SHOGUN REVIEW - Between two stools


courtesy LittleGiraffe

It’s a challenge to find new things to say about a game with as many reviews as Shogun. This review explains why I think despite good mechanics (including the fantastic combat tower!), Shogun falls short not only as a wargame but also as an economic efficiency eurogame. I don’t spend any time at all on rules here (see darlok’s positive review for a nice overview at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/146449). Also note that I’ve only played Shogun once, (but have played Wallenstein 2 or 3 times). Caveat emptor.

Shogun is Dirk Henn’s 2006 update of his 2002 hit Wallenstein. Unlike Henn’s 2001 Atlantic Star, which was simply a (good) retheming of his 1996 hit Showmanager, Shogun offers a different map which effects gameplay and a few new rules which add a bit more player interaction and tactics to the game. Overall the changes are good, but like its predecessor Shogun is a game of brilliant mechanics that adds up to significantly less than the sum of its parts. Henn, by the way, also designed Alhambra.


courtesy Debate

There are several reviews that decry Shogun's failures as a wargame, including this very detailed analysis by Cleitus The Black ( http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/246589). Indeed, there are significant drawbacks as a wargame:

There are no more than 2 attack actions per turn. The game lasts just 6 turns, so it is impossible to attack more than 12 times.
There is only one possible reinforcement action (which also adds 1 army), or 6 total per player for an entire game.
As Cleitus The Black observes, “The game simply does not allow for a massive mobilization, or an outflanking war of maneuver.” Though it’s sometimes just possible to maneuver armies in one action to a province you attack from later in the round, it is risky, hard to plan, and usually inefficient.

What the reviews don’t tell you, however, is that Shogun, like Wallenstein, also has significant limitations as an economic euro-game. I am the atypical game-floozy in that I love all sorts of games, includes ATs and standard euros. And by all sorts, I mean pretty much everything from Dungeon and Dragons to Henn’s Atlantic Star to Magic: The Gathering to Imperial to Civilization to Pickomino to Age of Steam to Die Macher to Car Wars to Car Wars: The Card Game to Notre Dame. But Shogun falls between several stools. It does a lot of things well, but very little that satisfies – well except for the brilliant combat tower, which I love almost (but not quite) enough to forgive its other flaws.


courtesy Nodens77

There are also several reviews that extol the virtues of the game from an efficiency/economic engine perspective (see darlok’s review at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/146449). Also see pOpcult’s review at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/141992 where he writes:
Well this description fits me to a T, but I disagree:

Puerto Rico, Power Grid and Age of Steam all revolve around economic engines. An engine by its nature ramps up over time to greater and greater capacity. Great economic games (including Settlers, by the way) offer different growth strategies that succeed in various ways (Selling coffee vs. producing on a factory in Puerto Rico, for example). Long-term strategies are exciting in part because it’s so hard to get the timing right so your engine is cranking in enough time before the game ends.

There is really no economic engine in Shogun, just the necessity of taking gold from various provinces and rice from various provinces. But because the provinces themselves are fairly static (because there is so little combat), the yield of each province is absolutely fixed, and because there is no real decision other than to tax and farm precisely once per turn, production remains fairly flat over time. This is not to say that there are no interesting economic choices in the game – money is painfully tight as it should be. There's just not much you can do to effect cash flow (except choose a benefit of 1 extra gold that turn, and choosing to bid little or nothing on turn order).


courtesy Asperamanca

Instead there is a painstaking solo session every turn in which you have a number of fairly difficult decisions to make about which action to take in which province – difficult, but not compelling. It’s always tough for me to try finding objective criteria for why some types of brain burn appeal to me and some leave me flat. For example, despite liking the games as a whole, I don’t particularly like the last couple of turns of Age of Steam, Railroad Tycoon or Caylus. I think it’s because I keep looking at one stack of cubes, figure out a solution, then find a solution for another stack of cubes, forgetting how it effects or is effected by the first set of cubes. This is just tedious to me, and why I love games in which the heavy lifting is done early and mid-game and the end game is more of a roaring finish in which you reap what you sow – Puerto Rico, Settlers, and Imperial (all 10’s in my book).


courtesy Legomancer

Here the problem is that this type of unsatisfying brain burn occurs every single turn. Why? First because actions occur in random order and you only see the order of five actions before you must play all ten of your actions. It’s a great mechanic in theory, because it allows for some planning but also some very important random actions. The problem, as with many games, is that although the order of the last five actions are random, the planning issues are for the most part derivable – and difficult problems that are derivable is a huge pet peeve of mine, because it is the life blood of Analysis Paralysis.

