by smauggy
What follows is a meditation on the game that, out of the hundreds in my collection and after decades of boardgaming, has most engrossed my attention: the mighty and confounding Virgin Queen. For no other game than VQ have I spent tens of hours retrofitting game components, creating player aids, and writing teaching scripts. For no other game more than VQ have I invested as much time, organization, and friendship goodwill imploring people to play. No other game than VQ better induces the trancelike flow state of total immersion in strategizing, calculation, and intersubjective inference that transforms the best game experiences into allegories for life itself. This is one boardgamer’s account of why. But be forewarned: it is verbose and indulgent in detail — not unlike the game it contemplates. It is also partisan: the MTL;DR here is that VQ is an extraordinary, endlessly replayable game that magnificently rewards the many challenges of its presentation.
An overview: VQ is the successor game to Here I Stand, an extremely highly regarded game with which it shares the same designer, player count, historical setting (rolled forward a few decades), and ~75% of the rules. It enlists six players to represent England, France, Spain, Holy Roman Empire (HRE), the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants (Dutch/Huguenots) seeking supremacy across the domains of territory, culture/science, marriages, piracy, diplomacy, espionage, and religion in the late 16th century. The powers are asymmetric — differently endowed with territory, card events, force pools, and a few rules/powers — leading to dramatically varied experiences playing each. Each turn begins with a card draw, followed by a structured diplomacy phase and then an action phase in which the powers, in a fixed order, play the cards they were dealt one at a time round robin until their hands are exhausted. As standard for a CDG, each card can be used either to initiate a specific event or spent as “command points” (CP) from a large menu of actions. Permanent VPs are awarded from marriage, piracy, artistic/scientific achievement, espionage, and a few other minor possibilities, while zero-sum VPs arise from (1) military control of designated key spaces on the board (“keys”), and (2) the status of the religious struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. There are also three auto-win conditions that end the game instantly: control of a threshold number of keys (military auto-win, open to all powers), a sufficiently lopsided religious situation favoring one side (religious auto-win, open to Spain, France, and the Protestants), and a special event called the English Catholic Rebellion (ECR) that only Spain can win. Assuming no auto-win has occurred, there follows a few admin/resolution phases and a victory check to see if anyone has reached a threshold of 25 VPs (or, post-T3, a +5 VP lead over everyone else). If no one has won and it is not yet T7, the game proceeds to the next turn. Throughout, dice are rolled to resolve actions — including combat, espionage, religious conversions, artistic/scientific patronage, diplomacy, and marriage outcomes.
VQ intimidates. Most boardgamers will declare the requirements ridiculous and even those favoring “heavy” games will find them daunting. While the average game lasts only 3-5 turns, each will take ~90 minutes in F2F play even with experience, entailing a 5-10 hour game. A meaningful portion of this time will be spent watching your five opponents play their turns — resolving events, rolling dice in military and religious combat, or agonizing how to spend one card’s CPs against the action menu. A full 7-turn game with dilatory players and an undisciplined diplomacy phase could take 15+ hours — a marathon commitment rivaling AH/SPI hex-based wargames of yore. Also in common with those titans: a ruleset spanning 70 pages of dense paragraphs, replete with exceptions and at times descending into legalistic enumeration of conditions for rarely arising corner cases. Also required: familiarity with several resolution charts not described (or even mentioned!) in the rulebook, along with the deck’s 100+ cards and the timing of their entry into the game. Many of these cards’ events are rule-breaking and a solid minority have tectonic implications. (Case in point: the vexed status of Scotland, a neutral power vied over by England, France, and Protestants. Which major power Scotland allies with is very consequential because it conveys a key space, a potential base for invasion of England, and the fate of Mary Queen of Scots, around whose marriage and intrigue other consequential events can ensue — some described in the rules, some only on the action cards, and some only on an entirely separate chart that is not described in the rules and that can lead to the ECR — a single-roll auto-win! It will take at least 2-3 games to grasp all that is going on with MQoS/Scotland.) There are rich opportunities to make grievous, strategy-shattering mistakes by misunderstanding the rules for unrest, siege/assault, naval transport, neutral powers, and religious rebellion. Even when competently taught, the base rules will take veteran boardgamers hours to internalize, and the first several games will require multiple consultations of the rules. Compounding these challenges for the first-time player are
(1) the complexity of a map that can present multiple layers of information about a single space — military control, religious control, home ownership, fortification, ports, occupying land/naval units — represented by tiny cardboard chits in an opaque stack requiring frequent fiddly manipulation to inspect;
(2) the general opacity of the gamestate — a new player won’t even understand the threats he faces in the very first moves of the game; and therefore,
(3) the real potential to be effectively eliminated from contention to win within the first half of the game.
