Feudum: Medieval Life With A Behemoth And A Sea Serpent

So Feudum has arrived on our table, and, despite its whimsy artwork, it’s quite a beast. A behemoth to be exact. And maybe a sea serpent.  My buddy @idontknowrules has been seriously talking about this game since forever, and we got it on table pretty much as soon as it hit his doorstep. The game mechanics aren’t too difficult to learn, but understanding how the system works is quite brain burnery and puzzly. ‘Tis super excellent.

The object of Feudum is to be the “most venerated in all the land,” in which 2-5 players score points through five epochs, which may be made up of one or more action rounds. The map is large, as the kingdom is divided into six regions: sea, island, forest, badlands and mountain, and on the side of the boards are three guilds each. There are also 22 spaces for location disks on the map. At the bottom of the board, there are six piles of region tiles, numbered 1 to 5 in descending order.

In each action round, players select four of their 11 action cards, and then each player plays a card one at a time in turn order. You can also spent a saltpeter to use a fifth card for the round. Also, you can spend a sulfur to immediately play a card for back-to-back actions, instead of waiting for your turn to come back around. The 11 cards are:

• Migrate
• Move
• Influence
• Improve
• Explore
• Harvest
• Tax
• Conquer
• Defend
• Repeat
• Guild Action

Migrate, move and influence basically put your pieces onto the board, either your pawns (which are represented in these nice big cubes) or influence markers (which are smaller hexagon pieces in your player color). Movement is also dependent on the routes or waterways, and you can pick up vessels with a guild action (a different action card — more on that later) to help move across the map.

When you place an influence marker at a location, you are either a ruler, subject or serf of a location. The first person there is the ruler of the location; your second influence marker is a subject. If an opponent places an influence marker at the same location, he or she becomes a serf. The locations you rule increase your guild status (also, more on that later).

An improve action and certain resources allow players to improve a location they’re ruling. Outposts become farms to towns to feudums. Every time a location is improved, a region tile is removed from its corresponding pile. These region tiles act like the timekeeper of the game and determine if the game moves into the next epoch. Collected tiles are considered wild cards or can be used as the landscape on the flip side of it.

If you become the ruler of a feudum, you become a vassal and get to pick what type of feudum you want at that location, which will increase your influence. However, you must now show loyalty to the king by conquering locations. If you don’t do so in a timely manner according to the epochs, you lose veneration points.

When you use an explore card at an outpost, you can draw Royal Writ cards, which are either end-game victory scores or one-time use action cards. You cannot have more than 3 Royal Writ cards at a time.

If you rule a farm, you can harvest the land and randomly draw five goods from the haversack and place them next to your farm. The more feudums you rule, the most goods you’ll draw from the bag. You can also randomly draw some of the goods to put into your personal supply, but you’ll need to spend rosary beads to do that. I’ll explain later where you can get some rosary beads.

The taxing action allows you to collect 2 shillings, and extra shillings for each additional town and/or feudum you rule.

The conquer action, which can never be your last action of the round, attempts to unseat a ruler from a location. You add up the attack and defense strengths of pawns, feudums, defending subject and rebelling serfs. You can also add saltpeter and weapons to raise your attack strength.

The defend action guards against the conquer action. It gives you +1 for defense. If nobody attacks you during the round, you get 1 VP for the card.

The repeat action allows you to take an action of a card you’ve already played in the round. If you use this repeat card to move twice, you can place one of your discs on the epic voyage track. Moving up the track will get you VPs at the end of the game.

The guild action is the most complicated action card of the bunch. On this card, you can either trade, pull or push. This will make more sense in a second. Remember when I said there are six guilds on the board, and as you place influence on the map, you can either become the Guild Master (the person with the most influence) or the Journeyman of the guild (the person with the second-most influence of that guild). All the guilds are connected, so that a Guild Master can push resources to the guild on the right to score points or a Journeyman can pull resources from a guild to the left to also score victory points. Bonkers, right?

The six guilds are farmer, merchant, alchemist, knight, noble and monk. Each guild allows you to get various resources to activate certain actions, either by trading, pulling or pushing. The Farmer Guild trade allows players to send goods from their farm to the guild for food or shillings. The limit on the Farmer Guild is 10, unless there’s a rosary bead that increases the limit. The pull action for the farmer guild will draw rosary beards from the monk guild, giving the journeyman points. The Guild Master pushes resources out of the guild into the Merchant Guild to fill up rows for VPs.

