Originally published in 1997 by Avalon Hill, Successors was built on the foundation laid by 1993’s We the People, the first Card Drive Wargame (CDG), but its most immediate inspiration was Mark Simonitch’s Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage released in 1996. There’s something about this era of CDG design that really stands out when looking back - the somewhat Go inspired element of political control and the emphasis on point to point movement always stand out to me. I’ve never played Hannibal, although I’ve heard it’s amazing, but I am very familiar with We the People and I could see both its influence and how Successors moved beyond that simple foundation to make a far more robust game. Successors also brought something new and exciting to the table: more players. So far as I’m aware this was the first multiplayer CDG and it laid the groundwork for Here I Stand, one of my all-time favorite games. Given this history, as well as the fact that it was co-designed by Richard Berg, a designer I am fascinated by, I was very excited to finally play Successors. The deluxe 4th edition from Phalanx Games had sat on my shelf for at least 18 months sadly neglected until earlier this year when I finally managed to get it down, punch it (find out I was missing a piece), and play several games of this majestic and sharp masterpiece of wargame design.
Successors is about the Diadochi, the period after Alexander the Great died when his generals would eventually murder his heirs and carve up his empire for themselves. Players are each given two random generals to play, each with their own little card for tracking armies and other pieces. In the 4th edition each general comes with his own special power, something I believe was added to the 3rd edition as a sort of expansion, but in my experience, we forgot about these as we were learning the rest of the game. Beyond their powers generals have two statistics: Initiative which determines how far they move, including how reliably they can intercept and avoid combat, as well as a Battle Rating that affects their die rolls in combat. Generals each come with a starting territory, some units, and sometimes a bonus or penalty to either legitimacy or prestige. Players also have four minor generals who all have identical stats but in a nice touch do all have different names. Generals are the main way that players interact with the game map and as a result Successors feels like a struggle between individual people and their followers. You refer to the generals by their name and they develop reputations over the course of a game.
I'll confess that I’m not particularly familiar with the history of the Diadochi, but Successors does a good job at making you feel like you are either trying to secure Alexander’s inheritance or carve it up without requiring you to be an expert on the history. The fact that each player has two generals does a lot to make the game interesting, but it does make it harder to feel like a single historical actor – you are split between two (or later in the game possibly three) individuals but you don’t have any clearly identifiable faction linking them. I don’t think this is a flaw in the game, but I do think Successors manages to simultaneously evoke the narrative of its historical period without really making me feel like I’m reliving it. Unlike say, Here I Stand, I don’t feel like I’m playing history. Instead, I feel more like I’m making a prestige historical drama – the overall thread of history is happening but what I’m doing doesn’t feel very rooted in historical events. It’s a game first, and history second.
Play passes around the table with each player choosing a card from their hand and playing it either for its event or Ops (classic CDG stuff), but in one of Successors’ more interesting layers they roll a die and based on the result and their generals’ Initiative values each general will get a number of movement points to use. Movement points can be used to move across the map, of course, but also to remove (but not place!) control on the map and to conduct sieges (but again, without taking control should they succeed). Ops can be spent to place control on empty spaces, to recruit units, or to move a general - effectively giving that general two moves in one turn, allowing for remarkably fast transit across the game’s board. Combat units are kept on a general’s card and cannot move without a general (major or minor), so armies stomp across the map in big stacks threatening everything around them but leaving much of the board empty. We’ll talk about combat later, but this centralizing nature of the army movement really emphasizes the maneuver aspect of the game.
You will quickly find yourself following the movement of your enemies’ generals closely and debating whether you want to be in their way, or whether you want to try and sneak your way behind them and hopefully capitalize on the empty territory left once they pass. This also prevents Successors from ever being too much to take in – there are lots of very hard choices to make but the game state is easy to read. There are only so many active pieces on the board at any given time and you won’t get caught out because you failed to notice a stack of enemy units somewhere. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the game would be slightly more interesting if you couldn’t see the size of enemy generals’ armies, but given how punishing combat can be that might radically transform the game.