To summarize: a remote historical era, a complex ruleset laden with exceptions, an epic duration with lots of “downtime,” effective player elimination, many unique pieces with tiny print, and the meaningful chance for the game winner to be decided by a single die roll.
This wonderful portfolio led to my most exasperating boardgaming experience ever. I sponsored a boardgame retreat and cajoled five friends to fly in from different locations to learn VQ with me over a long weekend. After three hours of my fitfully learn-teaching the rules, we began the game and stumbled our way through a turn and a half before the grumpiest player declared, “This is the most boring, confusing, and pointless game I’ve ever played — I’m out.” This put an abrupt end to a huge amount of effort…and nearly a friendship as well. It took about six years to try again.
So…VQ flagrantly violates most of the current norms for boardgame design. It demands unreasonable effort in preparation and organization. It is over a decade old and out of print. Why, then, am I here to praise the Virgin Queen and not bury her? What could redeem these trials?
So, so, so much. I highlight six qualities here:
First, tactical depth. Every turn, in a moment I find among the most exciting of any game, each power receives a hand of cards that will define his scope of action for the next ~90 minutes. Each card is a precious, complex asset that can be used for its event, the many different actions it can pay for, or for diplomatic leverage. Defining a sequenced plan for the turn — finely balancing where to take the initiative, where to keep options open in reserve, prioritizing the small set of things to achieve against the large set of options — is an exquisitely complex and fun puzzle. All of the game’s subsystems are under consideration. Contemplating the use of a single card, do I as Spain build a fortress in the New World to defend against English piracy and do a religious conversion in the Netherlands to defend against a Protestant rebellion in Antwerp?…or do I need to use the points to recruit mercenaries and naval transport them into Malta before the Ottomans can put it under siege?...or do I need to save that card for its important event that will allow me to convert neutral Venice to my control after the HRE fulfills my expectation of putting diplomatic influence there? Do I, as England, commit Francis Drake to New World piracy and circumnavigation before my Protestant rival…or is it important to keep him in the English Channel and build a fleet to deter Spain’s possible build and deploy of the Armada…or do I need the points to maximize the chance of a successful assassination of Henry III, which will give me a VP and help my HRE ally hold onto the key French city he captured last turn…or do I just need to patronize Shakespeare to the maximum and ensure I snag the last of the top cultural awards for a writer before the French takes it with Montaigne? What things can I get done, and in what order should I do them?? Now, all good games have tense decisions under constraint, but only a subset include my favorite dynamic of “getting things done” while “maximizing option value” to respond optimally to opponent actions. For example, Inis features one of the purest forms of this dynamic: it is almost optimal to pass every turn and await your opponents to play out their hands, but if everyone passes, the turn ends and you have forfeited your right to do anything!) Other great games as varied as Twilight Struggle, War of the Ring, Eclipse2, and TI4 have somewhat similar “turn arcs” that combine min-max decisions with intricate sequencing considerations. However, I find that VQ embeds this dynamic within a uniquely rich and variegated palette of tactical options that generates sharper trade-offs and more engrossing calculation than any of them.
