Below an article on Sekigahara new gamer strategy from InsideGMT contributor David Wiley of Cardboard Clash and Swords & Chit. You can also find this article on David’s blog. Enjoy! -Rachel

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Greetings Grognards! Once again I hope, in spite of my pending application for status as a certified newbie wargamer, I can use that term in such a familiar fashion. I covered my wargaming background, little as it is, in my first post where I provided some insights based on my spectacular failure in my first play of Twilight Struggle. If you haven’t read that one, then allow me to lay some background about me for you. For years I’ve danced around wanting to be a wargamer. I’ve played a lot of War of the Ring, which has been my absolute favorite game for half a decade (which is about as long as I’ve been consistently playing modern board games). I’ve dabbled in a few games here and there, even going as far as to review a very small selection on my blog (Stamford Bridge: End of the Viking Age and Agricola, Master of Britain and 878: Vikings – Invasions of England) and post a few articles for the early wave of InsideGMT a few years ago based around 1960: The Making of the President. But so far my experience with wargaming has been more of a “I’d like to play more of those” without any real progress on actually playing any of them. And in the past two months, that has started to change because I have a good friend who loves playing wargames and is a willing opponent. We’ve played matches of lighter fare, such as 13 Days: The Cuban MIssile Crisis and Watergate, and some of longer affairs, such as Twilight Struggle and Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan. I’ve even borrowed his copy of Peloponnesian War and recently brought the campaign battle to a successful conclusion for the Athenian army. And so, with this brief introduction out of the way, let me dive into the second of what I hope will be a semi-regular occurrence going forward at Cardboard Clash: a focus on wargames!

This time I’m going to reflect back on a Thursday night several weeks ago, shortly after the failure in Twilight Struggle, when he brought out Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan for us to try. I had heard a lot of buzz about block wargames being great games, and this was commonly mentioned as one of the better ones to explore. While this game is slightly later in the timeline than my preferred Medieval period of history, it is still relatively close at 1600. The historical setting of the game interests me quite a bit, actually, and I’m looking to find a book or two in the area at libraries to dig in more about the historical Sekigahara. I’d love to get recommendations!

This article is an attempt to collect some of my initial impressions of the game and theorize on what I might do differently the next time I play Sekigahara as the Tokugawa side. Which might not happen for a long time, as we randomly select who plays on which side of the battle (and that randomization has ensured his placement as the Soviets every time we’ve played a U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. game!). In fact, this may come back to haunt me if he reads these and implements them against me or, worse yet, feigns the use of these things against me and I overreact based upon my own intended strategies. This post is not intended to provide high-level strategy tips, as it will require more plays to arrive at that point to where I could even pretend to provide that level of insight. This game, at least on the surface, is extremely simple and straightforward, and many of you Grognards probably consider this more along the lines of a gateway wargame, not something worth replaying frequently because of its limitations. That’s fine, this post isn’t going to provide anything more than entertainment value for you. And yet for the sake of others who, like me, might be on the verge of their first plays and are not quite ready to grok some high-level depth in strategy, this can hopefully provide some insight so you can learn from my mistakes and have at least some idea of what to attempt to accomplish in the game.

Insight #1: Rules Are Important. Don’t Miss Rules.

You may be wondering how, with such a simple overall ruleset, it would be possible to miss rules. I think we actually played this one really well overall, considering I came in knowing nothing for the rules of the game and the chaos of noise going on around us during the rules explanation. We even took our time to look up key things several times, and I pulled open a player aid on my little smartphone as a reference (Update: The game did have player aids, but they were apparently in my friend’s car and not in the box, so we didn’t have access to them because we didn’t know they existed!). Yet we both completely missed one key thing that I didn’t discover until I watched the Heavy Cardboard teach & playthrough afterwards: you are supposed to redraw cards after a battle based on the ones you played. We redrew cards for losses, but not from the battle itself – this made it a more challenging decision in a battle as to whether to play cards to gain Impact or save those cards for what you wanted to do on your turn. Suddenly movement isn’t quite as costly, and multiple battles during a round aren’t as likely to be punishing to a player who used more cards during earlier battles.

