Surprised Stare Games
3-5 players, 90-120 minutes
designed by Alan Paull
reviewed by Stuart Dagger
Hitherto Surprised Stare and I have dwelt in different parts
of the forest. They are a British games company producing
real games aimed at the hobby market, I am the editor of a
British games magazine, and so I clearly have some sort of
obligation to investigate what they have to offer. And I have.
With the exception of Scandaroon I have bought all their games,
but each time prior to this one I've got it home, read the
rules and decided that this was just not the sort of thing
that would appeal either to me or to the others in the group
I play with. So the games have gone unplayed and therefore,
by me at least, unreviewed. Fortunately for the magazine's
coverage, other members of the Counter team have felt differently.
Tara Seat of Kings received a clutch of approving comments
in Counter 36, and both it and Scandaroon were favourably
reviewed by Ben. However, with this latest game the company's
path and mine have at last converged. It is a completely different
type of game to anything they have done before and I like
it very much indeed.
The big difference between this one and Alan Paull's previous
game is that Confucius is strongly-themed with a good historical
feel to everything the players are doing, whereas Tara Seat
of Kings was just a multi-player abstract with beautiful art
work.
The setting is China during the early part of the 15th century.
As the interesting historical notes tell you, it was a time
when the Chinese were reasserting themselves after the years
of rule by the Mongols. Under the Ming Dynasty the empire
was again expanding and the great admiral Zheng He was undertaking
his voyages of exploration. Meanwhile, at home the country
was governed through a civil service split into three large
ministries. Players compete in these three areas: the conquest
of new territory, the grand naval expeditions and control
of the ministries. Most designers attempting this theme would
have been content with that, but what Alan has very cleverly
done is to place at the heart of the game a Confucian social
code that can be manipulated to restrict your opponents' freedom
of action. It is this that gives the game its originality
and makes it a bit special.
The social code is built round the idea of being beholden.
Each player has a set of gift cards with values 1 to 6. Each
represents a gift that you can buy and then present to an
opponent. Gifts cannot be refused but once accepted put you
under an obligation to the giver. You owe him a favour and
that means that in certain situations you mustn't step on
his toes and in others you must actively support him. To get
out from under you must either give him a gift at least as
expensive as the one he gave you or must discharge the debt
by doing him a significantly large favour.
The key to taking actions is a ``double currency'' one of
money and licences and both are handled by a deck of cards
in which each card is worth either 3 of one and 1 of the other,
or 2 of each. Actions also require the expenditure of action
points and how many of those you have in a round depends on
how active you have been in the giving and receiving of gifts
- the more social contacts you have, the more things you can
get done.
The ministries are those of the army, finance and public
works, and each has space for 7 officials. At the start of
the game there are three in place in each ministry. Each round
will see one added to each ministry and one ministry will
also see the entrance of a candidate who has been successfully
sponsored through the civil service examination. These candidates
that have come through the examination are members of one
of the players' families and so are loyal to them. The loyalty
of the others is gained by bribery and each official's tile
is marked with his ``price''. Once all the positions in a
ministry have been filled and all the officials in it have
been acquired, there is a vote to determine who gets the points
for being the Minister and the Secretary. Points for first
and second place is a well-worn mechanism, but in this case
it doesn't necessarily work out quite as you might be expecting,
for the voting system is a transferrable vote one and in the
course of it favours will get called in.
Example: Red controls 3 officials, Blue 2 and Green &
Yellow 1 each. The count will continue until all but two candidates
have been eliminated. The gift situation is that Yellow is
under a gift obligation to Green and Green under one to Red.
Blue is under obligations to both Red and Green, but the latter's
gift to him was the more expensive. The tie at the bottom
is split by using the fact that the seven officials are ranked
according to their position in the ministry. In this case
suppose that Green's man is not only above Yellow's but actually
has the top job. This means that Yellow is the one to be eliminated
and, because of the obligation he is under, must throw his
support behind Green. Green is now tied with Blue but again
wins the tiebreak and again picks up the transferred votes.
