How Does Bretwalda Play? | Board Wargames | Board Games | Phalanx | Part 1
Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Zillow Blitz and welcome. Today we're going to begin an overview slashgameplay video of Brett Walda, which is the new two to fourplayer strategy/war game from Fallink. In this game set in 796 AD, you take charge of one of four factions and v for control of England, trying to become Brett Walda, the ultimate ruler of the nation. Here is Brett Walda all set up and almost ready to go for a four-player game. We've got our four factions off on the side of the board and the main game board up here. We're going to do in this series is I'm going to talk through give a general brief overview of gameplay and then we're going to take the vantage point here of Mercia the blue faction and we're going to play through an entire year of this three-year game with the perspective of thinking like Mercy is thinking in this fourplayer game. By the time this two-part video series is done, hopefully you'll have an idea and an understanding and an overview of how gameplay works and also get a sense for whether this is a game for you and have seen pretty much all the types of gameplay that are in included in Brett Walda. So, with that in mind, what we're going to start out with is the briefest overview that we can so we can jump right into gameplay. But, we need to do some things to ground this game play so we can cut down on the initial confusion. First up, what are we trying to do and what's going on? Well, the time is 796 AD and in this two to four player game, and we've got it set up for
four players, there are four factions vying for control of England, which we can see is the map right here in front of us. And over the course of three years of game play, 12 turns, you're trying to become the Brett Walda or the ruler of England. Now, how do you do that? Well, you do that by earning more victory points than your opponents. And we'll talk now a little bit about how you can get victory points in the game because there's three critical ways that this can happen. And just as an aside to get things centered in the game here, this left side of the board here is the victory point track. All of the four factions have a colored marker and they are all starting on zero because no faction has a victory point at the start of the game in the the spring here of 796.
Now, a lot of the terms in this game are old English terms. Victory points are called dulks. And so going forward in the game, we'll interchange these two terms um pretty much freely as we talk about things. So the goal basically is to get your marker moving up here and trying to get more victory points than any other faction. Now, you'll notice that this victory point track here maxes out at eight dalks or eight victory points. At any point in the game, if a faction gets eight victory points, it's an instant win and the game ends. Even if it's in the middle of a turn. If at the end of the turn any faction has seven victory points, it's an instant win. If at the end of the game or those condition, those instant win conditions don't happen, then the faction that has the most dels at the end of the game wins. And there are some tiebreers if more than one faction has that same total. The next logical question is how do you get victory points or dulks in order to win the game? There are three major ways to get victory points and docks in Brett Walda. In order to understand the first one, we need to take a little bit of a look here at the map and understand what's going on with the general gameplay and the general map layout. First up, this is again a map of England and we can see if we look closely that it's divided up into these irregularly shaped regions. There's some cities and things like this. There's water over here. We have some port markers. And we'll talk about these uh the map and the regions and what's on it in more detail as we go through the game play. But the other thing that you'll notice is that we have these colorful coins here. And these coins are dulks.
They represent victory points. If you as a faction, so for example, say blue were to come down here and take control of this region, they would have possession of this dulk and it would earn them one victory point. Now, these docks are transitory. So, if you lose control of a region and another faction comes in and takes it, you would lose control of that victory point and your score would go down. So, these are going to be shifting back and forth as game play shifts and as nations as factions take over different lands. But this is the one way you can gets in the game. And you can see there's quite a few of them scattered out here. So, geographical expansion because you'll notice that each one of these regions starts the game with only one region under their control. Yellow is here. Green is way up here. Red is over here on the right. And then blue, the nation that we're going to play, the faction we're going to play, Mercier, is right here in the middle. Each one only starts with one region. So, one of the key elements of gameplay early on is you're trying to expand, take over regions so you can get Dalks and victory points and increase your total. That's one way to get Dalks.
