Andrew Young - Sep 20, 2011 4:09 pm (#45118 Total: 45231) If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind. Sekigahara Chris and I played our first game of SUJ last night. We think we got all the rules right but time will tell! Strategy and tactics, not sure... Initial Thoughts I've been wanting to play this game for several weeks. By my reading of the rules it really looked like a cool system. I liked the simplicity of the rules yet I could glean a bit of the sublety of the execution of the game. Seemed like it could be a "chess match" type game. I had high hopes for a block game to replace some of the reigning classics (Hammer of the Scots, in particular). See my closing thoughts. Week 1 I took Tokugawa and Chris took Ishida. Week 1 was marked by some scouting movement with the purpose of gathering the opening resource locations. The setup for me had blocks of different factions spread out over the map. In some of the single locations I had drawn 3-mon blocks. I was hoping for smaller mon blocks as I figured these would be overrun. No battles this week. Ishida did the same type of maneuvering. We each had a mustering action as well. Week 2 I wanted to clear the Northeastern reaches of Ishida factions as well as lay siege to Ueda castle. Ishida had 3 blocks in the space. We battled and removed those forces. On the next turn, I had enough cards to destroy the disk there. Ishida was massing a huge force in the Osaka area while sending probing missions towards Kiyosu. We had 2 battles there in Week 2. My forces getting pretty hammered in the fights. Ishida took losses as well, not sure he thought I had the cards to deploy as I did. On the central highway some Maeda troops got into Kyoto and caused some disorder in its environs. Ishida took the opportunity to remove that threat. It cost some resources of his, however. A large Maeda stack sat at the crossroads at Tsuruga for awhile acting as a potential threat. Week 3 We tried to hold onto Kiyosu as best as possible. Nevertheless, we had to fall back to Okazaki castle in the 3rd battle, losing the area. Week 4 Tokugawa had had the most castles and resources for all of the weeks. So, I had been in a resource heavy position all game. We had traded a lot of 0 Card play moves for most of the game with a spattering of 1 card plays when thought necessary. Ishida did a 2 card play move in Week 3 to conduct a larger operation- he beseiged Anotsu castle (unsucessfully) and took an empty Miyazu castle after I had extricated a 3-mon Maeda block back to the main force at Tsuruga. I had 1 2-card play move all game. It came in Week 4 when I needed to generally mobilze a lot of blocks into positions. I had my main force of Tokugawa blocks at Ueda for most of the game, after the castle fell. But, Tokugawa only had 2 blocks covering him. I had many reinforcements at Edo, however. They would soon meet their lord. Week 5 Sadly, I made a silly mistake. I moved Tokugawa's small force onto the main highway near Ueda. My hope was to get those Edo forces up to him. I had 7 castles and 5 resource locations. It looked to be my game to lose. I just had to hold off and shore up defenses. Not sure what I was thinking but a 4 block Ishida force marched into the area and had enough to deploy a 14 Impact fight. So, I lost 3 blocks and that was that. Chris played a great first game! Closing Thoughts As Tokugawa's head rolled off the central highway into a ditch I started to ponder... I had Toku cards to play in that last battle but decided not to play them. I figured if he had the cards to kill all three blocks it was game over anyway. This relates to a critism of the game for me. Seems like battles are all or nothing things. I thought there may be more reason to not play cards now, wait til later, etc. Doesn't appear that way. In fact it seems from this first playing that you want to play as many cards as possible so as to draw and cycle the deck. Why not start a battle somewhere to be able to draw more cards? Not sure if these thoughts will endure with repeated play but I'd love a reason not to play/deploy as many blocks in a battle as possible. I don't think there is a huge case to made of "well, you may want to keep the location of some blocks hidden". Doesn't seem terribly important to do. I love the feel of the game, the movement mechanism and the battles. I need to play more to learn the depth of the system if its there. Pictured AAR is on BGG- I forget how to link pictures to CSW from BGG so that they show in the body of this message. http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/701336