The second planning problem is more basic: all actions must be placed face down so that opponents can’t see what you’re doing where. This means you need to keep flipping over cards you’ve already played unless you have an eidetic memory. The problems themselves are fairly interesting: do I build a castle in this territory, or first put more troops in to defend the castle, or tax for a bunch of gold.

I should point out that in the 3 or 4 games I’ve played of Shogun/Wallenstein I think I’ve either won or come in a close second out of 5 every time. So it’s not sour grapes talking; I can do the planning, I just don’t want to. There are significant differences between the provinces as well, and not just geographical. Each province allows you to build 1, 2, or 3 buildings, produces between about 3 and 7 gold and 2 and 5 rice (I think). Maybe with time I would more appreciate these subtleties, but for now, there’s just not interesting enough for the time it takes to plan. It feels more like housekeeping than playing.


courtesy Tobold

One tenet of most euros – even euros that are often called multi-player solitaire like Thurn & Taxis – is low downtime between turns. So even if you don’t have high player interaction you at least have quick game flow. But the AP problem means that most of the game is spent just looking at your own 10 actions without regard to what other people are doing. Compare this to the quick play/counter-play of Caylus or Die Macher. Even Power Grid (and Age of Steam) have several phases and a fairly tight group of decisions that keep play moving quickly.

It’s worth noting that both StarCraft: The Board Game and A Game of Thrones (both designed/co-designed by Christian Petersen) use a similar simultaneous solo action planning in which each province/territory may only take one action (see my detailed review of Starcraft at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/1731591). The key difference is that in each of those games you at least two of each type of action, not just one – and three of each action if you invest in respective upgrades. This is critical because it allows for much greater flexibility (enhancing the war game aspect) and because it allows you to spend resources in order to increase the number of actions of a specific type you can take in one turn – thus incorporating tech tree/ economic elements into a war game. Each of these games also have differences between different territories, but these are easy to see right on the board and don’t require looking at stats on cards over and over during your planning.


courtesy Superfage - action tokens from A Game of Thrones

GAME REVIEW CHECKLIST
Given that this is remake with a few differences, let me also do a little comparison to Wallenstein.

The map. The critique I’ve heard about the new map is that because it’s long and thin (Japan) instead of more square-like (Germany), there are more remote regions which are simply better than the middle regions because there is no corresponding advantage to being in the middle and thus more vulnerable. This is all true. In our game last night the top two players were one at the north end of the board and one at the south end. Either bigger bonuses or better territories in the center would fix this. I still prefer it to Wallenstein, however, because more remote territories = less opportunities to attack/get attacked = faster pace. I also like the sea connections, but I don’t know the game well enough to analyze it from a game play perspective.


courtesy Nodens77

The other improvements to Wallenstein are:
Bidding on turn order. Adds more player interaction, plus it’s quick.

The bonus cards relating to turn order. It’s a nice touch that you are not only bidding on turn order, but that your decision is also informed by which bonus you get (+1 to attack, +1 to defense, +1 to gold, +1 to rice, +1 to your big mustering). This is reminiscent of Around the World in 80 Days and it works pretty well.

Unfortunately, though these are small improvements, the turn order is less meaningful than it could be both because of random action sequencing, because the bonuses are not important enough, and finally because of random events.

