The Challenge of Barletta - How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial

Outmaneuver foes with programmed movement, sneaky [music] attack, and expensive mistakes in the Challenge of Barletta. And today, we'll be teaching you how to play the Challenge of Barletta, game designed by Michele Quondam, and published by geotiles.it. And check out the link to the project page in the video description below.

And hey everyone, it's Stella. And Terence, welcome to Meeple University. And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comment. You know what to do. Now, let's get to the classroom. It's the Tower of Barletta in 16th century Naples during the Third Italian War. A group of visiting French knights has questioned the valor of the Italians, [music] and now it's on.

A famous chivalric battle between 13 of the best Italian and French knights, culminating in a nation-and-culture-defining victory for the Italians. In the game Challenge of Barletta, two players or teams will recreate a small part of this historical battle, pitting one, two, or three knights per side in an intricate tactical struggle and strategic battle of strength.

Capture the opposing knights or their flags, or take the most ransom to be the winner. The game plays between two and four players, and there are a total of six knights available, three Italian and three French. Each player controls either one or two knights of the same side, and both sides must have the same number of knights.

How you arrange yourselves within those constraints is up to you. For the main part of this video, I'm going to show you how to play a two versus two game with each player controlling a single knight. There's a few changes you need to know for a single player to control two knights, which I'll explain at the end of the video.

Choose your knight, and individually take these components, the card, your mini, your style intent marker, this has letters matching your knight's name, a set of two style resolution markers, a base style card, which shows this back and this front, a privacy screen, a player board, and a set of 10 cubes, four white, three yellow, two orange, and a black.

Within each team, take a shared pool of ducati coins in ones, threes, and fives to form your starting ransom pool. This will be 13 ducati with one knight, 24 with two, and 33 with three. You may sit around the table in any order, although ideally alternate between the teams. Shuffle the initiative, fight, and armor cards.

Starting from the youngest player and going clockwise, you'll do two rounds of adding one of these upgrades to your knight. Simply pick the type of upgrade you want, draw it, and add it. You may pick the same or different upgrades with each of your two choices. Set the unchosen decks aside. These three cards define your knight's hit points, any bonus armor, fight, or initiative they have, as well as any unique powers, and be sure to apply any which occur in setup.

This is the main board, which marks the Italian and French sides. The unboarded edge at the top is space for a future expansion board to connect. Place a green marker on each of the two tracks, one on the initiative track at zero, and one on the round track at round one. Do be aware that in the final version, there will be six rounds on this track.

On this prototype board, it goes up only to five. Each team takes their colored flag and places it on one of these half hexes in the back row of their side of the board. This can go on any partial hex, even over the round tracker, or in one of these corner spaces. Shuffle these two decks, style and tactics, and each player draws one of each card, adding them to the base style card that they already hold in hand.

Finally, from the youngest player and going clockwise, deploy your knights to the board. French knights begin in one of these two rows, and Italian knights in one of these two rows. All placements and movements in the game are directional. Each mini has one of these arrows, and you must always be sure to point it towards one of the edges of the knight's hex.

This is the knight's current facing direction. Once all knights have been placed, you're now ready to play. The Challenge of Barletta is played over six rounds of chivalrous combat. So, each round, each knight will pre-plan some of its scheming footwork, bluff three moves, then has a chance to move, and then engage in a melee combat if able.

One important rule throughout play is that there is no table talk. Thematically, the battle is taking place in real time and in heavy armor, so there's no opportunity for teammates to talk and strategize. To begin each round, each player draws two cards from the style or tactics decks into hand in any combination.

Then, evaluate which team has initiative and which player within that team is the herald. Now, this is going to have a lot more steps in later rounds, so we'll come back and talk about this later. But in round one, the team with initiative is whichever team has the youngest player, and that team nominates any one of its players to be the herald.

Having chosen a herald, you now move to the movement phase, and there are two steps to this, declaring movement, then resolving movement. First is declaring movement. This resolves in turns, clockwise starting from the player to the left of the herald. You will resolve your choice using these three tokens, and you must place your style intent token in one of the six hexes adjacent to your knight, and secretly choose either your movement or faint resolution token.

If you've chosen movement, it means that you intend to move your knight, with the space that you've declared with the intent token being the first space entered. If you've chosen faint, then you intend to stay put during movement, with this style intent token being merely a bluff. Multiple style intent tokens may be placed in the same hex.

Then is movement resolution. Each player will resolve the movement that they've partially declared, taking turns in the order of the herald's choosing. You cannot predict the turn order. The herald has full choice to decide who acts first, second, and so on, as long as all players ultimately resolve.

When called upon to resolve, reveal your token. If you picked faint, then simply remove your style intent token from the board, and optionally rotate your knight one step either to the left or right. Your movement is complete. If you chose movement, then you must play a valid style card from your hand to move your knight such that its first movement step is into your declared intent space.

