Hannes Riener - Jun 14, 2009 2:06 pm (#29185 Total: 29451) Kawanakajima 1561 Was it me who said in OOTW that it is cool to have A4-paper in my hands? Those mad Europeans with their sick metric system make maps that wont fit under my perfect cut 22x34" non-reflecting glass top. What else can I tell about the material. Well - we didn't use that tracks - rather scales - as they find themselves on that side of the board where the player of Uesugi Kenshin’s army will push the markers easily around with his forearms. I painted columns for turn/archived CPs and Bundori on a notepad - works perfect. I played the brown army guys (Takeda Shingen’s army). My fellow the blue ones. When a blue unit has to be turned around as a result of a battle, you find the color brown on the borders of that so reduced counter. I mention this because we were sometimes confused by this as Exhausted Status is marked with placing a smaller counter onto the unit and with the brown boarder graphics... not a good idea to put the enemies colors on your troops. The game itself. Basically it sounds easy. Rulebook has 20 pages. Core rule starts at page 4 and ends on page 10. 11 and 12 take care of the fort what is not used in the historical scenario, so we skipped it. I said basically, because once it comes to the chapter how the battle itself is handled, we had to concentrate a way more. Once you get it, it is kinda easy although me buddy was sometimes overwhelmed by "all that calculating". But I think it is a nice system - by the way: the player aid is imho one of the best I ever held in my hand. Sure, the game is not that complicate, but I played easier games where the designer put things on the aid what are useless and missed important ones. Nothing I really missed on that thing. To say a sentence about the battle concept. The core is: units have 2 values. Elan and Mass. When the attacking units moves to a defending unit, the following battle follows the charge-rules otherwise it is a melee. In general you roll 4 dice for one battle. 2 blue dice define the column and the 2 red dice the row on the CRT. In a very basic melee you have no modifier for the column and to find out the row shift you add up Elan and Mass of the attacker and subtract the sum of Elan and Mass of the defender. The result varies from No Effect to Step Losses, Retreat and Elimination - well known. In a very basic charge, the Elan of the attacker moves from being a row modifier to a column modifier. I really like that idea. It reduces the effect of charges, manpower, troop quality, whatever, very clever to those 2 values. There are also modifiers for leadership, stage of participating units, terrain, unit mode... but rather quickly those modifiers are no reason to check the aid after the first turns. During the game it was somehow something like this: "2+3 minus 1+2 makes +2 on the row. I will use the leadership at the top (column) so we have top+1 and row+2". *rolling* blue 8 and red 6 makes 9 and 8. Cross referring the CRT we see that the defender has to retreat. There is also a number next to the main result value what would affect the other affected units but in our game we never had the situation that one attacker was strong enough to fight more then 1 defender with a reasonable outcome. The Order system A Clan consists of 1-3 units. Clans can be in move, attack, defend or regroup mode. Each mode has it's own characteristics. Mostly only the Attack Mode allows to advance adjanced to defending units. We never had the situation that a clan was in Regroup Mode. Guess this rather happens autmatically when a clan is in attack mode and no enemy is nearby. Voluntary it would allow you to order a unit out of it's actual melee to get it back and recover. But while being in Regroup Mode the unit is so horrible vulnerable that we preferred to keep the unit in fight till it's end. At the begin of each turn you earn Command Points. You can use those CPs to order certain Clans by throwing their ID into the cup (did I already mention that it is a chit-pull system? There are always 5 basic counters in the cup. One allows rally, another starts cobmat phase of the brown, the other the combat phase of the blue unit. One orders all units in move mode). If it is out of the command radius of the commander the ID is placed on a delay track instead. Once pulled, you can try to give them a new order. For example: to change from Defense to Attack Mode you need a dr >= 3 You also can have a Battle Plan what allows special orders and abilities. The side with more VPs wins. That is basically it. We stopped at turn 5 as my fellow had to go. 1 turn took us on an average of 1h. This will become much less with more experience and... well, reduced armies in the later turns. We enjoyed it very much. There are - for us - some new ideas in this system that simulate difficult processes in an elegant way. Was really good fun and an fantastic experience. Complexity 3 out of 9. imho true and not. It is really not complicate but I would not bother a newcomer with a command and control system. There is one thing to criticize in the Kawanakajima scenario ... in the historical scenario, half of the game, there is not much to do for the Takeda Shingen’s army player. One half of the army is in defense mode and paralysed while the other half has to enter the battlefield and my guys had just crossed the river after turn 4 - still a way to go to join the rumble.