Shogun

I used to own Wallenstein, which Shogun is based on. They have mostly the same mechanisms but the map has changed from medieval Germany to medieval Japan. I bought Wallenstein about 20 years ago, but I have not played it for a long time. I recently gave it to a friend who was interested. Playing Shogun immediately felt familiar. The province names are all different now, and the shape of the map too, but the game delivers the same experience.

In Shogun, you score points mainly by controlling provinces with structures. You need to spend money to build those structures, and hopefully after you build them, you can hold on to them and repel any invaders. Every round in the game starts with a planning phase. For each province you control, you have one corresponding province card. Every round you can perform up to 10 actions, and each action can be performed only at one province. To plan an action, you place your province card face down on the action space on your personal board. If you don’t have 10 provinces, you will not be able to perform 10 actions. Sometimes you don’t want to perform a particular action. You can just place a blank card on top of that action space. 

Your player board

Your province cards and bidding cards

You place your province cards on your player board to plan your actions

Three of the actions are related to building structures. Three are related to raising troops. All of these require money, so there is one action for collecting taxes. When you do this, the province becomes unhappy and in future, it may revolt. There is one action for harvesting rice. You need rice to feed your population in winter. If you don’t have enough, you may get revolts and lose provinces. The last two actions are for initiating battles. This is when you attempt to capture an opponent province or an uncontrolled province.

At the start of a round, the order of the first five actions are known, but the rest will only be revealed during the round. Everyone performs the actions simultaneously, except for battles which are executed in player order. You cannot plan 100% accurately since you don’t know for sure the order of all the actions. You may plan to build a structure, but if that province gets captured before the build action is performed, you will be unable to perform that action. You don't on the province anymore. Well, that might not be too bad. The worse situation is you build and then the province gets captured. 

The cards along the bottom determine the order actions will be executed in the current round.

The most eye-catching part of the game is the cube tower. This is the mechanism for battle resolution. Soldiers (and also revolting peasants) are represented by cubes. When two armies clash, they are all thrown into the cube tower, and you determine the outcome of the battle by the cubes which fall through. Some cubes will get stuck inside the tower, and they may only be knocked out in a future battle. Of the cubes which fall through, soldiers of the opposing armies eliminate each other. You win if you still have soldiers left over. They go back to the province on the map. 

The game is played over a fixed number of rounds, and the highest scorer wins. Provinces are grouped into regions. In addition to scoring points for the structures in your provinces, you also score points for having the most of specific structures within regions.

Wallenstein (2002) was unusual as a German game of its era, because of how prominent warfare is in the game. Shogun was published in 2006, four years after Wallenstein. Many aspects of the game are deterministic. You know how much money you have and you know how many new troops and structures you can afford. Uncertainty comes in the order of some of the actions and also where your opponents might attack. Although there are only two attacks per player per round, which doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes an invasion by an opponent can drastically affect your plans. Provinces have different characteristics. Some produce more rice, some generate more taxes. They also have different numbers of slots for structures.

This is a simultaneous action selection game. You need to plan how to fully utilise your provinces. You need to construct buildings for points and for their abilities, for example, castles increase defense strength. You certainly need to plan to attack and capture provinces, and to defend against attacks.