Bretwalda Gameplay | Board Wargames | Board Games | Phalanx | Part 2
Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Zil Blitz and welcome to the second half of our overview/gameplay video coverage of Brett Walda. We'll pick up where we left off in the first episode. If you haven't seen that, there's a link to it up on the top corner here. Let's jump right in and resume. So, here's a picture of our Mercuria kingdom at the end of spring in the first year. We've taken over three areas and expanded our military power. So, all in all, I think a fairly good start for Mercia. But now, we're going to shift into summer. And summer brings the Vikings. So, let's walk through the seasonal phase at the start of the summer turn. The first thing that we'll do is flip over the summer seasonal card and let's see what we get for this. Oh, blimey, the Danes are arriving. But before the Danes arrive, we get a summer plague. So, each unit with one hit point or two hit points rolls its battle dice.
If blank, the unit is slain unless one food is discarded from any area you control. Oh my. So, looking at how the summer plague might apply to our units, our ruler here has three hit points. The elderman has three, but the things both have two, so we'll have to roll from them. And every faction starts the battle, the game with only one food. Uh, nobody collected food in the in the spring for turn here. So, that means at most we'll be able to save one of our units. So, I'm going to go through and roll in turn starting with North Umbrea. I'll roll for the other nations and then I'll roll back for us here for Mercuria to see how many of our units perhaps will have died. Both uh North Umbrea in the gold and East Anglia in the green ended up losing a unit. East Anglia rolled two blank dice, one of which was on the ruler. So, we used the food to save the ruler, but we couldn't save the curl. Likewise, North Umbrea did likewise, rolling one on their ruler and one on the thing over here. Uh they could only save one cuz they only have one food. So they ended up losing one of their things. Uh Wessix made it through unscathed. And now it's our turn. A ruler and our elderman have three hits.
So we'll roll for this thing first. We want anything except a blank, which we get. We roll for this other thing over here. Okay. So this thing is okay. We're going to sacrifice our food to keep this thing here alive. But that brings our food reserves down to zero. So, we survived the summer plague, but we're not without expense. However, we did come through it better than both North Umbrea and East Anglia, who lost units to the plague. Now, let's talk about the Viking phase and what we're going to do to bring the Vikings in play. The Viking stage starts out with a bidding process where you're going to bid both gold and or ally markers to be the one that can determine where the Vikings show up on the map. So, if you can control where the Vikings show up, you can place them strategically to hurt your enemies and be to your benefit. If you can't, you don't have any idea where the Vikings are going to come and one of the other players can drop the Vikings right in your lap. There are some other factors that come into play. We'll see how this all plays out. But the first thing we need to do is to figure out how much gold each faction has. And then we also have to figure out how many ally markers each faction has. Ally markers are like special gold coins that you can use only in the bidding phase when the Vikings come in or in controlling the neutral units in the next phase. So let's see how we calculate how many ally markers this transitory gold each faction is going to get. The the core way that you
get ally markers which basically are these temporary coins that have to be used in this phase by the way. You can't save them from phase to phase. The way you get these first is however many victory points or dalks you're behind the leader, you get that amount. So, blue here, which is us, Mercia, we're going to get one of these ally markers cuz we're one point trailing. So, I put one over on our board area. Likewise, green, East Anglia, is going to get one. And then red Wessex is going to get two of these ally markers cuz they are in last place by two points. There are other ways to get ally markers, however, and one of the ways to get them is through development. And that brings us to this development board for Wessix because they chose a development action that's actually going to get them ally markers. To understand that better, let's take a look at this development area of the board. So, every nation has a development area of the board. One here is for actually development, collection, furd, and movement. And the idea is that you have development tiles you can place in here that will strengthen these actions in subsequent turns of your of your game. Now, each faction starts out with 16 tiles, four colored tiles for each area. And they are identical, so everybody gets the same set of tiles. And if you choose a development action for your action in one of your turns, you get to pick any one of these 16 tiles and place it in its respective area. So when Wessix did a development action in the springtime, I picked this one here that's called
envoys. And if we zoom in here on envoys, it says you gain two of these ally coins before each bidding. So Wessix, which got two ally coins by being behind in the bidding, is also going to get two more ally coins because they've chosen this development action. So this makes Wessix, they're making a strong play to control the Vikings when the Vikings come into the battle. Now, there are other ways you can get ally markers, but those are the two major ones. Some of the diplomacy cards might have ally marker potential in them. You can trade them among players as well because training and bargaining is basically a free-for-all in the game. So, if you're playing with four players, making alliances and making deals could shift these around. But that's really all the opportunities we have each faction has for gaining ally markers at this current stage in the game. So now what we're going to do is we have we're going to do a bidding where each faction bids how much gold plus ally markers they want to commit to the Vikes to be able to control the Vikings in this stage. And at the beginning of this stage each player has to state how many gold and ally markers they have available to put into this bidding phase. If we look at North Umbrea they only have one gold coin and they have no ally markers because they are in front.
