The King Is Dead

Another week, another boardgame ...

One of the people I follow on Twitter is attempting a far more ambitious project than my 52 Games. He's attempting to play a board- or card-game every day of the year! Sometimes face to face, sometimes online sometimes solo, but he's playing something every day. Although there are some repeats, I think he's already played more different games than I have.

Anyway, a few weeks ago he posted a photo of a small, simple boardgame that looked very attractive, so I looked it up and decided to buy it. It's 'The King Is Dead'. My copy arrived yesterday and I played it with Catherine this afternoon.

It's nominally set in medieval Britain. The king has just died and the country is divided as three factions vie for control - The Scots (blue), the English (yellow) and the Welsh (red). The players - it's designed for two or three or two teams of  two - represent nobles trying to be the power behind the throne by assembling a court friendly to whichever faction comes out on top in the battle for the country. They are looking to have the greatest influence with the winning faction or, if the conflict triggers a French invasion, be the person who unites the factions against the invader.

Here's the board a turn or so into a game. It's a very pretty game.

So how does the game play?

The board is divided into eight regions, and each gets four tokens, mostly at random. The tokens, of course, correspond to the three factions, so will be red, yellow or blue. When a player takes their turn they can either play an action card then recruit a follower, or they can pass. The former allows them to play one of these cards:

Each player has a hand of eight cards. In fact each player has the same combination of cards, so you always know what they have left in their hand at any point in the game. Playing a card allows you to add, remove or move tokens, changing the balance of power in one or more regions. You then recruit a follower to your court by taking any one token from the board and placing it in front of you. As you can see, a game is limited to each player taking no more than eight actions.

If you pass, and all of the other players pass consecutively, then you resolve the power struggle in one region. The order in which the regions are resolved is random and determined at the start of the game - it's the cards lining the edge of the board in the pictures above and below. The faction with the most tokens in a region controls it; the tokens are removed and a coloured disc placed in the region to show its allegiance. In this game, Lancaster, Devon, Essex and Strathclyde have been resolved; the first three are controlled by the English and Strathclyde by the Scots.

A game ends when all eight regions are resolved, when a coronation takes place or if the French invade.

The French? Yes. They get in on the action too. If the struggle in a region cannot be resolved, because there is a tie for the most tokens, or it has no tokens at all, then it becomes unstable, and a black marker is placed in it. If three regions end up with black markers, then the game ends. This picture shows a game that has ended with a French invasion after all of the first three power struggles were inconclusive.

The two different ways the game can end affect how victory is determined. If  a coronation takes place then you count up which faction has the most areas under its control. Then the player with the most tokens of that colour in their court wins. This is a clever mechanism. In order to back a faction you must remove from the board the very pieces that they are using to control the regions. It's a tricky balance.

And if the French invade? Then the player with the most sets of tokens wins. A set consist of one red, one yellow and one blue. Which is, of course, a tricky thing to get if you are trying to build up a court aligned to one faction. The two victory conditions are, in a way, mutually exclusive.

Catherine and I played three games. The first ended in a full-on tie - we both backed each of the three factions with the same number of tokens, but Catherine had used up her hand first, and that's the absolute tie-breaker. So she won that one. In the second game, as shown above, I engineered three disputed power-struggles and forced a French invasion. Having collected a couple of sets whilst Catherine was trying to back a single faction I took the win. In the third game Catherine backed the English heavily, but I managed to ensure that the Welsh just pipped them to the post when the last three regions were resolved. Unfortunately we had both backed the Welsh equally, so the tie-break went to control of the second strongest faction - the English. So another win for Catherine.

And that's it. In its basic form it's a game with no luck; once the draw of tokens and region order is made, all of the game information is visible to all of the players all of the time, and there's no random element in any of the actions. An advanced version mixes some random cards into the player decks, so you aren't quite sure what your opponent has; we'll try that in some future games once we've a clearer idea of the strategy of the basic version. I'm looking forward to trying a three-player game as well.

52 Games - Game 29

Five Men In Normandy

I bought and downloaded a bundle of Nordic Weasel stuff a couple of years ago - the original 5 Core game 'Five Men In Normandy', plus a load of supporting material - but hadn't got around to playing it. However I've just finished rereading Antony Beevor's 'Stalingrad' so felt in the mood for some gritty WWII action. 