What this taught me, ultimately, is that it never hurts to plan ahead on what game you want to play. We’re trying to do better at this, so we can both come prepared having read rules and, if possible, watched a teaching video ahead of time to assist in capturing as many of these little details as possible from the first play. I still will continue my habit of doing the same things after the first play – shoot, I’ll admit there were little things in my favorite game, War of the Ring, that I was discovering after many plays of the game. It is easy to overlook rules. Player aids help, but aren’t foolproof. And yet sometimes even the smallest of rules can make a huge difference in the overall game experience. We enjoyed our first play greatly, in spite of this missed rule. I have a feeling it will change things a little during the second play.

Insight #2: Resource Locations Hold the Early Key

They are small red dots along the paths of the map, but don’t let their innocent appearance fool you: they are vital, especially early in the game, to gaining an advantage. A small one, yes, but an important advantage nevertheless! Don’t be fooled by these being an end-game scoring factor, they have incredible value long before the end of the game arrives and, ultimately, you want to end the game with control and try to trigger an early conclusion anyway. One of the best ways to do this, regardless of your side, is to control an advantage in army size. While you cannot influence what blocks get drawn for your reinforcements pool, you can impact how many blocks you get to pull out of that bag. These resource locations hold the key to getting more blocks than your opponent, meaning your forces are capable of being replenished better and you have higher odds of getting stronger blocks or the blocks you need.

The check for this comes at the beginning of each new round, and it simply is determined by who controls more of the resource locations. If both of you are gunning for these, that means there might be some heated battles over these spots on the map which could possibly play into your hand – assuming you have the cards to deploy the army you’re moving to capture or hold those locations. These locations also provide good targets for the Tokugawa armies that start the game far away from the ultimate target of Osaka, giving you meaningful objectives as those troops try to march across Japan. One additional block drawn may not sound like much, but it can be a significant advantage. Worst case scenario, you want to at least be playing to a tie on this to prevent your opponent from getting that extra block.

Insight #3: Going Second Can Be Very Important

The turtling strategist in me is delighted to come across a wargame where going second actually holds a good advantage in the game. It may not seem obvious, as there is still the common benefit to being the aggressor and going first to impact the landscape and force your opponent to either lose troops they didn’t want, to play cards they needed to hold for their own turn, or to get them to change their plans in a reactionary way. Those are all still very viable reasons to want to be first, and the Tokogawa faction holds an advantage in having the higher value on their cards of similar markings so they can easily choose their position on the round when they want, so long as they are willing to part with a more powerful card to ensure they are the ones making that choice.

There is an undeniable advantage to going second, because your opponent can end up helpless to respond to the final board state of the round. A well-timed sweeping through to snatch the advantage in Resource Locations or Castles in the second half of a round can lock up both an extra reinforcement and an extra card, both of which can be quite powerful advantages in the following round. Being able to see how they end their second half of a round, and then determine how to ensure you get one or both of those – or at the very least, how to remove the reinforcement advantage from their grasp – can be crucial in this game. This is especially true in the final round, assuming the game doesn’t end with an immediate victory condition. The reason I won my first game of Sekigahara boiled down to late control of those key spots on the map, something I believe I understood a little sooner than my opponent. I don’t anticipate it being as easy to pull off the second time, but going 2nd will definitely help to ensure that control – although going 1st will help to obtain it first if an area is currently uncontrolled.

Insight #4 – Move Early, Move Often, Muster Mercilessly

I was faced with an undesirable realization about halfway through the game: all of my armies of any significance were way too far away from Osaka to make any meaningful push. And, of course, the majority of my reinforcements drawn were tied to those distant locations. For the first half of the game, my time was almost always spent doing the 0-card movement or mustering because it seemed like the best plan was to horde the cards for battle – this may have been exaggerated a little because of our misplay (not drawing cards to replace those used in battle), which is why I can boldly state that it will probably be more advantageous to spend at least a single card for movement/mustering to move 2-3 armies than to save that card for its potential usage. Unless your hand perfectly aligns with an army you have and could be the difference between winning and losing, in which case hording that card might be the best play – especially if moving a space or two is all that army needs to cause a battle.

