Long Night for a Short Gamer

Many of the reviews for long, epic games are written by people already predisposed to the format. That's not to say they're unhelpful: many of the reviews posted for this game are excellent testaments to its popularity. However, my review comes from a different perspective.

In addition to my imposing 1m71 (5'8") frame, I also have a rather abiding love of games that take 5-90 mins. I play 90% of my games with my spouse. We like Lost Cities, Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, Hey! That's My Fish!, and sometimes when we really get carried away, we play San Juan or 2P Ticket to Ride.

In anticipation of a lengthy holiday layoff, some of our game club heavyweights (the guys who show up at club and immediately unfold two large tables, a map that takes up both, dump a kilo of chits on it, and then spend 45 mins setting up a 3-hour war of silent consternation) invited me to join them for a Boxing Day tradition: Martin Wallace's Struggle of Empires. Greg Schloesser calls it "a true gamer's game." What was I getting myself into?

This review is for all those people who love to play, but are quietly in awe of the Gamers.

In Brief:
Struggle of Empires is a multiplayer political / wargame whose central mechanic is area control. An auction mechanic plays a strong role in the framework of the game. For the newbie these elements play out as follows.

*Political: diplomacy (even if like me, you've never played the game of the same name) is easy. Speak little; listen lots. Don't believe what anyone tells you. Back up your few words with actions. Assume promises are going to get broken. Help people if they can illustrate how it will benefit you.

*Wargame: me-vs-you. Calculate odds, gather forces (talk allies into helping you). Roll dice. Determine who wins. Administer repercussions. Nothing too daunting here.

*Area Control: this one's the most difficult to grasp. In SoE, many people can have a controlling presence in a single region. Whoever has the most of their little control markers--even if that's 2, 3, or more players tied--gets the most VPs at the end of the round. So sharing the lead is just as good as having it outright.

*Auctions: are a simple concept. Want something? Offer money. Hope no one else offers more. In SoE, auctions determine who your allies are for that war, and the order of play. So if you want to go first and you want to kick Britain out of Africa, it's going to cost you.

Your goal is to gain as much territorial control as possible. You are limited to two actions per turn (you will always wish you had more).
You have six possible actions from which to choose. I'll illustrate how each of them go from a beginner's perspective:

1. You can build a unit - either an army (land), navy (sea, can help on land), or fort (purely defensive). These are the ones that do your fighting for you.

2. You can move two military units - take them from one place, move them to another.

3. You can take a tile - Tiles give you advantages in military strength, piece movement, economics, & placating the angry citizenry. Nobody ever goes two turns without taking a tile, though: they're valuable, and some complement each other really well--think Library+Smithy in San Juan.

4. Colonise an area - At the beginning of the game, the board is 'seeded' with chits representing colonial locals. Some of these are non-military, called population. If you don't feel like killing anyone, you can replace these chits with your control markers, and all it costs you is 1 of your own population (hey, somebody's gotta go over there.)

5. You can attack another player - essentially a pair of dice rolls modified by the tiles each player has in his/her posession. Highest point total wins. What makes this one potentially tough for new players (but only once or twice before you 'get it') is that the number rolled is not as important as the difference between the numbers. For example, if Moe rolls and , and Lindsay rolls and , then Lindsay wins the roll 3-to-1 (4-1=3; 6-5=1).

6. You can pass - you're always free to take only one of two--or even none of two--actions (though I don't recommend it: you're here to play, after all)!


That's the absolute basics of gameplay. The rest are the kinds of things learned by playing. From here, I want to review some of the game's unique characteristics and look at how the newbie can grapple with them.