At its core Successors is a game of control. There are two core paths to victory. One is to gain victory points by controlling regions on the board, the other is to establish yourself as the most legitimate successor to Alexander by controlling his heir, marrying his sister(s), forging an alliance with his mother, or by burying the king himself. Nothing directly is gained by fighting the other players, so while you will engage in battles Successors is at least as much about being a passive aggressive dickhead as it is about fighting. Control on the board is marked by placing down counters of your own color and you can take control of other players’ spaces and – occasionally – even isolate their control markers and remove a vast swath of their territory at once. Early in the game when the board is still mostly empty players will take their time filling in spaces and largely ignoring each other, but once the board is mostly full then it is time to start stealing from each other. The easiest way to take political control is with your armies during each turn’s Surrender phase, so you can find yourself in a situation where you and an opponent are in a slow dance of generals taking political control of an area only to lose it to the person you took it from in the first place as they follow you around the map – avoiding fighting but provoking you, nonetheless. When you finally grow tired of this cycle, or when your opponent has something you want, or gets in your way, then it is time to fight.
Usually Successors looks like this - control markers covering most of the board with a scattering of generals simultaneously trying to protect their own territory and encroach on other players.
Combat in Successors is blessedly simple and hellishly punishing. Players sum up the strength of their combat units and roll two d6. They then adjust the dice based on their general’s Battle Rating, a Battle Rating of 4 would set any die that rolled 1-3 to a 4. They then consult the combat results table and check the convergence of their die roll and their army strength to generate a combat result number. Whoever has the higher number wins. The winner loses a unit (usually) while the loser loses all their mercenaries, rolls attrition for their remaining units, and then disperses their general. Dispersal is both forgiving and brutal. The general doesn’t usually die (only a die roll of a 9 triggers a chance of that) but they are unavailable for the rest of the turn. Given how critical generals are to your game plan this could absolutely neuter you, and if you are unfortunate enough to lose two fights in one turn you are basically out of the rest of the turn. You can still play cards and move minor generals, but more likely than not the other players will be carving up your territory while you can do very little to stop them. At the same time, if you lose a combat very late in the turn your general might be back before you miss him, suffering minimal consequences for your defeat.
I kind of love this combat system but it is incredibly stressful. Starting a battle late in a turn is lower risk, because if you lose your general will be back sooner, but the same is true for your opponent so it may be too late to capitalize on victory should you win. Fighting earlier in the turn has the potential to yield huge results but could completely ruin you. The decision space around combat and the ease with which it is resolved combine to make an excellent system. At the same time, losing both of your generals is punishing should it happen to you. Even worse, should one or both die in those fights you will have to spend high value cards to get new generals, if you have them and if any generals are left in the game. On paper I don’t hate this, but in a big multiplayer game I think it generates some undesirable friction. Having your plans completely crumble because you risked too much is a perfectly satisfying experience in a wargame, but it is dampened significantly if there are still hours of game left.
The two generals in the lower left are in the dispersed box - punishment for their defeat. Meanwhile everyone clusters in the center to try and stop Perdikaas from bringing the burial cart to Macedon on the far right of the map.
Successors is the kind of game where it is very possible to come back from a disastrous position but that becomes harder and harder as the game progresses, so having disaster befall both of your generals on turn four or five could essentially eliminate you from competition while the game still has more than hour of gameplay to resolve. This is what I find frustrating, and to some degree I wonder if it wouldn’t be better with total player elimination so that someone in this situation could simply stop playing. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think this is a design flaw. Rather it is just the kind of game Successors is. It has sharp edges and when playing it sometimes you will get cut – individual players’ tolerance for that will vary and it is something to be aware of when you sit down to try it for the first time.
Those sharp edges emerge over the course of the game – or maybe it is more accurate to say that they become more pronounced. In the early game there’s lots of space to compete over and players jockey for position in a relatively amicable way. Whoever has the most victory points each round is dubbed the Usurper and is fair game to attack without losing your status as Champion, which grants three Legitimacy and is almost essential if you want to win via Legitimacy. This means that early on players will want to get some victory points but not too many. Getting too far ahead is a recipe for being brought down a peg or two by everyone else. However, by the late game several players will have given up being Champions and the board state will be a bit more of a free for all. At this stage the knives come out and things can get a little more vicious as players take it in turns to try and seize an opportunity to lunge for the auto-win threshold, only to possibly be cut down in the process.
Successors isn’t really a game that disincentivizes players from picking on the weaker players. Early on you need to deal with whoever is in the lead, but in the late game players in second and third might start racing to cross the victory points threshold for victory and it can be easier to pick up points by crushing the weak than by challenging the leader. This isn’t necessarily a lot of fun if you’re that weaker player. This is certainly more of a problem when everyone is learning the game and I expect veterans who play Successors a lot do not have this problem to the same degree. At the same time, this is a 4-5 player game that takes 4+ hours to play, so most people won’t be playing it dozens of times, which means they may never quite achieve that balance.