Second, strategic depth. VQ’s board state is dynamic — whole armies and fleets can be destroyed in a single action; an entire cluster of spaces can switch their religious allegiance — but there is an underlying stability that each player is trying to disrupt in their favor. Played well, each power must decide on a long-term path to build to victory. This path encompasses whom to ally with and whom to curb (and in what respects), which assets to defend and which to potentially cede, whether to play for a shorter or longer game, whether/how to build toward VP accretion or to plot for an auto-win. The asymmetry of powers naturally inclines each in certain directions, but these paths to victory are anything but prescripted. Indeed, misdirection and completely acting against type can be richly rewarded. And every decision is a strategic tradeoff: spending assets on culture and marriage means weaker garrisons and diplomatic influence over neutral powers; pursuing piracy in the New World means naval weakness in Europe; trying to surge to an early VP win necessarily entails much greater vulnerability if it fails, and so on. Contrary to some reviewers who claim the game is a point salad of mini-games, I find that VQ rewards a long-term plan that does not scatter its energies, balances offense and defense, cultivates options, and is ever mindful of the balance of power. Mindlessly pursuing the easiest VP in sight is a sure way to lose against competent opponents. A few examples:
Example 1: in my last game as the Protestants I made the counter-intuitive play of negotiating a deal with my natural rival France in T1 to not rebel in his country for two full turns. This is an eternity in VQ; it entailed my deferring the establishment of a Huguenot capital, put me behind in the religious tug-of-war, and severely curbed my VP progress. In exchange for all of this, I persuaded France to surprise his natural early ally Spain, jilting an important marriage (and inflicting loss of a card), and committing to marry my hard-to-wed royals. This (1) depleted Spain’s hand while (2) allowing me to concentrate on taking his hard-to-defend territory in the Netherlands (which he could not defend without the French alliance he was counting on) and, over time, to (3) invest in heavy piracy in the New World, also against Spain, which ultimately yielded enough treasure (and piracy VPs) to (4) fund more piracy, which yielded VPs and (5) provided treasure for use in diplomatic negotiation for Protestant-favorable events. This was a completely different path than the Protestants had taken in our prior games, and it provided a durable strategic course that, after many twists and turns, ultimately won me the game.
Example 2: Spain has the most assets, the most surface area to defend, and a surfeit of options to take territory, patronize artists, win over neutral powers, etc. Starting in T3 it also has sole access to the ECR auto-win, an expensive espionage action whose probability of success depends on a disparate array of supporting conditions — such as planting informants and Jesuits, landing troops in Ireland and England, the cryptography tech, and the survival of the fateful Mary Queen of Scots. These conditions are expensive and slow to orchestrate, but success means winning the game outright. Approached casually, the ECR seems like a long-shot spoiler attempt after the VP quest has gone sour, but an artful Spanish player can play the whole game setting it up, using and trading his assets to steadily increase his chance of success, forgoing the usual pursuit of VPs. Experienced players will of course see the ECR intention coming — and will point it out urgently — but thwarting it is not trivial: mostly it is just England who has to defend against the encroachment, and cards spent to help England defend come at the cost of advancing one’s own more urgent selfish objectives. England’s key defense is his home card “Walsingham” (which effectively halves the chance of the ECR succeeding), but using it for this purpose imposes a heavy opportunity cost and impedes his own path to victory. In my experience, a skillful Spanish player may generate multiple shots on the auto-win goal at 40-50%+ each — a very worthy objective to aim for in a 6-player game! To earn a win through the unfolding of a deeply premeditated scheme of diplomacy, resource management, calculated retreat, and misdirection is one of the most satisfying experiences our hobby has to offer.
