Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Lucky for us then nobody is wearing the crown at the moment, as the previous king has apparently popped his clogs. Shuffled off this mortal coil. He is an ex-king. Each of you plays one of his heirs, hungry for power, climbing over one another to be the next monarch. In my head I’m picturing the Trial by Stone from The Dark Crystal, but with fewer Skeksis.

Land grab

The main board represents the regions of the kingdom. Having control of one or more regions at the end of an Autumn phase (rounds are broken into Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) grants you bonuses which help you get towards your ultimate goal, which is having 15 (20 in a two-player game) Influence Points, thereby claiming the crown.

The majority of what happens in the game is dictated by the cards the players use. A card has a strength value which is used during clash resolution (i.e. who wins control of a region), and typically a power or ability too. Already you might be able to see some similarities between this and other games. The first things that sprang to mind for me were thoughts like “Oh, so it’s a bit like Love Letter / Citadels / Vaalbara”, and those comparisons hold some weight, but there’s a lot more going on under the surface in The Old King’s Crown.

Turn order really matters. The first player has to commit to which Location they’re sending their Herald (the big wooden piece) as a statement of intent. It’s up to the other players to decide if they want to go toe-to-toe in the same location or try their luck elsewhere. It’s a small action, but it feels like there’s so much riding on it. Winning a region where your herald is can net you an influence point in addition to whatever the location gives you. If you contest a region where two or more heralds share a location, the winner gets to steal an influence point from the losers.

In a game where you might only need 15 points to win, a well-placed herald can result in a three-point swing, and that’s before you even take the location’s bonuses into consideration. So right away you’ve got these intriguing mind games. Is that herald there because they’ve got cards you’re never going to beat, or are they just full of bluster, hoping to scare you into contesting somewhere else instead?

Being last in turn order actually has a really good benefit, which is just another string to The Old King’s Crown’s bow. The last player chooses the order in which the three region’s clashes are resolved. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but some of the cards you play can have effects which bolster the strength of cards in adjacent regions. Those cards aren’t much use if the cards in those adjacent regions are revealed before your bolstering card, such is the power of choosing resolution order. There is no such thing as a dead action. Everything you do matters.

Follow your own path

Each of the factions in The Old King’s Crown has its own unique player board and despite sharing some common cards and abilities, is asymmetric. Not to the extent of something like Root (review here) or a COIN game like Cuba Libre (review here), but still with differences. Each has its own set of action tiles at the bottom of its boards, and each has its own site of power at the top of the main board, with new action cards to invest in as the game progresses.

It strikes a nice balance here. I know people who won’t play COIN games because understanding how each of four factions operates and wins is daunting. I find teaching those games difficult for precisely that reason. The Old King’s Crown dials those divergences down to a point where everybody has the same win conditions, and everybody knows how the clashes will be fought, but there are enough differences there to keep things interesting.

It’s funny because as a die-hard Euro game fan, wargames are where I’ll usually stray into confrontational, interactive games. This game feels and looks more like a Euro with its deck construction and player boards, yet it’s unashamedly in-your-face. The mind games are fantastic, and even in our first learning game my group found ourselves goading one another, daring rivals not to add their companies (wooden pieces that add to your strength in a region) to a region to ‘see what happens if you don’t’.

I haven’t even mentioned the Great Road kingdom cards yet, which you can claim and add to your player boards for new actions and abilities. You can claim them from the middle of the table, but if one of your opponents has one that you want, or one you simply want to deny them of because it’s such a pain in the ass to play against, you can outright steal it from them. This isn’t a game you can play head-down. You need to know what’s going on with everybody, all of the time.

No man is an island

It’d be remiss of me to not draw attention to the solo mode in The Old King’s Crown. I was dubious of how well it would work at first, knowing how cutthroat and confrontational the game is. Replicating that feeling in an AI deck of any kind is no small feat. However, with the help of solo specialist Ricky Royal, the solitaire mode is very good.

The opponent – dubbed Simulacrum – plays with a special deck and a ruleset that introduces very little overhead into the game. Regular readers will know there’s a dividing line for me, when running the artificial opponent for a game takes more time and brainpower than taking my own actions, and this one happily sits on the correct side of that fence.