I haven't got any suitable WWII figures (not without disassembling a couple of HOTT armies), so resorted to Junior General instead. You only need a handful of figures, so it was a pretty simple task to assemble a few troops with rifles, SMGs and an LMG for each force.

The rules have a wealth of campaign and scenario generation material. I set up a terrain with plenty of cover, randomly generated a Soviet and German force and gave each of them a mission.

And here they are. 

On the left are the Germans. They are on a simple encounter mission; they've just bumped into the enemy and will withdraw once they have inflicted more casualties than they took. There are only four of them - one with an MG34, a rifleman (who acts as his loader), and two men with SMGs.

On the right are the Soviets. They rolled well and got six soldiers, three with rifles and three with SMGs. Their mission was harder though. On the board were five markers in terrain pieces. They had to be searched, with a one in three chance that the one being looked at would contain the thing the troops were looking for. At that point the squad could withdraw.

The hills blocked line of sight completely if it passed through two contours. One contour counted as cover.The two areas of vegetation blocked it as well. Everything else was cover. 

Everyone started hunkered down behind terrain and out of sight of the enemy.

To some extent the small German force could afford to sit tight. Their MG34 was in a good position to cover a lot of the Soviet objectives, and they could quickly move up the other two soldiers to cover the ones that weren't.

The Soviets had a harder job; they would have to brave the German MG fire to get near most of their targets, so needed to adopt a fairly cautious approach. One of their men moved into a small area of vegetation and searched it, but the target wasn't there. A shame, as if they'd found it they could have withdrawn fairly easily (and I would have set up another game).

The Germans moved up their SMG men unseen by the Russians. When the lead Soviet soldier emerged from the vegetation, he bumped into one. He also triggered one of the game's more interesting rules. If you are moving and come into a position where you can see an enemy figure that no-one on your side has seen before, that enemy figure is displaced by a few inches in a random direction. In other words your knowledge of the enemy's troops is not as perfect as you'd like, and even your own side's figures may not quite be where you'd hoped. It adds a nice level of unpredictability to the early stages of the game. In this case the German had taken cover behind the rocks (or so the Germans thought), but displacement saw him of the wrong side of the cover. More importantly, the Soviet had a line of sight to the MG34 position. It turned out the gun wasn't quite in position yet, and he escaped the guard fire he was expecting.

Anyway, the surprise encounter saw both sides spray some bullets at each other and duck back into their respective covers. But the Soviets now knew where the Germans were.

The other German soldier run to the cover of a boulder, but was hit by a long-range rifle shot from across the board. Most weapons have infinite range. Pistols can only fire to 12" and SMGs are limited beyond 12", but generally if you can see something then you can shoot it.

On the other side of the board the Soviets advanced a couple of riflemen to try and pin down the MG34. They got in a couple of shots, before a burst of suppressive fire saw them run for safety.

Firing in 'Five Men In Normandy' involves rolling Shock Dice and Kill Dice. The former are more numerous, and can cause figures to duck into cover or run away. The latter can knock down a figure (which subsequently gets a chance to recover) or take them out of the fight - dead or seriously wounded. Some weapons can choose to trade Kill Dice for extra Shock Dice; the MG34 is one, so can lay down a ton of suppressive fire.

Troops have grenades too. The surprised German in the centre lobbed one towards the vegetation in which his Soviet counterpart was lurking, and took him out of the fight.

Emboldened he advanced toward the other part of the board where the Russian riflemen were trying to set up a suppressive fire position on the MG34. Once again the displacement rule threw up a surprise; a previously unseen rifleman turned out to be advancing across the same piece of ground, and the two soldiers literally ran into each other (the Soviet was displaced right into a brawl with the German!). There was a brief struggle that ended with the German being killed.

The Germans had lost one man killed and one man wounded, whilst the Soviets were only one man down. A few of their troops were still hiding from the MG34, waiting to be rallied, though.

When a side activates you roll a D6. On a 2-5 they can activate two figures. On a 1 or a 6 it's a special turn. A 6 means that nothing can move, but everything can fire. And a 1 means that everything can move and doesn't trigger guard or snap-fire from the enemy. The Soviets got two of these scurry turns in a row, so as the MG34 crew watched helplessly (maybe they were reloading or something), the Russians swiftly moved into better positions.