I find it annoying that you don’t know the random event until after you’ve planned and determined your actions – as if planning isn’t hard enough. Why annoying? Well say you see 3 event cards in a given turn, knowing that only one will take effect that turn. 1 of these cards limits rice production to 3 (even if you choose a province with 4 or 5 rice). So the decision is whether to farm your high rice production area this turn, hoping that the bad rice production doesn’t come up (2/3 chance), or wait. If you wait and that event doesn’t come up this turn, then there will be a ½ chance the following turn of it taking effect. The problem is that there’s not really a good way to plan for this. If I choose my best rice production spot and the bad crop event takes place, it’s hard to think I made a mistake of some kind – after all, the odds were in my favor. And if I wait and the crop is indeed bad, how much satisfaction do I really get over my uber-play? Not much.


courtesy kilroy_locke

As for the bonuses, if there was more variation in the utility of each bonus – for example, if there was one +1 and one +2 of each bonus for a total of 10 cards, and five randomly came out each round – then there might be more bidding for turn order. To be clear about why turn order itself is less important remember that not only are your attacks limited to two, but the order of these attacks is random (and often unknown when you’re deciding your actions). So even if I go before my opponent, it is usually unlikely that our respective choices for an attack will effect the outcomes of those attacks. For example, if I take the province you plan to farm, you get no rice that turn, which is huge. But that is determined by random action sequencing, not turn order. So improving my turn order does nothing, usually, to change the outcome of such battles. Likewise, my opponent may want to reinforce to protect the province he’s farming. But again, turn order has nothing to do with that.

Given that turn order was utterly random in Wallenstein, it made sense that turn order didn’t matter. But if you want players to care enough about turn order to bid on it, you need to make turn order matter more. This reminds me of Twilight Imperium III (I couldn’t stand it – but played before errata came out; I hear it got better), which featured Puerto Rico-style roles glommed onto the old Twilight Imperium, but offered little of the nuance or tough choices of Puerto Rico.

1. DEPTH/COMPLEXITY
"How many and how compelling are the decisions you make per minute?"
- Analysis Paralysis/Downtime?


courtesy kilroy_locke - fittingly titled "Deep Analysis"

Too much bookkeeping, too much AP, too many derivable problems.

2. MECHANICS
"How intuitive, elegant and flowing are the moves that bring your tactics to life?"
One of these weird games that features good mechanics around an empty hull. I think that the simultaneous action could possibly work in another context, but it just makes the game less interactive and more dry here. While the mechanics are undeniably clean, once you scrutinize them carefully, I'm not sure they hold up well for what they try to accomplish. The combat tower, by the way, is a solid 10.

3. INTERACTION
"To what degree does it facilitate a rich social experience?"
Too much downtime. The game doesn’t really lend itself to much diplomacy (without bogging down still further), and the hard limits on actions prevent many interesting combat choices.


courtesy Biker1999
Having way more fun than I did!

4. ORIGINALITY
"How fresh and unique are the strategy, mechanics and theme?"
Given that it’s a remake, it’s not a very fair question.

For an in-depth recital of all the changes from Wallenstein, see http://files.boardgamegeek.com/geekfile_view.php?fileid=2146... courtesy of mrbass.

- What's the freshest part of the game?
The combat tower, of course (even though I saw it in Wallenstein). This is of course a matter of some debate. It’s a classic euro innovation to adding chance without incorporating the dreaded DICE. Some don’t like it because it’s entirely possible that you can attack with 4 armies and end up with 5. Get over it. The peasants believed your propaganda and joined up! The thing that’s so neat about the dice tower is that when your pieces get stuck in one combat (often losing you the battle), you have a better chance of winning the next combat. It’s a fabulous pretty non-derivable mechanic that add to the fun of playing tremendously. Unfortunately, I’d probably rather just play a basic Risk-style war game using the combat tower instead of dice than play Shogun. I hope this gets incorporated into other, better games.

5. AMBIENCE
"How much do the theme, aesthetics and bits add the overall experience?"
The board is nice, but it’s hard to read the names of all the provinces when you don’t know Japan that well. The cardboard theaters, temples and castles are a big disappointment. Even a mediocre game in a little box, Herocard Rise of the Shogun comes with neat little plastic buildings that add to the theme:


courtesy tablestar_rob - Go Plastic, Herocard daimyo!