Green now has 4 votes to Red's 3 and becomes the Minister,
with Red as Secretary. Note that had Yellow won that initial
tiebreak, Red would have become the Minister and the Secretaryship
would have gone to whichever of Blue and Yellow had the most
highly placed single official.
As you can see from this, the resolution process can be very
finely balanced and players will put a lot of effort into
getting it to tilt in their favour. Green came out on top
in this instance by effective placement of his stock of gifts.
Blue and Yellow gained no points from the affair, but the
support they were obliged to give to Green did at least mean
that their obligation to him was discharged and the gifts
he had given them ``cancelled''.
On your turn you have between 3 and 5 action points, with
the number being dependent on how many ``not yet cancelled''
gifts you have given and received. The sort of actions you
can take include things such as bribing officials, taking
money/licence cards, buying ships, sending them out on voyages,
recruiting armies, invading neighbouring countries, buying
gifts, giving gifts and nominating entrants for the civil
service examination. Most of these work much in the way that
you expect; the one that doesn't is the last of them and this
is another situation where obligations come into play. There
will be at most two candidates and each player must vote for
one of them by playing one of their money cards (face down).
The idea here is that you are helping to pay for the student's
studies and that the best prepared candidate will be successful.
If you are under an obligation to the sponsor of one of the
candidates, their man must get your vote; if you are under
an obligation to both of them, then the more expensive gift
decides.
The second main area for gaining VP is the navy. It costs
you money to buy ships, and licences to send them on a voyage.
A fleet of 5 junks sent to a previously unvisited location
gives you both VP and an ``Emperor's Reward'' card, which
will be a bonus of some sort.
With the army the nature of the costings are reversed - licences
to recruit and money to equip the army on a campaign. Here
too there are VP on offer, slightly higher than the naval
ones but also a bit harder to secure. Three ``military target''
tiles will have been drawn at the start of the game, each
requiring between 2 and 4 armies if the campaign is to be
successful. What makes this tricky is that each one comes
with a time limit such as ``unless the conquest of Mongolia
has been completed by the end of round 4, no points will be
awarded for it''.
In this description I have just given you the main features,
but as you'll discover when you play the game, there is a
fair amount of extra detail that is both flavoursome and important
to the play. For example, if you have an official of the Army
Ministry in your pocket, your recruiting costs are reduced;
while if you have one in the Finance Ministry, your bribes
cost less. Then there is the fact that officials can lose
their posts to well connected candidates who have come through
the Civil Service examination. To protect one of your men
from this you need to bribe him twice and that costs you both
money and action points that you'd sooner spend on other things;
but if you don't do it, it could well cost you control of
the Ministry. It's a nice touch is this one, for what it is
saying in effect is that in this society bribery is not just
a case of officials being on the make but of officials without
powerful political friends being vulnerable.
The game ends after at most 9 rounds and at that point there
are a few extra VP given out for most ships, most armies and
most officials.
As I said at the beginning, I like this game a lot. It has
an interesting and novel theme, all its mechanisms grow naturally
out of the theme and there is a deal of depth to the play.
My one reservation concerns the fact that the number of VP
to be divided out among the players is quite small. All my
games so far have been with 4 players and with that number
the average score is likely to be in the high teens. To this
you then add the fact that the number of VP going to the winner
of the Minister's position in one of the ministries is going
to be in the range 6-8 and you have a situation where big
swings can result from quite small shifts. As you saw in my
example, it doesn't take much of a change to alter the result
of an election. Quite how one would put extra VP into the
game to make the result less lumpy and more stable I have
no idea, as the three areas in which they are handed out are
the ones that matter if the game is to remain faithful to
its theme, and the sizes of the various awards seem to be
in roughly the right proportions relative to the importance
the Chinese Empire would have attached to them. Nonetheless
it can make for frustration when you are playing. One of my
group observed round about the halfway point of his first
game that he seemed to be working very hard for not much in
the way of tangible reward, and it was a fair point. However,
despite this I would firmly recommend the game to all of you
who like strategy games and who value novel ideas and thematic
fidelity.
The components, the graphics, the board design, the player
aids and the rule book are all first rate. This is Surprised
Stare's most ambitious game to date and their best.