The second way you can get Dulks in Brett Walda is through development. You'll notice we have different building types here. Now there are no buildings on the map at the beginning of the game. These are abbies. These are port harbors. These are mead halls. And these are granaries. We'll talk about these in more detail as we go through in the playthrough. But for understanding victory conditions, abs are critical. Abbies represent religious control over England. And we have a number of abbies that can be built. If you control three or more abbies, so if you have abbies in regions that you control, you have three or more of them, you get a dulk. you only get a maximum of one. So you can see that there's one for each faction. So this is another way to get a dulk in Bretwela is to have three abbies in your faction's lands and have control over those abbies. This also can be a shifting victory point condition. If you lose control of those abbies or they're destroyed, then you would lose control of that victory point. You'll notice there are eight more dalks here. This is the third and final major way to get victory points in the game. These are connected to chronicles. So let's learn what chronicles are. Right now there are a number of different card decks in Brett Walda. In one deck are what are called chronicle cards. At the beginning of this is the chronicle card deck here.
And at the beginning of the deck, each faction is given three chronicle cards. They pick two and they put one back on the bottom of the deck. These chronicles represent unique achievements that your faction can get. So here we can see an architectural legacy. control six buildings including at least one of each type. So this would mean you have to have one abbey, one harbor, one mead hall, and one granary. And if you have a total of six, you immediately accomplish this chronicle and you get the chronicle. These are permanent. They can't be taken away from you. And you can only get a maximum of two per faction. So you can get two of your vict the the dulks that you need to win the game can come through these chronicles. Now, there are options during the the course of the game that you can trade in a chronicle if suddenly you feel like it's impossible and try to pick up a new one that might be a little bit more favorable to achieve. But this is the third and major way to get achievement to get chronicle points to get dulks in the game is through the use of these chronicle decks. Now, I've gone through the other three factions except for Mercier, the one that we're going to play, and I've already just made their first two decisions. So, we can see here for East Anglia, which is the green faction, they've picked an architectural legacy, and then they've picked uh Preacher of Peace, which is to discard eight lordship cards from your hand.
Those are the two achievements I thought might be easiest for them to achieve early on in the game. So, with that, we've covered the three major ways that you're trying to get Dulks and Brett Walda. By expanding and covering more ground and to cover these lands that have Dulks in them, you get victory points. By doing chronicles, those special achievements, and by building and controlling abbies, you can get an additional victory point. So, let's talk about the general structure and context of gameplay so we understand the flow of how things are going to work in Brett Walda as we begin our playthrough. So, Brett Walda is a three-year game, and each turn is one season. So, doing the math, four seasons, three years, it's potentially a 12 turn game. Although, as we discussed when we talked about victory points, there are potential ways for the game to end early, instantaneously, if a faction accumulates enough of those dulks before the 12 turns are up. So, what we're looking at now though in front of us to the right hand side is the turn track.
This turn marker starts down here at the very bottom. The game starts in spring of the first year, goes to summer, winter, uh, fall, and then winter, and then so on as you work your way through all the turns. So, this is just a general turn record track. But there's more interesting elements to the turn record track than just that. You'll also notice here that there are three cards here in this pile. Likewise, there's three in these, three up here, and then three more way at the top of the map. And each deck of these cards, there are three cards in it. They correspond to the season. So, this first one here are three spring cards. And each turn in Brett Walda starts with a special season phase. Each of these season phases is different and they're going to have different characteristics. The spring phase that's going to start the game is the simplest of them and we'll talk about that as we begin. But basically in this phase you can change in one of your chronicle cards. That's really the only thing only thing. But when you flip this card over there's going to be a special spring condition that applies to the whole turn. Could be positive. It could be negative. It could be bad weather. It could be all kinds of different elements that happen here. So each game is going to have a different flavor. There are six cards of each season in the deck in the game and you pick three of them. The other three aren't in the game. So no two games are going to play out the same way with regard to the influence of these season cards. Now after spring we go to summer. The the characteristic of summer is Vikings. Then we're going to go to the fall. The character is the biggest characteristic of fall is that
you get to control the neutral nations on the map. And we'll talk about that, the neutral units on the map. And then winter, the cold comes in. you can't harvest food and you've got to feed all your troops. So those are to a simple degree a very simplified nature of each of the different phases of each of the different seasons and we'll see those in more detail as we start to look at gameplay. So that's the general structure of gameplay. But before we leave this conversation, let's talk about the general structure of a turn. To do that, we want to call attention to two things. One is the sequence of play, which has each turn, each season in the game has these three steps to it. We talked about the season phase, and we'll see those in more detail as we start to play, but the major structure of a turn is what's called this action phase. In the action phase, in turn, a faction's going to take an action, then it's going to go to the next faction. Each faction is going to take one action, then you're going to cycle through that again. So, each faction will take two actions, a total of eight actions among all the four factions over the course of a turn.