Moreover, Henn missed a big opportunity to involve these different buildings more into game play. As it is, there are random events that prevent attacking a province with a temple on a turn, or allow you to remove an unrest when you build a theater on a turn, but because you must decide before knowing for sure what the event will be, it just lengthens the planning process without adding much. It would be far more interesting if, for example, castles always assisted your defense, theaters always helped you against unrest, and temples maybe added to your rice or gold. This would allow to plan in a more meaningful way and add at least a small economic engine component to the game.


courtesy kilroy_locke
See the subtle Japanese influence on these colored cubes!

Once again, the game falls between two stools. It doesn’t have the charm of the old Shogun/Samurai Swords, oozing with theme and Risk-style combat (see a nice review of this AT by Dutch gamer harae, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/146551). Samurai Swords features Spearman, Gunners, Swordsmen, Bowmen and Daimo to fight, castles and fortresses, and even mercenaries. Neither does it have the speed or player interaction of Knizia’s Samurai - nor even the nice plastic pieces of Samurai, which add a lot to my enjoyment of that game (I rate it an 8).

6. AUDIENCE
"Who would love this game?"
Well, it’s rated #8, so apparently a lot of people love this game.
- Fans of X may love this game, but fans of Y may not.
The Shogun page lists no strong recommendations and 16 games as weak recommendations (my personal ratings in parens):
Die Macher (10)
El Grande(9)
Taj Mahal (9)
Notre Dame(9)
Imperial(10)
Antike(7)
The Pillars of the Earth(7)
Yspahan(8)
Caylus (10)

The other seven I haven’t played (Armada, Age of Empires III, Timbuktu, Senet, 1960, Twilight Struggle, Mini Inkognito).
This is striking because it lists 3 out of only 9 games I’ve rated a 10, and another 3 out only 22 games I’ve rated a 9 (out of 317 total rated games). And the other three games I like a lot. So clearly I’m supposed to be the target audience.

- Does it hit a sweet spot? Which one?
Not for me. For an economic game I’ll play Age of Steam/RRT/Puerto Rico or Power Grid. For a war game I’ll play Starcraft, A Game of Thrones or Struggle of Empires, or such AT staples as Risk 2210 A.D. (see my review at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/1850978) or Nexus Ops.

- Luck (& Chaos) : Player Control
The luck of the tower is great. The luck of the events and the sequence of actions, however, adds little to planning but time. I suspect the game would be better – and faster-paced - if you knew the sequence of all ten actions and the one event before deciding your actions.

SUMMARY
The mechanics are undeniably clean. Each turn is a little logic puzzle and the fact that there are only 3 turns per year makes for some interesting decisions. In a given province, do I muster, then build a building for VPs, then tax or do it in some other order? Likewise, deciding when and where to attack is challenging, because of action sequencing, tight economics, and the small number of possible actions per turn.

The peasant revolts let you use the combat tower again (yippee!) and offer some tension (and some pretty cool risk management if you find yourself needing to tax or farm twice in one place in one year), but the amount of time and energy spent on the rice and money don’t pay off in a satisfying way. These constraints, by the way, are almost identical to La Città (and many other games of course), but La Citta follows a more conventional and more satisfying economic engine model. Also note that the randomness in how much food you need in La Citta, though it has a random component (what the people happen to want), is also determined heavily by what your competitors do. In Shogun, it’s just a random draw – a draw that I find uninteresting.


courtesy Legomancer

Other things to like about the game? As pOpcult notes in his review:
Game of Thrones and Starcraft, however, achieve the same effect much better.

Also, I like games that play differently with different groups of people. Some games of Shogun/Wallenstein are high conflict with lots of battles are others are more like cold wars with just enough military buildup to dissuade adventurism. (EDIT: This is something I like about Shogun - it may not have been clear.) The balance of pain vs. gain in combat is just about right, as with Advanced Civilization: War is expensive, but if you can capture 2 or 3 buildings your opponent built, it may well be worth it. The down side of a game with very intermittent combat is that it risks more hurt feelings than either a game with no combat or games in which combat is more integral such as Starcraft or Nexus Ops for example (Civ has the same issue).

