Tuesday 9 January 2018

Sekigahara, the Beauty of Simplicity

It's weird for me to reflect back to the number of times I heard people sing the praise of Sekigahara, and for me to never have been sufficiently interested in the game to actually get it, or ask someone that had the game to play it with me. Maybe it was just a lack of interest in the era/war, but I've had situations in the past where I wasn't interested in a particular conflict until I played a game centred around it.

What truly amazes me is that, even on the day that I finally tried playing it, Sekigahara had been selected as a game of last resort. My friend and I had planned to get a game of Colonial Twilight in, but realised that after setup and rule explanation, we wouldn't have enough time to complete it. So we rummaged through my friend's game collection to find a 2 player alternative. Going through the collection, it was pointed out fairly early that Sekigahara would fit, but still we continued searching, only returning to the game once we had exhausted all other options.

With hindsight, it now almost feels like destiny was conspiring against me, trying to prevent me from playing a game that could potentially become one of my favourite games ever. And strangely, I feel confident in asserting this now, even after only having played the game once and even though me and my friend got more than a couple of rules wrong. Sekigahara is truly that good.

At this point, I could almost finish this review, although this would be a disservice to the reader, since I haven't plumbed the depths of what makes the game interesting. Sekigahara has elements of one of my favourite games ever: Napoleon's Triumph. Napoleon's Triumph is a game that I have compared to playing poker with 5 hands at once, and this simile is even more apt in Sekigahara. 

To understand why, it is first of all important to understand the chief mechanisms of Sekigahara. The game resides within the category of 'block war games', a sub-genre of wargames in which usually the strength of a particular piece is kept hidden in order to create a fog of war. This can lead to interesting decisions: is that huge block of enemy units actually a threat, or are they under-strength? Can I bluff my opponent into not attacking by seeming to be strong where I'm actually weak? Although these sort of mechanisms are present even in hex'n'counter wargames through the use of the stack, they are principal within block wargames.

The main difference between Sekigahara and most other block games is the way that combat is represented within the game. Usually, in block wargames, you have simple X+ to hit systems when you are fighting. Sekigahara, instead, uses a system that is both mechanically interesting and (after a brief read of the designer commentary present within the rulebook) true to the era.

The way it works is that you have a hand of cards, with most of the cards having an emblem (called a mon in japanese) of one of the daimyo fighting on your side. During fights, you can only reveal blocks (and thus add their strength) if you play a card matching the block's mon. If you don't have a card, that block won't fight, which represents the shifting loyalties and intrigue that was a principal part of the conflict. You also get bonuses for revealing mon of the same clan during a single battle, as well as using special cards to activate the bonuses of arquebusiers or cavalry.

In essence, the game rewards you for both bringing to the fight the right army combinations as well as ensuring that you have the right cards to fight at the right time, which to me felt like a mix between Napoleon's Triumph (where army composition is the only determinant of who wins a fight) and Maria (where you are trying to exploit particular hands of cards while bluffing your opponent into not attacking areas where your hand is weak). 

Hence, Sekigahara's elements of poker shine to the fore, and your poker hands are not only the blocks and their composition within the map, but also how they interact with the hand of cards that you have, leading to endless, cascading possibilities for bluffing, double bluffing and pulling out desperate, end of game acts that somehow manage to actually work out in your favour. 

But what is truly incredible of this game is that Sekigahara is able to pack so much depth in such an easy and quick to play package. The rules, for anyone that is familiar with the depths that wargame rulebooks can plunge in, is almost an exercise in simplicity. A few neatly laid out pages are all that divide you from taking off the shrink-wrapping and actually playing the game. It is incredible that, in a 20 page rulebook, only 11 pages are reserved for the rules while the rest are left for historical analysis and designer notes.

Wargamers, depending on how far they have dived into the hobby, are used to ponderous tomes or rulebooks of truly biblical size, but sometimes there is something to be said about a game that takes 10 minutes flat to decipher. This is not to say that heavier rulebooks necessarily lead to worse games, and some of my favourite wargames have rulebooks that I have puzzled over again and again, but simplicity, especially in a hobby which has quite significant barriers to entry, can be a virtue.

With such gushing praise of the game it can't be a surprise that I would recommend anyone, even non-wargamers, to at least try the game. To me, Sekigahara, much like Napoleon's Triumph, is a true showcase of how wargames can innovate, grow and reach broader audiences, and to do it in a small, easy to digest package that is unlikely to scare off an interested party, like many other, more complex games can. To me, simplicity and efficiency of rules has as much a place in the wargaming hobby as large, complex and strategically/tactically deep games.