I think it is safe to say that Tanto Monta: The Rise of Ferdinand and Isabella by designer Carlos Diaz Narvaez was my most anticipated game of the year. I adore Here I Stand, and Tanto Monta took that core system and applied it to the years right before Here I Stand. This includes the Italian Wars, a period of history I’m fascinated by. It also decreased the player count from six to four. Getting six people together who are all willing to spend a day playing through the Protestant Reformation is probably the single greatest barrier to playing Here I Stand, so this was really promising. The back of the box promised the same complexity as Here I Stand and a play time of 3-7 hours, which we should always take with a grain of salt but still it looked good for this being an excellent way to get some of that Here I Stand style action to the table more often. It also came out at the perfect time – my copy arrived right before a gathering of myself and my fellow We Intend to Move on Your Works partners in crime. The four of us convened in Pierre’s house for me to teach them all Tanto Monta, expecting a day of epic gaming with great friends. To quote a somewhat infamous review of Virgin Queen: it was a fucking disaster.
It Takes Two to Tanto
I want to start with what I liked about Tanto Monta. The core systems from Here I Stand all function just fine, albeit with more exceptions and variations than I feel is strictly necessary, but to focus on those would be to simply damn with faint praise. If the only nice thing I could say about a game is how mechanisms it borrows from another game are good, that wouldn’t be much of a compliment.
Instead, the most interesting addition that Tanto Monta makes to the system is that every player controls not one but two major factions. The Spanish player controls Aragon and Castile, the two most stable major factions that will endure for the entire game. Meanwhile, the French player also controls Catalonia, the Muslim player controls the Nasrids and an alliance of North African sultanates, and the Portuguese player controls the Beltranejas, a faction actively pursuing an alternative heir in Castile. In these latter three cases, one of these powers may be functionally eliminated from the game due to the Spanish player consolidating power over Iberia and creating modern Spain out of the political chaos of the peninsula.
Controlling two factions works really well and is achieved with relatively little complexity. For the most part you can’t intermix units or commanders between the two, but you can generally use cards to affect both, with the notable exception of home cards. As the French player I was more interested in the future of France, but I was also very invested in keeping Barcelona independent and committed considerable resources into resisting the attacks of the Spanish player. The siege of Barcelona was one of the defining narratives of our game, as it slowly ground on turn after turn.
The fact that I was immediately bogged down in two foreign wars, including one with the future Holy Roman Emperor, really prevented France from getting too involved in Iberia at the start of our game.
It was in the tensions within Spain between all of these factions that Aragon-Castile was trying to subjugate that Tanto Monta was at its finest. Constant combat as the Spanish player had to put out fires in all directions defined our game and made for many exciting turns.
The game’s aesthetics are also absolutely stunning, which isn’t really a surprise given that Ivan Caceres did the art. I actually have quite a soft spot for the old school look of Here I Stand but I cannot deny that Tanto Monta is a much prettier game. Ivan’s art is some of the best out there at the moment and, while Tanto Monta isn’t my favorite game he’s done, it is an excellent example of his work. I would love to see him apply his skills to the other games in the series.
Seeing it all set up is almost enough to make me want to play it again. And yes, I remain eternally cursed to only play these games while looking at the map upside down.
The map itself is also really well laid out. When moving armies around the Iberian Peninsula we found a lot of opportunity for interesting positioning and maneuver. Some point-to-point maps can be very bland and that is very much not the case here. The most fun we had in Tanto Monta was in moving big stacks of troops around and trying to trap enemy leaders in unfavorable battles.
So, I’ve been positive, there are things to like about Tanto Monta and I can believe that there are people who genuinely like this game. However, this design has too many flaws, and I don’t believe it can have more than a very niche appeal. Some fans of the system will still enjoy this game, but for me it just made me want to play Here I Stand (or to finally try Virgin Queen). I had fun on the day I spent playing Tanto Monta, but it was despite the game not because of it. Let me try and explain.
No, it’s too much, let me sum up.
There is just too damn much Tanto Monta. I think a lot will be made about Tanto Monta’s complexity. I have heard (only after it came out) that it is a more complex game than Here I Stand or Virgin Queen, but I don’t think that is strictly the case. No single system in Tanto Monta is all that complicated. I have played my fair share of complex games, and usually the challenge with complexity is wrapping your head around some key mechanism(s) that then causes an uphill struggle towards actually playing the game. That is not true of Tanto Monta, I fully understood every system in the game – even if at times the rulebook made it harder than it needed to be.
