The Hungry Gamer Previews Gunsen Battle for Toshi Ranbo
Transcript
Ooh, that looks tasty. Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another game review. And today we're talking about Gunson, the Battle for Toshi Ranbo, designed by Ben Rosset and Matthew O'Malley, published by Office Dog Games. And yes, that is the same team that made the exact same game, Fromage. I bring that up right away because this game, this troops on a map game set in the Legends of the Five Rings universe, is supposedly a troops on a map game that can be played in an hour. And so that's why I bring up Fromage, cuz that's a great game that can be played in an hour. So when this game was pitched to me as something to try, that's how it was pitched. It was actually kind of pitched as, "Imagine playing Scythe in an hour."
So here we are. Let's see how they did. Now, before I get started, thank you to Office Dog for letting me make this video. They were kind enough to give me an advanced copy of the game, which I have to give back to them in order to make this game. And with that being said, while this isn't a prototype, this is an advanced copy, and so some of the stuff you see might wind up being a little bit different if you get a copy. Just be aware of that. And also, this is a kind of a promo Toshi Ranbo that uh you might be able to get and well, I have it because it was in the box, so I'm playing with it. There you have it. And so with that being said, please make sure you turn on your Klingon subtitles because if I make any mistakes in the rules overview, that's where you'll find those corrections. Now, with that being said, if you are not interested in how this game is played, you can jump to my final thoughts, then you want to go to the time stamp on the screen right now. For those of us still here, let's talk about how this game is played. So, this is an area control game, and to win, you want to be the first player to get all of your fans here out onto the board.
And by all of your fans, that means seven. You'll notice that there are 2 4 6 8 10, and there's actually one on the other side of this. So, there's actually 11 different spaces that you can place your fans out. And only two of them are attack and win combat, so you can win this game without combat whatsoever. Now, with that being said, what's going to happen is on your turn, you will draft one of the cards from the market. And there's ways to wipe the market and so on. And then that's going to slot somewhere into your tableau. And this is what your tableau looks like. So, what will happen is you'll draft a card, and then you're going to tuck it under the same color slot in your tableau. And there's ways to tuck in other places, but as you can see, there's blue, yellow, purple, and beige. And then when you tuck it into a slot, you will then fire off all of the things that you have. So, if I got this purple one here, I would then go here, here, here, then here. So, let's talk about what some of these things are.
And I'm actually going to move Toshiro Ambo out of the way so I can do that. And so, what we have are a series of get resources and do things here. So, starting over here, what this is telling you is in combat, you're going to roll three dice and keep two dice. But, if I were to get something like this card here, now I'd be rolling four and keeping two, and I'd get an extra little blood drop. We'll talk about blood drops later. This is saying I can move an army one space. And what that means is you can take everybody from a hex, move them to another space. You don't have to take all of them if you want. Maybe I decide to do that. If you wind up going on to one of these village spaces, you'll take the thing right here. You'll get the reward, in this case a soldier, and then you put it right there. If you ever get three of those, you have earned the ability to place out one of your fans. And then down here it's saying, "For every coin you spend, you can take another move."
Then we have the recruit line. For every one of these symbols, you'll get a troop, and you can place troops at your fort, which is for a purple or one right here, or if you have built any of your buildings out onto the board, I'll tell you about that later, then you can build them there as well. And you can do a move, and you can pay your influence flags to move again. Over here, you'll get influence, you can move, and you can pay wood to move again. Over here, you will get wood or coin, then you can spend wood to build your buildings. And every player has two buildings that they are able to build. So, for the crane here, there's the camp, which is a place that they can build. It costs two wood to build that. Or the marketplace here, which it means they're going to get more money every turn, and it costs three wood to build that. And when you build them, you place them down here, and when you've built two, that will allow you to place out one of your flags onto the board. And then down here, you can do your orders.
And at the start of the game, everybody has two of them. But also at the start of the game, you're going to get neutral orders, and everyone get two more, so you actually have four of them. And these are going to cost money. So, I could spend three coins, I could place this right over here, and then I could recruit one of my three heroes that I have. Like so. And they have their all they have their own abilities and their own cards, they do different things. And if you ever build three of these, then that is another way that you will be able to to place out one of your flags. And I'm placing them on the board. You can't see them right now, but you will in a moment. Now, there are two other ways on this board here that are going to earn you victory points or fans. First, you have these secret objectives over here. And again, each player has their own that are unique to their clan. And you have three of them.
So, for Crane Clan here, have eight or more money at the end of a turn. If at the end of the turn, I have eight or more money, I can say, "Up, I did that." Place it out. And again, I get to place out one of my fans. You'll notice I have three, and I have space for two of them. You can only do two of the three. Then down here, these are noble orders. And all of them will cost an amount of influence here, little influence flags, and they do different things. Usually, but whatever it is, you're going to still draft a card, and then that card will get placed face down. And what it's going to do for you is it might allow you to place a special order, and you have two of those, which are these here, which you'll then be able to again place in any column that you want. It'll fire off, and it has some kind of power.
