Autumn is really kind of a scoring phase wherein players cash in sets of resources for honor points or to recruit new Samurai. The Hanafuda cards (styled after the traditional Japanese Hanafuda deck, obviously) feature numbers and pictures of animals or plants. There are a variety of sets available with rarer or more extensive ones producing larger numbers of honor points. Samurai are recruited by cashing in sets of cards with ribbons on them, and not only do they provide honor but they also embody special abilities and powers that affect everything from combat to resource collection. Trade also occurs in autumn and players who were able to wheedle a trade card from another family can exchange it for a chance to look at between one and five cards from that family’s hand and pick a card, ideally to work toward building a good set. Another option is for players who have collected any kind of diplomacy card from each other family- they can be exchanged for ten honor points. Family member cards being held (or held hostage) can be revealed to earn still more points.

From there, it’s wash, rinse, repeat for about four turns—maybe one more or possibly even one less- the game ends when someone hits 60 honor points and with increasing revenue and a high value set of Hanafuda cards the march toward victory accelerates pretty quickly.. There are a lot of interesting, tricky, and very thematic goings-on that flavor the proceedings and provide a lot of interesting choices. For example, if you attack a family that either has one of your family members held hostage (or that you gave them before they betrayed you) then you lose not only that family member but a big chunk of honor. It’s another way the game offers warranties on negotiations and it does create some tough decisions and even increases the grudge factor when you’re tooth-and-nail with someone you can’t afford to attack. But you can always offer military support to his or her neighbors and encourage an attack. So there is a lot of double- and triple- dealing tempered by the strict diplomatic structure and the relatively short playtime.

So SENJI turns out to be an extremely well-designed diplomatic game with more than a passing similarity to games like DIPLOMACY, DUNE, and A GAME OF THRONES- games that I really enjoy. It looks great, plays quick without losing depth or scope, and it has a unique design that really isn’t quite like its predecessors or anything else out there. It hits the right level of thematic connectivity and abstraction and it manages to stuff military affairs, development, and commerce into the negotiations-centered package. This has to be Cracked LCD’s Game of the Year, right?

Not by a mile.

So then how could it all go wrong? The answer is simple- SENJI is simply over-designed, over-engineered, and much too mechanical to approach the greatness of a fairly free-form game like DIPLOMACY. It lacks the awesome theme and intricate “wheels within wheels” interaction between the six vastly different factions in DUNE. And it doesn’t have the range of possibilities and player options that are in A GAME OF THRONES. The game never seems to take on a life of its own outside of the mechanics and even the otherwise brilliant diplomacy card system comes down more to trading cards and trying to get equivalent values than anything approaching the shrewd, humanistic negotiations required in the better diplomatic games. Put another way, there’s just too much “game” in SENJI; it’s as if real, unfettered interaction between players has been written out of the design, almost as if the designers are afraid that truly open diplomacy would somehow break the system. The result is that there is much more attention in the game to mechanics, turn order, collecting sets, and other “overhead” than there is toward actual interaction.

SENJI strikes me as the kind of design that is very much an “answer” to supposed problems with older board game designs. In this case, games like DIPLOMACY tend to be very long so the answer is to shorten the game with limited victory points and increasing revenues and the result is that the game feels unnaturally limited, restrained, and any sense of scope seems illusionary due to the small range of options the mechanics allow.

Many players, particularly Eurogamers, dislike open negotiation due to social malfeasance, shyness, or the simple fact that player personalities can cause “imbalance” in game mechanics so in answer to that alleged issue restrictions are in place to limit the kinds of negotiations that can occur and the warranties offered by the trade cards prevent anyone from ever really being screwed. As I stated in my review of GALACTIC EMPEROR, a game that tried to condense TWILIGHT IMPERIUM into a shorter, more compact package, I think SENJI mostly succeeds in answering these “problems” but I question whether that should be a goal of a board game designer, particularly when the things that are altered, replaced, or tweaked is the good stuff like player chaos, interaction, and scope—nobody wants to see an author go back and rewrite MOBY DICK with 30% less whale.

What makes games like DUNE and DIPLOMACY so great, as opposed to SENJI, is that the players really make the game. There are tons of options, the possibilities for interaction are endless (even in DUNE, which has a very formalistic structure for alliances), and the game is as much between the players as it is between the players and the game mechanics. With SENJI, it feels like the mechanics- as in most Eurogames- are the centerpiece and the negotiations occur around them. That being said, I do believe that gamers who do not like the ruthless and liberated interaction that those games allows may find more to enjoy with the game as it is definitely a more controlled environment than those earlier titles.