The Campaigns of King David is a new multiplayer wargame from Clash of Arms Games about the rise of the Kingdom of Judah under David. The game is well researched, employs somewhat novel, yet elegant and effective play mechanisms, features a beautifully rendered map of the ancient Levant, and most important of all, is fun to play.

Components

The game components are generally fine for a wargame of this nature, but the map is a real beauty, modeled after antique maps and employing pastel colors and stylized icons. For me, it succeeds brilliantly in integrating necessary game information with aesthetic appeal. It is a paper map, with the usual creases issue, but it has a very nice feel, again suggesting antique parchment.

The game also includes clear and functional counters, player-aids, eight dice, a well-written rulebook, and a detailed historical commentary booklet. I particularly appreciated the historical commentary booklet and the phase counters, which employ the classic stick figures that readers of the Good News Bible will immediately recognize.

Game Play

The game can be played by 2-5 players. Each player controls one of five tribes (Judah, Philistia, Tyre, Aramea, and Moab) contending for supremacy in the Levant in the early 10th-century BCE. The game lasts 7 turns (or fewer, if one of the tribes achieves automatic victory), with each turn consisting of the following steps: diplomacy, initiative determination, 12 phases, and victory determination. The action occurs during the 12 phases, each of which relates to one of five different activities, listed below in decreasing order of frequency within the pool of markers:

• Action (6 markers). Players move their armies and conduct combat and siege operations.
• Harvest (3 markers). Players collect food for maintaining and building armies.
• Resource (3 markers). Players collect resources for maintaining and building armies and for building fortifications.
• Event (3 markers). Players receive random event counters that can be used at their discretion during game play.
• Build (2 markers). Players spend food and resources to maintain and build armies and to build fortifications.

Significantly for game play and feel, the order and frequency of these phases is variable from turn to turn. At the start of each turn, twelve phase markers are randomly drawn from a pool of 17. The first six phases are placed face up on the board and the last six are placed face down. This enables some planning early in the turn but leaves much of the future in the dark. I really like this system for two reasons. First, as all of us know, planning for the future is more difficult the further out in time you try to plan, and this game captures that feeling. Oh, if only we have good sales next year, we will be able to expand our markets, etc. Second, the system creates opportunities for risk takers and suspense for all players. Will you be able to conduct another action before new army builds? Should you attack now assuming your opponent will not be able to rebuild before you finish him off? Will you be able to collect resources again before having to pay to maintain your existing armies? How do you prepare for the various possibilities and reduce your exposure to risk, while taking advantage of opportunities? Will you aggressively build your army and hope to crush your rivals quickly or will you conserve resources and prepare for a devastating counter-attack? All of these questions and more must be addressed every turn and create high levels of tension and suspense throughout the game.

Movement and Combat

Army counters come in four varieties: chariots, phalanxes, infantry, and militia, with varying movement rates and combat strengths. The movement system is simple and straightforward: chariots move two spaces and all other units move one, with leaders allowing the creation of taller stacks of units and doubling the movement rate of those units, and with mountains and rivers slowing chariots. There is also port-to-port sea movement.

Combat is also simple but tending somewhat toward the chaotic. Armies have basic strengths (ranging from 1-4) but the effectiveness of armies in combat is determined largely by dice rolls, ranging from six-sided dice for militia to ten-sided dice for chariots in open terrain and phalanxes in any terrain. Lucky rolls can therefore result in lopsided and improbable victories or defeats, which may turn off some gamers. The game also features a simple siege system in which all units attack and defend with the same effectiveness, using six-sided dice, while cities defend with a number of 10-sided dice linked to their fortification level. In other words, chariots and phalanxes lose their military advantage when conducting sieges, necessitating the building of balanced army stacks for conducting combat operations that will involve sieges.

The movement and combat rules are easy to learn and easy to execute. The game requires no complicated odds calculations or tables to determine movement or battle results. Although the combat system may turn off some gamers, I found the level of randomness to be exciting and not unreasonable for the era being simulated; and for me, the ease of play more than justifies the bluntness of the mechanics.

Resources and Building

During the harvest and resources phases each area on the map generates a variable amount of food or resources for the tribe that controls it. Areas with cities generally produce more than areas without cities. Tribes stockpile resources until needed during a build phase. The cost to build and maintain units are roughly proportional to their strength. Players should note that the variable phase order system necessitates some caution in building units. Simply maintaining combat units requires significant resources each build phase. Because multiple build phases can occur without intervening resource or harvest phases, it is possible for a tribe to overbuild its armies and then be unable to maintain them during a subsequent build phase. Such a misstep can have devastating effects if your opponents have built more cautiously than you.

