Much Dishonour

The first thing that strikes you about age of war is the size of the box. It’s small. Not micro small bit smaller than your thought when you ordered it.

It contains a simple set of rules (check), seven dice (check) and a dozen or so cards. That’s fine. I’ve worked with less and had lots of fun so let’s jump in with no pre conceived notions.

The game is all about capturing fortresses belonging to various sizes clans. Well let’s be honest (ha) this game is about scoring more points than your opponent. You just happen to do it this time via this dice based fortress capturing mechanism.

Each turn a player takes all of the dice and rolls them. It turns up a collection of archers. Horsemen. Spears, horsemen and Dyamos (best spoken with a Japanese warlord voice). Having done this you look at all of the fortress cards in the centre and nail your colours to the mast and declare your affection for assaulting one of them. Once picked it’s no takey backey. Each castle has an entry fee of a certain mix of the aforementioned dice faces. It may be that you have the right ones off the bat or you may decide to reroll in which case (and here’s the rub) you remove one dice from your pile and reroll the ones you want to.

So you may you may not liberate a castle in your turn and add to your collection. Each of the castles is worth a certain amount of points and a complete set in one colour (a clan) is worth a little more.

So far so solitaire. In addition to being able to assault the centre properties you can also attack ones that belong to other players If you have an extra dayano to spare.

So it’s an exercise in naval gazing and dice rolling. Did I mention Reiner kniza designed it.

It’s fine. The few times I played it went on and on and on but I think that was more because we played it with three players. Bump up the players and it trots along.  It’ll happily seat six

It’s a simple solid filler game with the right amount of players. It only a tenner or so. So if your looking for a filler you could do a lot worse (masquerade for example)

Now excuse please much dishonor if I don’t play again

Huzzah!

Vic