So they have a capacity of one as one gold coin. Wessex has four ally markers and two gold coins. Their bidding capacity is six. As Mercia, our bidding capacity is two. We have one ally coin and one gold coin. East Anglia's bidding capacity is three. One ally coin and three gold coins. Now, what would happen in a four-player game is that secretly each player would put into their hand the number of ally markers and gold coins they want to bid on the Viking control in this phase and then reveal them. Who's ever got the most total wins control of the Vikings in this phase. If there's a tie, the pretender picks who gets to control the Vikings. In this case, if there were a tie, it would be North Umbrea that can control them. But in this case, we know Wessex is going to win. They've got four ally coins. You have to use them in the current phase.
You can't save them. So, we know they're going to build bid at least four and nobody else is close to that. So, I'm going to simulate the bidding where everyone's going to bid their ally coins. Wessex will bid four, North Umbrea bids zero, Mercuria and uh East Anglia bid one. We're going to clear out the the ally coins and Wessex has one control of the Viking raids. You may be wondering how did the Vikings and Danes come into play? And that's where this Viking deck comes into play. So Wessex bid four ally for a total of four to get control of the Vikings. So they're going to draw five of these cards. On the other side of these cards are locations on the map and that's the locations where the Vikings come in. So let's pick five of these and spread them out and take a look. So these are what these Viking cards look like. We can see we have a coastal area highlighted and then one region highlighted and then the region's name is listed here, Lindelene.
Likewise, they follow the same path. So, as Wessix, they can pick from any one of the five cards that they've drawn, highlighting a coastal area and a region. They also got an interesting one here, which says, "Danes to uh arrive to any coastal area you choose." I I'm assuming by coastal area they mean the water and not the region, which means that the Vikings themselves would probably stay on the ship. Not quite sure on this one. and there isn't a clarification in the rules, but I'll assume that by coastal area means they're going to leave them in the ship. So, for that reason, I don't think Wessix is going to pick them. But what I'm going to do now is look through these other four and pick an area where I want the Vikings to arrive, where I think it would do the most damage and productivity for Wessix. So, of the four regions that they had cards for, one two of them here were nearby Wessex in themselves, which wouldn't be good locations at all. They don't want the Vikings to come near them. One of them would actually land the Viking forces right here in this area where uh North Umbrea has all of their forces, but I think North Umbrea would wipe wipe the Vikings out there. However, and there were none near us as Mercier here. So, I I was thinking I'd be fair and try to place them near us, but there is one that puts the Vikings in the coastal area up here and then in this land here.
