Compiled below you will find the seventh through ninth 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 #7: Cards that Enhance Board Position
Last time we reviewed the final two types of cards that let you fill out your Family Sheet: Offices and Allied Families. This time we are going to look at all the cards you can play to enhance your position out on the map, the category called “Play Cards.” There are four different types of Play Cards, we’ll go through each in turn below. Most Play cards are inexpensive compared to the Recruit cards seen earlier; Play cards cost about 1 Cattle on average to put into play.
We talked about the different kinds of Livestock in our fourth design diary but never really gave any indication about how you add Livestock to your march. Well with the Livestock cards of course! The first picture below shows the most flexible Turn 1 Livestock card, Shiels. These remote shepherd outposts were used in the borders to pasture sheep and horses up away from the populated river valleys. It’s just one of a number of cards that let you add Horses, Sheep or Cattle to your holdings during the Summer. There are even a few nasty Livestock cards that come into the game later; beware being in the lead on Turn 3 because the nasty Sheep Scab card can deprive you of some of your prized lambs at just the wrong time.
The remainder of the Play cards are used to mobilize defenses for your march. These cards are balanced so they get stronger on each subsequent turn (since defenses you add on Turn 3 only help you in one Winter combat season, they are roughly three times stronger than the Turn 1 cards). The first such set of cards add permanent defenses to your shire, either garrisons for abandoned castles or Peel towers (as described back in our third diary). The Signal Fires card (second picture) is the Turn 1 version of such a card and allows you to choose to either add one Castle Garrison or two Peels (the garrison is great if the majority of your Sheep are in the two Farm regions near that castle; otherwise the Peels are probably the sounder choice).
But if a player wants more direct protection for their sheep, they are likely to want to upgrade their rickety farmhouses to Bastles. The most unique Bastle card is shown in our third picture. It depicts Housesteads Bastle House, a building you can still see if you visit the Housesteads Roman Fort along Hadrian’s Wall (fourth picture). Back in the 16th Century the Armstrong family wasn’t known for their keen eye for historical preservation. Instead they saw all those stones along Hadrian’s Wall as a quick way to get some bastles erected. So if your Farm Regions happen to be in the English West or Middle March along the path of the famous Roman frontier fortress, this card is the way to protect a lot of sheep in a hurry.
The final way to add defenses before winter is to add to your mobile defenses by acquiring more Defense Tokens with a card like March Law. These are drawn randomly from a cup and will either reduce the attack dice rolled against you (if you force the incoming attack to be led by Ill-Drowned Geordie) or add 1 to 5 dice to your defense in either Farm Regions (the tokens with green backgrounds) or towns (the ones with the gray backgrounds). Examples of 12 of the defense tokens are shown in the final image.
NEXT TIME: Let’s end our look at the Summer Cards by reviewing the final type, Held Cards. These cards help you sometime later in the turn, typically just before, during or after the turn’s combats.
Border Reivers Design Diary #8: Sneaky Cards to Spring on Folks Later
The most intriguing sort of card in Border Reivers are definitely the 37 Hold cards that are secreted away for use later in the game (that’s close to one-third of the deck). To keep the identity of all these cards hidden as players draft and pay for their cards, each one does not cost you any Cattle. Instead you always gain 1 Cattle when drafting one of these cards. The number of cards you may hold is based on the number of Sheep you have on the map: for every 2 full Sheep you can support 1 more card in your hand. This limit is only checked once each turn (during the Fall Phase); if you don’t have enough Sheep to support the cards at that time you have to discard the excess.
There are four types of Hold cards, based on the exact turn segment when they are played. The first group are the “Hold: Notoriety” cards that are played at the same time you are adding Notoriety to the marches based on your Offices and Allied Families. These cards typically enhance or alter your Notoriety placement. For instance, there is a Blackmail card (Figure 1), certainly appropriate since the word “blackmail” entered the English language from its use here in the Borders. The term applied to the situation where you were forced to pay off a rival to prevent them from pillaging or reiving your holdings. And yes, just like in the game, the historical payments were typically made in cattle.
Probably my favorite Hold: Notoriety card is called Monition of Cursing. It references the 1500-word diatribe unleashed on the reivers by Gavin Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, in 1524. A small part of this lengthy sermon that excommunicated all the reivers from the church ran something like this (in a modern translation):
I curse them going and curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them seated; I curse them eating, I curse them drinking; I curse them walking, I curse them sleeping; I curse them risen, I curse them lying down; I curse them at home, I curse them out of the home; I curse their wives and I curse their children, and their servants and all who participate with them in what they decide. I come against their friends, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their swine, their geese, their hens all their livestock.