You might be able to use it to recruit another hero, or just take any one of these other order cards here, and then place it in whatever column that you want. If you do all three of those, you guessed it, you get to place out one of your fans. And now, as you can see in this case, I would have won the game. I'm also going to point out that it's not only one person can do these. As you do it, other players can take their fans and place them out on top. And while it's hard to see from looking straight down, when you look around the table, it's pretty darn obvious who has placed their fans out. You notice over here, this is those two spaces for your secret objectives. Now, the other ways that you're going to be able to get fans is by moving into and claiming these temples here. And when you do that, you'll get to take this and this is actually going to go onto your player board. It's going to upgrade one of the pre-printed parts of your tableau on your board. If you hold two of those at any one time, you get to place right here.
Also, if you ever take Toshiro Ambo. Now, you notice right here it says five. That means you have to have at least five strength in order to take Toshiro Ambo. So, for me, if I moved all five in there, then I would take that. You'll notice that down here, that's a place to put your fan, but also you can see, as long as you are holding Toshiro Ambo, you actually also have a space. Whoops, I'm just throwing stuff everywhere. You have a space to place one of your flags as long as you hold it. So, that's another way that you can win the game. There's ways to kind of move between watchtower to watchtower almost instantly. I'm not going to get into that. The only thing that I want to talk about is combat. So, here we go. Let's just pretend that we have two warriors being attacked by these three right there.
So, you're going to again look at your player board. So, like this here, again, roll three, keep two. And you're going to look at all of your other stuff, where like this, you might have a little blood drop, whatever it might be. And we're going to pretend that blue's the attacker. So, blue would be red here. And we look, they have three troops, so they have three strength. Purple has two troops, they have two strength. And we're going to pretend that purple had this card. So, they're going to start with one blood drop. And we're going to pretend that blue also had in their tableau one of these armors and they will place Oh, blue I said. And so they'll place one right here. Then we'll take a look and we'll see that they're rolling three keeping two, but because they had this card they're rolling four and keeping two.
So they will roll. And maybe they have rerolls, maybe they don't. They decide what they're going to keep. And we're going to say they decide they're going to keep these two right here. And so that means they get two more strength and two more blood drops. Then we'll say that the other player has a bunch of bonuses and they get to roll four keep four. And so that's what they're going to do. They're going to roll their four. And so here they got two armor. They have three blood. And they got 1 2 3 4 more strength. And so just like that, first we look at the strength here. The defender won the fight. Which means if there are any of the attackers remaining at the end, they will have to retreat.
Now, had the attackers won, then they would have been able to take one of these spots right over here saying that they won. And then after that, we look at the blood drops. So blue inflicted three blood drops on purple. Purple had two shields, so they blocked two, which means they lose one troop. Meanwhile blue or meanwhile purple did four blood drops and blue only has one shield, which means they defeated three of them. Now, an interesting thing here, had let's just say the attack went all the way up to eight and won the fight because everyone is dead, they would not get the reward over here.
But you're going to simply going to play play until somebody will put out their last fan, and when they do, the game ends instantly. So, with that said, what do I like about this game? First thing is wonderful production. Again, these are retail productions, so you're not getting the big Kickstarter bling or anything like that. And considering that, it looks wonderful. In particular, the clan art on the back of the clan boards, which you actually only see kind of when you're picking your clans, but just stunningly beautiful-looking game. The board looks great. The little samurai minis are great. The fans are very cool, and something you couldn't really see in the rules overview, but they nestle together perfectly, so that you stack them up, and it's not an issue. And because they are as chunky as they are, you can see all the way around the table who has fans where. Very, very clever.
Very, very awesome. Also, I really appreciate, as far as the production goes, the double-sided board. You only got to see the two-to-three-player version, which actually they took the space that they saved by kind of condensing the board a little bit, and they made a market for the cards on there. Again, just very, very clever stuff that they're doing in this game. So, I like all of that. This is billed as a game, a troops-on-a-map game that you're going to play in an hour. And it's true. I love that. It absolutely plays in an hour, especially when you know how to play. The first time we played max player count, which is six, I think, and with being taught, we played in an hour 20, 90 minutes. Played again recently at three player, and we'd all played, there was a little bit of refreshing that had to go on, and we were done in under an hour, without question. So, really plays fast, but you're getting that same level of depth that you feel like you're getting in a troops-on-a-map game. So, I really, really like that.
I also love that this is a troops on the map game that you can win with doing very little fighting. In fact, the three-player game that we played recently, Mrs. Hungry Gamer won. She fought one time. In fact, I fought one time. And the fact that she was able to still win the game without doing any fighting is awesome to me. I love that a lot of the kind of area control games are going in that direction, how you can have a low conflict area control game, but still feel like you're out there maneuvering your armies and trying to outthink each other. Really, really clever the way that works, and I really like that. Next, all the factions are asymmetric, and they're not necessarily out of the box asymmetric in the sense that when you start, you're all exactly the same.