And that's actually pretty damaging to North Umbrea for a number of reasons. So, now we're going to have the Vikings come in by ship here, and then they're going to land here, and we'll see what happens as they come into play. The Vikings always come in with their Viking ship, and they come in with two of these Viking FS. And then if there's a ship here, uh, then there has to be ship to- ship combat, but there are no ships there of any of the factions. So, the Vikings then are ex able to land. And the card here designates this one here, palenium, which is right here. So the two things are going to come here and take control of this area. Now if there were any forces here, there would be combat that would be instigated, but there's none. So the Vikings have control of this area. The only way to get them out of this is to defeat them in battle. So that's now creating a big problem for North Umbrea. However, one more thing happens. The Vikings pillage all adjacent areas, which means they're going to pillage the capital here of North Umbrea. They kill these are this area actually is I think it is adjacent. Yes. So they pillage these three areas. We're going to put down these Viking pillillage markers. That means North Umbrea cannot collect food or collect gold in any of these areas until they remove the Vikings. And they can't get any income unless they collect food. So this creates a lot of problems for North Umbrea. They're going to have to deal with the Vikings. And that ends essentially this Viking phase. But the
Vikings stay in play after this and have created some pretty big problems for the leading faction right now, which is North Umbrea. So well played by Wessex to create problems for one of their opponents. We'll see as the game continues on how the Vikings might be moved about and different things that are going to happen here. But now it's time for us to go into the summer phase. North Umbrea is the pretender. They're going to go first and we're going counterclockwise. So, I'm going to move north, make a move for North Umbrea, make a move for East Anglia, and then we'll come back to Mercia and see what we're going to do in our turn. Both North Umbrea and East Anglia performed a collect action. North Umbrea is actually in a bind here because they need more units to be able to safely take on these uh Vikings that are here. And because the Vikings are pillaging in here, when they collect, they didn't get a lot of resources. And we'll see how the collection action works once we do it as one of our own factions. But what what I'm trying to do with North Umbrea is to have them rebuild some units so they can go fight those Vikings and take the Vikings so they can free up these lands that are getting pillaged by the Vikings. The Vikings are a major thorn in North Umbrea's side. East Anglia likewise, they lost some forces to the plague. They need more forces to be able to come up and spread out and capture the land. In order to get more forces, they need more money. So they collected gold and food. And again, we'll see that in more detail when we do it. Now we come down to our turn and we have our action for the first turn. One thing I wanted to show about the development boards is that each side has these four markers that signify the four different types of actions. Movement, fur with
military units, development with the gear, and then collection with the money. And you place it. When you do your first action, you place it here. We're going to do a movement action. That means when we come back to it in the next turn, we've already used our movement token. We know we have to use one of the other three. But I think I have a bold move ready for us as Mercia. We're going to move our thing, which is a movement of two to cross a thick border cross two. So, we're going to move it back into the capital because uh in the next phase, the neutral units are going to move. And there are neutral units, you can see just right here in eight adjacent areas. So, it would be really easy for one of our enemies to control a neutral unit and pull him in here. But, so I'm just trying to defend the capital with that. However, we're going to stay on the offensive here. This is a little bit daring because there is an elderman here and it's in a city. So, it's going to get a defensive value. We're going to move all our forces here, our king, our elderman, and our brave thing in here and take on this elderman in battle. This is very similar to the previous battle we showed, except the elderman gets a red dye instead of a a gold, yellow die. So, it's a little more dangerous for us. Now, there are some elements of combat that we haven't looked at yet, how um hits are assessed when there's more than one unit and uh some of the play with lordship cards.
So, we might see that in this battle now. But, let's go on. We're going to roll first for our attack. We have three two reds and a yellow. Hoping for something good here. Oh, that's pretty good. We've been rolling well. Three swords and two shields, which is pretty good for us. So, we've got three swords and two shields. Let's see what the Elderman does. I hope they fail. Oh, that's actually not very good for us here. Okay, so the Elder rolled three shield, three swords. We have uh two swords that block it. So, uh, one of our units takes a hit. One hit got through. You start with the lowest value unit and you assign all hits to one of them before you go on. So, as we're in the first round, we have this little blood drop here that signifies we're going to put it right here on our thing. He's taken a hit because one of the hits got through.
We have three swords. The elderman rolled two uh shields there. So, likewise, we have one excess hit over what he was able to hold. So, we did hit the elder here. One of the things we didn't show in the previous battle here is that after um there is before battle cards, during battle cards, and after battle cards that you can play as well, but right after you roll the dice and assess the damage, you can play a lordship card um automatically for one increased sword. So, we could conceivably we have two extra swords here. I think actually we're going to do this. I I don't want to do that. Now we're going to go for one more round of battle. Okay, we're going to risk it here. So, we're going to take a chance. So, this now is the second and final round of battle. Let's get some good rolls. Oh, that's pretty good. But we didn't get a lot of defense. So, we got four hits and one shield.
