Daimyo Senso Review

Daimyo Senso pits you against up to 7(!) of your friends who are attempting to cover the most ground in ancient Japan to become the next Shogun. The game plays over 4 rounds with 4 seasons. Players will choose their faction and put their starting pieces on the board. Player order is determined by the printed table on the board. The interesting part here is that all of the players moves are predetermined. Depending on the season, you may move, deploy, or attack and everyone at the table will be able to plan ahead for this. Moving will allow you to move a set number of troops depending on how many areas you control. Deploy will let you put out more troops based on what you control. Attacking lets you attack other players and take over their bases. That's it. That's the moves. Each player has special actions that can modify their basic actions that are used once per year. After the fourth year, players will tally up their score based on how many castles, cities, or fortresses they control. The player with the highest score wins.

The Good: This is a great game if you want to play a large scale area control game with tons of swings but don't want to deal with a lot of rules. A 2 player game can be played in about an hour which is not something that you'll see from games like this typically. Obviously this depends on the players as well but it was really enjoyable to be able to play a game like this in such a short amount of time. In my one game, I was completely outnumbered and surrounded but with some lucky plays I actually broke through and took control of the board. There are tons of swings like this in this game.

The Okay: I feel like the combat could have been handled a little differently. It's not bad but it's not great. For every 2 attackers you have, you remove 1 defender. It's a very simple solution but I always like to throw some dice in these sorts of games. Once a player has a pretty strong defense of an area it becomes extremely difficult to take it from them since you need to outnumber them at all times essentially. I'm also torn between the predetermined player moves. It takes some spontaneity out of the game. Luckily, each player has a hand of cards and if you choose to do so you can use those instead to remedy this issue.

The Not So Good: This is a tricky one. I'm really not a huge fan of the artwork and having so much text on the board itself. For me, it was just very busy. The map itself is actually really nicely done with some minor gripes around finding certain starting areas.

Final Thoughts: I was pleasantly surprised by Daimyo Senso. The ability to play a big war game in such a short amount of time was really enjoyable. It's easy to teach and not too daunting for new players but there's enough strategy involved for more seasoned players to have a good time with it as well. If you're looking to support a smaller publisher with a lot of big ideas I really couldn't recommend this enough.

Thanks to Warrior With a Pen Games for sending me a review copy.