The Merchant Guild allows players to purchase a maximum of three goods from the market, the price varying in its location. The Journeyman pull action for this moves three foods from the Farmer Guild, and if a row or column is completed, that person gets VPs and draws 2 Royal Writ cards, keeping one of them. The Guild Master can also push up to four resources out of the Guild into the Alchemist Guild, and if carts are completed, then he or she will score VPs.

The Alchemist Guild is where players can purchase vessels for 3 shillings. The Journeyman can pull 2 goods from the Merchant Guild to score points and draw Royal Writ cards, keeping one of them. The Guild Master can complete vessels by removing available goods on the production chart and returning them to the bag. The Guild Master can also create barrels of krud, which will then add influence markers for all players to pick up at the Knight Guild.

At the Knight Guild, players may pay 3 shillings to pick up all their influence markers in their row. You may also then return three of your influence markers to control the beast or a sea monster. These guys add to your movement allowance. Monsters pin other player’s pawns at a location and have a defense of +1. The sea monster is limited to movement along the waterways. The pull action of the Knight Guild grabs resources from the Alchemist Guild to score VPs and draws 2 Royal Writ cards, keeping one of them. The push action of the Knight Guild pushes influence markers into the general supply and adds king’s seals to the Noble Guild.

In the Noble Guild, players can purchase king’s seals, which are required for end-game Royal Writ cards to score and to upgrade a town into a feudum. Pulling into the Noble Guild will take influence markers from the Knight Guild, and if you complete a row or column, you’ll score VPs and get draw Royal Writ cards, keeping one of them. Pushing out of the guild will flip over the king’s seals into rosary beards, which will fill up the Monk Guild.

In the Monk Guild, players can pay for rosary beards. Pulling into the guild will score VPs and gain Royal Writ cards if the sum of the rosary beards exceeds 11. Pushing out of the guild will place rosary beards back into the Farmer Guild (and we’ve come full circle), and depending on the sum, will score various VPs.

In short, each guild location has a trade, push and pull action. When players do a trade action, which is basically buying the resource there, the money goes first to the Guild Master and then the Journeyman, and sometimes the apprentice depending on the location. So the puzzle aspect of the game is when you want a certain resource (which can either be saltpeter, sulfur, iron, wood, food, rosary beads, king’s seals or vessels), you have to really plan your turns to get that resource to that location if you can’t outright buy it. And placing yourself in good standing as either the Journeyman or Guild Master helps reap benefits from people, including yourself, selecting certain guilds.

So up to this point, we’ve just been explaining the take actions portion of a round. After players take actions, they

• Nourish pawns
• Roll the progress die
• Advance epoch marker and score epoch
• Final scoring after 5 epochs.

Each pawn on the board needs to be fed at the end of each round. Players can also remove a sulfur from the wine barrels on the board to essentially nourish them for two rounds. But they are now likely to be drunk, so their defense is at zero.

Rolling the progress die will take off a region tile from the board. Depending on which tiles are now showing will determine if game play moves into the next epoch. There’s a little chart next to where these piles sit to remind players what will trigger the next epoch. Players check for loyalty, and they replenish landscapes, the map and guilds, depending on the epoch. The game lasts about 7-10 rounds, according to the rulebook.

When the game hits the fifth epoch, game play continues for one more round. If the fifth epoch was triggered during the action round, then the game will end, scoring the epoch as usual. You get VPs based on where you are on your epic voyage, empires (either type of location ruled or feudums), 1 VP per 3 shillings, and your Royal Writ cards you satisfied and have king’s seals for. The person with the most VPs wins the game. If there’s a tie, the win goes to the person with the most sulfur left in his or her barrel.

Naturally, this write-up is the simplified version of game play for this monster of a game. There are way more specific rules that you can read about in the rulebook, but I just wanted to write about the overall gyst of the game. The quality and components of the game is excellent, and this copy has a few expansions already included in it. My friend also sprung for metal coins. We fancy!

Setup takes some time, and, for our first game, setup and rules explanation took about 90 minutes. I kind of wish the player guides were printed just on one page, so you didn’t have to keep flipping it over to read all the things, but that’s my only small beef with the game, and that can be easily remedied. Anyway, can’t wait to get this on table again. This time, I’m going to get the monster so that I can trap other people’s pawns!