Oh, that's not what we wanted. But, I mean, it's all things considered, it could be worse. So, our four hits on that one shield put three hits on the Elderman. We've killed the elderman and we are victorious here by because we've eliminated the enemy forces. However, the elderman rolled two hits on one shield. That puts a second hit on this and we can't distribute it over the stronger units. You have to stay on one unit, the weakest one, until it's dead. So, unfortunately, the thing takes his second hit and he is killed. We've lost our first unit. So, conquest at a price for us. That was uh we've suffered our first losses here. However, however, we have a card that we can play after a battle here. This is, I think, a pretty cool card and a pretty cool time for us to play it. This card is momentum.
Played after a battle, it says after you win a battle, move any number of units from the battle area to an adjacent area, which means we're going to play that card after the battle and we can move the units from here. Oh, the question is, do we want to go down here and try to knock this curl out and take this city? Or actually, let's be a little bit more conservative. Let's go to this area here because there's a food icon here. That'll give us some more food. So, we're going to move up here and grab control of this area here. So, with all being said and done, I'm pretty happy about how we were able to expand in this area. We've got five areas now. We've got two dalks. Although, we could use some more forces here to defend this ground that we're taking. So, we might want to do some fur action, but we need some money, too. So, lots of things to do. Let's continue on now with the second uh with the next round of turns here in the summer. I'm going to do the other three factions. Then I'll come back to us for our final action in the summer. In Wessex's turn, they moved from their capital with their ruler and their elderman. Finally, defeating the thing was here. They rolled much better, which gained them this area. They're getting back on track. Both East Anglia and North Umbrea did a fur action to bring in a thing with the money they had raised from collecting in the previous round. So, they're building up their forces. North Umbrea so they can take on the Vikings East Anglia because they just need more forces. And now it comes to us as Mercia. Um what we're going to do with our action and this time we need some gold to buy more units to get more units and to defend the areas that we've captured here that we've conquered. So
we're going to do a collection action and we haven't seen that yet. There are two elements to the collection action and it happens unless you've got uh developments that you've built into your empire's skill tree that allows you to collect differently. A development action only happens where you have units. So that's a little bit of a disadvantage. That's another reason why we need more troops is so we can collect better. Now each one of these areas you'll notice has a numerical value on them. Um this is how many coins you collect if you collect in that area. So we're going to collect in our capital first. We're going to collect money. That's worth two gold coins. This area that we moved up to here doesn't have any gold coins whatsoever. So, when we collect money, we're going to get two gold coins. We had one gold coin before, so that gets us up to three now. Now, the second part of the collection action is that you collect food. You basically harvest the crops. And those go these are the little food tokens that go on the board. And these are placed actually in the area where those troops are where that the food symbol is. So, our capital has one and then this area over here has one. So, we've got two food within our empire at this point in time. And that's essentially it for the collection action. It's a very simple, straightforward action. That ends our second action. I'm going to go do Wess's last action. Now, Wessix as well did a collection action to gather some financial resources. They now have five gold coins and they added some food here to their capital. And with that, we've finished all of the eight actions in the summer phase. And we're going to go right now to the priority phase to
determine who is the pretender for the next round. Here's the current victory point totals. We've pulled even now with uh North Umbrea. And Wessix has gotten their first victory point with one. So we're tied with North Umbrea for the pretend for to get the role of the pretender for the next phase which means we go to the first tiebreaker. The first tiebreaker is the number of areas that you control. North Umbrea controls three. We control a hefty five. So we are the pretender for the next round. So we are the pretender. The snakeheads are going to be turned to the right. Now I want us to go clockwise. So we're going to go from us to East Anglia around ending with Wessex before it comes back to us again. So with that, we have completed the priority phase. We've completed the summer. It's time for us now to go to the fall. As we head now into this fall season, the interesting aspect of this is the special phase that starts the fall turn, which is neutral units and Vikings can move. And so we're going to see how this happens. Um, as usual, there's going to be an involvement with these ally coins, and we'll walk through this whole process as we get going. So, let's jump in and get started. But time to go to the fall. As with all seasons, the first thing we're going to do is flip over the fall card.