Example 3: England’s natural game arc is from weakness to strength. Starting with no military leaders, a minimal army, holdings it needs to fortify, and a small card draw, England develops by T4-5 into having the strongest navy, the best naval leaders/explorers, good artists, religious points from the spread of Protestantism, possibly one of the larger hand sizes (augmented by piracy and Elizabeth’s special powers), and arguably one of the better shots for a late game military auto-win. So, in general, England should play for a longer game. How to approach this goal? England starts the game at war with France, and following through on that confrontation holds the appeal of early naval supremacy, VPs and stolen cards from Atlantic piracy, and possibly taking a French key space before it can be fortified and threatening auto-win. Equally viable is to mend fences quickly with France, torture Spain with New World piracy, plant colonies, and get VPs from culture and circumnavigating the globe. The differences between these general directions are both subtle and consequential. The full-frontal path vs. France is exciting, but given England’s small hand size and the high cost of military offense, it will leave culture/science neglected and give Spain less to defend against in the New World. This relative neglect can compound into Spain building up a forceful shot at the Catholic Rebellion auto-win, which, intrinsically, England must defend more or less on her own. The second strategic path tends to curb Spain more by stealing its treasures and forcing New World defense, but it relieves pressure on France, who can surge to a high VP count through culture and marriage, especially if he persuades/bribes the Protestants to concentrate on the Netherlands. A balanced path preserves optionality while the diplomatic situation evolves but at the price of either a less efficient early attack or fewer explorer-pirates in the New World. The eponymous Elizabeth I is a key playing piece in any of these paths; either unwed to generate a special VP per turn, or using her other power to retrieve a key card from the discard. And this is all an over-simplification!
A third quality, overlaying both tactics and strategy: VQ’s fascinating spatial puzzle. Similar to most other CDGs (Hannibal, Paths of Glory, Wilderness War) the VQ map is a graph of land spaces and sea zones connected by lines, not hexes. It looks straightforward enough, but mastering the topology to best effect is anything but trivial.
Consider naval units. Ships perform six distinct functions in VQ: (1) transport land units over sea zones; (2) occupy ports to prevent assaults and naval transports; (3) establish naval superiority in support of assaults; (4) pirate opponents’ territories for VPs and cards; (5) defend against piracy; (6) intercept and fight opponent ships in order to do/prevent all of the above. Now, ships are expensive and cannot be rebuilt in the same turn they are destroyed, so naval combat is risky and consequential. Naval combat in VQ also rewards concentration of force with modest or no defender advantage, and naval movement is much cheaper than land movement (one CP allows you to move all ships one zone each). The net effect of all these attributes is a masterpiece of design. You get more done by spreading out your ships, but you are much less vulnerable keeping them clustered together. If you lose naval superiority, you can be ravaged by your enemy, but your enemy can easily over-extend himself in trying to exploit this advantage. Option value and the threat of action are often stronger than actions themselves. Balancing these considerations to decide how to deploy over a complex graph of sea zones and ports is as intricate a spatial puzzle as I have encountered in any game.
Religion presents another spatial puzzle. As in HIS, in VQ religious control is a separate attribute from political control over any given space in the “religious struggle zone,” i.e., France, Netherlands, England, and Scotland. In this zone, (primarily) the Protestants duel with Spain and France to switch the religious control of space from Catholic to Protestant, and vice versa. Any space in the first two of those countries that is religiously Protestant is then eligible to be a site of political rebellion by the Protestant player. A successful rebellion kills/displaces the defending units and gives the Protestant player political control of that space (and possibly adjacent religiously Protestant spaces as well). The rules for religious conversion and rebellion evoke a feeling similar to Twilight Struggle, which also features a tug-of-war + viral contest for control of spaces, generally governed by proximity/connectivity but with explosive reversals because of coups. In both games, the tug-of-war is taut; every action is consequential, and a key part of breaking through is achieving “card advantage”: a larger hand size or more free actions, so that eventually one’s actions can’t be countered. (Scheming how to do so is one of key fronts in the tactical struggle I mentioned earlier.) Every player has an interest in the religious struggle — except arguably the Ottomans, for whom it is only a balance of power consideration — but to different degrees and with very different ability to affect it: Spain and France strive to suppress the Protestant insurgency, England drafts off of Protestant progress but can’t let it get out of hand; and the HRE secretly decides at the start of the game whether to play for the Catholic or Protestant team. Because this struggle is “layered” onto the territorial one, VQ offers a uniquely rich intersection of resource management and spatial conquest. While there are echoes of this in some COIN games (or say, in Root, where the Woodland Alliance does some Protestant-like rebelling), I cannot think of another game where this layering works nearly as well.