The good archbishop’s words have lived on through the centuries. The English city of Carlisle, trying to decide how to commemorate their unique history for the Year 2000 millennial celebrations decided to install a “Cursing Stone” in their historic downtown district with some of Dunbar’s word inscribed upon it (see Figure 2). However the townsfolk soon decided they had cursed themselves because within the next few years Carlisle was plagued by foot-and-mouth disease, severe floods, and the relegation of their football team out of the Premier League. The stone was almost destroyed on the spot; thankfully the current Bishop of Carlisle suggesting adding a counterbalancing Bible verse to the stone and things have settled down since then. In the game the card does bring a curse down on four of your opponents, dropping them each in Notoriety in a March in which they are currently the Notoriety leader.
The next two types of Hold cards are played as you are preparing for an attack. “Hold: Target” cards allow you to expand the possible target regions for an attack. And the “Hold: Attack” cards usually give you extra dice or improved results from those combats you are planning. The most unusual such attack card is Devil’s Beeftub (final two pictures) which recognizes a peculiarly shaped hollow in the hills above the Scottish West March. You see the Johnstone family was fond of reiving cattle from their neighbors and then hiding their catch in this deep hollow where their pursuers would never look. A few days later when the chase was over, they’d return to the Devil’s Beeftub and retrieve their quarry.
The fourth and final type of Hold card is the “Border Ballad,” cards only available on Turn 3 that aid you in scoring at the end of the game. We’ll cover these in detail in an upcoming diary so I will hold off on sharing the details on those for now. But like the other Hold cards, they are a unique combination of inexpensive to draft, powerful to play, and full of quirky Border history.
NEXT TIME: We will step away from looking at specific cards and talk strategy for a bit. What’s the right way to approach all this card drafting we’ve been talking about?
Border Reivers Design Diary #9: Summer Strategy Analysis
We’ve gone through a lot of Border history in our first eight Design Diaries. So now let’s step away from the history for the moment and take a look behind the scenes at some of the game design considerations that went into the designing the cards in the Summer Deck. Gaining some insight into how the deck is constructed is a great first step to appreciate some of the strategies you’ll want to consider while drafting cards each Summer.
Let’s start by looking at how the different types of cards are allocated to the three Turns of the game (the first picture is a chart itemizing the full deck of 126 cards that are all used for a 6-player game).
So let’s look at the Recruit cards first. We initially want to consider the number of cards of each type and cross-index that with the number of slots you have to place these cards into on your Family Sheet (shown in Figure 2).
Notice that there are 12 Reivers included in the game when you have 6 players. So that is one type of card where you can probably get an initial Reiver into play early, and then replace him with someone even stronger later (since we have roughly 2 per player). Not so with the Wardens; there are only 6 of them total in the deck. Therefore, once you’ve recruited one you are probably set. Unless of course you jump into the lead and expect to be under heavy attack on the final turn. Then upgrading to a Turn 3 Warden might be an excellent move.
Offices and Allied Families are your most flexible sort of Recruit cards with three slots to distribute them into by Turn 2. When possible you want to set up matches between your Reivers and their corresponding Families; the one extra die you get per attack from such a match is hugely beneficial. So when drafting both Reivers and Families remember that those matches are listed on each Reiver card and seize on those opportunities when you can. But don’t forget that the deck includes two Double Cross cards (Figure 3) that allow another player to steal a family away, so you never can feel too complacent about your lineup of Allied Families.
What other cards are hotly contested? The answer to that question depends largely on which of the three turns you are talking about. On Turn 1, you need to get some kind of defenses in place before you start investing in more Livestock; I tried a “the best defense is a good offense” strategy in my last playtest game and it failed miserably. That plan just doesn’t work when there are 5 other players that can attack you. Luckily there are three different approaches to playing defense, either permanent defenses, mobile defenses or protecting your sheep in bastles. For Turn 1 you can get away with a solid defense from one of these sources. Later in the game when the raids get fierce, you’ll need significant defenses from several of these defense types.
In Turns 2 and 3 the Livestock cards are much desired since there are losses to replace from the previous raiding season. At times you might be locked out of the Livestock you need; in that case you can always discard a card instead of playing to cash it in for a “Default Action.” Such a move yields you 1 Horse, 1 Sheep, 3 Cattle, 1 or 2 Bastles, or a point of Notoriety in your Home march. You’ll see the number of Default Actions taken increase toward the end of the Summer when players are drafting from just 2 or 3 cards and those last few choices may not fill in their final need perfectly.
And finally on Turn 3 the Border Ballad cards enter play. Those, like Border Widow’s Lament (Figures 4 and 5 for the card and an oil painting that goes with the ballad) provide extra VP for players who have stocked up in one area of the game. However with strong Reivers, strong Wardens, dastardly Attack cards, and a Double Cross also in play, some Border Ballad cards may get passed several times before someone pulls the trigger and drafts each one.
NEXT TIME: We’re ready to move into the Fall season so we look at the various historical Events that come out each Fall, three events per turn.
Previous Articles:
Border Reivers Design Diaries #1-3: The Marches, Anatomy of a March, and Defending Your March
Author: Ed Beach
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