Autumn Diplomacy. Every faction takes two ally coins. This will make this next phase very interesting. So, I'm going to distribute these among each one of the four factions. This phase also starts with a distribution of the ally coins to the factions that are behind the leaders. So North Umbrea and US are in first. So both uh East Anglia and um Wessex are going to get another ally coin each. So I'll distribute those. Lastly, we saw that Wessex has the development. You gain two ally coins. So they get a between the autumn diplomacy that gave them two trailing in victory points by one and then also having this diplomacy this uh development skill they get five big ally coins. So we've distributed all the ally coins and now it's time for us to go to the phase where the neutral units and Vikings move. And let's talk about how that works. So now that we've distributed the ally coins, it's time for us to start moving the neutral units and the Vikings. And how this works, it goes in reverse turn order. So, we are the pretender starting first. So, in this phase, we're going to be last. It goes clockwise. So, we're going to start over here with Wessex. Now, you can spend ally coins like gold or you can spend gold to basically pay the units that you want to move. And you pay the value of the unit and then you can perform an action with them, a movement action with them. You can activate all the units in an area if you would like.
So if for example Wessix wanted to move everything here, they could pay three, which is the value of the thing to move the three, and then one for the curl and one for the curl. If they spent five coins, they could activate all five all of the units in here and have a full movement with them. Now, we talked about how the faction curls can't move, but the neutral unit curls can move in this phase. Combats are resolved from this and everything goes through as normal except the neutral units are going to move. Now, of particular note here is Wessex has five of these ally coins. So, they can create some pretty serious havoc here with this. And this is going to go around in sequence. So, Wessix is going to bid and move some units. Then, North Umbrea will go, then we'll go and it's going to continue going on until each faction passes at which turn this phase will end. So, I'm going to start with Wessix. I'm going to go to North Umbrea.
I'm going to go east angle and then I'm going to come to us moving some of these neutral units and showing what happens when it comes to our turn. We'll be moving some as well. I'll also show anything that moves that has an impact or a bearing on Mercia as well. Just to show what can happen and how dangerous these can be. The East Anglia ruler was alone here. The Elderman was right here. Wessix would had the five ally coins. Spent them all to activate the Elder, moved them in here. They both fought to the death and knocked each other out. So, the ruler of East Anglia now has been killed. They're going to have to select and pick another ruler, bringing in their second ruler of the game. And one thing that we didn't talk about in this uh in the precursor phase is you have three ruler cards. Um there are some instant win conditions for ending the game, but another way the game can end instantaneously is if a faction's third ruler is killed. So, this one here is killed, and this is out of action.
Now they're going to have to pick a king or a queen from the second ruler card, bring them into the game. If they lose two more rulers, the game would end at the end of that current turn. North Umbrea took advantage of our weak defensive position here by taking paying one for curl. They can move two. It moved one here, recaptured this area, moved one here across these thin borders cuz they have movement of two and it took both of these areas away from us, which is unfortunate indeed. East Anglier, who had their ruler killed by Wessex, spent three gold to get this thing activated, moving it down in here, knocking out the curl that was in the capital of Wessex, and that caused them to lose their meal and all the food that was there. So, a crippling revenge move by uh East Anglia on Wessex. To prevent other factions from getting the same idea, we're going to spend uh one of our ally coins to move this curl and get it out of the way again, pushing it up here into this other area to the northwest to prevent someone else from paying money to move it and do further damage in our areas. The other factions are out of ally coins, and I don't think it makes sense to spend gold to move much around.
We're going to spend our last one here to move this one further away from us here to get it out of the way. Just sliding it over here. I I don't want to send it up into combat here cuz I think it would lose against the thing. So that would be just helping out uh North Umbrea by moving it in there. And with that in mind, everyone now will pass as we go through this phase, which means the moving of neutral units has ended. Nobody nobody spent money to move the Vikings, which could have been an interesting move because you could have perhaps moved them and created some more pillaging, but it didn't really make sense. They're kind of well positioned where they are right now. But the biggest consequences of this phase here was that East Anglia loses its ruler up here and then Wessex loses its capital here to this pesky thing. So East Anglia and Wessex getting at it. We lost two areas as well which is inconvenient for us too. And now with the prephase done, now we're going to go into the turn phase. We are the pretenders, so we're going to go first in this next phase. So now it comes to us in the fall turn. We take the first action out of all the factions. And one of the things we want to keep in mind here, winter is coming.
