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Rob Zacny

Episode 344: Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan

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Three Moves Ahead 344:

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Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan

Rob is joined once again by David Heron as well as the elusive Julian Murdoch to discuss Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan. Sekigahara fills a fascinating niche in the wargame space by giving a lengthy game experience that is light on rules. It's easy to teach and learn yet still gives the impression of a much beefier experience.

Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan, War of the Ring

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Now that was a twist ending.

Interesting insight into wargaming. Though I feel you could just start by reading those short rules section.

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Sekigahara is my favourite light wargame, might be my favourite wargame. I've played somewhere between 15-20 games, there are some reoccurring patterns but the game doesn't quite solve out.

 

For opening moves the main thing to look at is Fukushima and the fortresses either side of it. A common opening move is for Ishida to try and swoop out and snatch Fukishma on the first turn and then follow up with one of the two castles. This prevents an early strike from Tokugawa, gives Ishida castle advantage and makes it harder for Tokugawa to reinforce this side of the board later. An opening move for Tokugawa can often be to reinforce this position but that can be very opening hand dependent.

 

In general Tokugawa has to decide whether he or she is going to build a kill stack and brute force it down one of two roads or try and conquer majority of castles and towns and go for a points victory. Which of the three or so overall strategic approaches Tokugawa takes will shift the game in quite a different direction. Consequently I haven't seen enough repetition to make the game that predictable.

 

One element that reduces the randomness of the card deck is card counting. I don't count precisely, i'm far to lazy but having a general grasp of how many traitor cards, how many double cards and what proportion of cards of one mon or another have gone through your opponents hand is a very good way of determining the strength of their hand.

 

Hannibal Rome vs Carthage is getting reprinted by phalanx games in the near future. I recommend checking this out. Its about one step up the complexity scale but its a bit less restrictive on your moves. Equally if you can find a copy of GMT's The Successors that's a good multiplayer lightish wargame.

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For opening moves the main thing to look at is Fukushima and the fortresses either side of it. A common opening move is for Ishida to try and swoop out and snatch Fukishma on the first turn and then follow up with one of the two castles. This prevents an early strike from Tokugawa, gives Ishida castle advantage and makes it harder for Tokugawa to reinforce this side of the board later. An opening move for Tokugawa can often be to reinforce this position but that can be very opening hand dependent.

 

In general Tokugawa has to decide whether he or she is going to build a kill stack and brute force it down one of two roads or try and conquer majority of castles and towns and go for a points victory. Which of the three or so overall strategic approaches Tokugawa takes will shift the game in quite a different direction. Consequently I haven't seen enough repetition to make the game that predictable.

 

Yeah, that's an excellent summation of the strategic problems for each side: Ishida has to take and hold the best chokepoint to establish a resource advantage over Tokugawa and to force at least one of the game's deciding battles at a favorable location in the road network, while Tokugawa has to determine how and where to concentrate forces in order to break the Ishida line, either to win a military victory or to force them to fall back to a less logistically advantageous position. Generally, the Tokugawa have the advantage in this nexus of decisions, because the game usually rewards the violence of action, but smart and confident reactions by Ishida can counter even a strong opening by Tokugawa.

 

I've had an amazing game as the Ishida where I managed to engineer a battle of mutual annihilation with the advancing Tokugawa force, sure that Tokugawa Ieyasu himself was leading it and that his death would end the game with my victory... but no, my opponent had quietly exchanged Tokugawa with the Maeda leader up north and went on to win an unspectacular victory via points, one I was glad to concede. I'm very excited to listen to this podcast.

 

 

EDIT: Also, I've owned this game for two years now, with regular sessions of play, and I'm still not sure when to bring out the Mori. As Ishida, you have to bring them out in order to win, but I have no feel for when the best moment is to flush half my hand for the strongest homogeneous force in the game—probably because it's different, every game. I think that's very good design.

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I may have to give this game a look. I initially blew it off because I had no interest in the subject. I'll have to add it to a buy list that GMT is already heavily represented on, what with the COIN and Fields of Fire reprints. 

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Working out when to bring in the Mori blocks is something i'm still a little vague on. A lot of the Ishida deck is Mori cards so if you don't bring them out you are not really getting value for those cards so, assuming i get castle/card advantage i tend to spend those extra cards bringing the mori stack out. Using the Mori to snatch one of the castles at the top of the board and threaten Tokugawa's flank can be worth the expense.