Remarkably, the designers have managed to create a solo opponent which not only leaves you free to play in the same way as you would for the multiplayer game, but also seems to have its own personalities. It’s not like the cards are imbued with the souls of players, but it captures the idea of playing against someone who’s got their own intentions, not just randomly pulling cards and plonking things where fate decides. The Simulacrum’s cards have behavioural traits such as plotting and warmongering, and cards played in different phases combine (or not) in a way which feels natural.

Would I buy The Old King’s Crown just to play solo? For me, maybe not. The table talk and tension built by human beings is what makes the game truly outstanding for me. That said, the solo mode is excellent, and if you’d told me it had come from Morten and his Automa Factory, I’d have believed you in a heartbeat.

Final thoughts

I’m so pleased to see The Old King’s Crown get this far. I’ve been bumping into the guys from Eerie Idol games for years now, and the artwork has always caught my attention. The aesthetics and watercolour shades are absolutely gorgeous. We’re really spoiled here in the UK with indie studios at the moment, and the incredible design and art they’re bringing to games. I expect to hear lots of “This is their first game? Really??” once boxes start landing on tables.

Ultimately it’s a glorified bluffing game, but putting it in simple terms like that just highlights how much heavy lifting the word ‘glorified’ is doing. Strategising, adapting, and improvising all play a part. Customising your faction with the Great Road cards. Choosing if and when to invest in your site of power cards. Trying to remember if your rival across the table has already played that low-value card that assassinates your high-value one. Heck, some cards even let you claim other factions’ dead cards from the communal Lost pile and use them against their previous owners.

I had a hard time getting my head around some of the nuances and terms in the rulebook, but as with any preview I write, there’s a caveat that nothing is final, and things like the rulebook won’t be finalised for a while yet. While I don’t know exactly what Patrick and crew over at Leder Games did to help with development, knowing that a) they’ve been involved, and b) Pablo and the Eerie Idol team were sensible enough to involve them, is an indicator of the level of polish and quality you can expect.

With an easy-to-follow ruleset that leaves the majority of your brain free to plot and scheme, The Old King’s Crown is just wonderful. It’s the kind of game that you’d imagine would lead to some ‘kill the king’ when someone races ahead, and to some extent that’s true, but for every ally with a hand on your shoulder, you’d better believe they’re holding a stiletto tip at your ribs too. The Kickstarter goes live on October 24th 2023, and you can sign up to be notified of the launch right here. I suggest you do, I think this game is going to be deservingly huge.

Preview copy provided by Eerie Idol Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Old King’s Crown (2023)

Design: Pablo Clark
Publisher: Eerie Idol Games
Art: Pablo Clark
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post The Old King’s Crown Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Maybe.

Theme park

Euro games get a bad rap for not carrying their theme too well, and while that’s certainly true in Revive, I can’t help feeling like in some ways it’s actually pretty well done. The story of the game says you’ve been stuck underground since something bad happened to the world, and now your phoenix-like, fledgling tribes are emerging back onto the surface. You’ll try to explore this abandoned world, building and expanding your reach, while your population learn the secrets of their past, uncovering and activating machines to make their new world a better place.

I know – blah, blah, blah. But the way it goes about it is pretty cool. The landscape tiles of the main board are all flipped face-down to begin with, and there’s a decent feeling of venturing forth as each player emerges from the chasm in the middle of the board and spreads out, like ants from a crack in a dry lawn. There’s a mechanism where your citizens have to hibernate to rest, rendering them useless for the next round, and while exploring they can find crates with supplies in. It might not be the most thematic game in the world, but there’s certainly more to it than I initially thought.

The main reason I worried about the game is because of the things I heard about it from those who picked up a copy at Essen. For every post I saw praising the game, I’d see another slating it for just being a Euro mechanism sandbox, with mechanisms seemingly thrown at the game just because they could. The reality for me was much different. There really isn’t that much going on, certainly not as much as I’d feared, and I think a lot of it comes down to the presentation.

When you see these player boards for the first time there’s an undeniable reaction of “Wow, what’s going on here with all of this stuff?”. By the time you’ve got your player board, the tribe board that slots into a notch on the side, and your card areas all around the board, you’re looking at each player having their own area as large as older games in their entirety. The spiderweb of tracks on the – admittedly gorgeous, double-layered – player boards looks more confusing than it really is. The three main tracks could have been laid in a straight line and taken a quarter of the space, but Revive is a game that makes you want to feel special. You’re meant to be leading a tribe here, a nation, and on a subconscious level that’s a feeling you don’t always get if you’ve just got a small cardboard player board like in Hansa Teutonica. You need something bigger, like Gaia Project, and now Revive, to make you feel like you’re in control of something significant.