It kind of depends on what it is that you choose to build, but your faction has things that only your faction has. And so, you're going to be able to build up a few things that way that's going to make you more asymmetric as you go through, and they're really good powers as you develop them. As you get them out, I really like the way that works. And then, on top of that, there are a few of those neutral cards that get dealt out to everybody at the beginning of the game, which will further make you asymmetric, and I like the way that that works. It's easy to teach. There's just a few concepts you need to know. You need to know you're going to fire off your columns for the most part. You need to know how to win, and you need to know what each of the four columns does. The hardest thing about this is combat, and that's not very complex, either. So, it's very easy to teach. The tableau building is intensely robust. It is really satisfying building up the tableau and figuring out which of these columns you're going to fire off, which of the columns you can put a card in when you do your noble order. Very, very clever stuff, and intensely satisfying, and you usually feel like later in the game, you're doing something that's really, really cool. Next, when it comes to combat, I like that's simple. I like that you can have some things in your tableau that of you, but I kind of like that you're making a choice every time you fight of am I trying to kill or win?
Because both of those are options. You can kill the other player and wipe out all their troops, but still be driven off. And so you still lost the fight. And there's different things that happen that can change that up, but I really enjoy that sometimes you're making a choice, do I want to win or do I want to kill? Cuz if I kill them now, it's going to be a little harder for them to continue their march. But also if I let them win, they're going to get a fan. Or maybe it is I just need to win this one so I can get a fan or whatever it may be. And I like that choice that you have to make. And the last thing I'll say is I really like that there are more things than you can do in the game. Your secret objectives that you have. You got three of them. You're only going to You're only going to do two.
You have your heroes that you're going to be able to potentially build. You're not going to be able to build all of them. So you're always making choices of what it is that you are going to do in any given game. And I like that you always have a wealth of things that you can do and deal with and play around with. And it's going to be more than you can possibly use in the game. With the exception of building stuff. You have two buildings that you've built to you get your thing. But other than that, you have more cards than you're going to be able to use in any given game. And so again, I like the way that works. It adds to a little bit of replay and changes things up even if you have the exact same factions on the board. So with that said, what are my quibbles with the game? The first thing I'll say is I think there's one miss on the production. And I say that now I'm looking at an advanced copy. So this may change down the road. But when it comes to the wood tokens and some of the village tokens, they get confusing. And this happened to me the first time I played, I wound up losing a village token cuz it wound up mixed in with my wood. And in fact, after the last time we played, I was putting everything away and I went to set it up to make this video and I thought I'd lost a whole bunch of village tokens. I hadn't. And so here's the thing. One of these is a village and one of these is wood.
They're slightly different shape. Now, you turn the village token over and it looks like a village, but it's very easy for it to wind up this way and this way and then suddenly you get a bunch of villages that give you a bonus wood mixed in with your wood and you're like, I can't find the village tokens. I've lost some. And that's the exact panic I had when I was setting up the game to do the rules overview. I was like, oh my gosh, Bree is going to kill me. I lost five of the village tokens. No, I hadn't. They just were wood tokens and they were mixed in with the wood and it happened to all be laying down that side up. Nitpicky, but something to where if I wind up with a copy of it and it's exactly like this, I'll probably put like a little dot on the reward side of the villages just so it's easy to tell apart. Next thing I'll say is the game suddenly ends and it's not like you can't see it coming, but every time that we've played, yes, we've kind of known, ah, okay, so-and-so's running away with this and you know that that's fine. We're all trying to catch up. And we did with varying degrees of success, but suddenly someone's going to get two or three fans like that and the game is going to just end before you know it. And is that a bad thing? No, but when you are used to big long troops on a map games, things like that don't really happen. I mean, you can often see the inexorable march of the armies or whatever, but it can
end a lot faster than you think it might. Next thing I'll say is this happened in the two multiplayer games that I played. There's no solo on this. I've just played a couple times multi-handing it trying to try out different things and different factions and all that. But in the multiplayer games that I have played, someone's won significantly. And the rest of us were kind of battling for second. I don't know Again, I don't know that that's a problem cuz they clearly played a better game all the way through, but this is not a game that's going to have some kind of catch-up mechanism for you. It's not there. You're going to have to deal with the people out on the board and you're going to have to figure it out and make a line of chits and all those kinds of things to keep someone from running away with it. And the last thing I'm going to say is I describe this game as a knife fight in a phone booth. It is fast, it is vicious, and it is over. So, unlike with a lot of troops on map games, there's not really a lot of long-term planning here. Yeah, you might plan two turns out, maybe three turns out, but that's it. You need to get what you need now and move on to the next thing.
And again, for the people who are lovers of Twilight Imperium, where you're going to take 13 hours and you're going to set something in motion in an hour or two and it's not going to be realized till hour 13, yeah, you're going to have a hard time with this cuz this game is going to be over in an hour. So, no long-term plans, make a choice, go with it. If it's not working, adjust now. And that's just a little bit of a different style than some of these big troops on map games. But there you have it, folks. That is Gunsan, the Battle for Toshi Ranbo. Really enjoyed it. Really Really enjoyed it. Really like the way the tableaus build. I like how fast it is. I like that it's asymmetric. And again, the fact that you can win this game with minimal combat is fantastic. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if I've made any mistakes in the rules overview, please let me know in the comments with the timestamp so I can get that in the Klingon subtitles. If you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, MAYBE BECOME A CHANNEL MEMBER.
As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.