Argent: The Consortium, Dead Reckoning: Letters of Marque, Ichor, Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, Up Front, Caesar: Rome vs Gaul

Week of May 26th, 2025

Although usually my bias is for economical design, there is a certain and very specific kind of wild, over-the-top game that I enjoy, and Level 99 really nails it with Argent, Millennium Blades, and Empyreal. I do truly love these games. It’s funny because a friend of mine got on the first Kickstarter for Argent back in 2014 or something. When I was first introduced to it, and he was teaching it, I was thinking to myself “omg, this is another one of these absolute kitchen sink games, there is no chance I’m going to like it”. I can’t remember if it won me over immediately, or of it took a couple plays, but about a decade later I’m still enthused to play it whenever I get the chance — which is less often than I’d like.

I think the reason it works for me is that despite the crazy setting and apparent wildness of the game, it’s actually shockingly tight and well-executed. Economical excess, if you will. When I’m teaching the game these days I invariably make some kind of comment along the lines of: this may seem surprising given the aesthetics, but the designer really knew what he was doing. Despite the crazy nature of the spells, the powerful artifacts, the fact that almost everything has a special power, there is a consistency to the design that allows it to play pretty cleanly. It’s not terribly difficult to teach, and the game is well-structured enough to be fairly easy to grasp for a game of this footprint. For example, I think it’s easier to come to grips with this than the theoretically simpler and more constrained, but more mechanically intricate, Molly House. The closest analog I can think of is Glory to Rome. But Glory to Rome didn’t work for me that well because it feels out of control and it has a ton of sharp edges, while Argent: The Consortium to me has more more of a feel of controlled extravagance.

Even though I’m a big fan of the game, there is a bunch of content from the expansion that I’ve never used! Everyone was new this time, but I still threw in the new faction from the expansion (the Technomancers) because they involve no rules and it gave me something new to explore myself. They’re interesting, by giving fairly easy access to the Research action they can open up the spells and make it easier to hit high-level effects which is always entertaining. Several players were casting level 3 spells by turn 4. So I’ll keep those guys in. Almost all the expansion content is either rules-light or rules-free, which is awesome, so now I want to get the game to the table a bit more often so I can explore some more of it. I’m especially intrigued by the scenarios, which are a narrative-light way to emphasize various aspects of the game as well as to turn it into a more traditional “most points at the end” euro.

We had 5 players, and of course I was teaching and everyone else was new so the game was long-ish — a bit over 3 hours. I thought it was ok for new players but it was definitely pushing it; it wants to be more like 2. Having more players does open the game up and make it more interesting, with more different action spaces and more interactions, but the length is just something you’ll have to judge. The game moves at a better clip with 4, but is a richer experience with 5. If you’re going to play with 5 (or 6, because you’re insane) the game does need to move and so game experience is very helpful. With new players, 4 is probably better.

Dead Reckoning has fallen a bit out of regular play in the last year or so. Not totally surprising, we’ve played it a lot and games like this often have fixed endpoints in today’s environment of gaming excess — even for a very good and very expansive game like this. It was nice to get it back to the table and be reminded of its quality. We never quite finished the Salt & Thunder narrative expansion, but I had forgotten we were really close, so we left that stuff in and threw in the new non-narrative content from Letters of Marque. The new stuff is great, extremely lightweight and seamlessly folded into the core structure of the game while giving it even more thematic depth (external great powers who will get you get you goodies if you help them out, but if you get involved with them someone may put a bounty on your head). The thing I like about this game is that it gives you so many ways to engage with it, and that the game-world is immersive enough and the game tractable enough that you can always get stuff done and it’s always engaging, even if you don’t win or even are not particularly competitive. The Letters of Marque stuff enhances that good stuff.

It was also interesting to play both this and Pax Hispanica pretty close together. I gave Pax Hispanica a hard time for being historically preposterous. It was interesting to ponder why I give Dead Reckoning a pass for working in a historically problematic genre while Pax Hispanica gets blasted for its historical vandalism. The easy distinction is obviously that Dead Reckoning makes no pretense at history, and has an aggressively diverse cast of characters: female captains, crew members of every ethnicity, non-white-people all over the place. Historical pirate crews were legendarily diverse and egalitarian and early adopters of universal healthcare. So yes, it’s not rocket science. Still, the whole pirate fiction genre is historically problematic as it sets itself in a real historical period while generally whitewashing the slavery, exploitation, and the brutality of real pirate crews. It’s tough. But Dead Reckoning is so glaringly obviously a fantasy world that I think it passes muster in a very similar way to the Level 99 games that I enjoy, which do very well with diversity and representation.

