Milton Bradley’s Shogun: The game with many names
A few years back, I purchased a used copy of Shogun, the Milton Bradley version from the 1980s. It was recommended to me by a friend who had said that the game was way better than Axis and Allies, another Milton Bradley game from that era that I also owned. At the time, Axis and Allies had been the longest and most complicated game I had played (this was in my early stages of the hobby), and when I saw a pretty decent used copy of Shogun a few days after the recommendation, I snatched it up right away. And then it sat on my bookcase for years …
That is, until last weekend. I finally rallied 4 other players to tackle this game with me, and we set the date to play. We all looked up the rules online so that we would be ready for combat on game day. Of the 5 of us, there were two of us who hadn’t played it before, one of them being me. We all laughed that for such an old game, many of us still had a version of this Milton Bradley gem. The game, originally called Shogun, changed into Samurai Swords during a re-release in 1995, and was renamed Ikusa during the 2011 re-release under a different company.