How to Start

When I was 12, my father and his wife took a friend of mine and I on a Civil War summer trip to Gettysburg and Virginia. This was when Gettysburg still had its old-timey floor light show at the Visitor's Center showing you an aerial view of the battle. The presentation looked like a board game - troops moved in formation, fought, and fell dark; reinforcements entered from the edge of the map, and after a few turns, slavery was over.

In a large gift shop across the street from that Visitor's Center, I bought a suede Union cavalry hat and a copy of the board game, The Civil War.

After skimming through the rule book, I saw "How to Start" listed on pg. 53. That means 52 other pages explained concepts, die roll modifiers, combat results tables (CRT), demoralization, command points, etc. All this before you were allowed to start playing -- hardly the same planet as Risk. I was so disheartened I'd never find someone to try it with me that I put the box in a closet for over a decade before dragging Flint Dibble into a game with me, which he won as the North.

I bring this up because as we begin writing the rule book and deciding "How to Start," a number of questions come to mind:

1. Automatic - during setup, will each clan have a set number of units pre-organized into a few army stacks? Or will they start with a pool of money to spend, customizing their forces as they'd like?

2. Custom - should players have customized clan names/mons including general names or do we stay historical?

3. Cultural - should some clans have oddly-balanced armies? Should the Takeda be cavalry-heavy at start? Should Chosokabe have more archers?

4. Handicaps - if one nation's starting economy is rather weak, should they begin with a larger force?