I was (and maybe still am) excited by this game, but was surprised when I found for an $80 dollar game you will only be getting 50 or more cards (though total 300 figurines with over a 100 chits). I led myself to believe there would be some strong card play mechanics aside from the dice rolling battles, ala Risk. Some of my favorite board games with figurines all have hundreds of cards that come within the box and lend so much variety to the game, like Mansions of Madness, Fury of Dracula, Wiz-War, Gears of War, and even DungeonQuest.

Does anyone else think this game will be good with cards not being so much a factor? I do realize more info will be released in the near future, but it just seems to me now I can get a variant of Risk or Nexus Ops for a much lower price and it would feel for the most part the same game. Does anyone knowing the older version believe this is true or not? Thoughts?

As in the original game, the cards are used to provide random reinforcements for the USA player, both in number and in location. This makes each game a unique experience. In addition, this new version will have a small number of cards to assign unique capabilities to each invader faction, further differentiating each game experience. There is no mechanism in the game for having a hand of cards and playing cards from it in order to influence events.

Tromdial said:

Having played both Fortress America and Risk, I can tell you that they both have a completely different feel. I like both, but Fortress is by far my favorite.

I don't believe that it suffers one bit from it's low number of cards. It helps the game retain a flavor all it's own.

The cards are very similar to the older version (at least for the Americans). I don't recall having alternate cards for the invaders like in the new one, so if anything there are more cards in the new version. I will say I do wish somewhat that there were more of the partisan cards, but they are really well balanced in the game and I am sure a lot of play testing went into what works and what doesn't. Its a great game, one of my all time favorites. (It knocked Axis and Allies of its pedestal for me in the 1980s).