Of the two new Knizia games in Bitewing’s latest Kickstarter, I was mildly skeptical of Ichor. A few more plays though and it has fully won me over. Our last game went deep and was a tight back-and-forth until I could grind out the win. I think I was worried that all the special powers and their interactions would create a level of complexity that was at odds with its core elegance, but after just a couple very short games it was playing cleanly and intuitively. The piece density is high and so the moves are often quite constrained, which gives the tactics a clear legibility as compared to a more open, traditional abstract game like YINSH where you’re trying to find very subtle patterns. Because the tactics are reasonably straightforward — not totally obvious but discoverable without too much work — the game is really all about the special powers, similarly to (but less extreme and less intense than) Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. It is a bit of an unusual design in the 2-player euro space, both because it’s a Knizia and his games are usually unique and because this sort of tactical positioning game is unusual in more thematic games, and for that reason I’m curious to see if it gets extended play. For now though I’ve been really enjoying it as a closer after a game of Up Front or Caesar: Rome vs Gaul, or if there are two of us still standing at the end of a games day and we want something short to play.

I mentioned on Insta (before I moved over here) that I’ve been experimenting with small (tiny, really) house rules for the current edition of Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage. This is a game that I’ve always found to be a total classic, but like Successors it’s run into issues handling really extreme super-stack strategies. Rome particularly can dump 15+ CUs into the chokepoint guarding the entrance to Italy and just dare Hannibal to try to push through. While I don’t think this breaks the game exactly, it does generally take Italy out of play (Hannibal is too easily bottled up in Cisalpine Gaul) which is boring. Plus it’s an obvious exploit; too much of the system — crucially the attrition and retreat tables — are designed with a clear assumption that stacks would max out at about 10CUs. If you don’t address this somehow, the game just becomes a lot less dynamic. No Hannibal in Italy, just Rome trying to crack the fortresses of Spain and Africa sometime before the game ends. You could try fixing the system by adjusting the attrition table to support large stacks, but that’s serious work, and armies larger than 10CUs just didn't exist. The Romans had 80,000 soldiers — 8 legions, a double consular army — at the battle of Cannae, which was the largest army they ever employed in the field during the period and was larger than they could practically command. In the game, that’s in the neighborhood of 10CUs. 16CU blocking armies just make zero sense historically or in the context of the game system. So, what I’ve settled on is just this: you can’t get more than 10 battle cards from CUs in total. This works great, and produced the dynamic, exciting, and high-risk action I’ve always enjoyed the game for. The flip side is that the game goes back to being noticeably pro-Carthage, about 55-45 in my view. The nice thing is that the latest edition includes a number of variant strategy cards which you can add to the deck. While they’re mostly garbage and I wouldn’t mess with them, you can strategically add just a few — one each of 1, 2, and 3 ops — to nude the game towards Rome. I like a second Elephant Fright, Dictator, and then I haven’t totally decided on the right 2 but I think maybe Sicilian Allies Desert. I very strongly recommend this small set of adjustments. After finding games which devolved into superstacks kind of boring and wondering if the game had maybe finally aged out for me, I’ve gone back to loving it again.

I’ve written about Up Front a lot in this newsletter, including a lengthy piece about why it’s absolutely worth playing in 2025. To be clear, I stand by all that, no question. However. I’ve been shepherding a couple people through learning the game, and watching what parts of it they enjoy and what parts of it they struggle with has been very enlightening for me. Up Front, for all its many substantial virtues, is a product of the ‘80s. Back then hobbyist gaming like this was still a relatively recent form, the standards for things like the tradeoff between complexity and historical flavor was in a different place, and we hadn’t had great models of how to design strategically. I’ve come to accept that Up Front is about 20% too complicated, and how you would get to something in better balance has come into pretty clear focus for me. The rules for malfunctions and wire, for example, constantly trip people up because they are crazy and objectively bad. The rules for infiltration and close combat are evocative and work for what they’re trying to portray but they take people too long to fully internalize. I’m strongly pro-light-vehicles in Up Front, but the amount of rules detail they put in there for the treadheads and because it was an expectation at the time is clearly wrong. There are whole rules sections that again were expectations at the time — prisoners, radios, entrenchments, encirclements — which are not helping, while a genuinely useful section, night, is (shockingly) a bit underdeveloped. Plus of course the layout and writing of the rules is just terrible. Simply by using clear, simple, direct language in a crisp style and a more coherent rules ordering you could cut 10% off the complexity at minimum, simply through presentation. Then you consider how the usability of the action deck could be starkly improved with some subtle tweaks and the vision of a much more playable version of the game comes into focus, one that sacrifices almost nothing in terms of the game’s core virtues. Plus you could bring it more into line with all the new historical research that has come along in the past 40 years and fix its two glaring mis-steps (the French and Italians) and fill its one huge omission (the Chinese).