For me, games are about interesting decisions more than anything. To some extent this is objective, as I've tried to explain best I can. But to some degree it's subjective. Obviously a lot of people who like the games I like think this is the cat's meow. And there are plenty of good elements in the game. As a whole, the sum of the playing experience is just less than the sum of its parts.


courtesy hotrodqt - "The mysterious inner workings, from the top"

So to those wargamers who say "It may be a great economic euro, but it's disappointing as a war game," let me add that there are both better economic euros and better war games.

cheers,
topherr

By the way, it's very late and I plan on editing liberally over the next couple of days. If you find any typos or other mistakes, please geekmail me directly and I'll fix the problem ASAP. Thanks!

EDIT: I changed the word "Eco-Euro" to simply "Euro" after reading some posts about how Shogun is not an economic euro (and not a wargame).



I'm not sure it really fits into either of these camps either, but whatever you call it, it doesn't work for me, regardless of semantics. I had no expectations going into Wallenstein at all, and I think I gave Shogun a chance on its own merits. I wrote the review because I saw negative reviews from a wargame/AT perspective, not a euro perspective. Whatever type of euro it is, it falls flat for me.

That said, for those of you who love Shogun, more power to you! Enjoy. I'm simply trying to put my finger on the vague feelings of dissatisfaction many of us feel, despite the game's ultra-high rating.

Nice review. I still rate Shogun much higher than a 6 myself though.

I don't think of it as a war game or an economic engine game. I think of it as a logistics game. It's all about the planning of your actions.

I also think you and I see downtime differently. We're all planning our moves at the same time, so I don't see much boredom in that. As far as the actions go, they can all be done almost simultaneously, except for the movement ones.

I liken Shogun to a fresh puzzle game that gives you 6 great riddles in which to practice your risk balancing techniques.

Good review although I couldn't disagree more. Shogun does what it sets out to do wonderfully. It has all the excitement of a good ameri-wargame with the careful planning of a euro. The action selection system works well because it mitigates the downtime. You are all making decisions at the same time. This factor keeps the game moving along nicely and makes it a ton of down right FUN for me. It is one of the few games that is almost never turned down at our club.
Yes, it is not a wargmae, which we remind people every time we play, but its still funny to watch people who think it is. I still beleieve you have to fight to win usually so in that respect it is a type of wargame, just not the Risk kind.

Wow.... this is a really well-thought review. I share many of your views and also do not find Shogun engaging. It is so boring and not fun that I gave up after 6-7 games. The only thing that saves this game from a complete disaster (in my opinion of course) is the battle tower, which really is a cool mechanic.

I hate the order phase, which is strange since I love A Game of Thrones and it uses a similar mechanic. Somehow, in AGOT it feels right and flexible, while in Shogun it is devoid of any excitement and limiting.

Negotiation is almost non-existent since there are no support orders from other players. The fact that both sides usually lose troops in combat means that it is better to wait out battles and attack during the last turn than engage in warfare.

My biggest concern is that the game feels too static and unpredictable. I like luck in games, but they have to be fun. Shogun is not fun for me and I am really happy that I traded my copy away.

I've only played Shogun once (last weekend), so my feelings about it are still in the formative stages, but so far I am with Sheamus and Wade: good review, but quite a bit different opinion than I have.

I think the problem is that yes, broken into its components, Shogun is not a very complete wargame (too static), nor is it a very complete economic game (few opportunities to dominate any market). But I am not sure that this deconstructive method is a good way to analyze this particular game. Shogun covers a lot of ground. I think because of that, it can be forgiven for not excelling at any individual aspect.

Taken as a whole, I found Shogun to be quite satisfying. The game is a continuous crescendo, with every season being more significant to the outcome than the last. I prefer that construct to the one which I think you said you prefer, which is to think hard in the beginning, and then let your long term strategy play out (forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing this, I'm too lazy to reread your exact words). In Shogun, I think there is plenty of room for long term strategy (actually, it is necessary), but with the firepower and potential rewards increasing throughout the game, there is also plenty of room for changes in momentum and come backs. I like that variability.

