Thursday 5 April 2018

More a Simulation Than a Game: A Partial Pendragon Review

Ages ago, I went to a weekend convention with a couple of my friends, all of which were 18XX players. What followed was an entire weekend of 18XX games, from dusk till dawn. Call us crazy, but I had a good time and a good time was had by all. By the time Sunday came around, the last day of the convention, we were all a bit tired, so the game that we decided upon was 1853, the classic Francis Tresham game based on building railways in India.

This is an very old picture, mind you!
The reason for the choice was that, overall, 1853 is a smoother ride than most other 18XX games. On a forum, I described 1853 as a game replete with gentlemen's agreements, one that you would imagine playing while sipping cognac, smoking a cigar and talking about the gold standard.

The gameplay of 1853 is very sedate, non-competitive and relaxed: unlike most other 18XX games, it's impossible to go bankrupt, it's impossible to have a company dumped on you, and the train rush is so sedate as to be almost leisurely. By some definitions, 1853 would not even be classified as a game (apart from the starting auction, which ultimately decides the winners of the game).

By the description above, you might think that 1853 is not particularly good, or even outright bad, but there is a charm to the game: the use of narrow and broad gauge track seems to be somewhat realistic, the railways in question seem to build organically, and there's something rewarding about seeing the end result of your decision making placed on a large, beautiful map. And thus, this was perfect for the Sunday that followed an entire weekend of 18XX games, all furiously, cut-throatingly competitive.

So what does this have to do with Pendragon? Well, the first time I played Pendragon, I had the same reaction to it that I had to 1853: the actual game mechanisms within Pendragon weren't exactly what I would consider "good" from a pure gameplay perspective, but the simulation aspects that Pendragon has, and the ability of the game to weave a story of the final decades of Roman Britain, truly make for an interesting and evocative game.
First game of Pendragon I had, playing as the Civitates

Now, to put things into perspective, I'm not saying that Pendragon is not competitive, or that it's anywhere close to how non-competitive 1853 actually is. My base of comparison is not between those two games, but between Pendragon and other COIN games. As you might know, I'm a huge fan of the proper use and minimisation of post-decision randomness in games. To me, although some aspects of COINs are completely random, the designs themselves discourage the use of randomness in order to win.

The best example of this is any of the insurgent factions, such as FARC from Andean Abyss. FARC can attack directly in that game, but they can only remove 2 enemy pieces at most, the attack has a chance of failure if they have below 6 guerrillas, and it reveals all of their pieces if they do it. Since being underground is so important in the game, this mechanism discourages the FARC player from attempting the action unless he can guarantee victory (using Ambush), or if the guerrillas are already revealed anyway, in which case there's no downsides from attacking.

All other COIN games in the series that I've tried (I've yet to play Liberty or Death) have followed this formula that disincentivises the use of dice. This could not be further from the opposite in Pendragon. A lot of the most crucial, necessary actions within the game use dice: raiding, which is one of the only ways for the Saxon and Scotti, determines the number of troops by randomly rolling a number of d4. The number of dice is determined by how much you wish to spend on each, separate raid.

The results of these dice rolls can have a huge impact on combat as well. Combat within the game is a curious beast: it is almost completely deterministic, although you can roll to have your troops either evade the enemy attackers, or attempt to ambush them, the latter of which allows you to cause damage before your opponents can strike.Although fully deterministic combat does seem to coincide with the dice minimising nature of COIN games, the actual combat diceroll does actually still occur: it's just the roll that you made when attempting a raid in the first place.

Due to the strict deterministic nature of combat, having one more or one less raider can make all the difference, and essentially decide whether you can storm that castle, or if there is no point in trying. In some ways, this meshing of random number of troops coupled with deterministic combat is the worst of both worlds, without the strength of a fully deterministic game or a purely random one.

The issues with the dice rolling do not stop there: another crucial aspect of the game is the "settle" special ability for the Saxons and Scotti. Settling is always used in conjunction with returning, an operation that allows you to return your victorious raiders with the plunder they collected. For every raider that returns in this way, you roll a d6 and for every 4-6 (or 5-6 for the Scotti), a raider is turned into a warband and placed in that region within Britain, which is ultimately the only way to actually start having settlements within Britain (apart from another special for the Briton factions).

The issue with this particular dice roll is that there is little way to mitigate it apart from having more raiders that you can convert, and if you blank out, that's an entire special action lost on basically a dice roll (and using special actions is a very valuable resource within any COIN game).

What strikes about Pendragon in comparison to most other COIN games is the constant, important use of dice, with a huge amount of post-decision dice rolls required in order to actually get anything done. Considering my tastes, I should have hated Pendragon, but I don't. I actually loved playing it.

Reading my criticism above, it might be hard to believe that this is the case, and I don't deny that many other games in which I've had similar experiences (I'm looking at you, Here I Stand) have been slated by me in the past. But, for all its shortcomings, within the beating heart of Pendragon lies a core of simulation that truly represents the era, and represents it well.

There is a dichotomy in wargaming where people want to have two slices of two completely different cakes: simulation and gameplay. To some, the simulation aspects of wargaming is what makes them important: how the game simulates the era, how it approaches the decisions and tactics used by one side or the other. To others, the simulation aspects are all well and good, but how good is the actual game as a means of competition?

To me, I require a little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B: I like the historical simulation aspect as well as the gameplay. Pendragon, however, is solidly within the simulation camp for me. The development of the game is a sight to behold: initially, the Britons hold strongly to the Island, while being under attack: eventually the enemies from without (and the petty bickering from within) prove too much, and concessions have to be made. Independence is gained from the Roman Empire, but even this is fragile, and soon the lords of Britain are at each other's throats. The raiding is random, but it is random for a reason: you never know how many Saxons or Scotti are going to disembark from their boats, or where exactly they are going to strike. The Saxons and Scotti can't really control how many of their people want to actually settle in Britain: they have to make do with what they get.

I played as the Civitates  within my first game of Pendragon: they are basically the nobles and civilian elites that helped to rule Roman Britain. The other Briton faction is the Dux: the remains of the Roman Army, trying to either keep ties with the empire, or control Britain on their own. What truly amazed me as the Civitates is the amount of distaste I had for my erstwhile Dux ally by the end of the game: my Dux opponent had made it a mission to drive down my resources and wealth, to the extent that I couldn't wait for Britain to fragment so that he couldn't use up my precious resources.

Although I'm not a student of the era, this growing antagonism between the civilian and military sections of Britain seemed true to the premise of the game, and the way that it was grown organically within the mechanisms of Pendragon truly made the game feel special to me. On the other hand, the constant use of resources by the Army meant that some of my turns within the game were simply "Gain resources, then turn some of those resources into wealth" (wealth being a duplicate Civitates-only resource used in certain special actions).

Resource conversion isn't exactly the most exciting thing that you can do with a Operation + Special within a game, but as boring as it was, it made sense in the context of the game, and truly created a feeling that the army was appropriating my hard-won resources for their own needs, which just brought images to my mind of an angry noble plotting his revenge against the Dux after another taxing of his lands.

To me, the last anecdote encapsulates both what I love and hate about Pendragon. The game truly resonates as a depiction of an empire in decline, and it has such flavourful, colourful notes to it that it's hard not to fall in love with it. On the other hand, if you step back and strip Pendragon of all it's flavour, it's flair, it's incentives and subtle psychological tricks that it plays on you, the game itself is bare, unrewarding, random and ultimately, slightly non-competitive.

So would I recommend the game? Absolutely, if you want a unique experience. And absolutely not, if what you are looking for is an actual game. In the end, it is up to you to decide.