Despite its shared parentage, General Orders: World War II comes across as the antithesis of Undaunted: Stalingrad. Where Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s magnum opus of the Undaunted line was sprawling and personal, General Orders is a trifle, two heavily abstracted battles that say little about their subject matter, but really doesn’t care to in the first place.

It’s rather good, a few complaints aside.

Contested Italy.

Right away, the thing you need to understand about General Orders is that it’s a worker placement game. Yes, blocking and all.

There are two main pieces in each battle — three if you’re playing on the second map, but let’s table that for now. Discs represent troops and hexagonal cylinders are your commanders. While the former hold territory, invade enemy spaces, and get chewed up by artillery fire, it’s the latter you place on the map to enact each order. There’s a little side board for things like reinforcements and drawing battle cards, but the real meat of the game is found on the map itself. Placing a commander on a zone’s advance option allows you to move troops into it. The same goes for utilizing a paratrooper drop or firing artillery. Filling an action spaces blocks it off for the rest of the round. Including, say, when you advance into enemy territory and therefore make it impossible for your foe to move back into that same space. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this a twist, but it feels like one because of how it intersects with the gameplay.

Okay, so General Orders doesn’t say anything about World War II beyond the most superficial tidbits. (Italy was an artillery campaign; beach assaults in the Pacific were bloodbaths.) This is a game that operates according to its own logic, and it’s a logic we’ve seen expressed so often that it makes a comfortable fit here. Because spaces are blocked until the end of the round, both sides must race to occupy the best action slots. The game is fine-tuned for such things. Acquiring reinforcements or cards, for example, yields smaller quantities for whichever side gets there second. Meanwhile, advancing into a valuable destination, such as one containing a perk that improves your other actions, often permits a small window of security before the next round allows a rival counterattack.

At the same time, the whole thing has been injected with a few wargaming sensibilities. The biggest of these is supply. It isn’t enough to control a space; you also need to trace it back to your headquarters. Anything that gets cut off is properly severed — no reinforcements, no launching attacks from that space, no firing artillery shells that can’t be trucked in. And both maps are designed with flanking maneuvers or airborne attacks in mind. Entire fronts can stall because a well-timed company of screaming eagles was scattered behind enemy lines. Rather than devolving into a stalemate between entrenched rivals, the maps feel dynamic and alive.

Cards are powerful.

The cards go a long way toward bolstering that dynamism. Thompson and Benjamin deploy these as privileges rather than rights, only doling them out when players claim the proper order on the side board. Wise commanders would do well to invest in such things. Some are boilerplate: extra reinforcements, additional combat dice, that sort of thing. But there are also a few that can swing a battle resoundingly in one’s favor. Doubling the strength of an airborne attack is one, especially if you can now strip the enemy of their crucial artillery. Another lets you make two invasions in a row, blitzing through enemy lines before they can be shored up. My favorite, though, is the counterattack. This jettisons the usual worker-placement blocking restrictions, letting you deploy into an action space that’s already occupied. Yum.

By contrast, the dice are… well, the biggest compliment I can pay them is that they’re reliable. They default to one hit, with an extra space apiece for a miss and a double hit. Combat itself favors the defender: they roll to inflict casualties, and then both sides lose equal troops until only one player occupies the zone. Or until nobody does. Total wipe-outs aren’t uncommon in General Orders. This adds significant value to cards or actions that roll entire handfuls of the bastards, especially once the cannons start firing. Artillery, it should be noted, is absolute bullshit, perhaps the closest the game gets to historical verisimilitude. Like the rest of the game’s excesses, this is a bullshit that can be countered. Personally, it isn’t a session of General Orders if I haven’t cut off my enemy’s artillery supply at least thrice.

I mentioned two maps. The first takes players to Italy, where both sides quarrel for control of an alpine village that has been pre-spotted by dueling artillery positions. This map is all about nabbing bonuses in the village’s center, with two major lanes of supply along the map’s outer edges. Since victory can be achieved either by earning points — through occupation of the village — or by decapitating the enemy’s headquarters outright, there are heady decisions to make between achieving steady gains or deploying risky blitzes and airborne attacks. There’s a classic tension at play: the more territory you capture, the more vulnerable your position.

The Pacific scenario, meanwhile, adds both air combat and asymmetric geography. This is the more flavorful map — while I never once thought about who was controlling the Germans or Allies in Italy, the Pacific makes a clear distinction between Japan and the United States. The latter have an advantage in manpower and aircraft, but must also face an uphill slog under artillery fire, not to mention greater risks of having their supply lines severed. The air combat is a nice addition that still feels somewhat underutilized, especially since you must sacrifice your own aircraft in order to drop bombs on your foes. But while I preferred the first map, it was this one that got me excited for the possibility of further entries in the series. It’s the more playful of the two, toying with new ideas and possibilities, even if I also missed dropping a bunch of paratroopers onto my enemy’s heads.

The Pacific scenario adds some asymmetry.

Bottom line, General Orders does exactly what it sets out to do. This is a firecracker in a small box, a twenty-minute duel packed with big swings and heart-pounding drama. It can be underwhelming in spots, with dice-chucking that belies the game’s exciting core and the occasional artillery barrage that kills everything, but those are hiccups in a system I’m otherwise quite pleased with. I like it so well, in fact, that I offer this pledge: If they do a tiny version of Stalingrad, I will do a compare-and-contrast with the massive campaign from Undaunted. There. Order placed.

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A complimentary copy was provided.