I think it revealing that at the end of my first three hour game (four first timers), I wanted it to go on longer. I think this was because the overall story line on the board was still progressing in interesting ways, not because any particular element was extremely appealing.

I don't agree with everything you said but this was a fantastic critique with many arguments to back up your issues with the game.

Excellent review. Thank you.

Very nicely organized review, the use of photos is always pleasant.


I think that a lot of time could be saved in both reviews such as this and discussions around arguing against Shogun being a Wargame because it's simply not. I personally never thought it was supposed to be, or would I expect it to be. I also don't consider it to be an Economic game either, nor ever expected it to be. The game's excellent overall rating on this site would seem indicative of gamers expectations being well met, thus I often find these discussions confusing.

It's a game about scoring victory points and ultimately about area majority. The battle aspect is just another means to get more victory points. Perhaps the overtones of the game/theme may have one thinking it's a Wargame, but it was pretty obvious to me after a peruse of the rules that it as about scoring points.

I think those that find it too lucky or chaotic probably need to spend less time in the tower and more time building(buildings, troops). I've seen the cube tower be unforgiving, but honestly my games have ALWAYS had a well deserved winner and most games have people competing for first.

Those that complain about the game being boring, well, that's something I could see. Players with AP can make the game drag, and there is a lot of house keeping during rounds. I try to assign tasks to people and keep the game moving every turn but this can be seen as a fault to the game.

In closing, like most things in life, it's about proper expectations. There is no need to make in depth arguments against Shogun being either a Wargame nor an Economic game, it's absolutely neither. I would argue that's it's a really fun area majority game featuring direct conflict that is often decided in the final stages with the top players trying to stave off rebellion and hold onto to key provinces.

Cheers!

Good review, and I agree with a lot of it even though I rate the game a bit higher than you do. However,



seems like an odd statement. The game is practically simultaneous most of the time.

Also, I'm not sure the game is really much of an "economic eurogame" at all. It's mainly an area-majority game.

This can happen when players take too long planning their actions. Particuliarly later in the game where u have some players with very few provinces and others with several, the ones with few will finish their planning phase obviously quicker...


-
James

Great review! I agree with most everything you mentioned. I really wanted to like this game, but it did fall short for me as well.

-ikiru

*enjoy the sauce*

I disagree entirely with your opinion of the game, but this is an outstanding review.

I agree with you in almost every regard. I've played both Wallenstein and Shogun and found the only fun thing was throwing cubes in the tower, which happens all too infrequently. Everything else was tiringly static and dull. It's like the point of the game is to maximize your score by doing as little as possible. I want to do stuff when I play a game.

I don't think I'm on Dirk Henn's wavelength (or BGG's Average Joe in his regard for Henn's games) because I've never played a game he designed that I ever wanted to play again.

I love the game, to me it is an 8+, because of the combination of both elements (little wargame, little economic/Euro) but your deep analysis made clear why you didn't like the game that much.

Great negative review, we need more people like you here on BGG!

To be clear, I didn't find it too lucky or chaotic, and loved the cube tower. When we played a couple of days ago I attacked Noto (with a theater and temple on it) on the last turn with a 5 to 2 advantage and ended up with both of us losing our guys and the buildings wiped out. Because of this - I was one cube away from taking Noto - I lost to another player by 3 points, including 2 points for the most temples in region Noto is in. That's swing of 7 points. This didn't bug me. It was actually really exciting and fun - the euro equivalent of watching two little armies on Brazil defeat 10 guys from Africa in Risk 2210.

Bingo. I seriously wonder if I would like it as a simple wargame, with lots and lots of opportunities to use the tower!


I responded to this point along with several other points above at the end of my review. As I say above, to those of you who love Shogun, more power to you! Enjoy. I'm simply trying to put my finger on the vague feelings of dissatisfaction many of us feel, despite the game's ultra-high rating.

cheers,
topherr

Good review.