Checking your balance

Asymmetry in games can be an odd beast. Games like Obsession (review here) or Votes For Women (review here) are both asymmetric, but both feel like the balance is very carefully baked into the game. Some games, such as Tapestry, can feel wildly swingy in comparison, resulting in games with a huge disparity in final scores. The tribes in Revive are asymmetric in nature, so each player ends up with a different unique power that’s for them only. The players also have their own artefact cards, which give them secret end-game scoring conditions, and on top of that, the large corner tiles placed on the main board are randomised too.

I don’t mind a gulf in scores when it represents players simply playing the game better than the rest of the table, but sometimes things just feel unfair from the get-go. You might get dealt an artefact card which rewards something that doubles up with the end-of-game scoring condition on one of the big corner tiles, or maybe meshes well with your tribe’s unique abilities. When that happens it can feel like a one-way street to Loserville – population: you. We played a game of Revive at my local group where one player had a tribe which let them use books (one of the three resource types) as wild resources. They also managed to get some modules which awarded double books, meaning whenever they played a matching card into a slot around their board, they were drowning in books. Now maybe when we’ve all played it more we’ll find a good counter, but at the time it certainly felt very one-sided.

The publishers, Aporta Games, have taken this sort of feedback on board, which is great. One of the designers – Kristian Amundsen Østby – posted this Official Low Luck Variant on BGG, so if that sort of thing bothers you, at least there are options now. Going into Revive without knowing these sorts of things could leave a sour taste in your mouth, which is why I’ve taken the time to go into a little detail here. Revive is so much fun, it’s definitely worth your time.

Tools of the trade

So who’s going to enjoy Revive, and why? Revive is somewhere between a deck-builder and a deck-construction game, combined with tech trees. Half of your actions will involve playing a card into a slot around your board, and the cards are multi-use. Cards played into the top of your board obscure the bottom of the card, and so give you the benefits or resources shown on the top half. Cards in the bottom do the opposite. The resources you gain by playing cards let you play the three other main actions: explore, build, and populate, which translate as flip tiles on the main board, and add buildings and people from your player board to the main board.

This is where the game starts to feel like the one I mentioned above – Gaia Project – and its step-sibling, Terra Mystica. In both of those, there’s an emphasis on getting pieces off of your own board and onto the main board, to expand your influence on the main board while simultaneously unlocking abilities on your board. Revive does this same thing, and it’s very satisfying to do. One of the things I really enjoy in Revive is that none of the actions feel weak, or like “Well, if I want to do this cool thing later, I need to do this lame thing for a while first”. Exploring brings instant victory points and lets you choose the lay of the land, often triggering track advances at the same time. Building nets loads of adjacency bonuses from the main board. Populating is arguably the most satisfying because when a meeple leaves your board, they unlock the action or ability they were covering.

My personal favourite thing is the module mechanism. The card slots around your board have notches next to them where these cardboard ‘modules’ fit nice and snug. Mechanically, all they do is give you some bonus resource when you slot a card of matching colour in, but there’s something very personal about choosing and attaching one. The same goes of advancing around the three tracks on your board. Clear a wooden marker from an indented disc and you get to take a machine disk from the market. All you’re doing is putting a round piece of cardboard into a round hole, but the satisfaction we felt as a two-year-old doing the same thing with a shape sorter must lie dormant, in some kind of lizard part of our brains. It’s just as much fun to do now as it was all the way back then.

Final thoughts

Revive isn’t for everybody. There’s a lot to think about, and fans of lighter fare may struggle with the decision space at any given time. The game is quite generous with the resources given to you, so there’s often an abundance of choice when it comes to what to do next, which some people really don’t like. If you like that feeling of a sandbox, however, with open-ended strategy from turn one, you’ll love it.

The apparent lack of balance can make it feel like the game gets skewed in someone’s favour at times, which can be mightily frustrating if you’re not the one lady luck favours. As I said further up though, there’s an official variant and plenty of house rules if that’s your thing. My job here is to review the out-of-the-box experience, however, so it’s only fair to make you aware of it.