And then you're going to go to the priority phase, which is basically a cleanup phase that gets you ready to jump up to the next season. We'll see these all in more detail as we go through, but it's helpful to understand what actions a faction can take as they're being involved in gameplay. And over here, we can see actually that it's not super complicated. There are only four different actions that a faction can take when they choose to take an action. They can do a development action which is basically building buildings and increasing the capacity of your faction. You can do a collection action where you're going to pick up the gold that's on the in your regions based your income that you're generating and then the food that you've generated in your factions in the in the regions you control. This third action is a really a recruitment action. And the recruitment action basically allows you to bring more troops into your faction's armies.
And lastly, the movement action. The movement is where you're going to move your units around the map and have combat. Now, in a turn, in a particular turn, you're going to have do two of these actions. You cannot do the same action twice. So, playing as Mercia in the in the spring of the first year. We can't do development twice. If we do development in the first action, when it comes around to us again, we have to pick from one of these other three actions. And that's the general structure of a game turn and the general structure of play. We're pretty much ready now to jump in and to start playing. But before we do that, let's just take a quick look at the map and take a look at the units and the general nature of gameplay in terms of what we're looking at. So, here's a bird's eye view of England, and we've got a lot of units on here, but what exactly are we looking at? We've talked about the the home regions for each of the four factions, and we can see they've got some units here, but the question I'd have is like, what are these units doing? And then what are all these white thing factions and units doing all over the place? Well, color-wise, it's pretty easy, right? We've got red, we've got green barely visible at the top, yellow, and then blue, the one that we're going to control down here. Those are pretty clear. Those represent the four factions. These uh beige units here or white units here are actually neutral nations. They're independent factions.
They come into gameplay in a number of ways and we'll see them. But basically, if we want to take control of this region, we're going to have to move in and then battle this neutral force here, conquer this neutral force before we can get control of the region. And we'll notice that a lot of the regions have no forces in them. Some have neutral, and then we've only got one capital region of each faction. That is where we start the game with. So expanding through the neutrals and through these open regions at the beginning of the game is pretty key. You'll also notice that not all the units are the same, right? We've got different sizes and shapes. So, let's learn about the units very briefly before we start into gameplay. So, here's a picture of the five basic units that are in the core game of Brett Walda. If you have the game found crowdfunding one, you'll also have a bishop. I don't have the bishops here, so we're not taking a look at those.
Those are the only ones that we don't have here. We're going to start from the left to the right. One other thing about the force pools are they are identical in the game. So, yellow, red, blue, and green. Each of the four factions have identical force pool pools and you're limited by the number of units you have in your force pool. You can't go beyond that. Starting on the left, we have the weakest units in the game. These are the curls. They don't have a lot of capacity early on in the game. As a matter of fact, they can't even move at the beginning of the game unless you increase their capacity to do so by developing your nation through that development action. So, these are the weakest units in the game, and we'll see these in more detail as we play. These are kind of the things here are the core infantrymen. These are your stock infantrymen which are pretty good fighters. Um, and they can move and they're going to be kind of a core of your army. Then the third unit here, these are the eldermans. These are very strong. Your strongest military unit outside of your ruler is your elderman.
You only have one of these, so you have to treat it carefully as they are expensive to replace. Now, you'll notice I've got two rulers stacked up here. At the start of the game, you're going to pick either a king or a queen. And we'll talk about that as we go forward because I haven't made that decision yet for Mercier. Um, depending on which one you pick, that one is in the game. And your ruler can die. And if your ruler dies, they can be replaced. So, the next time you might pick a queen, but you're going to have one of these two ruler units on the game. And they are quite strong as well. Lastly, each faction has the capacity to build two ships because there is oceangoing movement on the outer portion of the of England in the ocean regions that are surrounding the the geographical landmass of England. So, those are our five units. Um, we'll talk a little bit more in detail as we go through on these on the playth through later, but that gives us just a rough idea of what we're looking at in terms of force strength. We talked about the independent neutral units. They have curls, Danes, and Elderman's. Those are the only three units that they have.
