Sekigahara: Marching warriors across Japan

Sekigahara has been on my wishlist for a while, and I couldn’t have been more ecstatic when I saw this at game for $30 at a recent Arizona Game Fair flea market — unstickered!

Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan is a 2-player game published by GMT Games in 2011. According to the description, “the battle of Sekigahara, fought in 1600 at a crossroads in Japan, unified that nation under the Tokugawa family for more than 250 years. Sekigahara allows you to re-contest that war as Ishida Mitsunari, defender of a child heir, or Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s most powerful daimyo (feudal lord).”

Sekigaha plays out for seven weeks, with each week consisting two movement and battle phases for each player. The game comes with 119 wooden pieces, which you’ll need to sticker yourself. There is a lot of stickering. But it isn’t too bad as the wooden pieces are substantial and it’s not too hard to align the stickers with the edge. Mitsunari’s forces are yellow, while Ieyasu’s forces are black.

Sekigahara also comes with 110 cards as each player has their own deck to draw from. Lastly, there’s a mounted map, rulebook and a handy-dancy player aid for each person. The game isn’t difficult to learn compared to other wargames, as the rulebook is well written.

The game lasts about 3 hours, but the time goes by quickly because there’s little downtime, as there is constant movement on the board, and you’re always strategizing your next move.

In a nutshell, Sekigara is a card-driven wargame that involves blocks on the board, which represent a unit that warriors that correspond to a daimyo  You are marching your forces across Japan to defeat your opponent’s leader, and using cards in your hands to deploy warriors and inflict war casualties. The cards are suited, and their symbol must match the daimyo warrior block you’re deploying.

The coolest thing about this game is the hidden information. Your warrior blocks are facing toward you; and your opponent’s blocks toward them. You can see a giant formation of blocks marching toward you, but you don’t always know how strong the warriors are who are coming down to attack you and which leaders accompany them.

At the start of each week, players must play a card to bid for turn order. If your card has the highest number, you get to decide if you want to go first or second in each phase. Turn order stays the same throughout the week.

When it’s your turn, if you play zero cards, you can discard any number of cards and redraw from your deck, or you can move exactly one stack. If you discard one card, you can move three stacks. If you discard two cards, you can move all your stacks. Additionally, you can muster blocks from your recruitment box in place of a stack movement. The recruitment box is filled with a specific number of blocks at the start of each round, and they just sit there until they’re recruited.

Cards also come into play during the movement phase. Each stack has a base movement of one space. Highways; leadership from a leader, castle or capital; and a force march from discarding a card will give you movement bonuses, while the size of your stack will negatively affect your movement total. The larger the army, the slower they’ll move. And to get a leader bonus, you’ll actually have to show a leader from your stack, which can make for some revealing moments. When you enter a space with your opponent’s blocks, the movement stops. If you have four times as many forces than they do, their block is overrun and it gets removed from the game. Otherwise, battle occurs.

When players battle, the attacker deploys the first block by playing a card with the matching symbol. Initiative is calculated based on the number of symbols, plus bonuses for matching special attack symbols as well as matching the symbols from previous blocks deployed in this battle. The losing side holds initiative then and keeps playing cards to deploy blocks until they take the initiative lead. There are also Loyalty cards that can be played as an interrupt, and if the recipient doesn’t show a card with the matching symbol, the impact for that block gets calculated for the other side.

The battle continues until one side declines further deployments. The impact is then calculated. For every 7 points worth of impact, the opponent removes one block from the game. And the losing side also removes one block. For every two blocks removed, that side gains 1 card. Both players then redraw for every card used in battle.

When the two phases are done, the week ends and the reinforcement phase begins. Players discard half of their cards, draw five cards and draws blocks from their bag to add to the recruitment area. There are also various locations on the map, that when controlled, either give you more cards at the start of the week or more blocks to add to your recruitment area.

The game ends immediately if the Tokogawa block is destroyed, or the Ishida block or Toyotomi disk is destroyed. If neither of these things happen after seven weeks, VPs are calculated — 2 VPs per castle and 1 VP per resource location to whoever controls it, and the person with the most points wins the game.

Sekigahara is so much fun to play! The combat is very in your face, and you have to make tough decisions about how to spend your cards. You need a lot of cards to move around the board quickly and to be successful in battle, but you also need the right type of cards to be able to deploy your warrior blocks. There were some moments when one of my blocks just got annihilated because I didn’t have any cards that corresponded with that stack. I’ve learned that it’s a good idea to keep your armies varied, so that you can be prepared for anything. But you’re at the mercy of which cards are drawn, and which blocks enter the game. And man, you can blow through your hand so quickly when discarding to move stacks around.

If you’re looking for a great introduction to wargames — and have a few hours to spend — Sekigara is just so much fun! The game is visually appealing, and the blocks and use of suited cards make the game accessible to many types of gamers. The game mechanics are simple and streamlined, but there’s so much strategy and history in the game. I immensely enjoyed the hidden information aspect of it, and I can’t wait to get this on table again! Hopefully at next week’s Consimworld — let me know if you’re going to be there!