The problem as i see it is that it doesnt feel as if it tells a story, it just starts, you make a few moves and then its all over. Something is clearly missing. It doesnt succeed in being a wargame and the economic part isnt that interesting thanks too the lack of story arc.

I really liked the the first three games, but I dont have much of an interest to play it again.

I like your review but also like the GAME. I don't see it as a true Euro and even though it won some awards, as a true Wargame either. I do see it as a good game, for what it is.

Well-done review. I see your points but I disagree with your conclusion.

Very good review. Echoes a lot of my sentiments.

"Between '2' stools" yeow! Wouldn't ONE of that had been enough? I've heard of folks "digesting" something, butt, they usually 'mean' that in a metaphorical "sense"! At least with the "little wooden cubes", then it ought to be "high in fibre" content, and should "pass along" quite nicely then! YOU have set the 'pile' on it all into a realm of which we wouldn't, nor should we, encourage for others to have a "go" with this method.

I disliked the review.
No economic engine? Turn order doesn’t matter?
Calling the bidding quick? It's long & rewards the rich.
One game has too much war & another is has too little. This is bad?
That's called replayability.

“So improving my turn order does nothing, usually, to change the outcome of such battles. Likewise, my opponent may want to reinforce to protect the province he’s farming. But again, turn order has nothing to do with that.”

? When you lose a to-be-farmed province BEFORE you farm it your economic engine will mis-fire. Oh, wait....

However, I was highly amu-entertained by this:
“I find it annoying that you don’t know the random event until after you’ve planned and determined your actions – as if planning isn’t hard enough”

You want to KNOW the random event in the future? hmmmmmmmm....

I think we can shorten the review:
'I can do the planning, I just don’t want to. '

Given that I criticized a game rated #8, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to say they didn't like it!

Actually I thought this was a good thing about the game, but I can see how it wasn't entirely clear. I added a clarifying sentence above. Thanks.


It's true that there's some tension about farming a threatened province when farming happens to come before one of the attacks. But there's not enough player control for me here - often you can't see either the attacks or the rice so it's just a guess as to which will come up first. So the safe thing to do is to farm from a less vulnerable province. This may excite other people - just not me. And though the game has (tight) economics, I don't see how it can be called an "economic engine."


Exactly. Random events are more interesting to me when you time to plan around them. Then you can rethink your tactics each turn based on the random tactic. Cuba is a good recent example of a game that does this well. In the Year of the Dragon has complete random order, but you can see it all from the beginning of the game. I can see how the random event after planning is appealing to some - again, just not me.


Touche. I find it laborious and bookkeeping-intensive compared to the relatively low player control you get, leaving me unsatisfied. If I want to plan hard stuff, I'd rather play Struggle of Empires, A Game of Thrones, StarCraft: The Board Game, Advanced Civilization, Die Macher, Roads and Boats, or Age of Steam. These are not all similar to Shogun, but require similar types of thinking and, for me, more payoff.

Obviously you like Shogun better than I do. As I said, even if I have detailed reasons for why it doesn't work for me, at some level it's subjective. The mechanics of Ricochet Robots are also good, and the idea is clever. It just makes my head hurt, but Caylus and Roads and Boats do not.

Enjoy Shogun!

cheers,
topherr

I actually prefer Wally.
*snicker*.
And I give you 1 point for the touchy-feely subjective post.

I'm hoping I'll really enjoy this game when I get around to playing it (so I hope your opinion will turn out to be different to mine), but I have to credit the work you put into this review! Outstanding!

This is about the best reply provided to the review so far, and I do agree with paydirt. It's neither a eurogame nor a wargame... might be a mix of both, but who cares. I'm looking for a challange. I want my opponents to play as tough as they can so to demand more creativity to solve my own problems, and in this I think Shogun is an exellent game. It's just a game about some japanese warlords trying to gather honor to become shogun. Being warlords doesn't mean all is about war, or rather war is not just about fighting (Sun Tzu was very elusive on this subject 2500 ago: read "The Art of War").

Superb game.
Edit: wrote Srt instead of Art... ups!