And in winter, you have to feed your troops. And this is how food works in the game. Your ruler eats for free. You don't have to provide any food for your ruler. Every other unit that you control has to consume one food from someplace on the map. It doesn't have to be in the same map, but it has to be from an area you control. So, we have food that we collected last uh in the summertime here in our capital. We have one food that we collected up here in this area. So, we have two food. So, if we get to the winter in this current state, this elderman would eat this food. This guy, the thing, would eat this food. We're all set for food. But, if we were to recruit curls um and not provide more food for them, any extra troops would die and starve to death in the winter. The winters are harsh here in Bretwalda. So, we have to keep that in mind. And that's going to to a certain degree shape what we can and want to do in the fall because it's at the beginning of winter when troops feed. So, you have to be ready for winter when it comes. With that in mind, and because we haven't seen this action yet, let's go do a development action for uh Mercuria and show how that works. So, development actions are two-step actions. We're going to put first up, we'll put for our first action, this little gear icon, which signifies the development token.
And then for a development action, we take a look at our 16 development tiles. There are four red tiles, four blue tiles, four yellows, and four development for green tiles. Each one for these areas here. So, you're going to be able to put two over the course of the game in each area of the matching color. That means you're only going to be at best using half of your development tiles in any game of Brett Walda that you play. Now, the benefits that these provide are akin with this type of action. So, for example, here this development action is going to make things stronger. This one says, "Your cities provide an extra shield in each battle round." This one here says, "Build any numbers of buildings with development." So, usually when you do a development action, the second part of it is building a building. Um, and normally you can only build one. If you have this, you could build as many as you want. Um, here is for the collection action. Two of your units do not need food in the winter. So, this would allow you to have a larger army because you don't have to feed those units. So, this actually would be a pretty good one for us to get if we wanted to grab this now because then we could recruit in the next turn and that would give us a larger army for the winter. So, I'm tempted to take that one. Um, here's a furred action. It says, "On furred, recruit on furred." So, when you recruit, recruit one curl in each of your countryside areas you control for free. That's a pretty strong one here.
Now, we also talked about how uh curls can't move, but one of these movement actions, if you pick this development, move your curls like any other unit. So, this is pretty helpful because you can spread the curls all about the places rather than having just stuck in the areas where you recruit them. So, lots of different benefits and things to think about as you're doing a development action. And I think for the sake of getting a larger force as quickly as we can and not worrying about food, let's actually do this. We're going to um pick this development here that says your uh two of your units do not need food in the winter. So, that's going to allow us immediately to have a slightly larger army, which I think is going to help us early on here in this uh this current year and going into next year as well. I mean, it's going to be nice to have we don't have to worry about that food. So, we're going to pick that as our development. This is free.
And that's the first part of the development action. The second part of a development action is you can build a building. All buildings cost three gold coins. We have three gold coins. So, we're going to spend those three gold coins. They go back to the general supply. And then we're going to pick one of four different types of buildings. And let's talk briefly about which each one each one of these buildings do. So um the granary uh and they have different restrictions on where you can build them. You can only build one building in an area except your capital where you can build two. Now this is the granary. The granary allows you to uh re get one extra food when you take a collection in an area that has a granary in it. The mead halls allow you when you take a furred action, you have the option of buying with gold your uh the diplomacy card, the lordship cards, but um with the me hall, you get a free lordship card when you do a furred action. So that can be pretty powerful, too. This is the uh harbor. Uh and the harbor allows you to exchange food and gold at an exchange rate. That's pretty helpful. Uh and this is the abbey we talked about. These are good for getting that that victory point. Uh these also give you extra gold when you recruit in an area. Uh they give you extra gold when you recruit with um when you collect in an area with an abbey in it.