Revive is a ton of fun to play, especially with the way things start to combo as the game goes on. I wondered why the game includes two cubes to track the actions you take (you get two actions per turn), because it doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to keep track of, but later in the game you’ll be thankful for them. The familiar dopamine hit of “Do this thing, which gives me this other thing, then that triggers this. Then I take these free actions…” is ever-present and very satisfying. It just gets hard to keep track of how many actions you’ve taken.

Revive is a beautiful, lavish production which fans of mid-heavy Euro games will lap up. Aporta Games have made a game which feels like a £100+ production in a box which will cost you a little over half of that. The included mini-campaign does a good job of drip-feeding a few additional rules and attempting to build a little more story, but in all honesty, you’re neither going to care about the lore nor worry that you’re missing out on it. If this all sounds like your kind of thing, pick it up, you’ll have a great time with Revive.

Review copy kindly provided by my retail partner, Kienda. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Revive (2022)

Design: Helge Meissner, Eilif Svensson, Anna Wermlund, Kristian Amundsen Østby
Publisher: Aporta Games
Art: Gjermund Bohne, Martin Mottet, Dan Roff
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Revive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Dune Imperium is one of a batch of games from last year which combined deck-building with worker-placement. Lost Ruins of Arnak, Endless Winter, and Viscounts of the West Kingdom all sprang into being around the same sort of time (although Viscounts is more action-selection than worker-placement). With all of that competition around, a game had to be good to get noticed, and Dune Imperium is good.

The Spice must flow

Like those games mentioned above, Dune Imperium doesn’t give you many workers to place. You start each round with just the two to employ. Playing the game is an exercise in keeping plates spinning while keeping an eye on what your neighbours – and rivals – are up to. There are four factions you’re trying to curry favour with, all of who are immediately familiar to fans of the franchise: The Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit, and of course, the Fremen.

Driving up the level of influence you have with each of them gives you benefits. The most important benefit, as with any Euro worth its salt, is good ol’ Victory Points (VPs). The first person to end a round with 10 VPs triggers the end of the game, but what makes Dune Imperium oh-so-tasty and interesting is that VPs aren’t forever. Although they might live you with on your side of the table for now, others can’t wait to get their grubby little mitts on them.

Each faction awards an Alliance Token to the first player to reach a certain rung on the ladder, and a VP along with it. Don’t count that little chicken until it’s hatched though, nosireebob, because if someone overtakes you on that track, they claim the token, and the VP with it. This might not sound too dramatic, but what we’re talking about here is a two-point swing. Picture it: you’re sat on 10 VPs waiting for the round to end, and for your celebrations to start. Someone else is on 9, and overtakes you on a track. You lose the token and drop to 9, they take it and boost up to 10, rubbing salt into the proverbial wound.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

So there’s this tense tussle for points, which fits really nicely with the desert planet setting. Points are like anything else in the harsh landscape – hard to come by. Much like the water on Arrakis, in fact. Water, spice, and cold, hard cash are the currencies in play, and it’s a game where it’s honestly pretty difficult to min-max. You need a little bit of everything, as you tend to need one type in order to generate another. The cards, and the actions that come with them, do a fantastic job of carrying the theme.

The worker spaces where you send your agents are in limited supply, so there’s a good deal of competition when it comes to who goes where. Your agents are put out onto the board by playing your cards from your hand, from a deck you’ll craft during the course of a game to try to drive things in the direction you want to go. The cards have a really nice multi-use function, which means that as well as allowing you to place a worker on a spot, there are additional bonuses you can take at the same time.

The cards you don’t play are as important as the cards you do. There’s an area on the board devoted to conflict, and the way it’s handled is really nice. During the game you deploy troops to the garrison on the board, which in turn can be put into the conflict area. At the end of the round, the player with the most power in the conflict area takes the best rewards from that round’s conflict cards. Cards still held in your hand are revealed, which can add to the strength. There’s a great feeling of tension, wondering whether someone’s got something decent still in their hand, and deciding whether you want to deploy more troops to pre-empt it.

