I spread Pendragon’s massive board over my tiny corner of counter space I’ve set aside for wargaming and was relieved to see that it just about fit. There was no extra space, so the deck and any extra tokens would have to live on the board, but there was space in the various sea locations to make that an acceptable compromise. Pendragon’s board is gorgeous, and the components deeply satisfying to place and push around. That said, it’s also a bit of a bear to set up – there are so many bits of wood to put down to mark the status of Britain before the Roman collapse. I left the game up over the weekend, playing turns whenever I could grab a few minutes, which was definitely better than trying to set it up and learn it all in one go. After having spent a good few hours with it over several days I can confidently say that I know how to take actions in Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain, whether I actually know how to play the game is another matter entirely!
The game a few turns in - normally I try to give a blow by blow of the game but there’s so much happening and I was struggling to keep up with it! Also apologies of components move around or are in the wrong place - I made some mistakes!
The title of this post is a little misleading – this is not actually the first time I’ve tried to learn a COIN game. Some years ago, I bought a copy of Falling Sky in the hopes of finally experiencing one of these games I’d been hearing so much about. I sat down and read through the rules, and at the end of that process I knew how all the individual bits worked but had no idea what the game looked like in aggregate. Any wargamer with experience with the series, or many other complex wargames, will have groaned at reading that sentence – obviously this was not how I was supposed to learn the game. My background was in miniatures wargaming, so I arrogantly thought I was ready for a complicated rulebook with lots of edge cases. What I wasn’t prepared for was for a game series that so fundamentally deviated from how I expected play to work that I didn’t even really understand how to take an action after reading through quite a few pages of rules.
This time I set out to do the sensible thing and learn via the very helpful Playbook which walked me turn by turn through an entire Epoch of the game. I also set up a second Epoch so that after having my hand held for several turns, I could journey out on my own and see if I’d actually learned how to play. Spoilers, the answer is kind of.
The board before resolving the First Epoch - this marks the end of my hand holding at the point from which I must start off on my own!
I know that Pendragon is not supposed to be the easiest COIN to learn as a starting point since it has quite a lot of extra bits of complexity – like the rules for plunder – that aren’t in other games in the series. However, as my previously unsuccessful experience with Falling Sky may indicate the historical settings of ancient Rome or late antique / early medieval appeal to me more. Sadly, I never got Falling Sky to the table and eventually sold it off to a new home – something I slightly regret now, but so it goes. Pendragon was the nearest thing to a medieval COIN, and so I was determined that I would learn it. I say nearest thing, because we could spend hours debating whether this counts as Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, with the cold hard truth being that they’re just terms for different perspectives on the same thing. Also, in Pendragon you can play Irish barbarians raiding Britain, which, as someone who’s lived in Ireland for nearly 15 years, I found quite satisfying.
My first two turns of Pendragon took ages, I was so slow as I tried to figure out what the action sheets were telling me or where to place pieces. This was partly my own fault. For reasons that made total sense at the time, I laid out my board with the southern end of England pushed into the corner – I theorized, correctly, that I would need more ready access to the numbered track at the top of the board than I would the Civitates’ reserve units and settlements. The problem was that as a result I spent a lot of the game looking south from Scotland – which meant I was trying to read all the names of the province’s upside down. I’m not particularly familiar with the Roman names for regions of Britain to begin with, so trying to read them upside down with their complicated (but very pretty) font was a real challenge. This is largely ceased to be a problem once I started playing on my own, since unless a specific Event called for me to locate a region, I was happy to just mentally refer to them by their medieval names.
I waited until a new day had dawned before tackling Pendragon on my own. An early event let the Scotti build a settlement in north Wales while the Saxons are raiding in the east of England.
I think it was around turn 4 or 5 that I felt I was beginning to understand how the game actually played. I understood how actions were selected, what playing an Event entailed, who got priority in what turn. It felt like a switch flicked in my brain and I (kind of) understood. A few seconds later I realised that while I understood how to pick an action, I had no concept of what action I should actually be picking.
Scotti set up another settlement in the north while the Saxons push deeper into the midlands, destroying a Dux fort thanks to an Event. Despite their incursions the Dux position remains strong. Not shown: the Dux have spent most of the Roman resources, depriving the Civitates of a lot of their actions.
By the end of my time with my first attempt at Pendragon I think I have a decent grasp of how to play the Saxons and Scotti barbarian factions (for those not in the know, Scotti is the Latin name for Ireland, and not, as you would assume, Scotland). I’m not saying I have even the slightest hope of actually successfully launching an effective strategy with them, but I understood the interplay of launching raids, pillaging regions, and occasionally building settlements. I could choose something to do as a Scotti player and then execute that action. This is in sharp contrast to the paralytic fear that clenched my heart every time I had to figure out what it was the Dux should be doing. Ironically, at the end of my game the Dux won based pretty much solely on the inertia of their strong opening position and me not really understanding the Victory Conditions until after it was all over.
Barbarian incursions continue in force - Scotti have made an incursion into Cornwall and the Saxons have claimed some territory.
I definitely feel like I understand COIN games a lot better after my time with Pendragon than I did when I started. Learning the whole game solo was a challenge. The information load was a lot, but there’s also plenty of bookkeeping to do in Pendragon and it was hard to keep up with that. I suspect distributed across 4 players, many of whom are very invested in it being very accurate for their own victory conditions, would make it a lot manageable but it was a struggle for me on my own. I think I noticed on turn 6 that I’d completely forgotten to place a Hill Fort during set up and just hadn’t noticed. That didn’t really have any effect on gameplay, but it’s stuff like that presented a real challenge for me.
End of the second Epoch. Both Scotti and Saxons have made initial settlements on the island, but there is sufficient untouched prosperity to deliver a Dux victory since this is the final Epoch of my learning game.
All of that having been said – Pendragon is a fascinating game and I’m very much looking forward to actually playing it for real. For this first time, I played every faction myself to try and get some grasp on their respective actions and playstyles, but in future I’m looking forward to trying the solo bots and then, eventually, sitting down with some friends to play it for real. Teaching the game is definitely going to be a challenge, but one I intend to do my best to prepare myself for. In the meantime, I think I’m finally ready to actually sit down and read the rule book – and inevitably see all the things I got wrong!