With all those things in mind, I want us to start getting more lordship cards uh because I think they're helpful in combat and I think we're going to go the combat route. So with the three gold that we spent, we are going to buy a mead hall and we're going to drop this. We can build me halls in the cities in the capital. So for one of the two possible buildings that we could build here in our capital, we're going to build a mead hall. Now one of the rules about building two buildings in areas, you can't build the same building type. So we'd have to build something else in that area. But we've now added in a development that's going to help feed our troops in the winter. And we've added in a mead hall that's going to help us to get more lordship cards and be more powerful in combat. So with that in mind, we have finished our development action. I'm going to go around to the other three factions and do their actions and then sum them up and we'll come back for our second action. East Anglia is hurting with the loss of their leader. They'll get them back in the winter of the next turn here and they only have one gold coin. Uh but I so we're going to need to collect and get some funds here. They took a development that's going to allow them to collect in two areas that you don't have your units in because remember when you collect you only collect in areas with your units. So we're going to be able to collect in two areas. That's going to give us a big collection in the next uh the next action here in this turn. North Umbrea still suffering from the effects of these Vikings here with the pillaging going on here. They have decided to uh move their things. They moved over here, moved over here. They as well, they are completely out of gold. They're going to need some food as well to survive the winter. So, they are moving into these areas and hopefully be
able to build some food, get some food in the next turn as well. Wessex took a development action, the same one that we did, which allows them to feed two units in the winter for free because they don't really have a good way to get food and they would lose their elder, leaving only their ruler because they lost their capital here. They're in somewhat of a world of hurt, too. We come back to us for our second action in the fall. Uh, that was dumb. We should not have built the meal because we spent the only money we had on the mead hall. We don't have any gold coins right now, so we can't recruit curls because they cost one each. So, that was dumb as a brick. Uh, normally I'd be tempted to undo it, but we're not. This, you know, the turn's gone on and things like that. We are instead we're going to have to collect because we need money. And the only place we get money here, we get two gold coins for recruiting, uh, for collecting in our capital. We also get more food.
So, we've got plenty of food lying around on the map, which makes that whole development action that we took to have extra food um, seemingly even more pointless. So, not the smartest move there for us as we go through these uh, fall turns there. Now I'm going to make the last moves for the factions here in the fall and then we'll shift over towards the winter turn. East Anglia collected picking up five big gold as well as enough food to feed everybody for the winter. They are uh they have that special bonus that allows them to collect in two areas without units. So they use that to grab the extra gold. North Umbrea likewise desperate. They have no food whatsoever thanks to the Vikings and the pillaging. So they're messed up by the Vikings. They decided to collect. So they got two uh food units and they were able to get two gold coins here. They're not going to have enough units to feed all their troops. So someone's going to starve in the winter unless they can solve that problem. Wessix biting their time by recruiting a thing and paying three gold. Now they're going to be able to come back and try to retake their capital and hopefully get back on the uh the uh expansion track here. And with that, the fall comes quickly to an end with relatively little combat. We're going to go now to uh determining who the pretender is for the next round.
We're going to go to uh winter is coming, but first let's calculate our pretender. Not much progress made on any of the victory points with the fall turn here. We actually went backwards one. The pretender goes to uh North Umbrea in this turn because they still have their two original areas under control. North Umbrea claims the Pretender and they're going to go clockwise for the next turn. Now, there is no bidding in the winter, so we don't have to do the ally coins uh this phase because there's no bidding to go on. Lastly, we move our turn marker to winter of the first year, and it's time to go to winter. As we slide to winter, you'll recall that East Anglia's ruler was killed in the fall. As a reminder, they suggest putting your new selected ruler on top of the next season card. And this is a free placement. This has a value of five, but when your ruler is slain, you get a free replacement of your second ruler card. So, we're going to put them back into their map on any area they control. They've dropped the ruler up here with their elderman perhaps being able to now come over here and capture the rest of this peninsula in this turn. Back in action as always, we will pick the next season card and see what kind of effects are going on with us here. Oh, okay. Bloody winter.
So, each winter starts in addition to having to pay your units food, each winter starts with a penalty. So, you have to remove two from the areas you control, two food from the areas you controlled, and then feed your armies. This is going to create some problems for North Umbrea. Um, and the bloody winter effect that will be in effect for the whole turn, roll plus one white dye in each battle round. Interesting. So, the battles in winter will be bloodier. And then the one of the special features of winter that distinguishes it from the other seasons is that when you do the collect action, you can't collect food. You can collect gold, but you can't collect any food. Let's go uh feed our troops. Now, we'll start with us and work our way around. So, the winter penalty, we have to remove two of our food. We'll remove one from each. And then, if you recall, we have the two of your units uh do not need food in the winter. So, we have our ruler that eats for free, and then these two units can eat for free. So, we're just going to leave our food out there. That turned out to be pretty handy for us resolving our food issues. Likewise, Wessex picked the same skill that we have that they can they don't have to feed two of their units. They don't have any food at all on in their kingdom. So, there's no penalty to pay and they can feed everybody because of that special development feature that they created.