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Having listened to the podcast, I particularly like how Julian articulated the purpose of the "traitor" card. It seems inconsequential (and often is) but its presence in the deck makes fully flushing your hand during a battle, either to win the battle or just to refresh your selection of cards, a not-always-optimal move. Without it, there's no point to holding cards back, especially for the attacker, and I've eventually come to appreciate the slightly increased weight it puts on pushing a victory too far and on playing cards that you might need elsewhere.

 

However, I don't understand the panel's ostensible confusion over movement. It's fairly simple: each block has a base moment of one, and three things (presence of a leader or castle at the start of the move, movement along a highway, and discarding a card for a "forced march") can bring it up to a maximum of four. However, every four blocks above four in a movement stack reduce that movement by one. The fact that movement of large stacks is prohibitively expensive to perform serves as a counter to the attacker's general advantage in Sekigahara: the attacker must move divided, concentrate their force at a point, and then attack after having exhausted some of their cards to concentrate forces, which combines with the traitor card to make attacking a risk unless the attacker has minimized all possible variables. This is a "stack of doom" solution that it would be good for 4X designers to consider, I think.

 

This pattern continued on the podcast with the conversations about combat and initiative, really. Combat is structured the way it is to heighten the will-they-won't-they tension of bluffing that you have the cards to make that massive army of yours fight at all (and there's nothing more satisfying than sending four blocks against a sixteen-block monster protecting a major junction and confirming your suspicion that they were hoping the sheer size would keep you away). Initiative is structured the way it is because initiative is Tokugawa's advantage, just like position is Ishida's advantage (the asymmetry in the game is extreme for its relative simplicity and yet it's almost invisible if you've only ever played one side). Some of this episode, thankfully not most of it, felt like a group of blind men with an elephant, as Rob noted: each of the panelists found a mechanic overly straightforward and thought it could be abstracted further, when really the competing demands of all those barely-there mechanics joins together to make a surprisingly intricate game that pushes hard on both players to balance everything, without needless Avalon Hill-style complexity forcing them to lose perspective.

 

Finally, if I had to give one piece of future advice also related to last week's episode, a group of relative amateurs guessing at the putative top-level optimization of a game that they've just learned doesn't make for the best design roundtable. If you look, for instance, on BoardGameGeek, there is almost no consensus over multiple threads about "optimal" strategies, except Ishida taking Kiyosu and Tokugawa taking Aizu in the first couple of weeks. Even then, the randomization of starting forces and card hands can make those actions sub-optimal, too. Woe betide the Tokugawa player who has to face four Uesugi blocks the first turn and reinforcements there afterward, making a march on Kyoto a huge risk. The genius of Sekigahara is how it demands flexible awareness of overall strategic situation while still knowing the line of best fit (a gradual consolidation of forces and territories over the first four or five weeks, followed by an advance along one or both highways and a climactic battle in the sixth or seventh week).

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"Woe betide the Tokugawa player who has to face four Uesugi blocks the first turn and reinforcements there afterward, making a march on Kyoto a huge risk."

 

"The genius of Sekigahara is how it demands flexible awareness of overall strategic situation while still knowing the line of best fit"

 

Wise words grasshopper

 

 

I were to name a podcast i would name it the Killstack podcast and it would be all about the ways different games deal with the Killstack. I think that Sekigaharas way of simulating the inefficient lumbering nature of large armies on the march is really sound and feels natural within the system. Most games use stacking limits or leader counters with limitations on the number of troops they can lead. Wilderness War, a game I was playing last week, does the use leadership values to control the kill stack, but you can combine the leaders together and build an uber kill stack. Satisfying when the French clobber the brits.

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Finally, if I had to give one piece of future advice also related to last week's episode, a group of relative amateurs guessing at the putative top-level optimization of a game that they've just learned doesn't make for the best design roundtable. If you look, for instance, on BoardGameGeek, there is almost no consensus over multiple threads about "optimal" strategies, except Ishida taking Kiyosu and Tokugawa taking Aizu in the first couple of weeks. Even then, the randomization of starting forces and card hands can make those actions sub-optimal, too. Woe betide the Tokugawa player who has to face four Uesugi blocks the first turn and reinforcements there afterward, making a march on Kyoto a huge risk. The genius of Sekigahara is how it demands flexible awareness of overall strategic situation while still knowing the line of best fit (a gradual consolidation of forces and territories over the first four or five weeks, followed by an advance along one or both highways and a climactic battle in the sixth or seventh week).