Fourth, diplomatic texture. One commentator perfectly described VQ as a “hexagon balanced on a pin” — high multi-way tension where any seeming equilibrium is fleeting. Multiplayer solitaire is it not. Every power is subject to invasion and cannot defend all of its territory against a motivated opponent, let alone multiple. Well-timed alliances can allow a player (essentially) to teleport a stack of troops across an expanse of now-friendly territory and hit a lightly garrisoned target. Resources are too scarce to win at the territorial, cultural, religious, and colonial/pirate competitions all at the same time. Card events can initiate significant action-at-a-distance, and boycotts on marriage and diplomatic agreements will leave a player less able to convert his assets into game-winning progress. In short, options abound to manage a dynamic balance of power. Consequently, VQ provides sustained, intense clash across both tactical and strategic timeframes. With alert and experienced players, the clash in VQ is more engrossing than in any Euro or 4x game, and is head-and-shoulders above any of the high-clash multiplayer games I love (Eclipse2, TI4, Root, Mare Nostrum, Dominant Species, Scythe, Antike2, …Titan…Diplomacy?).
And yet VQ is not a simple free-for-all or a matter of “tear down the leader.” Nor does it trade on the tension of “dudes on a map” and area-control games like Inis, Blood Rage, or Kemet where “everyone is vulnerable in every way all the time.” Nor does it crescendo to an inevitable battle royale in the center of the board. The arc is subtler and much less scripted. While it is not possible to turtle defensively, playing offense is inherently difficult: building and moving troops/fleets is very expensive and land combat strongly favors the defender. Consequently, board positions are relatively durable and military conflict generally rewards those who aren’t involved in it. The decision to go to war itself must be premeditated, since you are not allowed simply to move into neutral enemy territory. You have to telegraph your intention to attack by declaring war (at a price) during the diplomacy phase — before actions — which allows your opponent to defend at much lower cost than your attack will require. Outside of straight military conflict, card-driven events are rarely simple “take that” negative effects inflicted on an enemy; they are usually situational and come at high opportunity cost (since they can be played for action points instead), therefore requiring diplomatic orchestration to play to effect. And most non-territorial VPs are simply permanent, meaning that a power who is allowed to “peacefully” accrue too many of them can put themselves out of (efficient) competitive reach. (France excels at this, which earns another apt commentator’s quip: “Anytime France is not actively losing in VQ, he is winning.”) The net effect of all these attributes is that VQ rewards a much higher-order skill you could call “diplomatic efficiency,” i.e., making relative progress versus competitors at lower point cost, compelling or persuading them to undertake the less efficient side of military clashes, and trading to advantage all of the game’s complex assets — board position, cards, marriages, standing with neutrals, religious control, and more! Just incredible.
My admiration here extends beyond the texture of the diplomacy to the mechanism itself. In terms of game enjoyment, I find negotiation to be a two-edged mechanism in games that are not Euro multiplayer solitaire, especially 4p+. On the one hand, other humans are fascinating subjects of study and persuasion; on the other hand, games that enable and reward negotiation of every action can grow tiresome. Games like John Company2, Princes of the Renaissance, and Archipelago are wonderful, but they effectively require contentiously arguing about every decision if at least one player approaches the game with a maximalist attitude — otherwise, you cede too much advantage to that player. Personally I never tire of good-faith competitive negotiation, but I’m in a minority: the set of like-minded boardgamers is a tiny subset of the tiny subset who will undertake an ultra-heavy boardgame in the first place. So it is a real design challenge to admit the right amount of negotiation that meaningfully rewards the interpretation of a complex game state and the artful persuasion of competitors, while also allowing the game to proceed with reasonable pace and minimal exasperation.
