A Few Acres of Snow (board game)

A Few Acres of Snow is a two player board wargame designed by Martin Wallace and published by Treefrog Games in 2011. It recreates the eighteenth century colonial struggle between Britain and France for control of North America, with one player commanding the British colonies and the other commanding New France. Rather than moving armies across a fixed map board in the traditional wargame style, each player builds a personalized deck of cards representing towns, forts, trade goods and military units, and uses those cards to found settlements, build infrastructure and launch attacks against the opponent's territory. The game's title is drawn from a remark attributed to the philosopher Voltaire, who dismissed France's Canadian colonies as worth little more than a few acres of snow when advising King Louis the Fifteenth that they were not worth defending. A Few Acres of Snow won both the BoardGameGeek Golden Geek Award and the Meeples' Choice Award in 2011, and its distinctive deck building and area control mechanics were reused by Wallace in two later games, Mythotopia in 2014 and A Handful of Stars in 2017.