Initially it might seem like you can just get away with not taking part in the conflicts, but so much of the game lies in that space. It feels like playing poker, the sense of some people just cutting their losses and waiting to fight again another day, and others fighting tooth and nail over the precious rewards on offer, waiting to see who can bolster their forces during the card reveal.

The sleeper must awaken

Dune Imperium plays a really tight game, and there’s a lot that I really like about it. You don’t get to cycle through your deck too often, but it still feels like the deck construction is more important than it is in a game like Lost Ruins of Arnak. I like how tight-fisted the game is with resources and points. Getting a few drops of water, or a couple of VPs, feels like a big deal. The game does have a limited number of rounds, driven by the conflict deck, but more often than not (in my experience), the end of the game is triggered by the players.

The VP track is big and bold on the board, so anyone out in the lead can almost feel the unspoken pacts being formed by those attempting to claw them back. The swing of points that can happen late in the game as the Alliance Tokens change hands is really good fun. Despite it being a Euro with no real direct interaction, it certainly feels like a battle.

The presentation and artwork are great, but the board annoys me. The middle of the board, which represents the deserts on the planet, is so big and empty. You could argue “Yes, Adam, it’s a desert, that’s the point”, but it feels like a wasted opportunity to me. The conflict area could be much smaller, and then the card market might not even need to be next to the board, which would make the whole thing more neat, and compact.

Final thoughts

Dune Imperium is great. I enjoy it every time I play, and thanks to the various Leaders you can choose to play as, each time you can play with a different strategy. The whole game feels very balanced, and I’ve not (yet!) played a game where there was a winning margin of more than two or three points. It does a great job of managing to feel like a proper worker-placement game, and a deck-building game at the same time.

I think it could do with a way to refresh the cards in the market row. As it stands, if there are five cards there and nobody wants one of them, there’s no real way to get some new cards to choose from. It’s not too much of a problem in a multiplayer game, but in a solo game it can feel like you’ve got to buy something, just to see something new. Speaking of solo, the solo mode is otherwise excellent, and can be played with the included deck, or the great app that Dire Wolf have created.

Overall, Dune Imperium does a really good job of capturing the feel of Dune, especially when you’re talking about the new film version, which this game shares its artistic style with. The comparisons with Arnak are inevitable really, given the mass appeal of both, the shared mechanisms, and the close release dates. While I’ll still always happily play Arnak, I’d prefer to play Dune Imperium, if I had the choice. There feels like there’s more variety in the game, and the games feel closer, more tense.

Fans of the franchise will eat this game up, and fans of good board games will really enjoy it too. If you fall in the middle of the intersecting circles in that Venn diagram, Dune Imperium is a must-buy.

Dune Imperium is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Dune Imperium (2020)

Designer: Paul Dennen
Publisher: Dire Wolf
Art: Clay Brooks, Raul Ramos, Nate Storm
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 minutes

The post Dune Imperium Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rescuing Robin Hood is a card game. Over five rounds you try to rescue more powerful villagers to add to your crew (deck), and to do this you need to beat the guards that stand in your way. Battle in this game is done by the numbers – that is to say, you’re going to be flexing your big maths brain working things out. There are three traits that every character in the game has: wit, brawn, and stealth. In order to beat a guard, you choose one of the three traits from your current merry band, and then try to remove guards from in front of a villager. That’s where the fun, and the agony of choice, begins.

Feared by the bad

Standing between you and the villagers are a number of the sheriff’s men, but you only get to see the stats of the first guard in each line. The hand you’ve draw for the round determine the strength of each of your traits, and then you decide which you want to use. It’s not as simple as just choosing the strongest, however, as each of them has a different method to take them on.

Choosing brawn means flipping all of the guards in a row face-up, and hoping your brawn level is at least as high as their total, or you fail. Wits lets you push your luck, choosing whether to stop after each card, or risk flipping a further card, risking undoing all of your hard work. It’s a classic Blackjack-style bit of push-your-luck, which I really like. Finally, stealth lets you choose any number of cards – face-up or -down – and hope your total is high enough.

This all sounds very simple, I know, but in practise it’s agonisingly difficult to choose sometimes. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. Thanks to the rulebook, you know the average strength of each of the blue and red guard cards, so you can make a semi-informed decision, but unless every card you attack is face-up, there’s a certain amount of trusting in lady luck. It’s definitely a game to make sure you’re wearing your lucky pants for!

