First published on BoardgameNews.com

As I noted in a November 2008 news item on BGN, Victory Point Games is a small publisher that was born from classes on game design, prototyping and project management taught by Alan Emrich at The Art Institute of California: Orange County. VPG gives student interns hands-on lessons in design, development, playtesting and publication by putting their designs into print, but the company has also expanded beyond the student body to publish games from established designers, as with Joseph Miranda's Caesar XL, which Kris Hall reviewed on BGN in February 2009.

While many of VPG's releases are introductory wargames, my first sampling of the company's offerings is Scott DiBerardino's Tenka, game #2 in the company's "Casual Cards" line. Tenka has such a simple, appealing structure that I want to like it – unfortunately the game play resulting from that structure seems unbalanced, with one strategy leading to victory in all six games that I played.

Tenka includes a deck of 72 cards, with 20 unique purple cards and 13 cards each of Provinces, Priests, Knights and Lords. These last four types of cards can be played in two ways, by either placing them in your court (and thereby earning some advantage) or pitching them from your hand or court to gain a one-time benefit. The cards are:

• Provinces: These are the goal cards; if you have five provinces in your court at the start of your turn – and more provinces than anyone else – you win the game. Each time you make it through the deck and reshuffle, the target number of provinces falls by one.

Place a Province in your court, and you can play another card immediately; pitch it, and you can take a card of your choice from the discard pile and place it in hand.

• Priests: If you have more Priests in your court than anyone else at the start of your turn, you draw two cards for the turn instead of only one. Pitch a Priest, and you steal a random card from another player and add it to your hand.

• Knights: Each Knight in your court is worth 1 strength during a battle, whether you're attacking or defending; pitch a Knight, whether from your hand or court, and you gain 2 strength in battle. (Note that pitching a Knight from your court boosts your strength by only 1 since you lose the Knight's placement power.)

To attack another player, you must discard a card from your hand to pay the costs of battle. You then compare strengths and optionally pitch up to one Knight. Each player other than the defender can pitch a Knight to throw strength to either side of the battle, then the defender can pitch a Knight. Whichever side is on the losing end of the battle discards cards from his court (and then from his hand, if needed) equal to the difference in the two strength totals. If the attacker wins, he can keep one of these discarded cards or steal a Province.

• Lords: If you have more Lords in your court than anyone else at the start of your turn, you can play two cards instead of only one. Pitch a Lord, and an opponent must discard a card from her court.

Each of the 20 purple cards is unique, with a pitch ability, a play ability, or both. The rules suggest adding ten of them at random to the deck, which would increase the variability of the game – or so you might think.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt eight cards, then chooses and reveals three non-purple cards as his starting court. Players then take turns drawing one card and optionally playing one card until someone hits the magic Province total. The downfall of the game comes from the power of the Lords, something that any Magic: the Gathering player would likely recognize. If you can play more cards than your opponents, you are likely to overwhelm them. Mana costs in Magic restrict players from playing all their cards in one blast, but no such restrictions apply in Tenka as the cost of playing any card is the same: the opportunity cost to do so. Thus, playing more cards lets you do more things.

In my first game with two players, I included two Lords in my starting court, then soon added the Chamberlain, which boosts the power of the Lords. Now whenever I pitched a Lord, my opponent had to discard a card in addition to losing a card from his court. I could also pitch the Chamberlain to recover two Lords from the discard pile, and I did so, after which I discarded a Province to pick up the Chamberlain once again. My opponent soon had an empty court and hand, which gave me the Priests majority and an easy path to the goal line.

In my second two-player game, I again had the two Lord-one Chamberlain combo in play early. Victory soon followed. I removed Chamberlain from the deck for game three, but the Lords on their own proved powerful enough to win the game for me.

I then played two games with three players, and despite one player opening with three Knights that player didn't win. He devastated my holdings, but then fell victim to two pitched Knights from his two opponents. The non-Knight opponent made a run for Provinces, but then had nothing to defend himself with and his progress slowed, only to fall under the Lords that I had started to play in mid-game. I had opened without Lords to try something different, but then felt like I made little progress and changed courses. Lords also carried the day in games #5 and 6, with that final four-player game being the first time that we had made it through the deck, thereby lowering the number of provinces needed to win.

Perhaps the Lord dominance is a result of groupthink and poor gameplay, but a half-dozen games would seem sufficient for other strategies to emerge should they prove better than the straightforward one of simply playing more cards than the opponents can. If they're there, I haven't seen them.

Thank you for your review!

I admit Tenka can be a quick and brutal game -- if one player gets an early advantage and can exploit it effectively, other players will have to work together even more effectively to prevent a runaway win. You have demonstrated this with your usage of the Lords.

However, Lords never emerged in years of playtesting as being consistently too powerful. What we found is that if you played your hand out too quickly, you became an easy target for any "military" power that comes along, because you will have less cards to absorb casualties. Without a way to refill your hand, those extra plays become less and less valuable.

In fact, I know a number of players who swear that having the Priest advantage makes one unbeatable. And others that think that having a large standing army of Knights is the only key to victory.

I think the main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that a strong hand in one suit is a serious advantage, as it should be -- but it generally takes something else to eke out a victory against determined opponents. Experience helps here.

One additional comment: the game was really designed for three or four players, but I did my best to balance it for two players as well. There is not a lot of "catch up" capability in the mechanics (by conscious design) and two-player matches tend to resolve quickly and decisively. The good news, is you can play several times in a single sitting, since the game is so short.

Thanks again for your input.

Thanks for the follow-up note, Scott! It's always tough to know when you have enough experience to review a game. A half-dozen plays seemed sufficient in this case, but you're suggesting otherwise. If our paths cross at some point, I'd be happy to play a few times with you to see that experience in action and find out what I've been missing.

Regards,
Eric