I find the strong appeal in being able to move 2 armies AND muster 1+ recruits onto the board. Better yet, if going last, I think there is good value in tossing two cards to make significant movement around the board with all armies and the muster action. I waited far too long to begin moving those distant armies, and once I did almost all of my efforts were spent ensuring one particularly large army kept soldiering onward toward Osaka to try and crack that nut before the game reached its conclusion. Staggering several smaller armies along, taking branching paths even, could allow a maximum of force taking fortresses and resource locations along the way while bringing them closer, one turn at a time, toward the end game condition of conquering Osaka. Had I moved the army one turn sooner, I could have taken the victory via Osaka instead of via Victory Points.

Insight #5: Conquer Castles for a Late Card Advantage

There are an odd number of Castles on the map, meaning someone is always getting an extra card drawn. This is always something that will be an important advantage, and not just for the card. However, the Castles increase in their importance as the game winds down to an end. First of all, your armies are getting into position and, in some cases, might be quite a bit larger. Having enough cards to deploy as many blocks as you can is something you’ll want to value. Not planning on conquest this turn? There is still value, as that extra card can be used for a better movement action (such as tossing 2 cards to move ALL armies and muster) or to toss for a forced march to move a single army one extra space. This right here would be enough, however…

Castles can be difficult to conquer. Your opponent loses the chance to make you automatically lose a block when you lose the battle, and thus must hit at least 7 Impact to get you to suffer a loss – this is balanced by your 2-block maximum to retreat into said Castle and an inability to play any cards in response. It also nullifies the use of guns and cavalry, making those special forces ineffective which makes the higher impact a challenge. And, of course, the most important reason is that every Castle is worth 2 victory points at the end of the game, which is a significant value considering the other scoring condition, Resource Locations, are only worth 1 each. Having the majority in Castles is the key to having a head start on winning if the game runs its full course, as it means you don’t need to go overboard on the Resource Locations – just keep within 1 of your opponent.

Insight #6: Feint the Early Conquest of Osaka

This one is probably tipping my hand more than anything else, but it is a vital thing to consider. I waited too long to consider the conquest of Osaka, and when I did it was delayed further by the impending threat of the Mori Mon armies arriving. You see, they get to arrive in Osaka the moment a battle is declared there – and they don’t even require the use of a card to bring them into the battle. Realizing that my opponent was going to get 4 free blocks, each of which chained off the others, brought a pretty strong level of intimidation to the prospect of attacking Osaka. My solution was to spend the second half of the game moving a massive 8-block army across the map and, ultimately, it was able to win the field battle thanks to a perfect hand of cards. However, it took way too long to accomplish and required an obscene amount of my resources that could have been invested elsewhere, or at least diversified.

The biggest issue is that free deployment of Mori into the battle from the recruitment box. However, if one could send a suicide squad in early to trigger them, it would balance out the challenge for Osaka. At least in theory, right? Because that would force the armies to appear, and you could viably hope to take out 1-2 blocks in the process since your force would need to be large enough to prevent the Overrun from happening. But an early pincer attack from two smaller armies converging on Osaka might just be able to bring about a strong impact while at the same time triggering the trap, making Osaka a little easier to take in the late game.

Wrap-Up

So there you have it. Straight from the fingertips of an amateur, both in Wargames and to Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan. I’d like to think that I’ve given a fair amount of consideration with my reflections. These aren’t high-level tips or strategies. They aren’t intended to be, although I really hope the triggering of Osaka turns out to be as insightful as I theorize. I’m intentionally avoiding reading up on other folks’ strategies in the game, as the exploration is half the experience and I want to see how good, or bad, my approaches fail as I consider them for either side. Regardless, I honestly cannot wait to play Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan again soon. In fact, I think my wife would probably even enjoy this one (and, knowing her, she would absolutely slaughter me in the game).

My hope is that you found some enjoyment here, even if you are a seasoned veteran of wargames who has moved on from the simpler block wargames like Sekigahara. Even if it is at the expense of an amateur who may be in for a rude awakening if he realizes these insights are completely off the mark during that rematch, getting devastated by an opponent who capitalizes upon the mistakes I make with brutal efficiency.

And I hope this is a continuation of what will be many contributions to InsideGMT in the future as I explore more games within their lengthy catalog.

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