However, North Umbrea, this is catastrophe. They have to take two food because of the winter penalty and then they can feed. They have no food left over. We can see here how the Vikings messed them up because they can't collect in these areas. They had to redistribute troops to collect. So, this little pesky action here has really messed up uh North Umbrea's advances here. They have no food at all. Their ruler eats for free. Everybody else starves to death. All they have left is their ruler. This is setting them back a whole what a catastrophic winter for uh North Umbrea here. Setting them back quite well. Now, we could actually we could conceivable or even, you know, East Anglia or us could conceivably say, "Okay, let's team up and let's really put the hurt on North Umbrea here, knocking them perhaps back even more."
East Anglia has four food. They'll pay one food penalty from each place. And then they have to pay their troops food. So, they have the ruler and two. So, they consume all their food, but they're able to pay all their troops and they all survive. So, the only one hit hard by winter is North Umbrea. Wow, they got hit really hard. Lesson learned. have extra food for the winter. At this point in this two-part series, we've seen every feature in the game and we're closing. We're we're over 30 minutes in this video. So, rather than show the actions in winter, which we've seen before, we've seen all of them. I think I'm going to uh call the video here. A few comments though as we wrap up. Comment number one, there was a comment made on the previous YouTube video where I mentioned that East Anglia moved through here and ended up here and gained control of these two spaces. the Greyman pointed out that he thought the rule stated that it's only the areas you end in. And that's actually the case. So it you don't get from the way the rules are written, you don't get control if your forces move through an uncontested area. You only get control of the areas they end in. So we should not have given control of this area to East Anglia. The second thing that I wanted to call attention to that we didn't talk about here is that each one of these faction boards have a special ability written down at the bottom here. And I don't see these mentioned anywhere in the rules.
So they're really easy to miss. This one here is recruit one extra land unit in the same area where you take a furred action. So where you recruit as Mercia only you can recruit an additional unit. So they have a special furd ability here. Each one of the factions has a special ability. We didn't talk about those in the course of gameplay. In Mercier when they recruited they didn't have enough gold to take advantage of that, but it is there. If you're playing the game and learning the game, make sure you read your faction's special ability because they aren't mentioned any place else. You h you it's really easy to miss these. And then lastly, the the only big thing that we really haven't seen is ship movement, and it's not very complex, but it does allow you to move fairly quickly around the board and carry troops, of course, from one place to another. So, there is some ability here in this game to be able to move pretty quickly by using ships and building ships to move along. But other than that, I think those are all of the major features that we've seen in in the game here. The last thing that I would offer up is that we haven't really shown too much of how the lordship cards can be used by factions. Um, and as those go as you go forward with the game, you're going to be playing those lordship cards quite a bit. They're quite creative and they allow you to do a number of things.
Um, in addition to when you are doing things like a furred action or a development action, you can spend a lordship card as one gold coin, too. So, if you're just a little bit short of doing a a certain action when it's your turn, you can discard a lordship card to get a gold coin to pay make that final payment for the for the gold uh that you might need for that particular action. And you could discard, you know, more than one, too. So, you can use them as gold coins, too. The last thing I would say that if you're learning the game, I think this video could give you a a good sense of how gameplay flows and how this flow of gameplay goes. Uh there may be some edge cases that I've gotten wrong though. In particular, for example, that summer plague that we had way on where one units would starve to death if they rolled a blank die on their die roll. I suspect we should have rolled that for the neutral units too and kind of reading the text of the card now. But I didn't do that. So, those types of things I may be slightly off on, but I think I've gotten the major elements of gameplay. Hopefully, this gated video will give you an idea if it's something that you might like and something you might enjoy. I really like this game. I love the gameplay elements to it. Uh the it it flows well. gives you that 4Xish type of game board game experience in a very classic setting that feels and just oozes art and and culture and history here. So, um I've greatly enjoyed the time I've been spending with the game and look forward to keep playing it.
Thanks so much for watching. If you do have any questions, uh feel free to ask them. And if you enjoyed this video, you might also want to check out another Fallinkx game coming up soon on their crowdfunding, which is Hood: Troubles in Sherwood. I'll put a link to the overview video for that one here. Thanks for watching everybody. Have a great day.