Byzantion Preview | Challenge Alliances and Influence the Emperor's Decisions

Today we step into the halls of power of the Byzantine court. Your goal is to argue, scheme, and influence the flavor of the emperor in order to reshape history. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Wolfpack. So good to see you all. Today we're talking all about Byzantin, which is an engine building game centered around completing events.

They're going to be some auction bidding mechanics and some unique items that you're gaining as you complete different initiatives. But with that said, today's video is sponsored by Meeple Pug. So, huge thank you to Mele Pug for sponsoring today's video. And please note that as always, since with these, you know, preview videos that prototype components are being shown.

So, that said, let's begin. Now, there are three phases in this game. The first one is the event phase. You're going to determine turn order by putting one of your dei. By the way, forgive me for any pronunciation mistakes today, but there is a lot of terminology here that they're trying to use in order to parallel along with the themes of the game.

But your deme is pretty much like a wax seal. So each person is going to take turns by putting their demy in one of these four spots. Now it doesn't show here. Again, it is a prototype. But each spot on this map is going to correlate to a specific item that you get to use for the rest of the turn. For instance, whoever has position one gets the leberon.

This person gets an extra dynamis, which pretty much means that they get an extra turn this round. The chalice gives you bonuses when playing events. The scepter breaks ties and the robes gains double the victorious reward if they contributed the most resources in an event. And then after you place your turn order, you're also going to flip around these ivory caskets.

And this is your available loot that you're going to gain during this round. Now, after you place influence, you're going to go straight into scheming and trying to influence the emperor's decisions. So, the event, if we look at it here, this event is called the Battle of Dar. And right beneath that, it's going to show you some flavor text along with the region that this is going to affect.

And this one is going to be the yellow region along this side. Now, the top left of the event is going to tell you what you gain if you win this event. The top right tells you what you lose if this event is cancelled. Now, this reward only affects the player whoever contributed the most. And then if this event is canceled later on, then the player that contributed the least will be getting whatever negative consequence that this is.

And then lastly, here are the two choices. So now we're going to put a certain number of these scrolls on either the left side or the right side. Now the side you want to pick depends on what you're looking for. So in this case, if you look at this, this is called the trenches of Belisarius. The reward is place one fortification and one legion.

And then on the bottom shows the items that you need to have in order to contribute to this event later on. So what does all this mean? Well, it says place one fortification. Now, all of these miniatures that you see on the board, they don't get placed until the very end of the round when events are triggering, when they like activate everything.

So, in this case, the trenches says you can place one fortification. These fortifications are these giant walls and each type of unit belongs to a specific faction. Fortifications belong to Stratiotica units. Everyone's going to have three secret quests to reveal at the very end. And you look at this quest here, it says that you can gain one dosa for every single one of these strate units on the board that have been placed.

So if you tie everything together, this means that you want to place these scrolls on the side you think you're going to win. You have [snorts] to consider two things. One, you have to consider whether or not you have enough resources to pay for this. And two, you also have to consider what your secret quests are.

If your secret quest wants more of these fortifications out in order for you to score points at the very end because doa are like how far your units are going to move forward in this victory point track. Then you want to invest in that specific event. Okay, we determined our initiative order. We figured out our events to see which one we're going to invest in.

Now we get into phase two, which is the action phase. And everything ties together to these events. So during the action phase, our goal is to gather as many resources as possible. That way we can contribute all those resources to the events during phase three. On your turn, you can spend one dynamis to do one out of six actions in any order.

First, you can spend a dynamis in order to draw cards. When you draw cards, you pay one octarus in order to draw two cards from the deck or pay two to draw one face of card and one from the deck. Or option three, pay three in order to draw one from the discard and one from the deck. Now, from there, can you guess what the second action is?

Being able to actually play those cards. So, you're going to spend one dynamis in your player area. These are the different player areas on each section of the board. So, you can spend one dynamis and then you can play cards from your hand, as many as you like, as long as you can afford it. And on the top left portion of the card, it's going to tell you how many coins it costs in order to play that specific card.

There are a couple different types of cards. One of them in this case is an instant action card. This one is called the Thieves Guild where you can steal up to six coins from other players divided among them as you choose. There are other ones that will give you some endgame effects. And then heroes, which you can tell because they have these laurels listed on the top right.