Now, there's also some black units here, too. The Vikings are coming. This will happen in the summertime. We can have Viking raiders show up and it's a whole mini phase in the beginning of the summer turn. We'll talk more about these when we get here, but just keep in the back of your head that the Vikings are real. The last thing that I think is helpful to know before we can start into play gameplay is that the game is also influenced by what are called lordship cards. Each faction starts the game with one lordship card. When you participate in a battle, at the end of a battle, you get a lordship card. And there are ways to buy and gain lordship cards throughout the course of the turn and throughout game play. So, one of the key elements, I think, to playing Brett Walda effectively is keeping in mind your lordship cards, keeping in mind how you can gain them, and then using them well. These are kind of wild cards that really can influence play in a lot of different ways. You'll notice here that they have these white bars that can tell you when you can play them. So this one here, fate intervenes, can be played anytime after a dice roll. Choose the face of one of the other rolled dice. So you can play this anytime on anyone's turn, just as you might happen to like it. Um, there's a plunder one here on your turn. So this would be an action you can take during your turn, but not during anybody else's turn. [snorts] And then a lot of the lordship cards influence battle here. Here's one before a battle that you can play to change the nature of that particular conflict that you're executing at that particular point uh in a battle. So, we'll see how these lordship cards influence play as
we go through the action in the game. But, it's good just to have a conceptual understanding that these things exist and they can do lots of different things. And with that, we've covered everything we need to know in order to be able to start the game. However, there are two pregame actions that we have to take for each faction, and I haven't done those yet for Mercuria, the faction that we're going to control. Now, I mentioned very early on that each faction has a mat that controls their different kingdoms, controls their different factions, and has a lot of information about it, and is where you track various things. Um, this is the Mercier board right here. In the middle here, we can see where we're going to build some developments, and we'll talk about that as we get forward, and we'll explain all of the details here. So, don't worry about that at the moment. The only thing that's really important right now is the ruler. So, one of the two pregame actions that we have to take as Mercier is to pick our ruler. We notice again we have the king or the queen icons here, and we haven't done that yet for Mercier, so we have to do that. Now, each faction comes with three ruler cards, and you're dealt one of them at the beginning of the game. This is the one that we were dealt. On the front side here we have the king side or the on this side on this reverse side.
Here we have the queen. Now each of the rulers have uh different characteristics and there are four different characteristics for each ruler. To analyze which ruler we want to take, we want to take a look at the four different characteristics for each one. Down the bottom we have a special ability. In the middle here we have hit points. So Ethylth here has two hit points. Higher is better. You want more. The right hand side is movement. We can see three little arrows. So, she has a movement of three. Higher is better. Three is the maximum. One is slow. Two is medium. On the left hand side, we can see this yellow die with two little sword markers on it. This is the type of dye that Ewith will use in combat. And there are three offensive dice in combat. White, yellow, and red. Red is the strongest. White is the weakest.
Yellow is in the yellow's in the middle. And we'll talk more about these later, but for we know that she has a mid-range combat attack. Her strength here is that Ethus may cross any type of border for just one movement point. So, not only is she fast, she has the ability to cross difficult terrain as if it's even easier terrain. So, Ethrit's primary characteristic here is that she's pretty quick. On the flip side of this ruler car, we have Karnwolf here. Now, we can see some differences immediately. Karnwolf's not as fast. He has a movement of two, so he's pretty slow, but hit pointwise, he's got three, which was stronger than the queen option. He also uses the red combat die, which is stronger in combat. His special ability here, when Karnwolf fights in an area Mercier controls, he's going to gain one extra shield in each battle round. We'll talk more about combat as we get into the details later. We don't really need to know too much about this except this is going to add some defensive capacity to the forces that he fights with if someone's attacking him in a region we already control. So for these reasons um for the fact that I think we might go a little bit heavy on combat to show what that looks like. And I like this red one and I like the three hit points and I'm not really going to play a style of game I think that's going to take advantage of a ruler that can move fast. We're going to pick Karnwolf as our ruler.