One of their soldiers searched the other area of vegetation ...

... and found what they were looking for. The Soviets could now withdraw.

The wounded German recovered, only to be knocked back down again by a rifle-shot.

The Soviets withdrew, but the hero who'd found the target was hit and knocked down by the MG34. He staggered to his feet, but a second burst put him down for good.

The four surviving Soviets withdrew.

The Soviets had completed their objective, but the Germans had inflicted more casualties than they had taken, so the encounter was a draw.

Even having to look stuff up and check rules the action took no more than an hour to play (I rolled the forces and did the setup the day before). It was pretty fun, although there were a few things I wasn't clear about in the rules and about which I will seek clarification. 

The mechanisms are fun, and the campaign system is interesting too; maybe something I'll try at some stage, running a player squad against a non-player enemy.

52 Games - Game 28

Fire & Fury

Our club still hasn't returned to its regular venue at the university, but there has been some gaming at one of the local RSLs. This has included semi-regular Sunday games; bigger battles where you need more than just an evening to play. I generally haven't worried too much about them, but I was tempted this week because they were playing one of my favourite rulesets from days gone by - Fire & Fury.

I used to play tons of F&F back when it was fresh, new and exciting in the 1990s. I even designed scenarios for it, most of which are lost in the mists of time, although I think I have a folders somewhere with the best of them. It does need a fair bit of space, though, and did take up a lot of time, so it kind of fell by the wayside over the years.

Anyway, I played a game of the newish regimental set a few years ago, and that's what was on offer yesterday. It's more detailed than the basic brigade set (and I believe that has acquired more detail as well), but the principles are the same and that's what mattered.

Gary put together the game, using 25mm figures from various people's collections, and kept everybody on track. We played a kind of meeting engagement, with the Union holding a hill and expecting reinforcements, whilst pairs of Confederate brigades came on looking to oust them. I got the honour of running the initial attack because, as someone who had played F&F before, I could show the others how you did stuff.

Here's the initial setup:

It was a good-sized table, with the Confederates to the right and Union to the left. The two ends were open woodland, whilst the centre was relatively open but criss-crossed by fences and with some dense woods on the Confederate side. The flank nearest the camera wasn't used at all.

The initial Confederate advance. I aimed at the right flank of the hill, which was covered by some green-looking Union troops skulking behind a fence. I hurled a full brigade at them.

I survived the long-range fire, and charged home.

Or tried to. In Regimental Fire & Fury you can be thrown back by fire before you get a chance to fight the close combat. And that's what happened; two of my three units decided that they wouldn't attack.

However the third - veterans all - did go in, and threw back the Union troops on the fence-line.

Meanwhile we had other troops appearing, but so did the Union. A big fight was developing in the woods on our right.

Confederates advance.

But that's a lot of guns!

A view through the woods

I had a second brigade, which spent most of the battle sitting in the dense woods in front of the hill. This kept a reasonable number of Union troops pinned, whilst the rest of our force tried to work around their flanks. The plan was that when one of the flank forces assaulted the hill, this brigade would advance as well and help administer the coup de grace.

On the right our troops were pushing forward boldly and the Union were falling back less boldly. We began to swing their line around and back them up towards the hill.

Here you can see the Union line with a right-angle in it, as the Confederates organise for yet another push.

My initial brigade was suffering badly. I'd formed them up along some fences, but the Union had reinforced with some dismounted cavalry and I found myself up against breech-loaders. My regiments were whittled down and forced back, with the only satisfaction being that the Union were taking a surprising amount of time and men doing it and that those units weren't available to bolster their position elsewhere.

The main Confederate attack was looking impressive. To the bottom left you can see my troops, who had left the cover of the woods when we realised that the corner of the Union position was looking very unsafe indeed. They took a lot of artillery fire as the went in, but the Union lost some of their artillery and had to reorganise in response.

At that stage we had to pack up - we'd had 4-5 hours of playing time, and felt that the game was nearing a conclusion. I think we called it a draw, but the Union, whilst still in a line along the flank of the hill, were close to a break in morale which would seriously hinder their ability to act. Most of the Confederates were still fighting fit, and had a few attacks left in them. 