The style card shows a movement pattern, which is relative to your knight's current position and facing direction. This card is to move two spaces forwards based on current facing, which the first step does take us into the intent token and is therefore valid. However, for this movement, the first step would be forward left based on the knight's current facing direction, which is here, making the play invalid.

After choosing, move according to the pattern without changing the facing direction of your knight, and then change the facing direction to match the direction of the sword in the final space. If you can do all of these steps without interruption, this is considered a completed movement. Remove the intent token, keep the card in play, there's an additional bonus that you can use in fights, and you may optionally make one further step of rotation.

Your movement could be interrupted, meaning that you can't finish the entire movement pattern in a number of ways, including by hitting the wall, by trying to move into or through an enemy knight, or with a movement which would end on a teammate. You can move through a friendly knight, but never finish on the same hex.

When this happens, you move only as many spaces as you can. You keep your original facing direction, so you do not turn to face the sword, and the movement is not complete, so you will not get its bonus, and you can set aside the card. You do, however, still get to take a free step of rotation, exactly as you had if you finished your movement.

Be aware, there are style cards which will have you retreat or take backward steps. There are also cards with multiple movement patterns on them. Although typically only one of them will match the style intent you've placed. Simply pick one valid movement pattern from the card and resolve that. Each of the game's style cards is single use and will be discarded at the end of your turn, except for your base style card.

It gives you three basic options of forward, forward left, and forward right, and you'll always pick it back into hand at the end of your turn. In any case, when called upon, you must always play a valid style card for your intent token and resolve as much of it as you can, even if the board state now means that you can't move or otherwise don't want to.

If you successfully complete the entire movement pattern on your chosen card, then after your standard one free rotation step, you may take a bonus movement. You may do this once and it costs you two elements, meaning two cubes or cards from hand, which you must discard in any combination. This lets you take a bonus movement step in any direction without changing your facing, then rotate one step.

Then as a further bonus for completing your entire movement, whether you took that extra movement or not, you may finish by placing a block token at the cost of a single element. Again, that means discarding any style or tactics card from hand or a single cube. In neither case can you discard your base style card.

This can never be discarded. Place the block into any hex in your front arc, that is directly in front of or front left or front right of your knight's facing position. If a knight enters a blocked space, even on the final step of their movement, then the movement ends immediately. They maintain their original facing direction and unlike all other cases, do not get the free step of rotation that usually follows a movement.

The style card is set aside and none of the other extra bonuses can be applied. If a knight moves into the opponent's flag space, then temporarily remove both flags from the board and the team whose flag was captured loses ducats from their ransom pool equal to three for each of their knights in play.

Give an action token to the knight who captured the flag. Being too busy with the flag, they will not engage in combat this round. Once each knight has resolved movement in the order of the herald's choosing, it's now time to resolve combats on the battlefield. In this phase, fights are resolved one after the other until there are no knights left who are eligible to start a fight.

A knight is eligible if it does not have an action token and it has at least one opponent in a hex in its front arc. Right now, every one of these knights is eligible. There are no action tokens and each has one opponent in its front arc. In this case, the knights on the left are eligible since they're in each other's front arcs, while on the right, the French knight is ineligible with no knights in its front arc, and the Italian knight is ineligible as it already has an action token.

Fights are resolved in an order decided by the herald. So to begin each fight, the herald chooses one eligible knight who will initiate the combat. Here, these three knights are eligible, but let's suppose the herald chooses Ettore. If there are multiple valid targets, here both French knights are in the front arc, then the player controlling Ettore would choose that target.

We'll suppose here that Ettore attacks Jacques. These two knights are considered contenders. Now check to see if any other knights have the opposing contenders in their front arcs. If they do, they automatically become supporters. Here, Jacques is in Fanfulla's front arc and thus Fanfulla automatically becomes a supporter to Ettore.

Charles has the supporter Fanfulla in his front arc, but does not have one of the contenders, and so Charles is not a supporter. Also note that a knight with an action token cannot be a supporter. Here, Fanfulla would not be a supporter. Here, he would be. Each contender now secretly bids between zero and four of their colored cubes on the outcome of this fight.

Once both sides have chosen, it's time to reveal the bids and count up the fight values. Add up the fight values of your cubes. This will be five for black, three for orange, two for yellow, and one for white. Add any bonus value from the fight card that you drafted for that knight in setup. If you're still holding your style card, meaning you completely finished your movement pattern, add the style bonus to the fight value.

Add a position bonus of six if your contender is attacking the opposing contender from its rear hex or a position bonus of three if attacking from one of its flank hexes. Here, it's a flank attack, so plus three. And add six for each supporter, regardless of position. Here, the result was 24 to 10, a victory of 14 points.