Loved by the good

Rescuing Robin Hood needs collective brainpower and decision making, and it makes for a fantastic co-op game. Before the first player makes a move, you get to chat things over and decide on the best approach. It’s a bit like planning a big heist, but less sexy. Between you, you’ll decide who should do what, where you can afford to take chances, and even use some bonus tokens to do things like reveal more guards, or move them around.

What follows next is great fun. One-by-one everyone takes their turn, and the tension and excitement is great. The three or four seconds of whispered mental arithmetic when totting-up brawn scores, or the tension of whether the wit check will succeed as you slowly turn that last… guard… card…

There’s lots of reactive planning when your plans inevitably tumble all around you, like acorns from Sherwood’s Mighty Oak, and in all honesty, that scramble is great fun. As a Euro gamer, I love it when my plans work just as I’d planned, but the co-operative damage limitation at play in Rescuing Robin Hood is great fun. There’s a real feeling of being all in it together, winning or losing as a team.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

Rescuing Robin Hood is more a game of deck-construction, rather than deck-building. Rescued villagers are available for players to draft into their decks at the end of each round, gradually increasing the potency of them. You never really cycle through the deck, and at the end of the second and fourth rounds you’re forced to whittle your deck down to eight, and then finally four cards. Card choice is really important. It’s also a tough game. Not difficult to play, the round structure is simple, but succeeding is hard!

In the fifth, and final, round, your team have to storm Nottingham Castle before you can even think about rescuing our favourite outlaw. If you make it as far as rescuing Robin, he joins your team for one last hurrah, trying to take down the Sheriff. Technically, you win as long as you rescue Robin, which is just as well, because accomplishing all three in one round is pretty flipping difficult.

If you’re looking for variety, there’s an advanced game to play, where you additionally draw challenge cards to complete as you play. And if you find yourself short of time, there’s an accelerated version too, to speed things up. My biggest complaint with the game are the boards and cubes used for tracking the values of your traits. They share something with Terraforming Mars, in that they’re wooden cubes on a card with a gloss finish. The slightest bump of the table, or brush with a sleeve, and they make a bid for freedom.

Final thoughts

When you open Rescuing Robin Hood and check out the gorgeous artwork, great rulebook, and custom insert, you’d be forgiven for thinking this comes from an established studio. For a debut game Castillo Games has done an incredible job, both in terms of production, and the game itself. Given how maths-dependent the game’s systems are, it’s clear that a lot of playtesting has happened to get the balance just right.

Fans of perfect information games probably won’t enjoy it too much, as there’s a lot of risk-taking and gambling involved. Rescuing Robin Hood is a proper social experience, and I can see it going down really well at games nights and conventions. The need to talk every step through, and the shared joy and misery when you win and lose, do a great job of binding the players together. If you lose, it’s no single person’s fault, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

The artwork and illustrations are fabulous throughout, and I love the punny names for some of the characters, like Anne Dittover and Hugh Jeego. If you’re planning on buying a game to play with two players mostly, just bear in mind that in my experience, two-player is a much more difficult exercise than with three or four people. Rescuing Robin Hood is a charming, easy-to-learn, co-operative card game, and I’m very impressed. I look forward to seeing what Bryce & Co have in store for us in the future.

Review copy kindly provided by Castillo Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rescuing Robin Hood (2021)

Designer: Bryce Brown
Publisher: Castillo Games
Art: Paul Vermeesch
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Rescuing Robin Hood Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Senjutsu” translates roughly as tactics, or strategy. As such, it’s the perfect name for a game that revolves around samurai battlefield action. Players negotiate the hex-based board with a deck of cards, hoping to build clever combinations. It’s a little like a deck construction game like Magic: The Gathering, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, or even Stone Sword Games’ other title – Z-Ball – which I previewed earlier this year. The big difference between Senjutsu and those other games, is the addition of a game board where the action takes place.

“If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you”

Position is everything in Senjutsu, and as someone who has studied the Japanese sword martial art Iaido in the past, I was so pleased to see this replicated in the game. The samurai are all right-handed, and in the real world this means as someone defending themselves from a swinging sword or knife attack, you want to be on the attackers left side. The action cards follow suit, and an attack like ‘Wild Swing’ is deadly if you’re in the path of the blade.

