I’m going to be honest with you, friends. I may be an adult, but inside I’m basically a big kid. My affection is easily won with trinkets and sweets. I do not have sophisticated tastes, rather, I yearn for simplicity. In my spare time, I just want to play with my toys.
Published by Queen Games way back in 2006, Shogun is set during Japan’s Sengoku period (1467-1573). Players assume the roles of a great Daimyo, leading their troops to conquer provinces across Japan. With an interesting twist of action programming and area control, playing the game is fairly straightforward. Each round begins with the 10 actions cards shuffled and placed along a row, indicating the order the actions will be taken. Only the first 5 are face up, however, giving players limited information on how the season will develop.
The actions players can take are things like spending money to build castles, temples, and theatres, or deploy more troops in the provinces they control, taxing the peasants for food or coin, and initiating combat with a neighbouring province. Combat in Shogun is determined with a cube tower with a couple slotted baffles shoved into the chute. All attackers and defenders are dropped into the cube tower, and whichever team emerges from the tower with the majority, takes control of the province. Any troops that get trapped in the tower might fall out at a later time for surprising reinforcements.
A round begins with the action cards getting placed in their spots, some face up, others face down. Then the 5 bonus cards get put into their slots, that will enhance your faction for a round, and serve as the player order queue for the rest of the round. Then simultaneously, players take all the province cards they have in their hands, and place them face down onto their action mat, indicating which action each province will take during that turn. Players also have a few bidding cards to bid for turn order, or, they can place those bidding cards on actions as a feint. They pass doing the action, but your opponents don’t know that.
After everyone’s programmed their actions, the bid for turn order resolves, an event gets revealed. There are 4 face up events at the start of each year, and each round, one of those events will be randomly selected to affect everyone for the entire round. Then, the core of the game gets underway. Starting with the first action in the action queue, everyone preforms that action. Most of the actions can happen simultaneously, as there aren’t any more choices to make. If you said you were going to bolster or build or tax in a province, you just, do that. It’s the combats that need to take place in player order. Combat is simple, you just take a number of cubes from a province and push them into a neighbouring region. If another player was there, you scoop up all the cubes now in that province and dump them into the cube tower. Whoever has the majority of cubes in that tray gets control of the province. In the case of a tie, control returns to the neutral peasants, and any unrest or buildings in that province are cleared away.
Shogun manages to create some stand up and shout exciting moments. There was one game where the purple player pushed his 5 cubes into my 2 cube province, and I managed to hold onto the province by a single cube. Then the immediate next action was another player attacking a province that had only a single purple cube. Well, those 4 extra cubes that got caught in the tower came out in force, drastically shuffling the distribution of forces on the island.
The gameplay is smooth, once you start resolving that action row, only slowing down when it’s time to count tiny cubes in that tower. The phase in which you’re planning your turn and programming your actions, however, can be fairly long as there is a lot to consider. It’s a real saving grace that everyone is doing that phase at the same time, otherwise Shogun‘s playtime could easily balloon to 3 hours. The analysis paralysis here is real.
In addition to keeping the other players off your territory, you also need to contend with the neutral peasants. They’re the faction you fight against whenever you battle against an empty province, and they revolt when you attempt to tax them too much. If you happen to take over someone else’s province that they taxed previously, those unrest tokens don’t go with them, the peasantry is still angry, despite the change in management. If you ever lose control of a province, either to another player or to a revolt,
There’s a lot to consider in Shogun, especially as each round inflicts an event on everyone. These can range from getting a minimum or maximum tax, to forbidding combat in provinces that have a temple. While you know what the events MIGHT be, you won’t know which one is actually in effect until after you’ve committed your actions to specific provinces.
After 3 action rounds, a 4th scoring round occurs. First, everyone loses some rice, then you must have 1 rice for every province you control. If you don’t, you suffer a number of revolts. This can be pretty punishing, especially when someone manages to attack the province you were going to tax rice in before you were able to tax said rice. The joys of action programming.
Last week I wrote about Arcs, a game where every mechanism and decision feels deliberate and worth discussing. Every mechanism and decision that Cole Wherle put into that design is worth talking about. By direct contrast, Shogun feels boring, flat, and uninteresting. And yet, I had fun playing Shogun. If both Arcs and Shogun were set up on tables with empty seats, I’d sit down to play Shogun every single time. It’s not that it’s a better-designed game, because it’s not. But because it reminds me of why I play games in the first place: to have fun. Shogun isn’t a masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. The best game is the one that gets played, and for me, I’m so much more keen to play Shogun. I’m not sure if that’s an endorsement for Shogun or an indictment for Arcs, but in the end, only one of those games makes me laugh, cheer, and want to play again.
