There is an online multiplayer option but the AI is more than competent enough to offer a worthy challenge; it’s whipped the Bordeaux out of me plenty of times. The rules uncertainty and vagaries have been smoothed away and a quick tutorial gets you up and playing in ten minutes. And gone is the three to four hour playtime- you can finish a six player game in thirty minutes, a two player game in twenty. The AI players, thankfully, never simulate analysis paralysis but do a pretty good job of holding grudges and acting ruthlessly. But despite the nasty AI and videogame bells and whistles, it’s still totally a board game: you click on a D6 to roll it and you draw a hand of cards from a pile sitting on the table next to the board.

And on this board the players go to war. Six rival factions (Navarre, Burgundy, Flanders, and Brittany in addition to England and France) vie for control of provinces in France, which each have one or two towns, in order to generate tax revenue and “Pretender Points” with the goal being the coronation of a new King of France—the faction with the most Pretender Points at the end of the game takes the crown. Each multi-phased turn generally consists of players expanding their holdings via an uncontested expansion- placing garrisons in adjacent unoccupied towns- and then attacking other players’ holdings to gain territory via a very fun, card-based combat system that rewards bluff, timing, and smart resource budgeting. It’s a fairly straightforward equation; overall land equals power and money, so you want as much land as possible. Others want your land and you want theirs, so the Hundred Years War (or a rough facsimile of it, at least) ensues.

But there are number of novel quirks that elevate MONTJOIE above the simple land-grab Rochambeau it could have been and into something really fun and unique. At the beginning of each turn, players get to vote on the political status of France- war or peace. If the vote comes back “war”, then players get more cards with which to attack and defend but a “peace” result means fewer cards and only one attack. So leading players will often be in a position where peace, despite its limitation on expansion, is more agreeable than going to war. Random events cover a variety of historical and not-so-historical tribulations and boons including poor harvests, English Chevauchee tactics, and the Black Plague. And, in an innovation unique to the PC game, an interesting and simple diplomacy system lets the players put a couple of bucks on enemy towns to encourage others to target them or you can offer another player a financial incentive to lay off the attacks for a round.

The combat system is a lot of fun and completely replaces the need for on-board troops. Players simply attack from a controlled town to another connected town. The combat cards represent a player’s armies and have numerical values ranging from three to six with a couple of special effect cards such as Engineers, Traitors, and Acts of God thrown in for an extra kick. The attacker has to play two cards, the defender gets one but the defender also gets the benefit of any fortifications as well as possible mountainous terrain. Add a toss of the die on top of that and we have a combat result. The winner gets to keep their cards (for use later in the round as defense), but the loser has to discard everything that they committed. So smart attacks and proper marshalling of resources is essential—being stuck without cards is suicidal.

Which sort of gets at the major flaw of the game: turn order is so unbelievably significant that it makes the turn order binding in a game like PUERTO RICO look tame. It seems like a definite advantage to go last, particularly in five and six player games, since the preceding players have likely spent or lost a lot of their strength. Going first is almost a disadvantage since players have the most cards at the beginning of the round and the likelihood of defeat (and losing cards) is much higher. There have been quite a few games where I found myself really hoping that the random turn order generator put me last so that I could best defend my holdings but when you’re first or second, you wind up in a position where you may be reluctant to expand for fear of losing cards.

I’m not totally sure that this issue is a problem since it does call for certain situational strategic considerations that are absolutely intended as part of the design, but on the other hand it can really throw the relative balance of the game sharply out of whack. So be careful with those cards, and choose your fights wisely- it’s the kind of game where you are simply going to lose battles, and deciding which ones to lose is a critical strategy. One thing that the PC game has made me realize is that the game is actually much better as a two to four player game than a five or six player game; the increase in control and the reduction of turn order dependency make for a more strategic and tense contest.

Despite the historical atmosphere MONTJOIE is pretty abstract overall yet it never feels as anti-thematic as most Eurogames. There’s no “Joan of Arc” card (just a generic “Hero” card that you can call Joan if you’re the French player), there are no detailed sieges, and the devastating effect of the English longbow is completely in the background. Agincourt, Poitiers, and Crecy are fought at the highest level of abstraction in the game but somehow it still feels right for a Hundred Years War game even if only at a précis level.