We're going to put the queen off to the side. We're going to take the king and we're going to put our king right here in our capital and we filled out the rest of our forces. The second pregame decision that we have to make is that each faction is dealt three chronicle cards and of the three you're dealt you pick two. So let's see what our options here. We've got pilgrimage to Rome, No Mercy, and then Roman Legacy. Roman Legacy says in order for us to get this chronicle point, we have to control eight cities. This is expansion not only into regions but into regions that have cities in them. But that's a so that's a pretty high bar I think to get eight regions with cities. But it feels pretty achievable if we're going to really focus on expansion in combat. So this might work really well to match up with Karnwolf and his combat abilities. So just for the sake of making a decision quickly, we'll take Roman Legacy for one of ours. Now the second two that we have to pick from then here are Pilgrimage to Rome or No Mercy. No Mercy says we have to eliminate four opposing units in one movement action.
That could take a while because we don't start with a lot of troops at the beginning and knocking off four is a pretty big battle or two small battles. I feel like this one could be hard. This second one we could pick though is pilgrimage to Rome. Uh so this is must be the cost that you have to pay in order to take this trip. You have to pay eight gold. So discard eight gold from your supply of gold. And there is coins and currency in the game. We'll show how that works as it goes forward. And then remove an elderman. That was our strong unit and a ship. So we'd have to build a ship and remove it. I don't I I don't think either one of these are very necessarily very easy. This would be pretty expensive, but we can control it, I think, a little bit more readily than No Mercy. So just for the sake of making a decision, and we really don't know what we're doing, let's pick a pilgrimage to Rome. It sounds pretty cool, too, especially cuz we got Roman legacy. So we get kind of a Roman theme here. So, we're going to pick these two for our chronicle cards with the understanding that next spring if we don't really like this one anymore, we can probably swap it out. And with that, we've done we've set everything up and it's time for us to start playing. But who goes first? Who goes first in Brett Walda is actually an interesting dynamic and an interesting element of gameplay.
We'll see more how this works as we get into the second turn, but for the first turn, we're just randomly deciding it. And I picked North Umbrea, the nation up here in yellow to go first. To signify that North Umbrea gets the pretender symbol. So they are the pretender. That means they are the one who's claiming to be Brett Waldo, the strongest faction in the land at this point in time. And again, I've just randomly decided this for the first turn. Now, the other thing that North Umbrea as the Brett Walda decides is which direction game play is going to go. Is it going to go counterclockwise or is it going to go clockwise? We're going to say North Umbrea just for the sake of simplicity and moving this along decides to move it clockwise. That means we're going to go from North Umbrea down here to Wessix over to us as Mercuria. And lastly, we'll finish with East Anglia for the first turn. And with that, we're ready to start gameplay. North Umbrea is going to start. It's the first turn, so we know we're going to start with the season phase in spring. Now, Spring allows you to change a chronicle card in your hand, but that doesn't happen in the first turn because it's incorporated into the setup where you get three and you discard one. So, all that's left for us to do is to flip over this spring card and see what effect is going to be in play for this first turn. Red Spring Battles. Gain one gold coin for each opponent unit you slay in battle in this entire season. Aha. So the the gods of warfare are calling for us to move forward and try to slay as many
opponents as we can in this first turn. This effect will be in play for the whole season for all four factions. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to do North Umbrea's turn. I'm going to do Wessex's turn. Give a brief summary of what they did and then we're going to come in and do our turn. So North Umbrea in yellow took their turn and recruited some units. We'll talk more about that when it comes to our turn. Wessex sent their queen and elderman to try to take this nearby territory, but they were repulsed and driven back basically leading to an empty turn. When we come to our turn now as Mercia, we want to what I'd like to do is to take this territory that has the Dulk in it, which is basically has no opposing forces in it. I'd also like to capture this city here that has defensive forces in it. Now, if we send one unit here and one unit here on a move action, I'm afraid we're not going to have enough strength to take this and we could actually potentially get defeated here if the die rolls went badly. So, we're going to wait a turn and instead of moving and attacking on our first turn, we are going to do a furred action, which is to recruit units. So, let's look at how that works. Basically, when you have a furred action, you can recruit one unit or upgrade one unit. That's it. But in your capital, you can do the action twice. What we're going to do is to recruit one more thing, which is going to cost us three gold pieces. We'll talk about the costs in a moment. And then we're going to upgrade this curl, which costs two gold pieces. So, we will have spent five gold pieces to upgrade our
forces to this strength. Now, you may remember we talked that the curls, those other units can't, those weakest units can't move at all. So now in the next turn, we'll have enough force to take this and enough force to take this. Perhaps even enough force to come over here and take this. So we'll have a much stronger attacking force in our next spring turn. Let's talk a little bit about how the costs of the units work. The player's aid lists all the costs of a unit. Upgrading a unit costs two gold. So if we want to go from a curl to a thing up here, we pay the difference, which is two gold. If we want to go to a thing or an elderman, we pay the difference, which is two gold. Now, every faction starts the game with five gold. So, we spent of our five gold, we spent three to buy the bishop as our purchase action. And then, because we're in our capital, we can do a second one.
