From: Roberto Chiavini <mumaye@libero.it> 
Subject: Two more reviews 

Pancho Villa (Sierra Madre Games)

This one ranks as the strangest game I ever played in my gaming life and
it's definitely even one of the more fun!! This peculiar game tries to
capture at a very tactical level (almost an RPG for certain details, and
similar to a random exercise in wilderness survival for other aspects)
the US expedition to capture Pancho Villa during the spring of 1916. As
it stands, the game is a three players game masqued as a two player one:
in fact, in a two players game the American player move also part of the
Mexican forces, but it's severely hindered in his movements by the
Mexican policia units, so that it probably better to have them as
enemies anyway (and this may in effect be the case, if for a random
event Mexico and the United States go to war one against the other). 

The game is really peculiar in all its aspects: from movement
(differentiated in mechanized and no mechanized, but both are severely
limited by the rules for water/gasoline, that almost any movement is
forced from one settlement (and there are really several different
settlements from city to pueblos to Mormon missions to a few others) to
another or along rivers or railroads or the moving force suffers
depletion and possibly starvation. But the real innovative system in the
movement phase is the forced random event die roll that may give to the
units involved any kind of result, perhaps positive (like recovering
from depletion), more probably negative if the movement is too daring.
This mechanism makes such in theory unbalanced game really fun to play
also solitaire. 

Even the combat system is particular: each combat unit is armed with a
rifle counter (that may be depleted too) and each such unit (plus other
particular ones like machine gun, artillery and airplane) rolls a die
and confronts the result to the command factor of its leader (4 for the
Americans, 3 for the Mexicans and 2 for the Villistas - bar Villa
himself that is worth 3): if the result is equal or less than that
number an enemy unit is depleted (or eliminated if already depleted).
There are also rules for tactics (mounted, dismounted or pinned) and for
defensive counterattacks.

Victory is based on the capture of Villa for the American/Mexican and
Villa exiting the south border of the map for the Villista. 

After a few turns, necessary to take confidence with such a peculiar
system, play moves fast, based almost totally on manouver and daring
attempts for the Villista, while the American/Mexican player may force
march and risk more to get the damned revolutionary!!

All in all I rate this game 7 in a 1-10 scale, and the only negative
aspect may be perhaps the really poor graphics.