Events

Twenty-seven different events are represented in the game by markers that are pulled at random by the players at the beginning of the game and during every event phase. Events do not occur automatically; rather, they are controlled by the players. Each player starts the game with three event markers, which are kept secret from the other players, and pulls one additional event marker during each event phase. Events are played at appropriate times at the discretion of the player holding the events. Events can have significant game impacts and will strongly affect the players’ strategic decisions. Examples include surprise attacks, ambushes, minor alliances, and improved and diminished production of resources. As with the variable phase order, the events create a good deal of uncertainty and suspense in the game. Gamers should note that the event rules have not been as fully developed as the rest of the game, and questions about their effects will likely arise. I suspect it will take some plays before all of these issues come to light and are resolved, but the good news is that the designer is active on BGG and willing to respond to rules questions.

Diplomacy

As one would expect in a multiplayer wargame, the rules allow players to ally with one another. Allied tribes may give or loan resources to one another, take their action phases together, choose to stack together, move together, and conduct combat and sieges together. However, if players break an alliance, they may not ally again later in the game.

Victory Conditions

Victory depends simply on gaining control of foreign cities and maintaining control of home cities. Each tribe has a different numerical goal, tied to its relative strength and geographic position, to achieve automatic victory at the end of any game turn. Judah needs 10 total cities, Philistia 9, Tyre, 8, Aramea 7, and Moab 6. Tribes suffer a -1 penalty to their total for each home city that they do not control. If automatic victory is not achieved, victory points are assigned at the end of the game for each city controlled. Each tribe’s number of controlled cities is modified by a multiplier that is again tied to the tribe’s relative strength, with Judah receiving the smallest multiplier and Moab receiving the largest.

Tribal Differences, Strategy, and Play Balance

Tribe-specific geography, military strength, leadership, and event draws all play key roles in shaping strategy. Judah is centrally located in mountainous terrain and cannot build chariots, but she can build more and more powerful phalanxes than any other tribe. Her food and mineral resources are limited at the start, but she is blessed with four skilled leaders that enable her to concentrate and move large forces with speed. Philistia starts the game with the most fortified cities and can take full advantage of sea movement, but she has a long frontier, a relatively small and weak army, and no leaders. Tyre is compact with highly concentrated and easily defended resource areas and has a diverse army, but she has no leaders and is geographically isolated with little room to expand easily. Aramea has a vast hinterland with abundant resources, a sizable chariot army, and a capable leader, but few cities. Moab is isolated and difficult to attack, but is small and lacks resources and leaders. Each of the tribes presents unique and interesting challenges, the successful resolution of which depend in large part on diplomacy as well as strategy and combat.

My sense is that the game is reasonably well balanced. A naysayer might point to Judah’s extreme advantage in leaders, but I believe that advantage can be neutralized not only through diplomacy but by the effective fortification of key cities. Judah starts the game further away from its victory conditions than any other tribe and although her leaders will enable her to take a few cities quickly, her opponents have plenty of time to stop the advance long before Judah can achieve automatic victory. But even if the victory conditions are not perfectly balanced, does it really matter that much? In a diplomatic game, diplomacy is the great equalizer. If one nation’s victory conditions are somewhat easier to reach, the players will undoubtedly take that into account during diplomacy.

Conclusion

Some gamers may not like the randomness and uncertainty of many of this game’s mechanisms, particularly the variable and partially hidden phase order, the highly dice-dependent combat system, and the powerful random events, but I personally like all of these design choices. They reinforce the game’s theme, heighten tension and uncertainty during the game, reward careful planning and husbanding of resources, and promote variability over repeated plays. The rules are simple and easy to learn, but the game play has depth and thematic flavor. Finally, the game moves quickly with little downtime, as each tribe has only a few armies to worry about during the action phases, and the players can resolve the other phases simultaneously. It should be noted that the game does require some accounting work during the harvest, resource, and build phases, and those who dislike counting may find these phases tedious. I personally found them to be nice breaks from the tension of the action phases. All in all, I have encountered few multiplayer wargames that combine this level of diplomacy, strategy, ease of play, and re-playability. I look forward to many future plays of The Campaigns of King David.