General Orders: Sengoku Jidai Review

Steve Godfrey
3 days ago
9 min read

General Orders: Sengoku Jidai

WBG Score: 9

Player Count: 2

You’ll like this if you like: General Orders World War 2

This is a review copy. See our review policy here

It’s one thing having one clever game system that combines a seemingly un-combinable theme and mechanism… but to have two? At this point, I can only assume the two designers have a huge mechanism spinney wheel in their office, and every so often they spin it, stick a war theme on whatever it lands on, and boom, a successful game system. Do you know what, though? Whatever it is, I'm 100% here for it!

If you’ve already played the original General Orders: World War 2, then the rules are largely the same, so feel free to skim through this explanation for the changes.

How to give General Orders

Pick the side of the board you’ll be playing on, take the components appropriate for that side, and set up the board as indicated. Each player will have a number of commanders (determined by the side of the board), and on your turn, you’ll either place one of your commanders on one of the boards or pass. When you place a commander on the board, place it on an unoccupied activation space and play out the action from that space.

Before I go into what the actions do, I want to talk about the concept of being “in supply.” A lot of spaces can’t be activated unless the activated space is in supply. A space is considered in supply if you can trace an unbroken line of adjacent spaces from the activated space to your HQ.

When you advance into a space, you can move any number of units from spaces that are adjacent to that space or that are adjacent to a water area that is adjacent to that space. However, at the end of your turn, you can only have five units in a space, so any excess you have will need to go back to your supply. Why would you take more, you ask? Well, if you move into a space with the other player's units, you battle. First, the defender rolls a die, and the attacker removes the number of units equal to the pips rolled. Then each player removes units on a one-for-one basis until there are either at least one of a player's units left or no player's units are left. This is the same with the Sail action, except this only involves your ships.

The bombard action lets you use your ships to attack an adjacent land space. Roll one die for each ship in space and total up the pips to destroy that many units.

The Shell action is essentially the same as the bombard action, except it’s targeting adjacent water spaces, and you’ll roll two dice regardless of how many units you have in the space. If you're using the side with the siege engines, then you’ll have the siege action, which works the same as the bombard action, except you’ll be targeting adjacent land spaces.

You can also place commanders on the side board. This board has two reinforce actions, two embark actions, and two plan actions. Each player can only use one of each of these in a round. Embark and reinforce will let you put more units in play, and the Plan action will let you draw a number of command cards, and one space will give you the first player for the next round. Command cards have a number of different abilities and timings on when they can be played, and everything is written on the cards. You can alternatively spend a command card to reroll any dice you’ve rolled. There are some spaces that will also give you bonus abilities as long as you control them, like, for example, being able to reinforce extra units or draw extra cards when taking those actions.

The game will end when either one player has control of their opponent's HQ or after four rounds. If it ends in rounds, then each player will score points based on stars in spaces they control and that are in supply. The player with the most points wins, with the tie going to the player who is first in turn order this round.

The student has become the master.

The first General Orders game (World War Two) served as another interesting take on the war game by introducing worker placement into the genre. It was tight, tense, brilliant, and condensed the whole experience into a box so small you could barely fit baby shoes in it. Most of all, it was accessible and hopefully more appealing to a much wider range of gamers because of the more familiar mechanisms. Although I appreciate the theme isn’t for everyone. With praise like that, it’s gotta mean that topping that for a sequel is going to be difficult, but what do I know! Apparently, for the two designers, this was actually super easy, barely an inconvenience. I’ll get into why a bit later because first, I want to focus on what makes their system so brilliant. Plus, I’ve not reviewed the first one yet, so I can’t just cheat and make you read that review.

It very quickly becomes apparent how clever and strategic this system and this combination of mechanisms is, especially when it comes to the area control aspect. In other area control games, it's not uncommon to see areas change hands or be fought over a number of times during a single game round. In this, though, more effort is needed because of the limited number of actions you can use to do that. In the original WWII version, only Advancing and Paradropping could let you take over a space. In this, it’s even tighter because you don’t have that paratrooper's action. You know, what with planes not having been invented. The only way you could achieve the same effect is by flinging people across the map with a catapult, but I don't think that’s really practical. Of course, once those actions are used, it still doesn’t mean that a space is safe because there are other ways to weaken the forces in a space to make them more susceptible to take over next round. In the original game, there were few ways to do this, but in this one, they’ve really upped the ante.

With the introduction of ships and siege engines, every space feels vulnerable to attack all throughout the round, and it just raises the tension. Nothing is safe, so you have to decide if your priority is trying to go on the attack or if you're going to have to defend what you’ve already got. It’s not impossible to balance both, but you’ll certainly find yourself leaning one way in a given round.

I see no ships!

