In the Shadows: Resistance in France 1943 – 1944 Game Review

I have come to terms with the fact that I am an abysmal COIN player. No matter how much I play any designs in the series, I never develop a sense of the shape of the thing. I don’t have the type of imagination necessary to see the larger picture, assuming “imagination” is the issue. I don’t really understand how my actions now will impact the choices available to me later. All of my decisions are made in and for the moment. It’s an odd feeling.

COIN, an abbreviation for Counter-Insurgency, is a vaunted asymmetric series from publisher GMT in which players take on roles from real-life asymmetric conflicts. Many of the games pit rebel/resistance—a distinction often in the eye of the beholder—fighters against an established governing force, often one whose legitimacy is questionable. The specifics of COIN change from game to game. The series is united by the core system, which is beautifully simple despite all the thorny particulars that pop up from title to title: Reveal a card, then choose what type of action to take on your turn, which will impact where in the turn order you sit for the next round.

In the Shadows: Resistance in France 1943-1944 is not, for all that preamble, a COIN game. It uses a Card-Driven system similar to 

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