Group Project: Fixing Warrior Knights

Warrior Knights is a remake of an old Games Workshop game. I never played the original version, but I understand it's undergone an overhaul. After 7 games (in the last week), I can say that I like a lot of things about the game, but there is something lacking.

Here's a review I posted on BGG, which turned into a discussion of game design. I'll link the thread below the quote for reference:

The game is a re-make of an old Games Workshop game, which evidently stole a lot (er, was "heavily influenced by") Kingmaker. Having never played either the old version of Warrior Knights nor Kingmaker, I can't speak much to either of those, but the new Fantasy Flight version of Warrior Knights is a pretty good rendition.

The game is about controlling cities in a generic midevil country. Each player is a Baron, with 4 Nobles under his charge. Barons hire mercinaries and assign them to the Nobles, then send those armies out to seige cities to either control them or raze them to the ground. Controlling cities confers victory points each round as well as income and votes during Taxation and Assembly phases (respectively).

The game is won either militarily, by controlling 1/2 of the unrazed cities on the board, or politically, by having the most victory points when the VP supply runs out. As yet I have never seen a game even come close to ending by a military victory, all games are won by victory points. The rules indicate that the supply of victory points should equal 10 VP per player in the game, but on these boards it's been said that that really isn't enough, and that all the playtesting was done with 12-15 VP per player. I have played with both 10 and 15 VP with 3 players and found that the 15 vp was a better number ofr sure. The 4 player game I played on Sunday seemed to have more player interaction sooner, probably because the board was more crowded, and 10 VP per player seemed to be 'enough' that time.

Let me preface this next paragraph by saying that I generally dislike war games. Ever since I was a kid playing Risk and Axis & Allies I've been terrible at them. Tactically I am pretty good in the short term, but I could never put together a long term plan, and I could never see my opponents' long term plans developing. Similarly, I wasn't too hot at Chess either. That said, Warrior Knights is a war game, but I like it very much. I think the reason is that there's a lot more you can do than simply maneuver and attack. Since you don't win militarily, you can go about controlling cities and defending them, and spending actions getting political power. You can use the game system to try and run your opponents out of money or make them unable to pay for their mercinaries (causing them to leave).

There are some very clever mechanics that I rather like. The first is the action selection mechanic. Players each have 12 cards - 2 each of 6 different actions. During the Planning phase, you select 6 of the actions to do this round. Then you put 2 of them in each of 3 piles. Each player does this, and 2 generic actions are added to each pile, then each pile is shuffled up. The actions are drawn from pile 1 first, then pile 2, then pile 3. In this way, you know what actions will happen, and approximately when, but you don't know if you'll go before or after other players, and you don't know which of your 2 actions will come up first.

The other mechanic I reallly like is that after resolution, the card is placed in one of three piles depending on the action taken... Taxation, Assembly, or Wages - where it stays until that pile "fills up". Until that time, you cannot use that card anymore. Eventually, the piles "fill up" (2 cards per player) , everyone gets their cards back, and a special phase is triggered: Taxation, where players get income from cities, Assembly, where players vote on Agenda cards, or Wages, where players must pay for their troops. Thus, when deciding which actions to take, and in which order, you often must consider not only what you want to do on the board, but also what the impact will be on the special phases.

Finally, there's a cool mechanic involved in the Assembly phase, a system of voting for Agenda cards (cards which confer special bonuses). Over the course of the game players amass votes. When an Assembly occurs, players each get 1 vote, plus 1 per city they control. Then players spend these votes in a blind-bid for each Agenda. All votes bid re spent, and you get to assign that many votes to whatever you're voting on... either a Yes/No vote for putting some law into effect, or voting for a particular Baron to get an Office or Concession. Unused votes are kept for the next Assembly.

There are some other cute mechanics, but they are largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of the game. In fact, it could be said that the Agendas don't have a big enough impact on the game to be worth the effort, but I don't know if I agree with that personally. It might be nice if there were more Agendas that conferred Victory Points or ways to get them, so that the Assmbly and getting votes had a bigger impact on the game.

In any case, I am enjoying Warrior Knights. The rules are pretty clean and clear, with the exception of one obnoxious annoyance to do with shifting troops from army to army. The game is fun, if long, and when played with the right number of Victory POints in the supply the end of the game comes at a good time - soon after players have had to clash with each other, and not just before. I'd like to play the game with more (5 or 6) players to see how the dynamics change. I noticed some things were a lot different with 4 players than with 3, such as crowdedness of the board, we were running into each other much sooner.
Look here for more info.

So, what I'd like to know is how to best define 2 routes to victory in the game. One in which a player wins by dominating the board - a Military Victory, and one in which a player wins through Influence Points - a Political Victory. I highly suspect it can be done with only minimal changes to the game as-is.

Any ideas? For reference I'll link the game's rulebook (from Fantasy Flight's website).