Don't we just go round and round?
In a word, no. In SoE, turn order is detemined by the players, and as I mention above: it ain't always free. At the beginning of each round, there is an auction. One player will bid (usually 0) and propose that a certain player go first, and another second. The added twist is that the proposal puts those two players on opposite sides of the alliance line: they are enemies. For example, Julie goes first and proposes
1. Austria and
2. Russia.
Lindsay (as Russia) wants to keep Austria on her side, and outbids Julie, and rearranges the chits to suit herself. Proposals are made, bids are outbid: that's how SoE allows players to decide who goes first, and who can and cannot fight whom. It all may seem rather irrelevant before the first war (and at that point it may well be). This bidding-for-allies-&-turn-order mechanic is one of my favourites, though: for two wars we didn't care very much what happened, either. In the third, the bidding was furious, with players even pooling money to get their desired result. I and my fellow players concluded during our post mortem that had the final war alliances been different in even a single way, the game result would have been completely altered. Isn't that arbitrary, though? Not really, since the players are determining the order themselves.

The Seeded Board: They're Right There for the taking!
At the beginning of each war, ten "local" chits are chosen blindly and distributed to their respective territories. Seeding the board like this is a wonderful device not unlike Poker's blinds: it's a great incentive to get active. Having (relatively) easy VPs ups for grabs encourages military action from players who might otherwise be willing to hunker down and play defense. New players should (within their chosen strategy) quickly go after the most vulnerable of these chits--they garner both VPs and let you practise combat without attacking another player at the table.

Shared Ranking
Shared ranking is another gem of a scoring measure. For example, if two players have 3 control tokens in the German States: they each get the 8 victory points awarded to the influence leader in the region. Another player may have 2 tokens, giving her the second-place 5VPs, and two more players might have one each, earning them 1 VP each. While this may not seem particularly interesting at first glance, consider this: because sharing the lead gets you as many points as holding the lead by yourself, there is no incentive to take on a co-leader. In fact, the result of this scoring system is that potentially the most rewarding fights are those where you pick on someone more powerful than yourself. Not only does it move you up the ladder faster, but it makes it easier to enlist help from your allies. See below for how this should further inform your decision making.

It's a Strategy Game: choose a strategy and play it.
I'm a firm believer that you should go into every first gaming experience hoping to win, expecting to lose, and determined to learn. To save your sanity in games like SoE, it pays to decide early in the game what your strategy will be, and stick with it. You may not win, but you'll learn a lot more than if you attempt a mish-mash of things, and change tacks constantly. Playing only one strategy also makes it easier to dissect the game in your mind afterwards. I felt after the first war that I'd played too cautiously, and wanted to branch out. But I checked myself, stuck to my plan, and in the end I'm glad I did. The next day, I was able to reflect on my mistakes much more easily.

One geek (I forget where I saw this, sorry) recommends choosing one of three strategies: continental, colonial, or a combination of the two. While I think the first half is solid advice, for the new-to-epics gamer, I'd go even farther. Based on initial positions, choose either continental (gaining control in areas in Europe) or colonial (everywhere else). Play entirely within that strategy for the first two wars. In the third war, look for easily-leveraged points in that section of the board where you didn't play your strategy. The vets will expect you to play safe here, so enjoy surprising them!

As an example, let's say Julie employs a continental strategy and after two wars has the lead in the Baltic and the Ottoman Empire, with seconds in Germany, and thirds in Eastern Europe. Not bad. If her position is strong, she should look at all the seeding chits (local populations, local forces, and slaves) in colonies. If in any region, there is a tie between allies for first and no other presence, she should hurry over, claim the open chit, and scoop up some second-place VPs. This is especially effective because there is no incentive for either of the two leading forces in that colony to take Julie on: one bad roll and they drop to second place, costing themselves valuable VPs.

War is Hell
Remember Risk? What little I recollect tells me that when 2 players rolled dice in battle, it was always the low roller who lost armies. How 1980. The atrocity of war is de rigeur for everyone but those waging it these days. SoE is no different. In a wonderful twist on "victory," any time you roll a 7, whether a meagre + for a risky 1, or a + for a resounding 5, you lose one unit to the battle. And remember, 7 is the most commonly rolled combination on two d6s. Keep that in mind whenever you think you have the advantage, but losing an army--even in victory--would leave you vulnerable.

