Crusader Kings

 

A bit of a change over the last couple of weeks playing Crusader Kings at Eric the Sheds, an interesting boardgame based on the computer game.  Rather than a strategic wargame, this game.is all about building up your dynasty and ensuring your royal line lasts.  I had a look through blog posts and it looks like I last played this 6 years ago.

The game has up to 5 players taking on the ruling families of England, Germany/HRE, France, Spain and the Italian States.  Each player starts with a King and quickly needs to secure a wife from some the available nobles in the unaligned states across Europe.  Once you have a wife you can then try and acquire some kids to ensure the family survives, and then get on with the business of expanding your kingdom or developing technology or building  castles (useful for raising extra tax).

Of course it isn't quite as easy as that.  Each noble has a trait... either a positive (clever, kind, chaste, etc) or a negative (cruel, dimwitted, inbred, etc).  As you acquire children and spouses these trait counters go into a bag.  To succeed in a task you need to draw a positive counter, so the nobles with the nice green traits are in high demand but you may need to settle for someone with a negative as not having a spouse is a bad thing.  Some negative traits can occasionally be a good thing... being cruel might actually be a bonus in a military action.

My delightful family in game #1

As well as empire building and raising troops to annex territories, there's lots of scope to use skullduggery and cause unrest, manufacture a cassus belli (essential if you want to go to war), or go for straightforward assassination!  Losing your King or his heir to a well-timed knife in the back can cause devastation!  But taking an action also has an event attached which often benefits the next player so there are some tricky choices about which cards to play.

We played the game twice over a couple of weeks.  The 1st game was quite cautious with little open warfare and even less intrigue... everyone was very cautious and mostly played nice.  By week 2 the gloves were off and the knives were flying.  Germany was repeatedly hot by a series of assassinations which effectively took them out of the game, althoug they did their best to exact their revenge!  

...the family weren't much better in game #2... lots of red tokens!

It's a really interesting, fun game.  Its perfectly possible to play without fighting each other... actually, war is quite tricky to engineer.  So strategies focus more on building alliances, securing lines of succession etc.  One thing we changed was the player order... when we've played it in the past this was fixed which meant the events (good or bad) would always follow from player A to player B etc.  We mixed this up by randomising the player sequence each turn which really helped with this.  Great fun and a game which really tells a story