The problem with Tanto Monta is that there are so many rules and, even more importantly, so many exceptions to those rules that the final product is a convoluted mess. There are 64 pages of rules before you begin factoring in the large deck of cards, each of which has its own effect and rules. I was the person in charge of teaching the game, and I’m good at remembering rules, and I frequently found myself having to stop players to inform them of some key exception that prevented an action or cut short a strategy or that they had to keep in mind when making their plans for this turn.
On top of this, the game includes quite a lot of tedious admin that doesn’t really seem to make much of any difference. Why does the Spanish player need to roll on half a dozen separate tables to determine their card draw, and why are some only used on even turns and some on odd? The statistical difference is negligible. Add to that the fact that the French player is doing the same basic thing but with different parameters and you get a very boring start to every turn. Also, why does the French player want to roll low and the Spanish player high when resolving these very similar systems? There doesn’t seem to be any concern for consistency in Tanto Monta, no desire to make the game easier to learn and remember because there is a core mechanism that can be applied across several different parts of the game. Instead, the game wants to carve up Here I Stand’s core into even more niche applications and specifics – this is a collection of rules, not a game system.
Tanto Monta also commits the cardinal sin of card driven game design – the rules are not always on the cards. Since Mark Herman invented the modern card drive game (CDG) with We the People, the greatest benefit of the CDG has been that it allows you to offload rules onto the cards. Instead, several cards in Tanto Monta refer players to a specific section of the rulebook. The mandatory event that triggers Emperor Maximilian’s intervention against France redirects to nearly a page of rules. On one turn nearly half of the Spanish player’s hand was cards that required him to look up paragraphs of text in the rulebook. This is incredibly tedious and grinds the game to a crawl. This is also poor design that completely fails to take advantage of the CDG’s greatest strength.
A sampler of what I felt were some of the more egregious cards in Tanto Monta in terms of sheer density of text and/or redirecting players to the rulebook so they could look up what the card actually does.
I found that every turn I would spend more time looking in the rulebook than I spent playing the game as I was constantly tracking down the exact text for some exception to a key rule that applied when this event had been played (or when X event hadn’t been played). The rulebook’s lack of an index made this even more tedious as I had to memorize where in the rules such an exception was likely to be. The play aid also skipped over a few key admin steps so I inevitably had to track those down every turn. My time playing Tanto Monta consisted of me flicking through the rulebook and essentially acting as a game master for the other players, and then when my turn came around suddenly having to make a decision on what I was supposed to do before burrowing back into the rules to make sure we were actually playing correctly. I always thought that next turn would be the one where all this effort would pay off and we’d be in the flow of the game, but it never came to be.
Tanto Monta also refuses to trust its players to have fun in its history. Here I Stand already had elements of being on the rails – leaders will die at key times, certain events must happen, etc. However, Tanto Monta takes even more control from the players. This is most noticeable with the game’s diplomacy. Here I Stand’s diplomacy is not strictly essential to the game, you could play an entire game without ever making a deal and the game would still work, but it is one of its most enjoyable elements. Tanto Monta completely neuters it – we never once used our agreed full ten minutes of negotiation time and often barely made any deals at all. This is because the game doesn’t let players act freely. On turn 1 the Muslims and Spanish cannot go to war – they must wait until a key event triggers by the end of turn 2 which will then place them in a state of war for the rest of the game. The Spanish and Portuguese cannot agree to peace until a certain event card is played which will bring them to peace. That event card in turn has its own set of requirements that must be met to even play it in the first place. The effect of this is that there is very little deal making to be done between the players, they either have nothing to talk about or have their hands bound by the game’s rules.
My two least favorite diplomacy events - the Peace of Alcacovas is not mandatory but must have been played for the Treaty of Tordesillas to resolve, and the latter is mandatory. I couldn’t find anywhere in the rules that explained what to do in what must be an incredibly likely outcome of someone drawing Tordesillas without Alcacovas having been played.
