Compiled below you will find the thirteenth through fifteenth installments of an ongoing design diaries series from Border Reivers designer Ed Beach. (The previous installments can be found here.) He regularly publishes new design diaries and other updates on the “Reivers and Reformers” Facebook group, so if you would like to read those as they are released you can do so here. Enjoy! -Rachel
Border Reivers Design Diary #13: Detailed Combat Example
With this diary entry we’re going to dive into exactly how to compute the Attack and Defense dice for a combat. Let’s begin by assuming we are the Maxwell player and this is our Family Sheet (Figure 1).
With Johnny Armstrong being so good at Raiding, we chose a Raid attack for this turn and decided to target the English West March (directly across the Border). That Dacre player directly across the border is our natural rival anyway! We are attacking third this turn, so we played our Opposite March Target card into the third slot, as shown in Figure 2. Note that this card also allows us the flexibility to change to a Feud or Gaolbreak if one of our light blue cubes is present if we decide such an attack looks better (see the notes at the bottom of the card that say “Also valid for…”).
Here’s what that English West March looks like when we’re trying to choose our final attack target (Figure 3):
So what’s the best Attack against this march? As we discussed back in Design Diary #2, each march has 4 Farm Regions (targets for Raids), 1 Gaol (targeted with a Gaolbreak), and 1 Family Seat (target for a Feud) that can all be attacked. All you have to do to compute the Attack dice is to drop dice into the six boxes in the Attack Dice area under your Target card (refer back to Figure 2).
As our first example, let’s take a Feud where we are sending 2 Horses and spending 2 Cattle to coerce the Armstrongs to add a second attack die on our behalf. And let’s say we are second in Notoriety in this March (which adds 1 extra Attack die). That attack would be:
- 2 dice for Allied Family (just from the Armstrongs; the Dixons only help against East Marches)
- 2 dice for Horses
- 1 die for Notoriety
- 2 dice for our Reiver (Johnny Armstrong has a 1 Feud rating, but that increases by 1 if he is allied with the Armstrongs).
- 1 die for the Feud cube present
- No dice for Offices or Attack Cards (our Office gives us rerolls but not extra dice)
So 8 dice total and our boxes would be filled with dice like this (Figure 4):
We can actually make a quick table of ALL the attack possibilities with the same assumptions of 2 Horses sent and 2 Cattle spent on the Armstrongs (Figure 5).
So it looks like a Raid on the Irthing Valley might be most profitable. But we have to take into account defenses too. How are those dice determined? Well the defender goes through the same steps of dropping dice in boxes but he only has three boxes to fill. One of them comes from the Defense Token he’s placed face down by this target. The attacker reveals this token just after the final attack target is declared. So in Figure 6 we peek at all the defenses dropped by the Dacre player (normally you would only look at the specific Defense Token in the chosen space but we are cheating and looking at them all now for the purpose of this example):
The Dacres have placed their best Defense Token (their Warden, Sir Robert Carey) to defend against Gaolbreaks, knowing we would get 2 dice from the 2 cubes there. He’d roll 4 defense dice. Their much weaker Deputy Warden (just 1 die) is defending against Feuds. And the only Defense Token they have against Raids is Fingerless Will Nixon which is a token that halves our attack dice (the story is that they have forced our Raid to be led by an inept leader like the infamous Fingerless Will).
Taking into account the dice that the defender’s Peel and Castle Garrison project into adjacent Farm Regions, the final lineup of attacks turns out to be this (Figure 7):
What a difference the defenses made! The Irthing Valley ends up being only 5 Attack Dice vs. 3 Defense Dice. Instead the best attack is probably in the undefended Caldew Valley where the Maxwells would be rolling 8 unopposed dice. The attack on Lyne Valley (9 dice vs. 2 defenders) is also very good because there is a standing up Sheep there (which means he isn’t protected by a Bastle) allowing that Sheep to be stolen and brought home to a Maxwell pasture.
So you can see that the Reiver combat system takes into account a wide variety of factors on both Attack and Defense. But it’s not complex! Instead you just perform a quick lookup to see how many dice should go into each of the combat dice boxes, 6 for the attacker and 3 for the defender.
NEXT TIME: Part 2 on combat, this time going over how to compute and apply the combat results.
Border Reivers Design Diary #14: Combat Resolution
With our previous entry we showed how easy it is to compute the Attack and Defense dice for a combat, made even easier by the boxes on the map that help ensure you get credited for each of the dice you have earned. But we didn’t talk at all about how the combat is resolved from there. Is it just as easy? Especially since we know there are have four different types of attacks that are each resolved differently?
Well I think it is simple as well, mostly based around the one constant from combat in the games in the Reivers and Reformers series: they involve rolling a lot of dice and looking for rolls of 5 or 6 for hits. That rule-of-thumb works well here too. But as usual, there are a few exceptions.
So here is the Border Reivers Combat Resolution Table that summarizes all four types of Combat (Figure 1).
Let’s start with the Gaolbreak row (the third one down), since it is probably the simplest. Both attackers and defenders hit on rolls of 5 or 6 as usual. Each defender hit nullifies a hit by the attacker. However in most Gaolbreaks, a few hits do get through. For each one that does, the attacker (looking under the 5 and 6 columns of the CRT) sees that 2 VP are earned, plus they gain a Horse (from the bank) and they get to remove a Cube from the enemy Gaol (which deprives the defender of 2 VP per turn for a captured Reiver). Since Horses are worth roughly 1.5 VP at the end of the game, you are gaining 3.5 VP per hit while also depriving the defender of 2 VP.
