir Second Edition, this leads to some intensely hard decisions.

Feast or famine

Where you might run into issues with Pax Pamir Second Edition, outside of its complexity, is its feast-or-famine gameplay. For instance, money is hard to come by at the best of times and is needed for almost all actions within the game. Yet in one game, I was taxed into submission. Forced to give every penny over to another player, leaving me helpless for a large portion of the game.

Now, this position was born of inexperience. But still, I’ve rarely felt so destitute in a board game.

On the other side, in a different game, I managed to get three court cards of the favoured suit. A mechanic I’ve neglected to mention until now. All actions on the cards matching the favoured suit don’t count towards your two action total. So with these cards, I was making five actions a turn, giving me real control over the map.

Abusing this favoured suit mechanic felt like the only way to have any impact on the map without help from other players. Purely because otherwise you only have two actions, and almost everything is a multi-step process. For instance, if you want to move an army, you must first build a road between regions. If you want to build an army, you must first own a region. etc.

As a result, working together, communicating and negotiating is the magic that makes Pax Pamir Second Edition sing. A table of players not invested in this aspect of the game will make it fall flat.

Before we move away from the topic of feast or famine, we need to quickly talk about the last Dominance card. This card dubiously awards double points. With points already so hard to come by, it means almost everyone has a chance to win with this last card.

This may be great for creating one last moment of tension for the game to finish on. But it can feel like it cheapens everything that came before.

Another aspect to be wary of is how this game is grounded in history. Everything shown on the cards, and the gameplay itself, invokes people, places and events from The Great Game. There’s been great care to ensure that Pax Pamir Second Edition pays respect to the past. Paragraphs of history are printed on the cards and extra reading material is provided for those who want to learn more.

This does give Pax Pamir Second Edition an almost solemn feeling to play. Resulting in my gaming group not buying into the game and history as much as I wanted them to. Especially, compared to Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile which shares similarities in complexity and gameplay but there the theme is played for laughs instead of accuracy.

Overall, Pax Pamir Second Edition is yet another fascinating game from master designer Cole Wehrle. But it’s not for everyone. While I thoroughly enjoyed the historic theming, the dynamic relationship of the map, and the combining of actions, my gaming group didn’t. They were eager to pack it up and move on to the next game. So it’s worth thinking twice before you take the plunge.