Restless Natives are of No Concern to Me
In fact, they tend to be relative pushovers. No, in SoE, it's your own citizenry you have to worry about (I suspect this is the mechanic that earned the game its "civilisation" tag). You see, nobody wants the war brought home. And for every coffin loaded off that plane, your "unrest" goes up by one. Everytime the government (i.e. you) deficit spends, you pay for it in more unrest. After war #1, you might think "so what? It's had no effect on my thus far." But it will, young Skywalker, it will.

You see, you can war and spend to your heart's content, but if at the end of the game, you posess in excess of 20 unrest, you are eliminated/deposed/sent to build your dictatorial library. "Twenty? Why that's a ridiculous amount," you say? Hold on: get the most unrest of any remaining players, and watch your score roll back 7 VPs on the final score track. Even if you have the next highest total unrest, you lose 4VPS (this little gem brought me victory in my game as a noob, BTW).

Warriors are Liar, liar, pants-on-fires!
Indeed, if there's one thing this game stands for, it's broken alliances. No sooner have you agreed to a pact of non-aggression with the Dutch over South America, and they're bidding to be on the opposite side of the battle line from you. Most of the pondering and indeed, the table talk, is focused upon the question: "What are they up to?" So don't worry if you feel like you don't know what's going to happen next: no one else does, either. Remember that at the end of the war, there's another auction: shifting alliances cause people who had helped each other in previous wars to go toe-to-toe just minutes later. If there's an environment more conducive to lying diplomacy, I'd like to see it.

Gettin' Schooled
How easy was it to learn? A lot of people like me are daunted by the seeming cornucopia of chits and tomes of rules that accompany most war / epic games. I had a look at the rule book upon my arrival at the den, and quickly tossed it aside in favour of a one-page summation I'd found in the BGG files. I drew the right to go first, and ceded that right to the player to my left. In that way, I got to see 4 vets take their crack at the auction before I had to make any kind of decision. All in all, this little gamer read a few reviews, printed off a couple of BGG player aides and tip sheets, and that was enough to make me pretty ready to play with the big boys. In the end, SoE's dizzying array of choices, more paths to victory than the Isle of Catan has sheep, and its unorthodox dice rolls/turn order are overruled by Martin Wallace's relatively simple and repetitive 1 turn, 2 actions, 6 choices mechanic, making this an excellent introduction to epic gaming for the beginner.

A Brief word on Theme, for those to whom it really matters
Lots of epic and/or war games look either like a dollhouse for boys or the aftermath of a sawmill explosion. SoE is quite different in that respect. Set in history, it feels like history. There will be game concepts that are new to you, but there won't be any terminology you don't know (if you're reading BGG right now). The game doesn't ooze theme like Thebes or Razzia!, but it's not far off. The reins of power are definitely tangible as you lean over to discuss with the French how best to carve up Central America. The possiblity of losing troops even in battles won is a nice reminder that war is indeed hell. (That last was a word often uttered during our annual boxing day game, in fact. As were others I can't print here.) SoE definitely brings out the military man.

Conclusion

Positives:
Most creative dice-based determination this side of Yspahan.
Incredible opportunities for diplomacy/interaction/dissection without slowing the gameplay down significantly.
Lots of options offset by easy repetitive turn actions.

Negatives:
Money tokens are almost impossible to handle.
Rule book is an 18C russian novel (quite fitting, I suppose).

Smack-in-the-face brilliance:
Allowing players to bid (and deficit-spend!) to arrange alliances for the war to come.
Incorporating military losses even for battle victors.

For the newbies:
Let yourself get immersed.
Pick one strategy.
Trust no one.
Enjoy the ride.


Struggle of Empires gets a 7+ from this newbie, (just because I might turn down a game if presented with other options--I still like my quickies--or if there are fewer than 5P at the table). But it has certainly piqued my interest in longer games. I hope my review contributes if not to your understanding of the game itself, then at least to your willingness to get in there and mix it up with the heavyweights in your game group.