LogFAQs > #966261616

35. Shogun

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20551/shogun

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Area control, player combat, troops on a map
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 120-180 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 6 players

Shogun is set in imperial Japan, with each player vying for influence for their shogunate. Throughout the game, players muster and feed troops, build structures into their cities to improve life, levy taxes, and of course march into one another's territory for war. The gameplay is broken into a planning phase, when everyone simultaneously assigns each territory they control to perform one of the myriad actions available, and the execution phase, where in a random but partly pre-determined order, each of these actions is resolved for each player's city. Combat is resolved using a cube tower - each player tosses cubes into the tower, and a random assortment of the cubes that went into the tower then come out, and that determines the victor of the battle.

What a glorious assortment of mechanics. Shogun isn't just a straight-up combat game like, say, the Game of Thrones board game. You get points by controlling landmarks that people actually have to create, and on your turn, if you've got enough territories, you're expected to build up landmarks. The taxation also adds another layer of complication, a currency that needs to be checked. And man, that cube tower is fantastic in how you know that the cubes that go in will eventually come out... but you don't know when they will, and which cubes will come out first.

One of the most important aspects to the feel of the game, though, is the structure of a round itself. Like in the Game of Thrones board game, there is a planning phase, where you assign which order you will do for each action. However, the order in which these ten events occur is randomized each round. On top of that, you only know the order of the first five events, meaning the final five events can occur in such an order that you can't actually execute your build step because taxation hasn't happened yet. This type of "commit to a plan without knowing how the steps leading up to it go down" is uniquely murderous for my analysis paralysis (AP) and helped to make for a super-long game.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to play Shogun again. It's random, confrontational, and kind of rough around the edges. If you don't know the geography of Japan, the locations' names are a bit hard to remember and read off your little markers. But for that one play, what an experience.