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Jesse Dean
United States
Orlando
Florida
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
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GMT is one of my favorite game companies. Part of the reason for that is there delving into the heavier eurogame market with titles like Dominant Species and Urban Sprawl, but I also like their willingness to release daring lighter wargames that abstract out some level of unnecessary detail to make a fast, fun game that is easily playable in just a handful of hours. Sekigahara is the latest in that line and with 1.5 games under my belt I am pretty impressed with it.
I was aware of Sekigahara before its release, and while I found some of the information on it interesting, it was insufficient to interest me enough to pre-order it. What was sufficient to fully catch my attention was a combination of a very good response from my geekbuddies (7.83) and the overall positive reviews for the game (including an 8.18 average rating as of right now). The news that it sold out at the publisher level and the fact that there was only one copy left at Coolstuff was enough to push me to get a copy, after all with how well it was regarded and the game’s limited availability it probably would have been pretty easy to get rid of it.
Sekigahara is set in the period of Japanese history immediately following the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. After his death occurred the order he tried to establish began to unravel and two powerful daiymos, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Ishida Mitsunari, battled for the fate of Japan. The loyalty of the various other daimyos was uncertain enough that several switched sides over the course of the war and even during specific battles.
So Sekigahara simulates this uncertain loyalty by having each player play with a hand of loyalty cards. In order to use a particular block in battle you need to be able to play the loyalty card associated with that block’s faction. Player’s take turn playing cards and revealing units, with the units particular strength causing an increase on the impact track. After the battle is over, relative position on the impact track determines both the winner of the battle and how significant losses are.
This uncertainty about the overall loyalty of your opponent’s troops, or even what troops are in a particular stack is such that it permeates the game with uncertainty. A large stack of troops may be moving towards you, but it may be a paper tiger, with no real capability to do anything to you. This bluffing, and the decision when to call that bluff is an important part of winning the game and is part of what provides the game with so much tension. You do not know your opponent’s true capabilities and identifying when the risk is worth the reward is the skill that is most frequently used in this game.
There is a bit of luck in the game in the form of what units you have coming out and what loyalty cards you draw, but these are what I consider “good” randomness, as it exists in the form of varied capabilities as opposed to random results. It is possible that the luck of the draw will negatively affect you in an unexpected ways, particularly when you redraw after a particularly tough battle, but on the whole I do not find the luck in game to be a major deciding factor in the game, though I doubt it will be significant enough to bother anyone who is actually interested in the game. The units themselves are even less likely to have an effect on the game, though getting a stack of similar units is probably a little bit more favorable, the ability to place a reinforcement unit in any friendly recruiting area is sufficient that it seems to matter only slightly.
Sekigahara seems to mostly about dealing with strategic ambiguity. You know what the constraints are for your units, but are uncertain what they are for your opponent. Thus the decisions you make are either ones where based on the information you have available you are fairly convinced you will win, ones where you are attempting to force your opponent to reveal to you their impressions of their hands vs. the unit groups they have on the board, or ones that are forced upon you by poor circumstances where you need to engage in battle because otherwise you will lose. Each of these options is replete with tension, making the game among the most tense I have played, with each choice having numerous repercussions across the board and thus ways to cause the game to spiral out of your control.
My first full game of Sekigahara was this past weekend against my girlfriend, Minerva. Though she does not play many board games these days, back when she was a more regular player we frequently played Command & Colors: Ancients and Twilight Struggle against each other, so I thought that perhaps Sekigahara would be interesting enough to lure her back in, at least for the short term.
I had her play Tokugawa while I played Ishida. I had heard that Tokugawa was easier to play, and as she is now less practiced in board games, I figured that would be a good start. While I was able to handily defeat her easternmost army, early on she was able to put her forces in her capital to good use, plowing up the road seizing resources and eventually approaching one of my castles. In a bit of a panic I sent forces from my own capital to reinforce my castle, despite her insistence that she had no plans to attack the castle, and the next phase she proved that may not have been entirely true as she brought in her army and smacked mine down, causing me to lose three blocks to her one, with two of the remainders retreating into the castle, and Ishida himself retreating down the road. My next attempt to reinforce my castle troops was equally unsuccessful thanks to one of my units switching sides during battle, and I lost even more troops to the attempt, leaving me in what I felt was a pretty desperate position. She had a large army preparing to hit me from the east and had even begun to threaten the north, while I was running behind her in both available reinforcements and hand size.
Then, much to my surprise she retreated. She had her hand on my throat and was slowly throttling it, but instead of finishing me off she fell back, focusing more on bringing in reinforcements, while retreating her forces back to more defensible locations. So, I took advantage of this opportunity and started to grab resource sites and seized one of her castles, pushing income of both cards and reinforcements from her side to mine. This was enough to allow me to get into a strong enough position that when her Tokugawa-lead army engaged with me during the penultimate round I was able to achieve a total victory, defeating her army and killing her daimyo, allowing me to achieve one of the instant win victory conditions.
Discussing it with her later, I learned that the reason for her retreat was that she realized that after her two victories her army was now a paper tiger and that any attempt I made to fight against it would result in her defeat. So she fell back until the loyalty of her clans were more assured and she had a good chance of winning future conflicts. Of course I had no way of knowing this. At the time I was going to try to pursue a different strategy as any attack against her at that point seemed suicidal, and I had almost given up on the game. A continued confidence in her actions would probably have caused me to simply avoid her large army and probably assured her victory.
So the game was lost not on any individual battle, but simply on a lack of ability to manage perceptions. This is very different from most any other war game I have played, even among the block games, that I cannot help but want to explore this one in much greater detail. It seems like it is worth the effort.
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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
