In the earliest development of Rebellion: Britannia we were visualizing the systems in the form of various levers, so that the key elements of Briton Tension, Briton Warbands, and Legion Cohesion (which is rather fun to say out loud) all had mechanisms to both increase and decrease them. We might show this in the form shown in Table 1. (It did not look this neat in our original notebooks.)
Each faction always has one of two possible leaders that are always available in a set (historical) sequence. But when a faction switches between leaders is determined by the Events deck, and since not all cards from that deck are present in the same game it’s possible these events aren’t triggered and a faction never switches their leader.
Continuing on from the previous blog post, The Events Deck, Part #1, this is Part #2.
Here are some further examples of Event cards.
This Event card has three effects:
There are 12 rounds in each game of Rebellion: Britannia – unless an automatic loss condition for Rome is triggered (she has 2+ Forts and 6+ Settlements burnt at the same time, or has all 4 Legions destroyed) in which case the game ends immediately.
At the beginning of each round the top card of the Events deck is revealed. Each card has two or three effects, and each of these effects modulate play in a variety of possible ways, either for the turn, or for the remainder of the game:
There’s another systemic layer to the game we haven’t really discussed in the blogs before now, at least not in any detail, which is a source of potential Victory Points (VPs).
This element concerns indigenous British culture. It’s a later addition to the design and something we are still exploring in development. Early playtesting exposed the possibility that we weren’t giving the British factions enough interesting opportunities to earn early VPs. We also had a concern that we weren’t representing enough of indigenous British culture within the design – there was some reference to the destruction of it through the rise in British Tension as a result of Roman buildings and roads – ‘Romanizing’ the British landscape and scarring and irretrievably altering it – but no real reference to its growth or sustenance. These were omissions we sought to address through a new system. This system would incentivize a more pliant approach to Rome and discourage military resistance. British factions would now have a reason to focus on non-military actions, and to therefore highlight other strands of their cultural identity within the framework of the game. It would theoretically be possible to win without ever fighting, but through careful management of cards to secure hegemonies in trade, agricultural production, the generation of crafts, the protection and development of ceremonial sites and customs. But this system would need to have a light design footprint – meaning it would be easy to learn and to integrate into the existing game.
We are quite proud that Rebellion: Britannia can be played solo and, in our opinion, quite well. Some designs have solo playability enmeshed in them from the outset, and some have it built into them later. In this case, the solo mode was developed in step with the design as a whole. (Maurice: I personally have a strong tendency to do this – it helps me design/test rapidly in the early stages when everything is still in flux.)
Players can still choose to be any of the four factions: Rome, Silures, Brigantes, or Iceni, and the game system ‘runs’ an opposing faction. If players choose to play as Rome they will have a different kind of game depending on their selected opposing faction, given the various different British tribe asymmetries. If players choose to be one of the British tribes Rome must be selected as the AI faction used in the game – they’re the big dog in this fight so they need to be present. In fact, if players so choose they can add multiple factions into their game, including playing with all four factions, three of them run by the game system. We’ve not yet tried it, but in theory, the game could even play itself, playing all four factions together through its simple AI system – although it would need a willing human to mechanically turn cards, comply with instructions and move pieces (no such human is provided with the game).
In this week’s blog, we take a step away from the history and dive right into the game itself. Daniel Burt takes us through a playthrough of Rebellion: Britannia in its prototype form on Tabletop Simulator, walking us through the sequence of play, key concepts, and some of the strategies the different factions may explore.
At the end of our previous installment, the defeated Briton leader, Caratacus, had been betrayed by the Brigantes, and handed over to Rome. However, the rebellious Silures do not seem to have been deterred by the loss of their leader, and continued to resist Roman occupation and engage in hit-and-run guerilla attacks on Roman forces. Such was the tribe’s resistance, that Scapula declared that they would be either exterminated or enslaved and forcibly removed from their lands. But again, this merely served to reinforce their resolve, and they continued to be a bothersome thorn in the side of the Roman Governor and to oppose Rome’s occupation throughout the Claudian period.
Rebellion: Britannia is a game about rebellions in Roman Britain, and concentrates largely on the Claudian period, which ran from 43CE to 69CE. Over the course of a quarter of a century, there were at least 5 major rebellions that the invading Roman forces had to deal with, including Boudicca’s revolt, which is certainly the most widely known.
After Julius Caesar’s initial expedition to Britain in 55BCE, almost an entire century would pass before Rome eventually chose to stage an invasion of the British Isles. Emperor Augustus considered an invasion, but failed Roman efforts to subdue the German tribes, and the disastrous defeat at Teutoburg in 9CE, led to him cautioning Rome to restrict its lands to those “within its present frontiers” (Tacitus, Annals, I.11), advice which his successor, Tiberius, chose to follow.
In October 2020 Fred Serval (designer of GMT’s Red Flag Over Paris, and A Gest of Robin Hood) organized a ConSim Game Jam sponsored by GMT. Participants had 3 days to make a game. As participants, we had to use a pre-existing GMT COIN game at its core and make something new from it. We weren’t able to use any more wood pieces than were boxed with the original game. We were, however, permitted to apply stickers to the board, or to any of those wood pieces, and were able to add any amount of cardboard tokens and decks of cards we might want. Initial discussions focussed on geographical milieu, and narrowed our choices down to India (Gandhi), France (Falling Sky), and Great Britain (Pendragon), and the latter won out. So from Morgane Gouyon-Rety’s Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (2017) we derived a game called Boudica’s Revolt.