Right, let's talk about one of the changes from the first game. Previously, you could only bring in units from adjacent areas to the space you're advancing into. Now you can also bring them in from areas that are adjacent to ships that are next to that space, meaning you can bring in units from a bit further out. It brings a lot more freedom in terms of how you distribute your units across the map and helps in not immediately giving away your cunning plans. Nothing says “I’m gonna attack you” more than adding units to a couple of next-door areas. At least now you can be a bit sneaky by putting people a bit further and not completely exposing what you’ve got in store for your opponent. What I love about this change is that it makes cutting off opponents' supply lines even more tactical and probably a bit easier since the water spaces cover a lot of the board and give you more opportunity to get to those all-important spaces quickly. Personally, I only used to try and cut off my opponent near the end of the game to stop them scoring points and because they then had to spend their last moves desperately trying to reinforce those areas and be distracted from what I was doing. Now, though, you may want to go for the other player's ships to really limit their resources in a whole section of the board. Something so seemingly simple as adding ships to this game just turns it up to eleven in terms of strategy because you have so many more options open to you. You have a lot more things to consider and so many ways to swing the fight back to your side.

I love the balancing act and the eventual race that comes with this mix of mechanisms. Each round, you have either 5 or 6 commanders at your disposal, and timing can be essential in this game because of the limited spaces to place them, thanks to the worker placement aspect of the game. For example, you may plan to move into a space and then reinforce it on your next turn. Your opponent may have other ideas and choose to hit that space by sea and wipe out those units before you get a chance to add those other units. On the flip side, reinforcing before you want to move may result in your opponent taking that space first. The game is full of these tough decisions, and the wrong one could see you going from being on the offensive with the upper hand to scrabbling to build yourself back up and resupply your forces. In some games, being on the back foot like that could signal the end of your game, but in Sengoku Jidai, and the previous WWII, you never really feel like you're out of the game until literally the end of the game. Unless you’ve played really badly, of course.

It’s written in the cards

If all the above is all the game had to offer, I’d still rate it just as highly. Throw in the cards as well, and you open up a whole new world (try getting that song out of your head). The reason I’d still rate it as highly without the cards is because, in my first couple of games of the original, I kinda ignored the cards and still had fun, but the cards certainly add another level to the game. It’d be all too easy to see a turn where you're not using an action to do something on the map or reinforce it as a waste of time. You quickly learn, though, that that’s not the case and that card actions can be just as important. First and foremost, you can just spend them to reroll dice, which, for someone who seems to have upset dice (they won’t tell me what I’ve done), is a massive deal. Each card will give some kind of benefit, like giving you additional dice to roll, adding units to the boards, or letting you take second actions. These are all things that may not sound like much on paper, but in such a tight game, any of these could make all the difference. Another simple thing on the cards that I love is that they give you the exact timing of when you play them. It’s written right there on the bottom of the cards and takes away any ambiguity.

It’s like Piccadilly Circus

This is a board that can get very busy. With discs, siege engines, and ships on the board, a lot of the commander placement spaces and victory point stars can easily get lost in the mix. I can’t tell you how many times games have nearly been won/lost because someone couldn’t see what stars their opponent had just because of the volume of stuff on the board. This was a problem for the original game as well, but it seems to be more of an issue here. Because there are more placement options, the spaces are now a touch smaller to fit them into the areas. Couple that with the sepia colour scheme, and they can easily get lost in the mix. In the original game, the commander spaces were bigger and could use better contrast to make them easier to spot. Don’t get me wrong, I love the artwork in this game; it’s beautiful, but the colour on the board can sometimes be a hindrance. We also found the shell and siege action symbols were a bit too similar to each other, and we kept confusing the two. The iconography is really clever in showing you what it does. But again, the size of spaces made them a bit difficult to read at a distance, so lots of leaning and addressing of the rulebook was involved.

The General Orders series is the Aladdin's lamp of board games (I bet you’re really singing that song from earlier now, aren’t you?) Epic feeling war game, itty bitty box. The only difference being that you will need to open the box to get the game out. If you rub the box too much, the only thing likely to happen is the ink rubbing off on your hands. When you do get the box open, though (it’s really not that difficult), you’ll be left with a strategic, fun, and innovative take on a war game that will leave you wanting to rack it up and play again.

Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson have yet again taken two seemingly incompatible mechanisms and themes and combined them to make a gloriously triumphant series of games that offer tight, strategic, and tactical gameplay while making it accessible to anyone who wants to dip their toes into this genre. For me, this surpasses the original, and that’s saying something because I love the original. That being said, though, both are staying in the collection.

Right, I’m off to predict what the next game in the series will be. So here’s a peek behind the curtain. I was gonna think of something “witty” to put here and was gonna say Lord of the Rings, you know, because of how many games have been using the theme lately, and now I can’t stop thinking how cool a Lord of the Rings version of these games would be. One side of the board for Helm's Deep and one for Pelennor Fields. We need to make this happen!