We've been playing this one lately as well and it's definitely on the lighter side but has enough meat to keep us all engaged. My whole table wanted to play this one again after the first play of it because it's such a quick play. Great review.

seems like fun; the knight art is everything my inner child wants

This mancala version of an action wheel sounds amazing

Great game. I have the deluxified version. Love the plastic minis. Easy to play. A must buy.

At 2:40 -- Slight correction on wedges with two actions. You DO NOT have to assign tokens to both actions... You can do either of them solo.. HOWEVER, you must assign at least ONE token if you want to get any of your upgraded bonuses for that action.. IE.. if you've upgraded travel, you can just use the upgrade as "free travel" you have to assign at least one token, then ADD the bonus to that token.

I like the game, but I have the same feeling I had for Endeavor, its a little too short on play considering the set up time and the lost potential for deep strategy.

I love that I can just hear Sam about to say "You know Claymores are a type of sword, right?"

This game sounds really great, I was watching it on Kickstarter but eventually didn’t back. I hope my flgs opens a copy for demoing so I can try it.

Very expensive to get now but glad i bought it. Looks a good solid game than plays in under an hour, with a good area control mechanic and rondel mechanism.

Sounds like a play-but-don't-buy game to me. [Edit: After playing it, I was wrong. I think this one is worth owning.]

If you find it too confrontational, focus on your movement speed and get away from others. You can also win by going heavy into building and focusing on the weaker foes. All in all, I'm glad I bought it. It is a very well built game and the author put in a good effort to make it feel intuitive (ie he put lots of player aids into the design). Really quite a good product though they might have considered adding more than the cutoff number of victory points. I've added "20 point" gemstones to my copy to make up for this oversight.

Trajan is one of my family's favorites and find the action selection puzzle intuitive. We appreciate the surface area of that decision space. This one being simplified is a turn off, but it looks like a pleasant game for others.

The game is great, the theme is awesome!

really really wanted to love this game but the game really just felt like it played itself. You almost always have two of your wedges with a bunch of your cubes on it so it becomes obvious what you have to do each turn for the most part. Never felt like I could do what I wanted but rather had to find a way to use the wedge with all my cubes even though I didnt want to use it that turn.

I've tried the 6 action point power three times and I still haven't been successful.

7:40 Sam's face 😂

Seems enjoyable, but I think it's a try before you buy game for me

Great yawn @ 13:09!

At 2:40 when Tom is talking about actions on upgraded sections he says you have to assign action tokens to both. I'm pretty sure this is wrong. You can assign all the action tokens to either action, or spread them around. But if you want to do an action you must assign an action token to that action, even if your bonuses for that action are already enough. Let's say you upgraded the section that lets you travel and build and you have only 1 action token there, but you have +3 build bonus. You can't use the action token to move into a hex and then the +3 build bonus to build because you only had 1 action token. I absolutely love this game.

As a Historian, I would just be irritated the whole time by the placememt of the enemy pieces. If they had zoomed the map out a bit, they could add more strategy and replayability by having Saxons, Saracens, and Slavs be in different (and maybe historically accurate) areas each with varying payoffs. So, even within the attack-centered strategy, you could decide between the Saxon, Saracen, or Slav route. I kind of feel like they just kept things in Europe to keep it somewhat more PC than actually sending guys to the Middle East, which seems silly if that's what they did. If you want PC, probably don't have the Crusades as your theme. As far as whether or not these guus would be considered "the good guys" at the time...yes and no. (Like I said, I'm a Historian, so I am duty-bound to give ambivalent answers to these kinds of questions.) The Crusades, in general, received broad support from all levels of society, though there were always some critics, and the criticism increased over the centuries as the cause continued to result in repeated dissapointments. However, the Crusaders themselves were often considered, especially by religious writers and the common people they came across, as morally unfit for their supposedly divine mission. There were constant complaints about the moral failings of these men from all quarters. Also, though some rulers did get credit for going on Crusade themselves, the issue was also about as likely to hurt their public image as help it as many monarchs and nobles tried to put off the expensive and impractical venture as long as they could even after being pressured to swear an oath to "take up the cross." This meant rulers and nobles risked looking like impious and hypocritical cowards if they hesitated to undertake an expedition that would certainly be financially ruinous and most likely a strategic failure. But they went anyway, because...Deus Vult!

Just way too light for what we were expecting.

The game looks awesome, but the theme does put me out unluckily u.u.

Not sure how I feel about a game that simulates the Christian version of ISIS. Sam to his credit did kind of acknowledge this.

The theme is historical, but that's all the good I can say about it. Meh. Games about religious wars that are so abstracted seem uninspired. At least with GMT games you get a history lesson when you play. "Space Crusaders"? I'd be all over that.

I don't think I'd want to stare at the lack of decent aesthetics all game though. That board is hedious.