Similarly, there are quite a few events that just cause a historical outcome to come into being – events that give control of a location to one player without them needing to lift a finger. The Treaty of Barcelona card causes a mandatory peace between two players and the handing over of key territory from France to Spain – this is not left up to the players. This idea is hardly unheard of in CDG design, legendary title Twilight Struggle has certain events that players must memorize because they will automatically shift a space between the two players. I’ve never liked that aspect of Twilight Struggle, and I like it even less in a big multiplayer game like Tanto Monta. I wish it gave players the tools to effect this history in the course of play rather than forcing a historical timeline onto the game and narrowing the space that players can explore.
Why let players negotiate their own treaties when you can simply have a card do it for them?
All of the exceptions to the game’s rules and strict event cards exist to enforce a historical outcome and can result in an experience where it feels like the game is playing itself. Sometimes watching a game pretty much play itself can be fun, but it is better as a solitaire experience and much better if it doesn’t involve an endlessly frustrating series of looking up rules and telling your friends that they can’t do what they want because the game says so.
A result of all of the rules’ bloat in Tanto Monta was that we, as players, basically didn’t use half of the systems in any given turn. Some turns we would engage with Minor Factions, but sometimes none of us had any cards to trigger them so we just ignored it. The one turn where players did make alliances with the minor powers came to a sudden end when the Lorenzo de Medici event simply broke all those alliances in one fell swoop. The papacy was rarely high in our thoughts, which was a blessing given that it is an incredibly tedious faction and even has its own flow chart in the rulebook.
The rules for exploration came up more often but they were often inconsequential and it was hard to get excited about them. The Portuguese player rolled on tables with little to no effect every turn and did not have a particularly fun time doing it. Then there are also events that will bring Columbus and de Gama into play, with their superior stats, and players can even get more VPs for achieving their historic voyages with those pieces than with others – another example of needless on the rails play. Why does it matter that Columbus sails west first? Why is that worth an extra victory point?
The Spanish player never used the marriage table.
Presumably for optimal play mastery of these systems is key, but many of them are not interesting in their own right. They are essentially variants of spend Command Points to get DRMs for dice rolls that hopefully give you points (in many ways Tanto Monta resembles a point salad Euro game), so as we played more we let them slide to the side and just focused on the parts of the game that were actually fun.
The Essential Developer
What this game really needed was more development. A really good developer will take scissors to the designer’s original vision and help them see what needs to be cut and refined – like a good editor, they enhance the overall work by showing what needs to be trimmed and what needs a little more polish. This game is a kitchen sink design, it feels like every idea the designer had was thrown at it and nothing was left on the cutting room floor.
This comes back to why I don’t think Tanto Monta is complex in the same way that something like 1914 Nach Paris is complex – the latter game doesn’t have that many systems, but each system is very involved and takes a while to wrap your head around. The core of Here I Stand is not that complicated (for a wargame, at least) and most of what Tanto Mont adds is not complicated if you take it on its own. What Tanto Monta does is sag under the weight of all these additions and, even worse, exceptions. Rules cannot be taken as universal truths in Tanto Monta, because lingering somewhere in the hefty 64 pages of rules is something that tells you no, you can’t do that, because of X, Y, or Z.
The solution that Tanto Monta seems to propose is that you simply memorize all of these additions – read the rulebook a half a dozen times and play the game 2-3 times and you’ll know it. This is an unreasonable stance, especially for a game where your first play could easily take you 10 hours and see you only reach the halfway point. The back of the box says this game is as complex as Here I Stand and takes 3-7 hours to play. This must be a joke. We played for nearly nine hours and only finished turn three, and we are hardened wargaming veterans.
Tanto Monta would be a better game if it had sought out more opinions beyond a core group of players and testers and if it had been prepared to kill its darlings. I’m sure every mechanic and exception felt important to the designer to achieve his vision, but many of them are a detriment to the game and he needed a developer standing over him forcing him to justify every piece of bloat and every exception. Every card that redirected players to the rulebook should have been an argument about efficiency in design.
Weird History
Some of the history on display is also a little confused, if I’m honest. I’m very familiar with the events in France preceding the beginning of Tanto Monta, and quite familiar with what was happening in France during the game, and I don’t really recognize the France that is described in this game. The opening of the rulebook says that France is an “emerging power”, as if it is the new player on the European scene. Of all the factions in Tanto Monta, France is the oldest and by this stage the most secure in itself. Charles VII had completed the transformation of the French monarchy over two decades before the game began, before Ferdinand of Aragon was even born.
