Green Gaming: Turning the compost.

I have apparently had more free time than I'd care to admit. Back in November, I picked up Tenjo, a Japanese Samurai, regional-domination game from BGG for $5.00. The game has nice bits, some ambitious concepts, however due to an abstract board design (too bland) and a lot of luck, the game is pretty bad. I decided to create a map-based, terrain board for the game and tweak the rules to make it playable. There were some good variant ideas which mitigated the luck and added a mission-oriented element to the game. I will try to coerce the wife into a two player game this weekend. I will post the results of our experiment. Everyone have a wonderful Mother's Day weekend and --if you game, don't get caught!!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, Katy and I spent a couple of hours fortifying checkpoints, conquering resource sites, and building new castles. Overall things went surprisingly well, we seem to have found a nice balance between combat and politics. There was a single, random incident that destroyed Katy's castle, sent her Daimyo's fleeing from her kingdom, and her samurai ravaging the countryside as Ronin. There will definitely be a fix for this --it was far too random and undeserved to be that severe. However, within a year, she was making a comeback. The overall mechanics seemed to work well, she complained that the combat rules were a little heavy on math, and these can be simplified. The mission oriented aspect, wherein each player tries to persuade the emporer to favor the objective that they are aiming to achieve, allowed for some tension and deceit-- always fun. I will post a link to a modified rulebook and anyone who enjoys reading through rules and spotting loopholes, flaws, and general oversights can lend a hand.