Of course, as a Confederate player I would say that.

Here's one final shot of the table and the impressive (if gloomy) auditorium we got to play in.

Thanks to Gary and Ian for organising things and to everyone else for making the game run smoothly, quickly and in an entertaining manner. I really enjoyed playing F&F again, even with the strange changes.

52 Games - Game 27

Pandemic

A quick post to cover another 52 Games entry.

Just before Christmas I picked up a copy of Pandemic for $5 in a charity shop. Looks like it's never been played - it was in perfect condition.

Anyway, it's taken us until now to get around to playing it. Maya had played it once, years ago, and enjoyed it, and didn't even know we had a copy. Once she found out we pencilled it in for one of our Wednesday evening family game sessions.

And the game? It's co-operative - you either all win or all lose - and you play various specialists teamed up to control and stamp out the spread of four diseases around the world. It's a race against the clock as each diseases slowly spreads and could potentially explode into a catastrophic outbreak. If you get too many outbreaks, or run out of time (basically exhaust the deck) you lose. You have to balance finding a cure for each of the four diseases with controlling the spread.

Our first game was a disaster. Not because we didn't know what we were doing (although we didn't, really) but because the initial draw of outbreaks saw a bunch of cities close together with high levels of infection, and we then drew an Outbreak card on the first turn which saw them spread and multiply. Because of the way the infection deck works, this then makes those cities more likely to see further infections, and we ended up with a fatal series of infection cascades that meant within a few turns we'd lost the game.

Still, we got to understand the outbreak and infection mechanisms, and what things to stamp on or control as quickly as possible.

I played the Quarantine Specialist, Maya the Researcher and Catherine the Operations Expert.

With the first game having ended so quickly we set up another. Once again I got the Quarantine Specialist, Maya was now the Dispatcher and Catherine the Contingency Planner.

We got a much better handle on this game, stamping out a number of outbreaks fairly quickly before they got out of control. One did go wild in China, but we were already on the scene and had a cure ready to deploy, so defeated it just before it would have gone critical. Maya was apprehensive about her player ability to move other people's pieces, but once we got playing she used it to bring useful cards to her and then throw out cures for each of teh four diseases. Catherine's ability to retrieve and replay event cards helped at the end, when she was able to use one to hold off a potentially fatal cascade, and I was often in the right place at the right time to stop diseases spreading with the quarantine skills. In the end we cured all four diseases for a win. We'd had six outbreaks, our of the eight allowed.

To be fair we were playing at the easiest level, but it was only our second game.

I think this is one we might pull out again. I'm not sure if it's likely to be an absolute favourite, but it wasn't without interest.

52 Games - Game 26

(I am now halfway through the 52 Games project. That seems fairly impressive, in less than three months, but obviously it's going to get harder as a lot of the games I regularly play have already been covered.)

More Galley Action

I played another game of Galleys & Galleons using the quinqueremes last night; same forces as the previous game.

I didn't take a lot of photos or make as many notes for this game; I just played.

Once again there was a small fight off to the side of the main action. And, once again, Syracuse got the worst of it, with two of their ships striking almost immediately. To be fair, one had suffered a crippling ram, but the other simply gave up the moment its Carthaginian opponent grappled it.

The two mail groups of ships met in a relatively open space, with some option for flanking attacks. The Syracusans advanced the quinqueremes into firing range and began to bombard the smaller Carthaginian triremes, with some effect.

The Carthaginians closed and rammed, then attempted to board, relying on their higher quality to give them plenty of bonus boarding actions to offset the advantages the larger quinqueremes have. By keeping them grappled the triremes avoid being shot at.

The fight was relatively even, with both sides losing a couple of ships, but the Carthaginians were able to exploit a couple of poor activations by the Syracusans to work around the flanks and do some two-on-one rams. 

The Carthaginian flagship rammed and damaged its Syracusan opposite number.

And the end came soon after, as a second Syracusan ship was sunk, pushing them over 50% losses. They lost two sunk and four struck; the side action had put them at a disadvantage from the start

The Syracusans have yet to win a fight, and the quinqueremes don't appear to be helping at this stage.