Like its predecessor HIS, VQ solves this challenge elegantly: a time-limited negotiation phase each turn that requires players to look at the game state anew, appraise their newly acquired cards, craft agreements with each other, and then announce them in sequence, while immediately adjusting the game state accordingly if — and only if — they are ratified by both parties. The scope of the binding, game-state changing agreements is broad — card/treasure transfers, military transfers, alliances, marriages, control of spaces on the map — but the scope of non-binding (and undisclosed) agreements is considerably broader still. Players can agree on playing events in the turn to follow, information exchanges, contingent actions, phony wars, multi-turn arrangements, and so on, limited only by creativity and negotiation time. (Time is another facet of “diplomatic efficiency”: you have to conceive, present, and close agreements within a limited time period…10-15 minutes in our group.) Once time is up, announcement and ratification follows, then declarations of war, then regular actions. By sequencing the diplomatic flow of the game in this way — (1) wheeling and dealing in private, then (2) formally ratifying (or rejecting) binding agreements, and then (3) playing without negotiation until the next turn — VQ imposes order on what could be an endless negotiation scrum. As a bonus, it also generates a special kind of tension from incomplete information in the main action phase. What can I infer about the secret commitments my opponents agreed to, in light of what was publicly announced? Which agreements have been settled at this point in the turn and which remain to be fulfilled? And will my counterparties follow through on what was promised?? To the extent a game wants to involve negotiation as a fundamental axis, this is a brilliant way to do it.
Fifth, high accountability and a satisfyingly high return-to-skill. Decisions are consequential, reverberating many turns into the game, and skillful play will be rewarded with game success. This follows from my earlier claims about tactical and strategic depth. To be clear, VQ is not perfect on these dimensions. Euro masterpieces like Gaia Project, Imperial, and Brass, virtually every Splotter game, and 18xx all have super-strong accountability with zero or negligible luck. And there are many games with high variance resolution that provide higher return-to-skill than VQ — say Twilight Struggle, War of the Ring, or backgammon and poker. VQ does trade-off some accountability and return-to-skill in its consequential die rolls, distribution of cards, and high multi-player clash. Where I find VQ remarkable and rewarding is the breadth of skill that it exercises. Played to its potential, the game requires (1) resource management, (2) deck awareness, (3) diplomatic persuasion, (4) intersubjective inference, (5) spatial calculation, (6) risk management and probability intuition, and (to use an unsatisfying phrase) (7) “strategic planning” in almost every action of every turn. VQ is not the apotheosis of each of these game skills in isolation, but IMO is the only game that synthesizes them all — and to such a high degree.
Sixth and last on my list, superb emergent narrative. As I reflect on the many games I’ve played, the most enjoyable and memorable have told a story. To do so, there must be depth, character, surprise — and, yes, duration. Every game genre has its distinctive beauty, but I am drawn to the “epic” end — TI4, Mage Knight, Western Empires, Rise and Decline of the 3rd Reich, Seven Ages, John Company2. These games all tell a story through a set of events that are finite and essentially known in advance. All the delight comes from participating in the complex variations that unfold: “Spain worked out a one-turn deal with the Ottomans to cede Malta and Tunis in exchange for directing piracy toward the French, but then allowed his undeveloped fleet to get slaughtered in Messina in T2. This, combined with a hapless HRE, who was emboldened by his early successful marriages to attempt a failed misadventure in Metz, allowed the Ottomans to get within striking distance of a military auto-win, so Spain couldn’t contribute to Protestant suppression. The Protestants were able to get all three Dutch key spaces and to take Rouen, with a key ‘Army Mutiny’ event and a bribe of the English for a one-turn use of its fleet in exchange for a mercenary unit and playing ‘Scottish Lord Rebel’ at an opportune moment for the English…” And so on and so on. No mere pushing around of trains and woodland creatures can possibly match this richness of story. It is not a story of discovery and adventure in the manner of a RPG, but something I enjoy much more: an iterated chronicle of intellectual contest with friends, using the events and locales of a chapter of history, evolving like a theme-and-variations work of music.
And that, my fellow nerds, is why I love this game.
Now, having praised the game to high heaven, I want to address three other topics: (1) a contrast to HIS, (2) criticisms, and (3) practical advice and support for playing VQ in your group.