From the opening of the rulebook. Not sure why France is emerging but Portugal is already described as a maritime empire.
Tanto Monta does the fairly common thing of applying years to each turn, so players can know approximately what time each turn of play covers. This is always fun. What’s weird, is that it then makes it very obvious when odd historical events take place. The first turn begins in 1470, but Maximilian Hapsburg can show up and join the Burgundian Wars against France from Turn 1, but he won’t be the heir to the Duchy of Burgundy until 1477 when Charles the Bold died, and Maximilian married his daughter and sole heir. The playbook tells us that 1477 is in turn 2, so why is Maximilian able to show up in turn 1? It’s a small thing, but in a game where you are adding and removing cards from the deck based on what turn it is, something showing up impossibly early (or late) really stands out.
Normally I would be fine with cutting a game like this some slack. Games like Here I Stand are not meant to be strict simulations; they are an invitation to play in history not a rigid guide to it. Besides, aligning the disparate histories of multiple regions of Europe into a set of coherent boundaries within which you let your players explore is challenging. However, Tanto Monta is a game that is determined to put up rails and fences throughout its design, forcing players onto a clear path and not letting them explore alternatives. This makes it all the weirder when the game itself deviates from history in key moments or elides over key shifts in the status of major powers.
Perhaps the most bizarre is the card for the Peace of Étaples, which says that the treaty marked the end of the Hundred Years War. The Peace of Étaples was made in 1492 between Charles VIII of France and Henry VII of England – neither of whom were even alive when the Hundred Years War actually ended nearly forty years earlier in 1453. The Hundred Years War is a modern historiographical concept with a fairly fixed set of dates, 1337-1453, you can’t just add another 40 years on the end.
This card just boggles my mind - it’s not even the first treaty between France and England that occurred during this period. Edward IV invaded France in 1475 and I couldn’t see any rules for that in Tanto Monta!
The thing with a mistake like this is that I spotted it immediately because I know the history of the end of the Hundred Years War incredibly well, but I don’t know the other history covered by Tanto Monta as well. When I spot an error in my area of expertise it makes me wonder if there are other errors in the history that I can’t see because I don’t know that subject as well. It shakes my confidence and causes me to worry about what else might be wrong, which is disappointing.
To Conclude
I probably enjoyed the game more than everyone else at the table, and I had a pretty bad time. We all finished with a newfound excitement to play Here I Stand, because the core system is still amazing, but the tedium of Tanto Monta had us never wanting to open this box again. I had plans to play Tanto Monta some more, I was already scheduling a second game before I had played my first, but I cannot face the possibility of teaching and playing this game again. I played it under optimal conditions: I had four of my best gaming buddies for a whole day. We have all cut our teeth on much harder games than Tanto Monta and after nearly ten hours of gaming we decided to pack it up and never play it again.
I’ve left out huge amounts of detail about the game from this review. Things like the changes to combat (not too complex, but also not very impactful we thought), the needlessly involved Venetian-Ottoman War event (so many rules for what could have been a single die roll), the increase in the average CP value of the cards (makes turns longer), or the pillage rules (genuinely never came up, not sure if we made a mistake or not) are all areas that I could have tried to have something to say but honestly after a while it would simply have been me listing mechanisms and saying that there are far too many in this game for its own good. The problem is more the number of needless mechanisms in the game and the failure for the design to present them to players in a uniform and universally applicable manner, the specifics are simply symptoms of the larger disease.
I think this comparison neatly summarizes Tanto Monta - on the left is the Arquebusiers event from Tanto Monta, on the right is the same event from Here I Stand. Tanto Monta’s version is at least twice as long and far more involved for, I would argue, little gain.
I’m sure this game is for someone, I expect the designer genuinely really enjoys it, but I will die on the hill that this is not a very good game and that most people will not enjoy it. The good news is that you don’t have to – go play Here I Stand or Virgin Queen instead. Both of those games should be getting reprints soon, the first in far too many years, and I highly recommend that you try them. I’m incredibly excited to play more Here I Stand and to finally play Virgin Queen, but Tanto Monta will be leaving my shelves at the first opportunity. I so desperately wanted to love Tanto Monta, but I just can’t.