I played Warriors of God tonight, and enjoyed it. I'm just going to give my initial thoughts, but there's an excellent review of the mechanisms by Tom Hancock. Come back when you are done.
OK, some thoughts:
- Dead easy rules. There's some complexity in how the sequence of play, a few typos (that aren't obvious at all and deal with the counter manifest), some ambiguity (the 'flypaper rule'), but I explained the core quickly after having only read the rules.
- Elegant action rounds -- You either move 1-3 leaders from A to B (the limits being shown by the border). You can't move away from an engagement unless you leave an equal number of leaders behind. (A control marker counts as a leader), or you can remove control (if you outnumber on leaders) or you can pass.
- Simple combat -- You get one die per troop (and leader) capped at the leader's battle rating. The leader with the higher bravery gets to add the difference to each die, and sixes hit. Some complexity (particularly archers), but not bad.
- The initiative mechanism works nicely. One player gets the first and last move (and one extra), the other player gets to pick one of two neutral leaders first, and sweep up leaderless troops in neutral areas first. Both sides have advantages.
- Tough decisions -- The simple rules give options. In our game, we had people moving in extra troops to battle to switch out a key stack (necessary because of flypaper rule), careful manuevering to avoid making a nincompoop the leader in an important battle. Deciding to take a siege (risking everything on a single die) vs. standing and fighting. Which leader to take? Ransom a troop, or hope he dies in jail?
But let me turn to a criticism voiced by Chris Farrell:
In general, the game doesn't make you pick up the die unless you're rolling for something really important. Sieges ... are resolved on a single die roll ... The initiative die roll will dictate whether the turn has 3 or 8 impulses ... And you can only gain control of provinces at all on a 1:2 or 1:3 die roll.
This last thing actually is really the only thing that sort of bugged me about the game. Controlling provinces is the key both to winning, and to forming some sort of territorial coherency for your kingdom and therefore managing troop mustering and getting some sense of strategy beyond raw opportunism, and the difficulty of gaining control of provinces is kind of odd. You can only roll once per turn, which represents ten years, so it's possible to send a leader milling around somewhere for 30 or 40 years (assuming he lives) and never actually be able to control the region. For me personally, this was almost a die roll too far.
For some reason, this got me thinking about the Sorites paradox. If you have a game decided by rolling a tough roll (a '1' on a d6), that's bad. But if you need to roll well, but throw lots of dice, that's ok. How many dice is lots?
Well, if it were only area control rolls, then not many. But you have siege rolls, death rolls, initiative rolls. (Combat itself uses reasonable number of dice each round, so we'll skip those). And you have up to 12 turns. In our game, we had ~6-8 leaders on the board most turns, plus a few area control rolls and a siege or two. So 2 (Initiative) + 14 (leader death) + 1 siege roll + 3 area rolls. Twenty important single die rolls a turn. Now, some of these are really coin flips, but still.
Some are more important, but the game clearly can hinge on some combination of rolls.
In our game, I invaded England with a brilliant leader (I forget who, a 4/3 Two Star leader) and enough troops to outlast the english. (I was rolling 4 dice hitting on 4-6). Since it was hopeless, the English accepted a siege. On a 3-6, I kill everyone and capture the leaders, on a 1-2, I have to disperse (and lose my troops because I don't have enough space to go). I make the siege.
But more good luck is needed to cement the victory ... on the next turn I have to take Brittany with my king (a coin flip) and not have any of my leaders die in England (which would free up troops that can be snapped up by new english leaders ...). So I had a rather lucky combo, each roll relatively likely (except the coin flip for Brittany), but combined a fairly lucky combination. Other combinations would also have won quickly, but I'm not sure I could enumerate them.
Early on, I was consistently failing to acquire territory via rolls (which Chris mentions), but my leaders didn't die young (or worse, get captured in their dottage and then unexpectedly survive, costing a VP or two). So for the first 5 turns (until the Siege of England), the game ran almost even.
So, coming back around -- how many big rolls is enough?
I have no idea, but I suspect Warriors of God has enough to claim a heap. But WoG deals with managing risk. Your leaders will die out. You'll lose troops. If you have 20 rolls where 1/6th of time bad things happen. you and your opponent should each get one bad thing a turn (and one more will bounce between you). If they only happen to you, you'll lose. But since it's a two player game you can concede if it gets out of hand.
I think I'll get a few more games out of it; it's enjoyable, and seems good.
It may actually be great. Too early to tell.