This week Michael tackles the latest Feudal Japan era board game from the creator of Mare Nostrum.
Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008
Author: Michael Barnes
Despite the restraint and restriction that the system imposes on the players, I can’t stress enough that SENJI is a very interesting, at times fascinating design. There are a lot of possible ways to win the game and I have seen winners that did not fight a single battle, winners that simply exploited trade cards to their fullest advantage and suddenly won with big sets out of nowhere, and winners who fought a lot of battles to reap the honor rewards for victory. The diplomatic system is fairly strict, but it works and it does reign in some of the hazier, metagame aspects of negotiation in an effective way. The problem I have is that the game lacks a sense of fun despite the Samurai powers, dice-based combat, and heavy (albeit controlled) player interaction. It’s like the heart and soul of the game was engineered out of it and what’s left is something that is just too mechanical to take its place among the great negotiation games.
Despite its initial promise and an extremely solid design SENJI turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the year for me and it’s the kind of thing that I can appreciate but that I will likely rarely play again, if ever—there just isn’t enough raw fun to support the sophisticated and thoughtful mechanics. Every minute I’ve spent playing it I’ve wished two things. One that the game had been a little more free-spirited and open ended. And two, that I was playing DUNE instead.
