Verdict
General Orders: Sengoku Jidai uses very simple rules to create strategic depth in a way normally restricted to abstract strategy games. Worker placement mechanics put strict limits on how and when you activate your forces, transforming a standard area control game into a fiendish puzzle that calls for precise timing. It's a perfect match for the feudal Japanese theme - every match is as economical, and as lethal, as a Samurai duel.
- Battles so tense and elegant they feel like a duel.
- Lots of game in a tiny package.
- Perfect blend of theme and gameplay.
- Rules are easy to learn, but there are vital strategy lessons to master.
- Small board may pose problems if you have hand tremors.
General Orders: Sengoku Jidai is a war board game that's as pure and precise as an abstract strategy game; or perhaps it's an abstract strategy game that uses carefully applied historical theming to sneak just a pinch of randomness into the genre. If the visuals say 'samurai duel', the gameplay is more like a knife fight in an elevator - you and your opponent are inches apart, with a blade constantly at one another's throat.
I received a review sample of General Orders: Sengoku Jidai from Osprey. I normally test games over several weeks, but when my go-to opponent for two player strategy games folded me in half in less than fifteen minutes in our very first match, I abandoned my plans to test a batch of games and immediately reset the board. I needed to know how he had crushed me, and how I could avoid it.
By the end of the evening we were trading wins one for one, and my opinion had solidified: this one is in the running for a spot on Wargamer's guides to the best strategy board games and best two player board games. It's fantastic - here's why.
Gameplay
Superficially, Sengoku Jidai looks like a traditional area control war board game. Your forces are represented with wooden discs, ships, and catapult meeples that occupy a hex map of Japanese islands, rivers, and fortresses. You win either by removing the last troop from an opponent's HQ, or by holding hexes with victory point stars on them at the end of four rounds.
But this is also a worker placement game. Players alternate taking one of their commanders and placing them into an action slot, normally on one of the map hexes.
So, to move your troops into a hex you'll place a commander into its single "Advance" slot, and pull in troops from adjacent areas - possibly starting a fight. Since there's only one Advance slot in each hex, once you've moved into a hex, your opponent can't send their own troops to reclaim it until the following round.
But there's a downside to moving first. You need to keep your troops 'in supply' by maintaining a continuous line of controlled hexes back to your HQ. Should your troops find themselves isolated from your lines of supply, they're unable to act. The faster and further you advance your troops, the longer and thinner your supply lines become - if your enemy cuts them, you can lose control of huge chunks of your army.
Combat
The thrust and counter-thrust of advance and counter-attack is at the heart of Sengoku Jidai. You can act decisively in pursuit of the killing cut, or delay and try to break your enemy's blade. The tension over when to act, and when to watch and wait, is most obvious in the way you move armies, but it runs throughout the design.
Take the Support actions. These are listed on a separate board, and you can take each one only once per turn. When you Embark new ships, or Reinforce your troops, you'll add new forces to the board. Standard stuff.
But as you can only Reinforce or Embark once each turn, the timing is fraught? Building up a massive troops advantage is the only way to claim a hex from an opponent; but as soon as you do it, your opponent has the green light to start their own assault elsewhere on your lines, safe in the knowledge you can't bolster your defenses until the next turn.
The last Support action, plan, lets you draw Command cards. these provide incredibly powerful one-time bonuses, such as letting you spawn in troops immediately as you advance into a hex, power up your attacks, ambush an enemy as they enter a hex you control, or even marching your troops into an area that already has an enemy commander in it.
Since the cards you get are random you need to take the Plan action early, so you know what cards you're working with. But this Support action does nothing to affect the board. In a game with just five or six actions per player per turn, this is a huge sacrifice of momentum.
Reinforcing that feeling, combat is decisive. There are various ways to make short ranged attacks - ships can Bombard adjacent land hexes, some land hexes can Shell adjacent river hexes, and on the larger Fortress side of the map some land hexes allow siege engines to Besiege their neighbors by hurling rocks at them. All boil down to rolling dice and removing enemy pieces without risking your own forces. With the right troops in the right place you can cut an enemy supply line and neutralise a far larger force.
Should you Advance troops into a hex the enemy controls (or use the one disruptive Command card that spawns ships directly into an enemy-controlled river), the conflict that ensues will be bloody. The defender first rolls a combat die (or two if they're defending a fortress), and removes attackers equal to the result. Then both players remove units simultaneously until survivors from only one force remain, or everyone is dead.
Since you must have more troops than your opponent to have any chance of claiming a territory, future battles are telegraphed by large troop build-ups. But just because you can see a fat stack of tokens, can you really tell where they're headed? And which potentially fatal bonuses are hidden among your opponent's Command cards?
Harsh lessons
The game has two maps; the tiny, symmetrical River map, and the larger, asymmetrical Fortress map, which also gives you an extra Commander to use every turn. The River is a training dojo for new players, and it's not a gentle one.
A port on the River map's central island lets you Embark ships right next to the enemy HQ. Claim that port early, spawn the ships, and you can Bombard their HQ. It's such an easy round one win that I don't think it's an oversight, I think it's a lesson. The move can be countered, and learning how - even if only by trial and error - will teach you how to build defenses and sever enemy supply lines.
The Fortress map doesn't look much bigger, but after the cramped confines of the River map it feels like a wide open battlefield. The distance between HQs is only a few hexes greater, but that's enough to make any advance feel perilously strung out and vulnerable.
With the extra space afforded by Fortress, you'll have more time and more reason to battle over the advantage hexes scattered around the map. These provide buffs to whoever holds them, like spawning in extra troops whenever you Advance or Reinforce, or improving your shooting attacks. In a game with such low variance and so few troops these bonuses feel substanatial, but attempting to secure these sites is only viable when assassination is off the table.
Wins by assassination remain viable on the Fortress map - that blade is as sharp as ever. But rather than wrestling with blades always inches from each other's throats, you and your opponent will trade probing blows as you attempt to establish a stable advance, while trying to parry your opponent's thrusts. It's elegant - and more importantly, it's incredible fun.
Components and graphic design
Sengoku Jidai has a very well written rulebook that is easy to reference, comprehensive, and clear. The graphic design of the rulebook, the Command cards, and the board strikes a good balance between being thematic and being legible. The wooden tokens are simple but effective. And other than a little warping in the game board which I'm still flexing out, I've got no issues with the quality of materials.
The game is also very small - the scale banana in the picture above was a very small banana. That's great if you're low on shelf space or want to lug the game around to game nights, and the board will fit any size of gaming table. But this may cause problems for people with hand tremors, as a single small hex will occasionally need to accommodate several commander meeples and a stack of troopers that can easily be scattered into neighbouring spaces.
Conclusion
General Orders: Sengoku Jidai is a razor sharp strategy game in a tiny package. The gameplay is fast, decisive, and all about timing, a perfect fit for a game set in the era of Samurai battles. It's a quick playing game - fifteen minutes if one player makes a critical blunder, forty five if you can match each other blow for blow. That just gives you more time to quickly reset the board to play another match - and another - and another.
My quibbles are very minor, and a lot of them are more matters of taste than quality. The level of randomisation is low but not zero, which might be a bit too much for some abstract strategy fans and not quite enough for some wargamers. New players will flounder until they learn how dangerous aggro strategies are and how to counter them, and the rulebook doesn't have any strategy notes. And the tiny box and board may be challenging for people with fine motor control problems to use.
All that said, it's one of the best board games I've played this year. Consider this a strong recommendation.