Feuds (second row of the CRT) are very similar except the attacker earns a flat 3 VP per hit. And the first time the defender rolls a 6 they also score 3 VP and eliminate one of the attacking Horses.
Let’s next look at the bottom row, Battles. They only make sense if you look at a battle card, like Flodden Field shown in Figure 2. That shows that the award per attacker hit (listed in the CRT as variable from 3 to 5 VP) is set at 5 VP for this battle, since Flodden was the largest one fought in the Borders. And the defender’s dice are shown at the bottom of the Flodden card. We see they get three dice and hit on a 5 or higher. Those defender hits are again Blocks that nullify one attacker hit each.
Finally there are Raids, the most common attack (and the first row of the CRT). It looks a bit more complicated at first blush, but it really isn’t too involved. The attacker now has two kinds of hits. On the usual 5 and 6 hits, 2 VP are earned and the attacker gets to steal an unbastled sheep from the defender. There are also lesser hits on 3 and 4 that awards 1 VP and allows a Cattle to be stolen. The defender’s hits on 5 and 6 block one attacker hit each, except the very first defender hit on a 6 which captures an attacking reiver (so a cube from the attacker is immediately placed in the defender’s Gaol and one of the attacker’s horses lost).
Is that all there is to it? Not quite. You can also be awarded Notoriety in the target march for wins in Feuds and Gaolbreaks:
+2 Notoriety for a Feud win (-1 Notoriety to the loser), and
+2 Notoriety if you break Reivers out of Gaol (-1 Notoriety to the inept Gaol keeper)
And after both an English player and a Scottish player have fought a Battle, the player with the most unblocked hits at that battle earns the Notoriety listed on the top of the battle card into that March.
And then there are always special Hold cards that can modify the results. Back in Diary #8 we showed the Devil’s Beeftub card without explaining it’s effect. But now that you know how combat resolution works it should be quite clear (Figure 3). It’s a great way to boost your scoring from a major Raid!
NEXT TIME: We’ve made our way to the end of a turn. Only the final Spring phase is left to explain – a final segment where we either prepare for the next turn or wrap up the game with final scoring.
Border Reivers Design Diary #15: Spring Phase and End Game Scoring
The previous entry completed our study of combat in Border Reivers. Once two rounds of attacks have been completed, the Winter Phase is over and its time to reset the game for the next turn – or count of the final score if this is Turn 3. So let’s look at this final season in a reiving year: Spring.
First of all, there is some board cleanup to complete. Attack Indicators are removed. Expended Horses are stood back up to show they are ready to ride again. The current Events are discarded and the Debateable Land is reset to exactly 2 Sheep. Everyone returns their Defense Tokens back to their Family Sheet.
Now scores for THIS TURN are computed and logged on the Reiver Score Sheet, which looks like this for a single turn (Figure 1).
The scores for attacks should have been logged as they occurred; the VP for Notoriety and Reivers in Jail are added in here in the Spring. (Note that the game does include a scoring track but I am both a junkie for statistics and rabid about making sure you can recreate the score if the scoring track gets jostled. So Border Reivers will always have a scoresheet!)
Now if this is the end of Turn 1 or 2 the game is resetting for the next turn. To assist those players who are likely to be in the worst shape from previous raids, two catchup mechanics now trigger. First, the player in last player gets to choose a discarded Summer card and put it into play for free. Then the other players in the bottom half of the standings get a free Default Action (check Diary #9 if you don’t remember what those are; typically this restores 3 Cattle, 1 Sheep or 1 Horse to that player). After these actions are complete, the next turn starts by dealing out new hands of Summer Cards.
However we could be on the Spring Phase of the final turn of the game. If so, this is the one time that players can play Border Ballads that they have Held from the Turn 3 Summer. Three of the five Border Ballads are shown in Figures 2, 3, and 4. These cards may reward you for stockpiling a specific type of Livestock or for playing a strong Notoriety game in a number of Marches. Reciting the ballad text included on the card is especially recommended!
And once the Border Ballads have been played, then players get points for the Livestock they were able to hang on to until the end of the game:
1 VP for every pair of Cattle
2 VP for every pair of Sheep
3 VP for every pair of Horses
Livestock is the final element of everyone’s score, so after those are added to the scoresheet you can compute the winner. However even if you didn’t win, there are some bragging right advantages to not ending up in dead last. That’s because Border Reivers comes with a “Reiver Name Generator” that you can use at the bottom of each spreadsheet. That lets you come up with a unique Reiver name for each player, something that looked roughly like this in a recent playtest:
- Alberto Grey the Laird
- Wantoun Ed Fenwick
- Wynking Chris Kerr
- Hen Harrow Dave Home
- Halflugs Justin Dacre
- Evilwillit Rob Maxwell
(I’ll let the reader decide who won that game and who came in last. I myself didn’t win, but at least I received a cool name).
NEXT TIME: We will cover the one Advanced Rule: Traits. This extra layer (where even the Families/Player Seats are drafted) is especially recommended for tournament play of Reivers by players who might have the slightest preference for one Family over the others.
Border Reivers Design Diaries #1-3: The Marches, Anatomy of a March, and Defending Your March
Border Reivers Design Diaries #7-9: Play Cards, Hold Cards, and Summer Strategy Analysis
Author: Ed Beach
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