Investor Wargames

The Appalachian Gamers played Britannia last weekend, and while we all enjoyed ourselves, when we next met, some of us talked about how unenthusiastic we were about the game once we had some perspective on it. There seemed to be few interesting decisions in Britannia; the game lists which territories provide each tribe with the most victory points, and so each player’s course of action is programmed into the game. This might have been alright if the game had a complex combat system or a production system in which a player chooses which type of unit to create. But combat in Britannia is plain vanilla die-rolling, and only a couple of nations have anything other than simple infantry units.

For us, Britannia pales when compared with two new sophisticated euro-wargame hybrids that share similar mechanisms: Perikles and Imperial. Both Perikles and Imperial are what I call investor wargames because players are not assigned nations or forces at the start of the game. Instead, players use mechanisms to gain influence over nations in the game, and they only control armies once their influence dominates a particular nation. Control of nations can shift during the game, and the games treat nations like companies that players can invest in to get a payoff.

Perikles is Martin Wallace game, and it is a rather abstract version of the Peloponnesian War that is played in three turns. Each turn, players place influence markers in various Greek city-states. Once leadership in each city has been determined, some random tiles are drawn that represent contested areas in the war. Players then use the armies they control to attack or defend these tiles in order to get victory points. In the subsequent round, leadership of each city-state is likely to shift, although players still have a sort of investment in the success of cities they have once led. Perikles has a mounted game board, but it is not a map. Armies do not maneuver; they are simply placed on opposite sides of contested tiles.

At first glance, Imperial (from Mac Gerdts who also designed Antike) looks like a conventional wargame, or maybe a redesign of Diplomacy. The mapboard shows Europe and North Africa in the pre-World War I era divided up into six super-power nations and several smaller countries that are available for conquest. Players represent international financiers who loan money to the super-powers, and who then take control of the nations where they are the biggest investor. A rondel gives players a choice of actions that can be taken each turn; the main choices are production of armies and navies, maneuver, taxation, and investor payout. Nations that grow and conquer gain power points that increase the value of investments in these nations.

The Appalachian Gamers played Perikles a couple of weeks ago, and we played our first game of Imperial on Wednesday of this week. (For Imperial, we used a much-discussed variant I spotted on the Boardgamegeek that gives any player who doesn’t control a nation one million dollars when the Investor card is activated. This variant makes it less likely that a player will be stuck without control of a nation for long periods of game time. I recommend it). Reaction to both games was positive, although Imperial garnered the most praise. I can’t remember when our group has responded so enthusiastically to a game. In spite of my dismal performance in Imperial (I came in dead last in a six player game) I enjoyed Imperial immensely, and it may become one of my favorite games.

How do Imperial and Perikles differ? Possibly the biggest difference is that Imperial is a luckless game with no dice and no cards and with perfect information available at all time, while Perikles has a good amount of randomness built in, and hidden placement of armies. Gamers who prefer to avoid luck-factor games will enjoy Imperial more than Perikles.

For me, another thing that Imperial has in its favor is the conventional map board and standard army units. It looks and feels more like a wargame without the complexity that usually drives euro-gamers away from wargames (in combat, units simply eliminate each other in mutual destruction on a one-to-one basis). This is not to say that conventional wargame tactics are the path to victory in Imperial. My attempt to use to the might of the British navy to conquer the northwest corner of the board wasted huge amounts of time and resources while other nations used taxation to gain the power points that made their nations triumph.

Although some of the gamers in my group may prefer Imperial to Perikles, I’m not going to claim that Imperial is a better game. At least one member of our group said that he liked Perikles more, and it is possible that even those who liked Imperial more may be expressing a slight preference, not a large one. Ted Cheatham said that Perikles reminded him of Liberte, another Martin Wallace design, in that he finds it hard to devise a strategy in a game where armies or political parties shift from one player to another. But this very difficulty may appeal to gamers who enjoy the challenge of games with depth.

In one of my first essays for Gone Gaming, I wrote how the blending of wargames and euro-games are resulting in interesting hybrids. I think that both Perikles and Imperial are good examples of this trend. I hope that more designers will go down this road. I hope that Perikles and Imperial are merely the vanguard of an approaching army of interesting hybrid wargames.