I was in a game Sunday where there was a conflict over the rules. After reading the revelant sections in the book and thinking about it a bit, I’ve decided there’s something a bit screwy here.
I don’t have the book handy (it belongs to a friend) so I can’t quote the section, but it says that, when the barbarians attack, if there are more cities than active knights, the barbarians win and sack the island. The person who contributes the least to the defensive force loses a city. (If two or more people tie for contributing the least, they each lose a city.) Following this strictly, this is what would happen:
Player A has one city, one knight. Player B has two cities, one knight. Not enough knights to cover the cities, but they each have the same number of knights and so are tied for contributing the least to the defense, and so would each lose a city.
Player A has one city, one knight. Player B has three cities, two knights. Player B is the one with the extra city, but Player A is the one who would lose a city, because he only contributes one knight where Player B has two.
Do people actually follow the rule this way? It seems to me that in both cases Player B should lose a city but Player A should not. :dubious:
(Does anyone else like to refer to their barbarian as “Marian the Barbarian”?)
That’s exactly how it should be played, according to the rules. In fact, my sister royally screwed the rest of us over the last time we played by exploiting this rule. Within the first few turns around the board, she built her second city just before the barbarians arrived, making the total number of cities larger than the total number of knights. None of the rest of us were able to make any knights before the barbarians got there, so we all lost a city. This meant that my sister, even though she lost a city with the rest of us, ended up with the only city on the board, which gave her a huge advantage in collecting commodities.
I would…if she had done it on purpose. Truth is, she wasn’t even thinking about the barbarians when she bought that city. It wasn’t until after the fact that she realized what a good move it was.
A few other things to bear in mind:
(a) cities that are metropolises can’t be knocked down. So if you have only one city, and it’s a metropolis, feel free to have zero active knights
(b) another nasty strategy is to deactivate one of your knights, decreasing the number of active knights, changing a win into a lose (this obviously only benefits you if you still end up with more active knights left than someone else).
My friends and I came up with a set of alternate progress cards, for variety’s sake. Would people be interested in trying them out?
Heh. I belong to a medieval recreation group called the SCA. We’ve named the three types of knights after guys who wear that style of helmet, and the Barbarian-ship is called by the name of an unpopular local fellow.
I’ve played this game many times and (alas!) you are correct about the ruling. I always try to get my fellow players to use a different ruling however. I don’t like the actual rule for two reasons.
One - it violates one of the basic concepts that occur in most German style board games, the idea that IF a rule exists that will help or hurt classes of players based however loosely on standing (and having the most cities has some kind of correlation with winning), the rule should pull the leader back to the pack. The barbarian rule does the opposite, the person who is “winning” will often be put uncatchably further in front by this rule.
Two - it violates the “theme” or “backstory” to the game. I feel that your knights should preferentially guard your own cities first. That seems extremely reasonable. Who would send their protection away from their town when there is an invasion? After that, they can guard the the rest. What’s the point of the barbarian rule then? Why build active knights? The reasons would be that you could still gain Victory Points for defeating invasions and you can still use knights to control places on the road network.
Truth is, she wasn’t even thinking about the barbarians when she bought that city. It wasn’t until after the fact that she realized what a good move it was.