Building strategy around this positional premise is handled really well in Senjutsu. In a lot of mini-based games with hexes to negotiate, it’s only proximity to other pieces that matters. In Senjutsu, rotational alignment is crucial. As you play cards from your hand, you stalk across the battlefield, circling one another, trying to simultaneously attack and defend. It lends the game the feel of an epic battle from any number of samurai films and anime.

The Kurosawa-esque drama is present in the way turns unfold too. Players choose a card and place them face-down on the table, and then simultaneously flip them. Each card has a different Initiative value, and the higher value cards go first. There’s palpable drama as eyes dart around the cards, waiting to see whose blade tasted blood, and who has a new wound to tend to. While I can understand that might feel like playing blind to some, it replicates how the swordplay should feel, reading your opponents intentions.

“You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain”

Senjutsu does a few things really well. There’s a starting, basic deck you can build from the plethora of cards included in the box, and it’s a good idea to stick with that deck for your first few games. Once you’re comfortable with that deck, there are rules included to let you construct your own deck. It’s really easy and adds soul to the game. It allows you to play the way you want to play. You want to be the equivalent of a bulldozer, pushing forward with wild attacks? You do you, friend, Senjutsu gives you the tools.

What I love about Senjutsu, is the way the game feels like a direct battle between you and the other players. It’s a game of reading your opponents, trying to second-guess them, and conversely trying to bluff them. The game is really easy to learn, and to teach, which means you can get straight into the heat of battle. Repeated play is rewarded with an understanding of the ebb and flow of battle, and the options available to you.

Each available character has slightly different abilities available to them, which adds a nice layer of asymmetry to the action. I really like the Kamae trees too. These are cards with a token on, and by moving that token around the branches your character can take different stances to bolster things like their attack and defence abilities on each card. It’s another seemingly small thing that can really change the balance of a battle.

“Do nothing that is of no use”

Do you know that feeling at the start of a game of Chess, or Draughts/Checkers? Your opponent makes their first move and you immediately start trying to get into their head. What are they doing? What’s their plan? What exactly is that cunning dog up to now?? That’s how Senjutsu gets after just a game or two. The game also feels very different with different player counts. Two players is great, a dance, a duel for the ages. With three or four it’s a very different feel, where unspoken pacts are made and broken in an instant. It’s a fantastic feeling.

My main worry with any deck-construction game is the balance of any luck in the game. This usually depends on factors like the size of the deck, the number of duplicate cards allowed, and the hand size. Senjutsu’s balance feels great, and there never feels like a truly dead turn. There’s always something good you can do.

Final thoughts

At its core Senjutsu is a simple game. Draw a card, play a card, resolve the card, repeat. But my oh my, there is so much in those easy steps. If I had to sum-up Senjutsu in one word, it would be elegant. So much love and attention to detail has been poured into this game, and you can see it, and feel it, in everything. The iconography is clear, the rules (even in a beta state in the prototype I played) are well-structured and don’t miss anything out.

It feels like a perfect blend of abstract strategy and deck-construction games. Everything is streamlined, and I have to use that word again, balanced. If you’re starting with the pre-built decks, you can have the game unboxed, setup, played, and back in the box again in half an hour. That’s absolutely bonkers! It won’t happen that way, because playing a game of Senjutsu is a bit like opening a packet of Jaffa Cakes – there’s no way you’re stopping at just one.

Paul and James, the brains behind Senjutsu and Stone Sword Games, have made something really special here. If anything is going to put someone off it could be the theme, but that’s only a matter of personal preference. Happily, this isn’t just a case of ‘Oh, samurai are cool!’ tactless cultural appropriation. A quick look at the Kickstarter page shows they’re working with three Cultural Consultants, which is something that more, much bigger publishers need to do.

I’ve got no hesitation at all in recommending Senjutsu, and it’s a joy to see a small studio taking on the big boys and girls. I take pride in highlighting the work smaller studios do on this site, and I’m sure this is only the start of great things for Stone Sword Games.

Osu!

(note: the headings in this preview are quotes taken from The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi, a 17th Century swordsman)

Preview copy kindly provided by Stone Sword Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Senjutsu (2021)

Designer: Paul D. Allen, James Faulkner
Publisher: Stone Sword Games
Art: Imad Awan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 15-20 mins

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