We tried out Warrior Knights last night, and found it to be a great game, even with only three people. We all found it incredibly intuitive after a while, and the color-coded cards and bits really help on that end. A good, multi-dimensional game that forces you to keep several plates spinning in the air at one time (so to speak) if you wish to claim victory. As Giles Pritchard says in his review of the game at boardgamegeek.com:
One of the things everyone I have played Warrior Knights with has said is, ‘there is so much going on’. A difference that is important to raise at this point is the gulf between ‘so much going on’ and ‘a lot to take in at once’. Many heavier Euro or American wargames fall into the category of being rules heavy and quite counterintuitive, having read about some of the issues people had with the Warrior Knights rules on the Boardgamegeek I was concerned that it would have those same issues. Warrior Knights is not a lot to take in at once, but there is certainly a lot going on.
Especially fiendish are the mechanisms related to the Head of the Church and Chairman of the Assembly positions. To utilize these positions at maximum effectiveness requires lessening your hold on the position itself. For instance: if you are the current Head of the Church, the position allows you to spend your faith tokens to vastly alter events to your favor (or against the interest of another), but by lowering your number of faith tokens you increase the chance that someone else will become the Head of the Church! This leads to a delicate balancing act.
Now on to a very brief recap:
This was a very pacifistic game—there were almost no player-on-player attacks until the very end of the game. (Having only three players admittedly made it easier to stay out of each other’s way!) Instead, we roamed about and used the siege attack to take most cities, trading speed for safety.
Schizo immediately grabbed the Chairman of the Assembly position and maintained a steady death-grip on the position, using it to net himself a huge number of noble offices by winning numerous tied votes. He didn’t lose the job until the penultimate turn, when Larry (in an attempt to gain two medieval pensions, no doubt) held down the job of both Head of the Church and Chairman of the Assembly! I myself held the position of Head of the Church a few times, only to end up a “double heretic” at game end! Call it my fall from grace.
Militarily Schizo got off to a slow start, while Larry and I netted a couple of cities each. A law that granted 10 gold to each taking of an overseas city helped keep Schizo and I rolling in lucre much of the time, and we all learned (through one devastating Wages phase) to keep enough money around to feed our troops! All three of us had got so caught up investing (read: betting) on overseas trade expeditions that we left dust in the treasury!
Other amusing occurrences included Larry’s seemingly perpetual state of poverty, my cursed luck in general, and a triple-whammy of three revolts (two off which struck a very poor Schizo).
The end-game came suddenly, as we all realized that there was only a turn or two to go and money soon became almost meaningless. Despite his enormous success in the Assembly, Schizo was somewhat behind on influence points, so I concentrated my attacks on Larry and made a late-game assault on his stronghold. Alas, the stronghold held (by tying an incredible 4 victory points!) and Larry went on to win the game (by one point, grrrr)—the nobles shall clash again soon and the fate of the kingdom shall be decided anew, I promise!
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