Sword and Sail

SWORD AND SAIL

The goal of the game:  To completely occupy a country with your troops.

Mechanics:

Sword and Sail is a strategy and chance card based game. The chance part of the game comes from the 16 randomly shuffled land cards that allow you to play your infantry on the map. These cards also can tilt the balance of power extremely easy between players, they can allow you to reinforce your troops or cause a distraction to the other players in your favor.

The space on Sword and Sail is a 2D card based strategy and chance game. However the players who may or may not want to prolong the battle or end it in a swift attack control the game space. The cards being drawn to allow action on the field are also constantly changing the space.

Objects, Attributes and State:

The objects in the game are 14 land cards, which are placed in the center and reshuffled once the cards are all used and the game is still going on. 1 Game board of the map of countries and state to control the territory. 210 cut outs of an army, but each player receives 30 infantry tokens and 12 ship tokens.

Actions:

Players turns are broken into 3 actions steps everything consumes 1 action point (AP) to do so.  By using a Card drawn from the middle the player used 1ap and places a troop on the field. If he or she chooses to move his infantry to the next space that to also costs 1ap. In that fashion players are able to frequently able to harass another player from completing his goal while you try to accomplish your own.

Resultant Actions:

 Because the game revolves around empire domination players will try to hinder another’s player by blocking movement into another location using their armies or go into war to claim a territory.  War has its befits and negative aspects to. The good thing is you killed his army and now can claim the state, however the bad part is by taking out his army you also lose a portion of the army you attacked with.

 Rules

Skills

The skill of the game comes how you can manipulate situations into your favor. Again this is a war-based game where you always want to stay a couple steps ahead of your opponent and make battles fall into your favor. A simple version of chess and risk would be best to describe the skill needed to play this game.

Ty making a move before I crush his puny attempts of world domination

Our armies scattered through out the map

Army slowly moving into play

This was a fun game to play. It had some broken mechanics but we found that if we tweak two rules the game would last longer and be easier to do combat with each other. The game seems more ideal for 3 or more players playing at a time. But by tweaking two rules when battling for a territory we can move two armies for the cost of 1 AP and also if it’s a two player game you need to control two counties in order to win.