I’ve wanted to play Sekigahara for years. The first time I saw the stacks of blocks and the glorious art of the board I knew I had to play it. Sadly, it was far beyond my meagre budget, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would play it with me even if I managed to buy it, so for many years I gazed forlornly at it from a distance. That is until last month, when I finally got a chance to play it thanks to my newfound competence playing games online using Vassal (and a helpful nudge from the Homo Ludens’ Discord Club de Jeu). That made it much easier to find someone who would play it with me, and since they also owned a physical copy of the game, I didn’t have to feel bad about not buying my own! I am not the same person I was back when I first saw Sekigahara, though. I have aged several years and played many games since. Will I still be as entranced by it as I was when I first saw it?
Let’s let the tension out of the room by saying that no game could live up to my imagination of many years ago, but I did really enjoy playing Sekigahara so while it may not be the game of my dreams it’s still a very good game. For those who may not be familiar with it, Sekigahara is a block game about the end of the Sengoku Jidai, an extended period of civil war in Japan that saw the toppling of the previous Shogun and, eventually, the rise of the Tokugawa family who would rule the country for the next two and a half centuries. In Sekigahara one player controls Tokugawa and their allies while the other player plays the supporters of Hideyoshi Toyotomi, a former ally of Tokugawa who had united Japan under his rule before dying and leaving it to his young son who Tokugawa is scheming to overthrow. The titular Sekigahara was a single major battle in 1600 that largely decided the conflict, but the game takes more of an operational view of the broader campaign between the two factions instead of just the climactic battle.
Each player has a mountain of blocks, which in the physical game are very satisfyingly stacked on top of each other to form towering armies, and a hand of cards. Players first discard a card to bid for initiative, which Tokugawa wins more often than not, and then take it in turns to decide how many cards to discard for moves. You can make one move for free, or discard a card for three moves, or discard two cards to move all your forces. How many cards you discarded also determines how you take Muster actions, which let you bring more blocks into play. Movement is very slow and the larger your army the slower it moves, but you can discard a card to forced march one extra space allowing you an extra burst of speed.
So, there are lots of things you can do by discarding cards but here’s the problem: you need cards to win fights. Each card has a symbol on it relating to one of the clans that is allied to your cause. In combat you must play a card of the matching symbol to deploy a block to the fight, if you don’t deploy them, they don’t contribute. Blocks also give bonuses when a block of the same clan is played into a fight, so you are incentivised to keep multiple cards with the same clan symbol but doing so will also limit your ability to succeed in other fights if none of that clan are present. Its quite a thorny puzzle that’s very satisfying when you get it right and very stressful when you get it wrong (or when your opponent gets it right).
Make no mistake, you will be getting into fights. They are essential to victory, of course, but Sekigahara also does a lot to reward aggressive play. After a fight you will draw cards equal to the number you played into the fight – so you don’t have to worry about using up all your resources in one big battle and not having anything to do after. The loser will even draw more cards based on their losses, a simple method of helping them catch up a bit after their defeat. These systems do a lot to nudge you towards more aggressive play, which is also the more fun way to play the game.
As clever as this system is I do have a few problems with it. First, and most obviously, you are very much subject to the whims of your deck. In my game neither of us drew any cards relating to the clans in the North of Japan for the first half of the game and so no actions were taken in that section of the board until very late in the game. It can also feel sometimes like you weren’t strictly out played, but rather your opponent drew better cards at a crucial moment. There is a system for recycling your hand, but it comes at the cost of losing a whole turn and there’s no guarantee you’ll get good cards out of it. In a game with so few turns and with such a range of possible actions – you could pass to refill your hand while your opponent moves literally every piece they have on the board – it’s not an enjoyable experience. This doesn’t ruin the game, but in a game that’s as long as Sekigahara is it’s a bit of a downer.
Combat is also very unknowable. You don’t know what cards your opponent has in their hand, and you probably don’t know what blocks they have. Much of the initial set up is predetermined so you could in theory memorise the starting position of each of the armies and track their movement, making estimates of which blocks moved where, but only if you’re a robot. For most of us tracking all the blocks, particularly after a few turns and once new blocks have been added, you can only guess that blocks in a region are more likely to be from a clan in that region, probably. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, a little bit of ignorance can be great for a game, but it does make it a lot harder to make good plays. I did a lot of bold and risky play in my game, and I was rewarded for it thanks to having better cards than my opponent, but I could have done the same thing and been utterly destroyed with minimal change in my own decisions. That might appeal to you, it might not, but either way it is something to be aware of.
I’m also not particularly impressed with Sekigahara as a depiction of history. Now, I’m no expert in Sengoku Jidai era Japan so take this with a grain of salt but I didn’t feel very drawn into the conflict when playing Sekigahara. The art is really doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of theme. The combat feels more like something you’d find in a Euro game. It’s fun (I like Euro games) but I’m not sure how it exactly it captures the feel of Samurai warfare. Sekigahara isn’t trying to be a detailed simulation so it would be unfair to criticise it for not being one, but I would have liked it if I felt more like the gameplay and the history aligned a little better.
I have a few other nit picks like how the game feels a little too long and the victory conditions are a little boring, but that’s really getting into the weeds. Overall, there’s a lot to like about Sekigahara. The combat is unlike anything else I’ve ever played before and is really engaging. The aesthetics are amazing, even if the game board sacrifices some usability in favour of appearance, and I imagine pushing the blocks around in real life is really satisfying (it’s a lot less exciting on Vassal). It’s not a very complicated game either, you could teach this to basically anyone. I think it is a little too fiddly for me to say it’s a perfect entry game, I think the Columbia block games (see my write up of several of them here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/columbia-block-wargames-review) are a better general introduction because they’re shorter and don’t have quite as much of a mental load when you’re playing them. That said, if Sekigahara appeals to you it is absolutely a perfectly fine place to start with card drive and/or block games. The best entry game has always been and remains the one that interests you the most.
For me, I won’t be rushing out to play Sekigahara again, but I probably wouldn’t turn down a game of it if someone else really wanted to play it. It has also made me more excited to take Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, a game using the same core system, down from my shelf and finally get that played.