Contrast to HIS
Like their rulesets, most of the praise above about VQ also applies to HIS, a game I also love but have admittedly played significantly fewer times at this point. My primary reason for favoring the later game parallel those of designer Ed Beach in his notes: the dramatically improved efficiency of the religious struggle resolution in VQ, and avoiding the two religious combatants (Papacy and Protestants) going right after each other. Every game of HIS features a huge number of dice rolls between these two powers in a contest that, yes, is highly relevant to the balance of power and therefore to everyone, but takes a long time to resolve and is hard for everyone else to engage in while two players in sequence engage in a rather repetitive battle each turn. This improvement in VQ accounts for the bulk of my preference, but also on the list are: (1) the ingenious marriage dynamic which renders diplomacy in T1 especially interesting; (2) the artistic/scientific patronage minigame that add an offboard contest that provides alternate paths to victory without overwhelming the fundamentally territorial nature of the game; (3) the option of piracy for all powers (not just the Ottomans, as in HIS), which really enriches the naval contest, as mentioned earlier; (4) a much more interesting New World conflict; and (5) a host of minor rule changes that I think improve the game (though I know some here disagree, especially about ceding spaces and resolution of wars). I do not simplistically believe that more options are better, but I believe VQ leads to more varied game states and therefore a bigger tree of strategic options. But none of these considerations would inhibit me from enthusiastically playing HIS at any opportunity.
Criticisms
Is VQ flawless? Of course not, but to me its deficiencies are remediable and all but disappear with experience.
The rules are a natural place to start. I am generally impatient with boardgamers’ complaints about game rules. It is extremely rare that close reading of the rules does not yield clear answers, especially when augmented with good-faith judgment. And when reviewers criticize the ways rulesets are written in aggregate, IMO they are usually just expressing their preference for simpler games. It’s hard to write a large ruleset fluently while covering all the potential ambiguities that can arise. Readers must do their part. All of this is true of VQ…just more so.
And yet VQ could do better. First, the most complicated sections often enumerate procedures rather than provide an intuitive explanation. For example, the rules for naval movement involve rotating stacks of ships 90-degrees after they’ve moved under certain conditions, and then rotating them back at a different point in the resolution process. The procedure is mystifying (and hard to remember in its details) without understanding the reason: ships moving to a zone not already occupied by friendly ships are exposed to interception; once they survive that possibility, they can “anchor” the space for subsequently entering friendly ships. While I appreciate the precise version of the procedure in the rules, it impedes comprehension and is certainly not how I would teach them to a new player. More intuitive or thematic explanation would really benefit the most complex sections — namely, naval movement, spring deployment and “wintering,” siege/assault of fortified spaces, religion, and activation of neutral powers.
The last of these intersects with the game’s initial setup in an especially confusing way: the game starts with England holding Dublin, but it does so as a conqueror, not as an ally, a situation one is supposed to understand by looking at the diplomatic status chart. This means that if a different power, say France, wins a diplomatic resolution of Ireland (triggered by an event), that resolution does not automatically switch control of Dublin to the new ally (who has to take Dublin by force if he wants it). If England wins the diplomatic resolution, he is able to “deactivate” Ireland — disconnecting Ireland from its possible allies — but England can only actually control Ireland via conquest. Contrast this to Edinburgh, which starts the game controlled by France as an ally, meaning that when Scotland’s status is resolved France will be ejected from Edinburgh if he does not win the right to remain its ally. Complicating matters, a specific event card, Scottish Lords Rebel, causes a special diplomatic check for Scotland in which all losing powers are ejected from Scotland — even if they were a conqueror! While this is all strictly defined by the procedures (in the Rulebook) and the initial setup (in the Campaign Book) and the diplomatic status chart (a separate sheet) and the text of the Scottish Lords card, it is highly opaque, splintered in four places, and confusing for any new player not carefully inducted into the rules by an experienced rules teacher — an obligation which should have been met by the rules themselves.
