Hire a Samurai
Hello and welcome to Should You Try, my blog about miniatures games and if you should try them. In todays issue, hailing from Britain it’s Bushido!
Bushido is a game that, much like the deadly shinobi of the media it aims to emulate, is rather elusive. As a skirmish game with a simple name like bushido, where facing and zone of control and range bands come into play you would expect it to be a historical game. However, beyond just the basic samurai it also includes Tengu, Yokai, Undead, things that go bump in the night and of course, Crabs. So despite being ultimately a fantasy game, it is mechanically more in line with a historical vibe.
What do I mean by that?
Well, what I would consider typical of fantasy games (Relic Blade, Warcry, Mordheim, Warhammer fantasy) is vast legions of nameless henchmen that are in service to either an existing named character from the fiction, or your own home grown general. In bushido, most characters have a name, so the fantasy is less imagining your own heroes and more mashing semi-historical action figures together; less Skyrim, more Dynasty Warriors. This feeling also migrates over to the gameplay. While skirmish games have trended simpler and gamier over the course of the medium where games like Judgement and Malediction are often drawing more from video games and other tabletop games than they are the historical format that these games have at their roots, Bushido is much more a peer with the historical games. You have tables for how many wounds an attack does, the aforementioned zone of control and range bands, and each fighter has unique properties that match its weapons and gear. Additionally the fights match up to if not an actually realistic simulation of historical japanese martial arts, at least a verisimilitudinous one.
How do I mean?
Well in say warcry for example, the way a melee combat often plays out is two models get in range of each other and then, they take turns rolling dice and spending resources to try and reduce each other’s health to zero. Sure the weapon matters, but only insofar as at what distance and with what speed can it whittle down an enemies health. This is fine, but does not give the feeling of a desperate melee combat or a swift clash. It feels… like you’re playing a game.
On the other hand in Bushido, when two models engage, both players get to decide whether they’re going on the offensive or defensive. To explain the mechanics of the game a little, when a melee happens both players get a number of dice equal to the fighter’s melee stats, then they decide how many dice they want to spend on attack and defense. Then the players roll those dice. If a player went all in on attack, they can often roll far enough ahead of the opponents defense to strike down a model in a single blow, but if you go all out into attack, you leave yourself open for counterattack and your opponent could be a little defensive, survive and strike you back.
This mimics, if not how real samurai fought, at least the way samurai fight in kurosawa movies, which to my brain reads as how samurai should fight.
This makes the base gameplay, the moment to moment of Bushido fun, and if it sounds interesting to you, I think you should try it. The app (I didn’t mention this but all of bushido’s rules live in the app) makes it easy to play. If all you take away from this is that Bushido is a cool samurai game with an interesting combat resolution mechanic, then I think that’s great, but Bushido’s great design also expands to the macro scale.
In a lot of games what can happen with objectives is that the game turns into a scrum for the objectives. This can be fine, but can often lead to the models touching and then feeling like they stand next to each other and deplete each others health bar. Lots of games circumvent this by letting you shove models around, or leave combat, without penalty, but Bushido circumvents this through mission design. In the missions I’ve played, there is typically one objective for the first couple rounds of the game, which then changes in the second half of the game to a different objective. This means that when the game would turn into that objective slog, the points are scored and it’s now a scramble for the new objective (or your carefully laid plans coming to fruition.) This extends the games feel of a dynamic tense showdown out from the micro scale to the macro scale.
And taking another step back, the game is reasonable to collect. Warbands tend to be in about the 6-8 model range for standard warbands with outliers going as low as four and as high as like 16. There are what I would call a reasonable amount of tokens and the game is played with d6s and measured in inches, so no funny dice or proprietary measuring sticks. The Themed warbands all provide what is functionally a complete warband that gives you clear direction with a faction that you might want to play, and the starter sets provide a similar benefit, with the primary difference being they tend to hover at around half of a complete warband. Models are easy to assemble and are either pewter or 3d printed resin depending on what batch they’re from. How they are aesthetically will vary from person to person, but I found them pleasing to look at and fun to paint, if a little towards the over-detailed size.
Now I have played only a handful of games and demos so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, but from reading about some of the warbands and their strategies this game can very easily turn into what I call a hockey fight game. Instead of both players fighting on even footing, it is very easy to accidentally build a slant list that attacks your opponents on an axis they are entirely unprepared for, figuratively pulling their jersey over their head and letting you wail on them until the ref separates you. The Awoken for example stack fear and can get to a point where you just cannot engage them. There are ways to counter everything in the game, but if unprepared for this type of game you can accidentally get yourself into a situation where one player just doesn’t have a great time.
Thus I must conclude that I think You Should Try Bushido. Mechanically unique in a way that I haven’t experienced another game of its like and a thematic success. Just make sure you have a compassionate teacher.
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