Now, here's the cool thing and when the engine building starts to kick in, because with heroes, if you have them in play, they actually will give you a discount to other cards of the same type. For instance, notice how this card has like this purple statue symbol on the top right. This is a level one hero in this faction, which means that if I play other cards of this type, it's going to give me a minus one discount.

So, if I wanted to play the golden laurels card on the right, it's gonna give me a minus one discount. So, instead of paying five coins, I only have to pay four. Now, after you play cards together, you can actually form something called a bandon. Now, why is abandon important? Well, that leads us to action number three, which is to activate a bandon or activate a card.

And in your play area, after cards have already been played here, this dynamics that you just played will now activate these cards. If you have abandoned, guess what? You get to activate all of these cards, which means you trigger all of these resources for you to gain on your turn. That's why having abandon is super helpful because then you get a bunch of resources at once instead of activating one card at a time.

Now, the fourth action you can take is to sell in the market. So again, spend the dynamics over here. And in this case, what you're going to do is sell resources that are missing. So right now, you see seven resources listed here. And the cost, I know, is super small, but it's listed on the top of the actual resource.

So in this case, the crown right now is worth two coins. So the crown is missing, then I can sell a crown if I had it in my inventory and then gain two of those coins. So for instance, if all of this food is missing, then I can sell food in order to gain four coins. The other option besides selling the missing resources is that you can also sell the very first resource, which is in this case the crown for two coins.

Now, if you can sell resources as an action, action number five is going to allow you to buy resources. Spend a dynamis as usual and then buy any resources that you want as long as you can afford it. And as soon as you buy one, then the rest are going to slide up because it increases in the cost. Right now, it goes from left to right.

And then from this bottom row here, also from left to right. And then if you don't like any of the resources shown here, if these aren't going to help you contribute to your event, action number six is going to allow you to reset the market so you can fill up all brand new stuff here and then gain a card as well.

So what we just went over was the six actions of the action phase. After that, we get to the final phase of the game, which is the resolve phase. We've gathered as many resources as we can. Now, we're going to secretly put our resources in our hand and then reveal them all at once. So, for example sake, let's say we focus on this first event.

And clearly, there's going to be a winner here on the left side where it's going to require one of these swords, one stone, and one wood. So, those are the resources I'm going to try to keep in my hand and then reveal them all at once. Let's say on three, we reveal and then I contribute the most resources.

First off, you have to make sure that everyone's resources combined together has met the event requirements. And then if you contributed the most, you gain what's listed on the very top left. You can also contribute like nothing at all. But the thing is, if not enough resources have completed the event, then that event gets cancelled.

And whoever contributed the least will then be getting this top right corner consequence, which in this case would be losing three coins. And if you can't pay for those coins, you're going to pay in victory points and go backwards on this track. From there, the event is going to tell you which sailboats, merchants, buildings are going to be constructed onto the map.

Now, some events may not even give you an option. In this case, the emperor is going to decide what happens. In this event, it's going to tell you to place one senator, one priest, and one legion. But whoever bid the most in general is going to gain nine points after that. And whoever bids the most amount of crowns will also gain nine points for first place, and then six for second, and so on.

At the end of the resolve phase, you discard down to six cards. And then you also will gain more resources for each card that you discard. Specifically, it would be one octaras and two nomisimma for each card that you discard. After that turn order passes and then the event is going to go downward. Once this market moves down to the final event and that gets resolved in the final phase of the game, then the game is over.

At the end of the game, some intrigue cards will trigger and all you do to score is to count your remaining resources and the total number of cards played. First, second, and third place gains a different amount of DOSA. After that, you reveal your hidden quest and whoever has their quadruga the furthest along the track, aka whoever has the most victory points will win.

That right there is a preview of how Bansion works. If you want to check out more of the campaign, I'm going to go ahead and leave a link down in the description below. Thank you all so much for watching and you made it to the very very end. Go and comment camel for the ones that are doing the most work in this game.

Honestly, like look at this. A fourpack of camels carrying every single resource possible across this gigantic map. [laughter] Thank you all so much for watching and I will see you all in the next