Usually, this would mean 14 damage dealt to the enemy, but there are two ways to mitigate. First, if the losing contender bid three or more cubes of the same color, then that player dodges. Damage dealt reduces to half, rounded up, so here of seven. Then reduce those hits further by the strength of your armor.

Here, it's armor of three, so the damage will reduce from seven to four before taking one armor token. Each of these reduces the armor's strength by one for each subsequent battle. The winner now chooses how to distribute the remaining damage to the loser in any combination of physical and morale damage.

You'll deal one wound for each physical damage dealt and remove one coin from the team's ransom for each morale damage. Next, determine each side's initiative value. You gain zero initiative for each black or orange cube bid, one initiative per yellow, and two initiative per white. Gain any initiative on the initiative cards dealt to the contenders and gain the same position bonus you would have gained for the fight score.

So, plus six if attacking from the rear or plus three if attacking from the flank. Here, the score was eight to six in favor of the Italian side, so move the initiative cube that many spaces along the track. This will determine who gets to play the role of herald in subsequent rounds. Next, both sides must downgrade cubes.

Take all cubes of the strongest color that you bid in this fight and downgrade them to the next lowest color before returning them to your supply. If you bid only white cubes, discard exactly one of them. If you don't want to downgrade, you could also choose to pay an additional cost. Paying three total elements to avoid downgrading black cubes, two to avoid downgrading orange cubes, or one to avoid downgrading yellow cubes.

The single cost avoids all cube downgrades for a single fight. Finally, give an action token to each contender and supporter in this fight. You'll now move to the next fight as chosen by the herald if any eligible knights remain. Here, Charles has Fanfulla in his front arc, so they will fight. Only once no eligible knights remain will the fight phase be over.

If it's not game over after the fights, you'll now set up and begin the next round. Remove action tokens from the knights. If one of the flags was captured, you'll now place them back on the board. Starting with whoever did the capturing, followed by the opponent. Flags always go along border hexes and if on the previous round the flags were along the short edges, then in the new round they'll be along the long edges or vice versa.

They must be placed in empty hexes and whoever is second to place places on the opposite side to whoever was first. If not done already, players discard the style card they played in the previous round or if it was their base card, return it to hand. Now advance the round marker and begin by drawing two new style or tactics cards to your hand, again in any combination like in round one.

Now, decide the herald. In all rounds other than the first one, whichever team has this marker on their side of the board has initiative, with the initiative swapping between teams if the marker is in the middle. If it's the first time that team has had initiative, then they choose one of their players to be the herald.

Well, if they've had initiative before, then the herald swaps between players inside the same team. Now, return the initiative marker to the center, counting how many of these coin icons you cross. The team without initiative loses one coin per knight for each of those icons crossed. Keep in mind that throughout play, you will have the opportunity to draw tactics cards, and these can be played from your hand at any time, or at the relevant time described on the card in order to resolve an immediate effect.

There's a wide variety of different tactics cards within the deck, so be aware that you can use these to your advantage, or to surprise your opponent throughout the game. So, now that we've learned how to move and how to fight, what else is there but learning how to win the game? To begin the game, you'll have your knights and your ransom pool.

And as the challenge goes on, your knights will lose health and your pool will lose money. If a knight suffers wounds equal to or greater than its health, then it is defeated. Remove its mini from the board and lose seven coins from your ransom pool. There are two instant ways to lose the game, either if all of your team's knights are defeated, or if all of your team's ransom is exhausted.

If neither of those things happens, then play out a total of six rounds. Remember again, this track is short in the prototype, and the player with the most remaining knights on the map is the winner. If the number of knights is tied, then calculate your team's survival score by adding up each knight's remaining health and your remaining coins.

Highest survival score wins, and if still tied, the challenge is a draw. And those are the core rules of the challenge of Barletta. Now, let's take a quick look at the other ways to nobly best those knights in combat. The game allows for a single player to control two knights. When you do this, you begin the game with a standard set of cubes and must manage those cubes between your two knights.

You'll have two base style cards in your hand instead of one, and begin with one extra style and tactic as usual. At the start of each round, you draw three style and tactics cards in any combination instead of two. When declaring style intent, which occurs clockwise around the table, you'll do both of your placements one after the other, but when resolving movements or fights, the herald is picking the turn order knight by knight, not player by player.

You may, if you wish, play a semi-cooperative game. This behaves like the usual game, but when you take ransom money from your opponent, keep it behind your screen instead of simply discarding it. The player on the winning team who claimed the most money wins the game overall. You could play a fully individual game, each player controlling a single knight with no teamwork.

Here again, collect ransom coins from all opponents when you claim them, and whoever has the most money at game's end will be the winner, unless there's only a single surviving knight who wins immediately. [music] Thanks for watching. We're using prototype version of the game, so things are not final.

And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.