T had a
late meeting on Monday so I went to his place for our (nearly) weekly game. He
said he’d set up.
At least one Mori got into the fight .
I was a
little surprised when I arrived (mid-set-up) to Commands and Colors: Samurai Battles (GMT Games, 2021) on the table. I was really excited when C&C:
Samurai Battles was announced; I seriously considered the Zvezda Samurai Battles (Zvezda, 2011), but I simply don’t have the space to adequately store
hundreds of (admittedly really gorgeous) brittle plastic figures (it’s hard
enough to find room for all of my Wings of War (Nexus Editrice, 2004) minis). The announcement back when in the Monthly newsletter of Samurai Battles being reprinted in the standard Commands and Colors format was welcome indeed.
T and I
are both big fans of Commands and Colors. I’ve written at length here before
about how the game helped to keep me sane when my wife had a prolonged hospital
stay in 2010, which happened to be when I received the core set of Commandsand Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010), and saw the beginning of our
mostly regular Monday night game. We played C&C: Naps pretty much
exclusively for nearly nine years playing through all the national expansions, before
we started peppering our weeks with some Commands and Colors: Ancients
(GMT Games, 2006), and then C&C: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) when it came out.
For
whatever reason, we haven’t played through the entirely of C&C Samurai
Battles yet, so it was nice to get back to it again. Through chance or design, the
scenario T chose for the evening’s diversion was the second of the three
Sekigahara scenarios, East of Mount Nangu. He’d started setting up with the Army
of the East (blue) on his side of the Table, with the Army of the West (red) on
mine.
Enemy casualties, with the indifferent Chosokabe forces watching on.
Much ink
has been spilt on the unbalanced nature of many of C&C scenarios. I’ve
always tried to take a conciliatory tone with these views, but I get sick of
the evangelistic nature of some people who insist theirs is the right way to
consider things. So here – where nobody visits and to no one will be offended,
I will make my stand; to insist every scenario of every game should be balanced,
allowing either player a close to fifty per cent chance of winning, exhibits a
level of childlike innocence and belief in fair play that in another situation
may even be considered charming. I’m the first to admit that the Commands and Colors
system is much closer to the “game” end of the Game/Simulation continuum, but a
lot of work goes into accurately portraying the situation of each scenario,
which in many cases will be weighted in favour of one side or the other simply because
that more accurately presents the historical situation.
Set-up map from the scenario.
Sekigahara: East of Mount Nangu is one of those scenarios that lend Commands and Colors that reputation. Anyone who’s played Sekigahara: the Unification of Japan (GMT Games, 2011) will know that the sometimes the troops of different noble houses will decide on the day whether or not they’re going to back your cause in battle. Just because hey show up for the fight, it doesn’t mean they’ll all fight. That’s the case of the Army of the West here. On the face of it, the two forces are pretty evenly matched. But under the Special Rules for the scenario we find that the troops sitting on the Red player’s back edge – the Mori (Red Left) and Chosokabe (Red Right) – cannot be activated except by playing a “Order One Unit Left/Right” card, for each unit, after which they can be ordered normally. To have a hope of getting all five units activated, you would have to cycle through the entire deck and get an extra Order One Unit Left card in your hand pretty quickly into the second round. Of course, being a Five Banner scenario (first player to reach five banners (or victory points) wins), and the fact that combat in C&C: Samurai Battles can be pretty unforgiving, the likelihood of making it through much more than half of the deck is slim.
Because I’m a little OCD about these things, I dipped into the probabilities at
play with the help of the MTG Nexus calculator (I've never been a fan of Magic: the Gathering (WotC, 1993), but they do have some very neat toys). The Command deck for
C&C Samurai Battle is contains 60 cards. Four of these cards are useful in
activating any of the Red player’s Mori/Chosokabe units. The chances of all
four cards even showing up in the first twenty card-draws (roughly the number
of cards drawn in our game, including starting hands) is 0.994%, a little lower
than 100‑1. And that doesn’t take into account the split in the dealing, or the
fact that the Blue player has a slight advantage with a six-card starting had
to Red’s five cards (my high school math is too rusty dig that deeply). Looking
at the numbers, I was lucky to get an Order One Unit Left card in my opening
hand. That got the Mori Mounted Spear Samurai into the game and won me at least
one of my two banners, and nearly cleared my Left flank (another special rule
for the scenario dictates that a player will receive a Victory Banner at the
start of each turn that there section is free of opposition units at the
beginning of the turn).
The killer blow.
The game played out fairly unusually for a C&C Samurai Battles game (almost more like a Napoleonics game). The forces available to the Army of the East in T’s Left and Center sections coalesced into a broad fighting front and advanced, picking off one or two of my units at a time, thinning the heard (I managed to break the line up with some multiple retreat rolls, but the damage was done by then). In our experience, it's often been a case of little scraps occurring between isolated single units of pairs, I had little opportunity to fight back with an unfortunate selection of Command Cards at my disposal. I chipped away at the advancing enemy, but found it difficult to land a killer blow, especially in the face of T’s superior numbers. The final score was 5-2; with one more round I may have got my score up to 3, but that's not how it played out.
That might sound like a complaint, but it’s not. Some people criticise Commands and Colors wholesale, saying that the system relies to heavily on the cards and doesn’t give the
players enough agency. Without giving in to the desire to call these folks whiney
little brats, I’d suggest that the uneven distribution of chances and opportunities
brings a level of realism to the (admittedly rather abstracted and schematised)
game that can be found wanting in traditional Igo-Ugo hex-and-counter games, where hidden knowledge is usually restricted to what might be hiding in a stack, and planning comes down to a good grasp of logistics. I was
playing this scenario with one hand tied behind my back from the beginning, and
that’s the way the scenario was devised, because (presumably) the Army of the
West did face a slaughter that day in 1600. The scenario is unbalanced because
the historical situation it portrays – a better word might be approximates –
was also unbalanced. I was pretty sure, going into the game, that I’d be coming
off the worse, but how glorious it would have been to overcome those odds, with
some lucky cards and better rolls, and reached that fifth banner?
 |
| For what it's worth, this is my storage solution for C&C: Samurai Battles. All the blocks fit into a $13.00 plastic craft tray with scalloped bottoms so it's a little easier to get the pieces out. |
No comments:
Post a Comment