We're going to upgrade our curl, which cost us two. So, we spent three to buy the thing and two to upgrade. We've spent all our gold, leaving us with no gold. But that completes our turn and completes our action on this turn. Next up, off camera, I'm going to have East Anglia go. I'm going to have North Umbrea take their second spring action. Wessix take their second spring action. And we'll be back for our action in a moment. East Anglia on their turn chose a development action. They added a special feature that's going to allow their curls to move. And they built a meat hall that cost them three gold. We'll talk more in this detail when we do this action in one of our turns. North Umbrea expanded quickly, moving into this area which was uncontested and gaining control of this dulk here. then also moving into the area on the other side of their capital, fighting the elderman that was there, defeating him and gaining control of this dock too. A very successful military turn for North Umbrea. Ideally, it would have been good if Wessix could have tried this attack again, but you can't do the same action twice in the same season. So, because they moved in the previous action, they had to do something else. They chose a development action, adding a skill to their empire as well as building a mead hall. And we'll talk more about development when we try it in one of our turns. Now it come back comes back to us on our turn and we are going to be bold as well. We are going to choose the move action and we are going to move our thing up here. Now a thing has a movement point of two. And if you're moving from region to region where one of these thin lines are, it costs one movement point. So this costs one movement point. But whenever you move
into a region with another unit, you must with an enemy an opposing unit, you must stop. So we have to stop there with them. Likewise, we're going to move our king in here, and we're going to move our Elderman in here, and we're going to fight this thing up here. With our last thing, we're going to move down across Awel's wall here into the city here. There's no opposition, so we immediately take control of this one. We get control of this DULK. We get control of the city, and we're going to drop a control marker in there, meaning that we have now got two dogs. And if you remember, one of our objectives is to get eight cities. of the areas that have these shields on them. These are cities. So we now have our capital which is one city and this other city to the to the to the west it would be of us uh is our to the east of us actually oriented here is our second city. Now we're going to go up here and do combat. So let's see how combat works. So let's walk through combat. Um the first thing to note is that every unit has a particular combat die. A thing has a yellow die. So, we're going to assign this die to the neutral thing here. The Earl Elderman has three, sorry, has a red dye, which is the strongest dice for attack, which is good for us. We also have this thing, which is going to get a yellow die for us. And then we noticed if we look back on our ruler, that we chose the ruler here, Karnwolf, that has the red most powerful combat die. So, we have an extra red die. Now, whenever you're attacking a city, there's also that has any place that has this shield on it, they get a
gray die, which is a defensive die. It has a lot of these shield markers on them, which going to make it harder to damage the unit. So, right now, at this point in time, if we were to start this battle now, we're going to be rolling two red attack dice, one yellow attack die against one yellow attack die and that defensive die. So, I I kind of like our odds here. However, there's a round that happens before you roll the dice in combat, and that's basically you can look at your lordship cards. The attacker goes first, and if you have any before battle cards, you can play those. We do have one lordship card, the one we got at the beginning of the game, but it's not a before battle card, so we're not going to play it. The neutral units never play lordship cards. The So, they don't have any. They can't play any. So, basically, we're going to go right into combat now, where we'll roll the attacker dice first, and then we're going to roll the defender dice, and we'll learn how combat works as we do this. We're hoping for lots of swords and shields.
