Brian Bradford - 12:18am Sep 3, 1998 PST (#56 of 56) Recieved a copy of the Svea Rike expansion "Batalj" today. I will give some comments on it. The game includes 42 new cards (6 x regent, 6 x history, 1 x archbishop and the others are standard event cards. There is a board with the battle map on one side and a map of northern germany on the other. The Battle side is divided into three zones and a reserve for each side, while the german map has city locations on it and movement paths. There are counters for soldiers, commanders and leaders which will be used to fight wars. I read the rules and here are my initial thoughts. Although the supplement adds some interesting concepts to the game in the use of the tactical battle board, I feel that this will just bog the game down. War is now fought on this tactical board. Players chose a province card and get one soldier token for each soldier symbol--these are placed on their cards. Commanders are taken for each Military leader (from history cards) and additional soldiers are given at the rate of one for every other military history card added to the battle. There are three new militay cards which represent artillery. Artillery is placed in the reserve when a player has them. Players place one card( and only one) in each of their 3 frontal boxes. All others are placed in the reserve. Battle flows with the Swedish doing everything first, then the enemy, which move in a predetermined pattern (no retreats or such). The idea of the battle is to kill all pieces in the enemies reserve area. When a player fires it is into an adjacent zone ahead only. Roll 1D6---if the roll is less than the number of soldiers in the zone you kill that number of enemy soldiers. ie. if I had 3 and rolled a 4 I would miss, while a 2 would kill 2 enemy. artillery bombards prior to each turn. The combat is actually more bland then it appears. The battle looks like it took ideas from the old block game Waterloo and the card game Dixie. The new regent cards allow for plundering as a player action (instead of agriculture, etc). Plundering is simple: a marker is placed randomly in every city. There is 20 markers and some have VP's and othesr Gold . 5 of them have a army symbol. Players take turns rolling a die and moving along the movement tracks towards a city, collecting tokens when they land on a city. If it is anything but a army the player takes the loot. If it is a army the player loses all plunder and ends his crusade. A player may stop plundering at any time. The bishop card serves only to give the person holding it 1 gold from each player...pretty dry. The other event cards add more historical flavor to the game, but I think there is too many cards now. The game is well packaged and the graphics are beautiful. I will try the new stuff this weekend and report on its play, but for now it doesn't look too promising.