 

 

Agree 100% It sounded like Rob has only played the actual game once (with the previous two games being him figuring out how the game works). It was a good show, but it did leave me wanting more - the difference between the game being good, and the game becoming a classic part of the canon is how it stands up to repeat playing when both players know what they're doing. Does the game eventually turn into a bluffing game, rather than a "strategy" game? As that would be cool an interesting. But perhaps the mechanics only support a relatively low skill ceiling.

 

Anyway, sounds like a cool game. Maybe if I ever find somebody to play WotR with again, I'll think about picking it up.

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On the subject of the traitor mechanic, Dune's was slightly different from what Julian remembers, but he has the essence of it:

 

There are leader tokens in Dune that come into play in combat.  Each side has a set of leaders (I think 5, but it has been a while, it could be 6), and those leaders have a combat value printed on them.  When you enter a fight, you commit a leader, some number of points of spice (the game's currency) and some number of available troops, and the sum of those is your combat value.  Highest wins, and you and your opponent assemble your hand in secret.  There are some twists that make this more interesting, but for the purposes of the traitor mechanic, that's all you need to understand.

 

At the beginning of the game, the leaders all go in the lid of the box, face down and mixed up.  Everyone chooses 5 (I think? Enough that all the leaders are chosen) without showing anyone else.  Each player chooses one leader from the set they pulled from the box and writes its name down as their traitor.  Then all the leaders go back in the box lid, and everyone grabs their team's leaders, and play starts.

 

In combat, if you meet the leader you have as your traitor, you win, even if you should have lost badly.  The traitor is a trump card.

 

The important thing about the Harkonnen player is that while all the other players get one traitor, the Harkonnen player has every leader they picked up in the traitor raffle as a traitor.

 

Because of the way the raffle operates, the only leaders of yours you can be sure aren't traitors are the ones you picked yourself during the raffle; those are safe.  Any others are potentially compromised.  Because of the way the math works, the Harkonnen player has as many traitors as everyone else combined, so you need to be particularly careful who you field against them.  Julian was mostly on the money, but everyone gets a traitor, and the Harkonnen get a legion of them.

 

Did I mention that there were combat cards ("treachery cards") you can include in battles that are used to assassinate leaders?  That the Harkonnen player gets to look at each treachery card and auction it off without showing anyone what they're buying, but the Emperor player gets the money?  The Bene Geserit player can tell another player they face in combat to do something ("Don't defend your leader from poison.") and the Atreides player can ask a question ("Are you using a lasgun?") in combat.

 

Dune is such a good game, and it's quite assymetrical without being too badly tilted in any direction.  It should get the 3MA treatment at some point, if you can pull together six people to play full games.  Apparently Twilight Imperium Rex: Final Days of an Empire is Dune without the Dune IP, and given what a good game it is, it's worth a go.  I've picked it up, but the box is still shrinkwrapped and awaiting a slice of my Copious Spare Timetm.

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Agree 100% It sounded like Rob has only played the actual game once (with the previous two games being him figuring out how the game works). It was a good show, but it did leave me wanting more - the difference between the game being good, and the game becoming a classic part of the canon is how it stands up to repeat playing when both players know what they're doing. Does the game eventually turn into a bluffing game, rather than a "strategy" game? As that would be cool an interesting. But perhaps the mechanics only support a relatively low skill ceiling.

 

Anyway, sounds like a cool game. Maybe if I ever find somebody to play WotR with again, I'll think about picking it up.

 

Personally, I think that the high-level strategy of Sekigahara is a house of mirrors. There is so much randomization in the initial block placement, every draw of cards, and every draw of blocks that it's virtually impossible to minimize the role of chance in any consistent way, even among experts, but the extreme simplicity of the mechanics with which the players have direct contact—moving blocks and playing cards—invariably leaves most players chasing the chimera of perfect or near-perfect control over chance. In over a dozen games, I've never seen anyone catch it, at least not for long. As with a lot of our understanding of military history, it's tempting to want to boil the flashpoint to a matter of opposed bluffs, but it's always just a little bit more: opposed bluffs modified by what each side thinks is a reasonable outcome, or rather the disparity between them, and by a little bit of wishful thinking, even among the best players. That's why I'm really wary of people saying that Sekigahara needs to be boiled down or bulked up, because more complexity would make the game a matter of skill and less complexity would make it a matter of luck.