Oh, that's pretty good. We did pretty well here. For attacking dice, we have five swords and one shield, which is a pretty good roll for us. Let's roll the defending dice. The defender's got one shield and one sword. This is a pretty good attack for us, as we can see. So, how this works now is we're going to determine hits on the defenders first. Here, although damage is done simultaneously, we have five swords. Their shield stops one of them. So, four hits get through on the thing. Now, the thing, however, only has hit points of two. So, because the thing has hit points of two, and we hit four hits on it, the thing is eliminated from combat and removed from the battlefield. Now they hit one sword on us, but we have one shield. One against one is zero. So they did no damage on us. So even though combat goes two rounds, this battle has ended after the first round and we've been victorious. So we've taken control over this city and our forces stay into this area. Pretty easy combat, but you can see we outnumbered them 3 to1 with much stronger units. So that was a victory we were a battle we were expecting to win. We can now also drop in here a control marker. This also gives us control to this port here too, which is valuable to have. The one last thing actually that we want to remember to do for battle here is that the red spring card is in effect. So, we gain one control coin for each opposing unit we slay. We did slay one enemy unit, so we'll grab a gold coin, put it into our
supply, which puts us back to one gold coin. The last thing that happens in combat is that each side that's in combat gets a lordship card, even if you lose. Now, the neutral forces don't get any, but we get a new lordship card. Intrigue. Excellent. We'll add this to our pile. So, that is actually the end of our movement turn here. Now, all in all, as Mercier, I'm pretty happy with our spring here. We've taken control now of three areas. We've got one DULK, one victory point, and more so we've got three cities. Now, there's another city over here, which would give us a fourth city. There's a fifth one up here, sixth one to the north, seventh one here. So, if we can keep expanding fast, we're getting pretty close to that first chronicle card for us here. I mean, it's a long ways, but but you can see where we're trying to go with this. The last thing we have to do in the spring turn is to take East Anglia's last action.
So, we'll do that. Now with East Anglia, we were a little bit bold in that we've taken our Elderman here, moved it one, two, three across that line cuz they have a movement of three. Grabbing control of two areas. Then moving the ruler here across this into this area, grabbing control here, giving them control over four areas and one dulk. So that brings us to the end of the spring movements and actions. Now we go to the cleanup stage for the first turn. The first step in the priority phase is to tally up how many dulks each side has. So, I'm going to change the scoreboard here to reflect the current running total of victory points. So, we can see that North Umbrea controls two zones with Dulks in them. So, those are the only victory points at this point in time, but they've got two. We've got one, East Anglia's got one, and then Wessix, which struggled out of the gate by getting defeated in battle, uh, only has one, has zero. So, currently, North Umbrea is in the lead with two victory points. And this is actually important because the side that is in the lead at the end of the previous turn goes into the next turn as the pretender. So we randomly determined that North Umbrea would be the pretender in the first turn. But now we're going to clear these actions off because this is the action board here that you put the markers down on them. They've earned the pretender for the summer in the first year. Now they get to determine the round the order of play here. Let's say they're going to switch it and the next turn the the game play is going to go counterclockwise. And the last thing we do in the priority phase is move the round marker to the next turn. We're heading to summer of the first year. And with that, we've gone through now an
overview of the game and we've played through the first season. Summer of the first year. At this point, I'm going to pause. I'll put a link to the next video we're going to pick up of summer and Viking raids in the second season. I would also I should also mention here a couple of quick points of order. The chronicle cards in the lordship cards are usually hidden from all players. I'm showing them face up because we're looking at all four hands and we're making it common knowledge. The other thing is there is a special solitaer mode in the back of the rule book. There's a re a modified game for solitaer play that has different levels of complexity. But even though I'm playing the solitaer, I want to show you how the four-player game works. So, we're showing the regular four-player game and not the soliter version of this game. I'll put a link to the next video as soon as it's ready. Thanks for watching. Happy to answer any questions you might