Balanced is perhaps a misleading notion, though, as Successors is a game that demands the players provide necessary balance by scheming together rather than by enforcing it with rules. Some generals start with better positions than others, and thus their players are an early threat that must be dealt with collectively. I liked this well enough, but again as the game developed the risk of your mistakes compounding and resulting in you largely being unable to win increases. I don’t mind being washed out of a game, but as I mentioned earlier this is a game where your chances of victory could dry up hours before the game ends, and that’s a much harder pill to swallow. This is still not a design flaw, Successors is precisely as it means to be, it is just a style of game that I don’t generally click with. Potentially relevant – I am also terrible at Successors and very likely to be the weakest player in the late game, so this happens to me a lot.
The other reason I don’t like Successors end game as much is that it no longer has the most exciting element: burying Alexander. On turns two and three of the game’s five turns Alexander’s funeral cart is in play. It starts in Babylon and can be buried in any of the map’s major cities, but if a player buries him in Pella back in Macedon, they receive ten Legitimacy and possibly win the game outright (you need eighteen for an automatic victory). However, getting the cart from Babylon to Macedon is no small feat. In my first game I gave up and buried Alexander early and I regret it to this day. While it is no doubt sometimes the correct decision, all my best memories of Successors have arisen from the chaos around trying to move that cart. It also dramatically ramps up the passive aggression, as players put their generals in the way of the cart and whoever has the cart doesn’t want to attack them because if they lose Champion status then that auto victory is suddenly three points further away, but going around will be incredibly slow and the cart disappears at the end of turn three. This dynamic is amazing and unlike anything else I’ve experienced in wargaming. It’s fabulous and the moment it is gone from the game I feel its absence acutely. The first three turns of Successors are so good that nothing follows can really live up to that hype.
At its core Successors isn’t very complicated (for a wargame). It has its fair share of chrome to track, but it can be taught in under an hour and play moves smoothly. For all that, it is a game of incredible depth. The rules for naval movement and interception take a little while to internalize but create some really interesting decision space around how to move your generals. The independent locations and especially the independent generals inject fun chaos and friction into the game, especially with the various cards that can spread unrest across the map. There are lots of little elements to keep in mind and definitely some strategic depth that I haven’t fully explored after three games (for example, I’ve never upgraded a fleet). I am terrible at Successors, but I can see how one could play it again and again and continue to find new strategies. No two games will be the same and there is absolutely skill involved in being a good Successors player. It’s a truly impressive design and I have nothing but respect for it.
I have slightly less respect for the 4th edition printing. I haven’t played the earlier editions, so this isn’t in comparison to those, but rather just issues I found that I don’t think should exist in a 4th edition of any game. The rulebook is dreadful, the layout is irritating, and the wording is often not as clear as it should be. Same with the cards – several of them have vague or confusing wording that should not exist in a game that has been through this number of iterations – CDGs especially live and die by the clarity of their cards and Successors 4th Edition has some of the poorest I’ve ever encountered. The game is also overproduced. It comes with a pile of miniatures, but the minis are hard to read at a glance – too many similar poses – so unless you are prepared to paint them you should play with the cardboard standees. These miniatures make the box enormous, a pain to transport to conventions which are the only place I will be playing a 4+ player wargame. It just feels like a game that was produced for an impressive table (and Kickstarter) presence first and practical playability second. It certainly is aesthetically pleasing, and the tarot sized cards did grow on me over time, but I can’t help but be underwhelmed by the production.
Overall, Successors is a stunning design. It takes the CDG foundations of earlier games and builds them into one of the most dynamic and exciting multiplayer wargames I’ve ever played. At the same time, I don’t love it. It is a harsher game than I like and, critically, I don’t particularly enjoy Successors when I’m losing, and boy am I losing a lot at this game. I can still enjoy Here I Stand when things are going disastrously for me because the historical narrative is still fun and there’s usually some (ineffective) thing I can be doing. In Successors my defeats feel like the result of my own idiocy but even worse, if things go very badly for me, I can find myself playing far less of the game than everyone else at the table. These are not flaws in the game – I fully believe these are deliberate features – but they are aspects that frustrate me. Don’t get me wrong, I would play Successors again and I recommend that every wargamer try it at some stage. However, I don’t think I need to own a copy. This isn’t a game I’m going to be pulling out and trying to recruit players for. Instead, this is the kind of game I’d love to play with some friends every couple of years at a convention, but probably only if we can’t get enough players for Here I Stand.