 

Also, something that would have been nice to hear discussed on the podcast: the "living rules" of Sekigahara are posted by GMT for free on their website, giving a good look at wargame-style section-and-subsection formatting but also eight pages of historical and design notes. Calkins gives a very detailed description of the leadup to the battle, the battle itself, and the immediate consequences, above and beyond what you'd find on the Wikipedia page, and then spends several pages explaining what parts of the Sekigahara campaign inspired what mechanics and the effect that he hopes each achieves. It's very cogently stated and I wish more games would have designers with the courage or personal clarity to explain their process like that. Certainly, rereading it now, it answers a lot of David's questions about loyalty checks and card management!

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Not having read the manual and commentary for Sekigahara I can't speak to the depth of that explanation, but in general I've been extremely impressed with the designer notes for GMT games and the length the designers go to explaining their reasoning for why the mechanics the way they are.It's something I wish we would see a little more of in board gaming outside the war game space.

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The designers notes are pretty good. Most wargames do have them, at least modern ones. The more abstract ones tend to need them to avoid copious  'it's not a proper simluation threads'.

 

Very few boardgame reviews are based on lots of plays and vast experience because unlike a video game you can't just sit down and play it for 20 hours at your leasure. I think the panel being relatively inexperienced with the game is fine, most of their impressions were well grounded. Even the idea that certain elements of the game might solve out with repeat play is an obvious conclusion to draw given the nature of the road map and the way the combat works. In reality it doesn't quite pan out like that but i don't think there is anything wrong with speculating. The real depth, like many card based games, comes with working out the value of the opponents hand. In poker this is rather straight forward, is their hand better than mine/what set do they have, in a game like Cosmic Encounter or Sekigahara its more complex as their negotiating or board moves will often give an indication what things their hand can or cannot do. This isn't just bluffing, its reading and maneuvering. The value of the hand and its capabilities is in a large part determined by the board positions. Because all of the simple facets of the game feedback into each other it becomes very difficult to distill it down to a singular problem that the player has to solve.

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Very few boardgame reviews are based on lots of plays and vast experience because unlike a video game you can't just sit down and play it for 20 hours at your leasure. I think the panel being relatively inexperienced with the game is fine, most of their impressions were well grounded. Even the idea that certain elements of the game might solve out with repeat play is an obvious conclusion to draw given the nature of the road map and the way the combat works. In reality it doesn't quite pan out like that but i don't think there is anything wrong with speculating. The real depth, like many card based games, comes with working out the value of the opponents hand. In poker this is rather straight forward, is their hand better than mine/what set do they have, in a game like Cosmic Encounter or Sekigahara its more complex as their negotiating or board moves will often give an indication what things their hand can or cannot do. This isn't just bluffing, its reading and maneuvering. The value of the hand and its capabilities is in a large part determined by the board positions. Because all of the simple facets of the game feedback into each other it becomes very difficult to distill it down to a singular problem that the player has to solve.

 

Yeah, I guess my issue was David saying that several of Sekigahara's mechanics seem like they're solvable, even though he personally was unable to solve them, and that that's a strong reason not to dig into the game with repeat plays. The gap between "seem like they're solvable" and "are solvable" is voluminous and filled with truly excellent designs at all levels of complexity. In the case of Sekigahara, the sneaking suspicion that the interaction of several simplistic mechanics might be solvable, if not for all the randomness of drawing blocks and cards, is the crux of the design itself, not a problem to be engineered out of it. That's why I was disappointed that David was so fixated on "fixing" Sekigahara after only two sessions with another player who had not yet grasped the mechanics to the same degree that he had.

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Ha, I remember Dave Heron made a similar complaint about Martin Wallace's A Study in Emerald where he claimed, after only a single playthrough, that the game had a degenerative strategy and therefore was "solved". This, in a deck building game where a significant portion of cards are not removed from setup each playthrough, and therefore you can never count on a particular card being available in any given game. Dave has a habit of shooting from the hip quite a bit!

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Very few boardgame reviews are based on lots of plays and vast experience because unlike a video game you can't just sit down and play it for 20 hours at your leasure. I think the panel being relatively inexperienced with the game is fine, most of their impressions were well grounded. Even the idea that certain elements of the game might solve out with repeat play is an obvious conclusion to draw given the nature of the road map and the way the combat works. In reality it doesn't quite pan out like that

Few things in boardgaming bother me more than people professing in-depth insight into a game after two playings.

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I received my copy of Seikigahara 3rd printing in the mail yesterday! Thanks for doing this show and mentioning its p500.

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