Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Foos
Entry tags:	boardgames, shogun

Doggone Shogun!
Tuesday night boardgaming:  Shogun.

No, not the Axis-and-Allies series game:  that's now called Samurai Swords, and my copy's back in Scotland.  This one is the rethemed/reimplemented Wallenstein.  Confused?  Have a side of D12s and a garnish of li'l wooden cubes with that.

Started at 6:30, more-or-less, as an act of mercy for Brian's "some of us have to get up in the morning!" considerations.  By the same token, we decided not to play "Die Macher", so in due course Shogun was "it".  Used the "standard setup for the first time you play" option.  We were more-or-less started by eight or so, though inevitably there were several sidebars after that before we were into the meat of it. 

Core mechanics: the central idea is choosing what actions to take, and in particular where to take them, on the basis of a limited planning horizon.  There are ten cards which indicate what order the ten actions may be taken in, and Initially only five are visible.  The rest are progressively revealed during the turn.



This is perhaps a little less subtle than it might be, since almost all the decision-making actually happens up front.  Seven of the ten are in fact completely automatic after being chosen.

Then, of course, there is The Tower.  Reminiscent of something that might show up on a Dave Gorman vehicle ("Dave, I've built a device for torturing small German game components."), this is in essence a way of providing both some randomness and some persistence and "evening out" over the course of a game.  Put cubes in one end, see what comes out of the other, subtract the wet from the dry (OK, the lower of attacker and defender from the other), recycle the disinterested parties.  A couple of times one of us ended up with more than they'd started with!



Course of the game: hard to give a coherent account of what happened, really!  In the first "year", I seemed to take quite a thumping militarily, but managed to build my way into a one-point lead.  .  In both scoring rounds, we were all sweating blood about what the "harvest" card would be: there would have been a considerable swing the first time, and a huge one the second. Each would have meant lots of revolts if the less favourable of the two came up -- neither actually did, so we only had a couple of rather minor revolts.  One of them may have been crucial, though:  it cost Brian five veeps, and he lost by four!  (Though he might have lost one or two elsewhere, anyway.)



Final scores: me 59, Brian 55, Roman 53.



I think I liked this one more than the other two did -- winner's bias, perhaps?  They reckoned it was a bit random and/or chaotic for its "weight", and I can see their point.  We got a fair bit of hilarity out of the tower, though, and the Viennese Whirls were certainly a hit.

rest of the photos