The second General Orders strategy game from David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin sets us in 16th century feudal Japan. Sengoku Jidai - literally Warring States period – saw a series of civil wars between the Shogun dictators and their Samurai and regional Daimyo.
Daimyo – Isn’t that magician Stephen Frayne?
You take the role of a Daimyo – the local military commander – and in a tight 2 - player struggle take on your opposite number to control the region by land and sea.
Many of the somewhat avant-garde game mechanics of the earlier General Orders game continue in this version though now naval battles and siege engines are prominent.
I’ll therefore cover the basic gameplay of the series and then discuss what has changed.
Same Old (skip this possibly if you’ve played General Orders WW II)
General Orders is a bit like Rock, Paper, Scissors meets Risk! There is only a small bit of dice-rolling luck tied to a brutal attritional combat system plus a bit of deck collecting. There are only 4 Rounds in the game and you will get to take just 5 Actions (later 6) per round. So by the time you’ve got some cards, built reinforcements and moved you’ve probably only got 1 attack per Round!
You have 5 “commanders” to use to take your actions. Advance, Sail, Shell, Bombard, and on the advanced side Siege. These are:- Move Armies, Move Ships, Shoot Land to Ships and Shoot Ships to Land with Siege being used against Fortifications. These are all “Linked” to areas of the board, Land and Sea as appropriate. Every area of the board, usually consisting a single Hex but sometimes 2 or 3 Hexes, will have the appropriate Move action space available but crucially only 1. It may also have the corresponding Shoot action.
You take an action by placing one of your commander tokens on the action space thus blocking it from being used again that Round, even by yourself!
In addition there are 3 Support Actions available: Reinforce, Embark and Plan – effectively: add armies, add ships, gain tactical cards. You can only take each support action once and the 1st player to take one gets to choose a greater benefit but in the case of Plan loses the initiative.
Combat is triggered when you move into an an area containing enemies. The defender rolls at least 1 and sometimes more dice depending on Fortifications and Cards. The dice are marked with 1 blank, 4 x 1 hits and 1 x 2 hits and the attacker has to remove the total number of units. This is the only luck element! Subsequently the attacker and defender both lose an equal number of troops until one side, or both, has none left. If the attacker still has units left they take control of the area. If there are no troops of either side left the area is left empty and as the Move action space is already filled for this Round no-one can move in and take control until next Round!
The board is double-sided with one side Symmetrical and the advanced side Asymmetrical with an even balance of Land and Sea areas. Areas can contain VP stars, Area Bonuses and your HQ and are controlled by having units in them as long as they are in Supply.
There are also two different 24 card decks of Operation cards. These can be game changers but you will only ever get a maximum of 8 of them and to do that would severly limit your other actions. More likely you’ll get 3-5, get them early and use them or lose them!
So What’s Different then in Feudal Japan?
Well, while we now have a whole new Naval element we have lost the colour we had in WW II and whilst the sepia drawings of the map and the monochromatic card pictures are well done they do seem drab. I am even tempted to shade the water areas in blue as they now play such an important role.
This is a shame because the game play is as tight as ever and the balancing of land and naval forces gives a whole new level of knots to unravel. The constant decisions to make with so little time: whether to seize bonus areas, reinforce or attack, get more cards but lose the initiative, trust in the dice or take the attrition.
Generally Go for General Orders?
Yes, of course!
Any of Thompson & Benjamin’s games are worth having because of their envelope-pushing game mechanics. I think this is a really worthwhile game and I want to play it many times to check out different strategies and balance.
However, at the risk of seeming shallow, the drabness was a big let down for me. In my mind feudal Japan was a colourful period of bright armour and banners and this seemed more like dark age Britain. I’m a great fan of Osprey because of their quality printing and components and given their sterling reputation for historical accuracy their version of the colour scheme might be more appropriate than mine but it wouldn’t have hurt to tint the water blue, would it?
If you’ve not tried a General Orders game get the World War II one. If you have that and like the game play, get Sengoku Jidai as well and maybe a blue pencil!
About the author:
Pete Bartlam is a games player slightly older than Gandalf! Whilst still enjoying a deep strategy game himself he is now as likely to be introducing the very young or retirees to the joys of boardgames.