So now I have to decide if this is a project I am willing to embark on, and if so on what terms. Maybe.

Caesar: Rome vs Gaul is one of my favorite games of recent years — tight, tense, and evocative, but clean and only a couple hours. There has been a nagging fear though: once we reached a good level of mastery, Rome became very strong in our games. Although they are reliably very close, Rome has usually been able to pull things out in the end.

So when we played this week, I wanted to play Gaul and see if I could take it up a notch. I started out with what I felt was a tough tribe draw, two tribes in remote Belgica near the Rhine and one in southern Celtica. So they were not just widely dispersed, they were unable to contest the critical territory in central Celtica. I was really worried the Romans would just consolidate their central position and that would be a problem. But Caesar came after me in Eastern Belgica. Originally I thought this was a mistake, I think Caesar needs to secure the central terrain, and I hoped it would buy me enough time to consolidate influence. It turned out to be more complicated though, as Caesar used his vault into Belgica to set up a very rapid score of the “tourist” VPs for Germania and Britannia on turn 2. Still, I was able to dodge and weave and build up influence while denying Caesar governance points, and I thought I was in quite good shape at the halfway point. Caesar had 6VPs, half what he needed, but had already scored the 4 easy tourist points and the next 6 would be challenging.

The wheels just came totally off in the second half though. A couple of local counterattacks against isolated legions went south despite overwhelming odds, and the ops balance was just nasty. I think Caesar got about 30% more ops out of the deck than I did, and that’s just a tough hill to climb. This happens in Hannibal too — some days you just don’t get the cards. Caesar ultimately notched another fairly comfortable win even though I felt like I had made some noticeable improvements in how I approached playing Gaul. You can’t read too much into a game like this though.

If I have a complaint about this game — and to be clear, I don’t really — it’s that it does feel swingier than the other top-tier CDGs (Hannibal, Sekigahara). I wasn’t sure why that should be, though. The deck is pretty balanced and while I haven’t run the numbers, twice through seems like enough time for things to generally even out. The conclusion I came to, and perhaps why the Gauls feel harder to play, is that the utility of Caesar’s ops points feel more front-loaded. That is to say, with their first op on each card, Rome will generally activate Caesar to go punch someone and that is likely to be high-leverage. Their second and third ops, if they get them, can almost be thought of as gravy (almost). That’s not to say they’re unimportant, you still need a quantity of ops to control territory, but they can get a decent amount done with one op. Gaul’s op utility, on the other hand, is much flatter. Each one is about the same. If they get shorted ops, it’s just going to hurt them more than it is Caesar.

The key change Mark has come up with for the second edition (which I hope will see the light of day before too long) is to really flatten out the ops deck so that it’s much less likely anyone will get a disproportionate share of the high-value cards. That strikes me as right, and should both enable and force the Gauls to play a more reliably active defense. You still usually get that now, but evening things out a bit should help.

All that said, this is a game I really like and have always enjoyed even as it is now. It’s just such a tight, interesting, asymmetric design. But even really good games can be improved from time to time.

Coda

I realize I haven’t recommended much clarinet quartet music yet. So here’s one!

My personal history with this piece is fun. There is a rich vein of Japanese chamber music that I discovered maybe 10 years ago, not too long before I took up playing clarinet again, and it’s been a very important source of very high-quality, interesting, and fun music. When I saw this piece in the catalog I had to order it because, I mean, how could I not? The Voynich Manuscript? It’s a perfect strange crossover between the clarinet, linguistics, and the occult, with a nod to cryptography on the side. It was a while though before I got good enough to tackle performing it.

As a piece of music it’s fun because it’s in this very distinctive Japanese or Korean mode that seems to trace back to Joe Hisaishi and Studio Ghibli: grabbing musical influences from all over the European classical canon and then mashing them up with East Asian textures and harmonies, but always with the focus on singable melody. The opening for this piece is very modern, drawing heavily on abstract minimalism and pointillism but with a melody hidden away in there. Then you transition to this absolutely gorgeous choral middle section, brilliantly written to exploit the clarinet range and timbre, before reprising the busy opening. It’s actually very evocative of the story of the manuscript, all in 5 minutes or so.

One of the interesting things about being an amateur classical musician is that we’re extremely reliant on the classics. When I go to workshops we overwhelmingly play “dead white dude” music — European music from the 1800s. So when I pull something like this out — colorful and emotional and accessible to amateurs, and written to be beautiful — it just blows people away. Whenever I break out my library of Japanese music, nobody even realizes this stuff exists, never mind knows how good it is. Afterwards they just want to know where they can get it.

Thanks all for this week. Be sure to like and subscribe. See you next week!