This general need for narrative intuition applies to much of VQ’s “content” — i.e., the unique events and rules that animate the game’s historical context and instantiate the asymmetry between powers. A partial list of these:
* status of Ireland and special resolution rules,
* status of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, and Scottish Lords Rebel event;
* status of Portugal and King Sebastian event;
* espionage vs. England, including assassination of Elizabeth and the ECR;
* Elizabeth I’s marriage, powers, and possible excommunication or assassination;
* The Ottoman’s leadership changes through the game;
* Malta and the Knights of St. John;
* the Catholic League;
* the Suez Canal;
* England’s explorers, naval leaders, and fleets;
* Papal Bull and Holy League events;
* all the home cards of each power
These mini-dramas provide fantastic texture to the emergent narrative I praised earlier, so I do not argue for their simplification or removal. However, IMO the rules would benefit immensely by (1) presenting each rule section with intuition, (2) explicating the base procedure as concisely as possible in bullet points while (3) highlighting places for (4a) deeper clarification for corner cases and (4b) exceptions for historical color. This approach would have the benefit of making the rules shorter, easier to internalize, and much easier to reference.
I do think there are a few game elements that gild the lily. The worst offender is the special ruleset for the Dutch waterways, which have some but not all of the features of ports. Not only does this add complexity without significant tactical/strategic interest, it does so in the most visually crowded part of the board. Five games in and my group was still checking the rules governing those few spaces! Another questionable element: Jesuits. These too add complexity, crowd the board with a special kind of token, and are essentially single purpose (enhancing the chance of the ECR). It would have been more elegant to incorporate the theme in card events. I could name a few others, but the overall point is that some of that chrome could have been invested in game elements that generate (yet) more interesting decisions.
I have a more serious question about the distribution of cards. The spread of values is considerable: 1 to 5 command points, and events that range from inconsequential to a high likelihood of a VP and/or conquest of a key space. Given a hand size that could be as small as 3-4 cards (+ home card), it is possible to draw a hand so weak that it curtails effective action for an entire turn. Now, mostly I think this is “part of the game,” and playing any game well means dealing with inevitable spells of bad luck (and exploiting those of your opponents). Also, diplomacy provides strong mitigants for a weak hand: you can negotiate to draw cards from opponents in exchange for significant actions in their favor (this turn or in the future); you can negotiate to give away your cards in exchange for actions in your favor, knowing that the random card draw you are giving your opponent won’t help them much. You can always lean on the balance of power to direct attention toward more threatening opposition. But I think the bottom end of the power spread is just a bit too weak, with 1-value cards being terrible: they are useless for many of the key actions in the game, including religious conversion, buying a standard ship or regular land unit, undertaking piracy, or sponsoring an artist — all of which take at least 2CP. IMO it would have been better to keep 1-value cards but tied to stronger, perhaps highly situational, events that reward finding non-obvious uses. (As it is, I personally would support a mulligan house rule allowing each player to redraw their entire hand once per game, or possibly allowing this only for the powers currently in 5th and 6th place. I think this would enhance game enjoyment and even add a small additional skill element without distorting the game at all. I haven’t tried these but intend to propose them for my group’s forthcoming VQ tournament…)
I save my most serious complaint for last: ergonomics. I hope in vain for the day when masterpieces of game design like VQ earn the same aesthetic attention as dozens of grotesquely bloated Kickstarter reprises of game design mediocrity. VQ’s hundreds of tiny cardboard chits, the space-wasting charts crammed with addenda to the rulebook, the flimsy plastic standees constantly getting knocked over, the frequent need to pull off, inspect, and manipulate a stack of military units and control markers on a space, the lack of enough Unrest markers (!) — all of these are indignities unworthy of this majestic game. It’s like listening to Beethoven on a phone speaker.
Practical advice for playing VQ
First, rules. More than other games, VQ requires a game master to induct new players in the game. Learning the rules as a group for the first time is a formula for frustration and possibly a failed experience. If the GM is not someone who has played before, he must invest the effort to fully internalize the rules in advance. It would not hurt to set up the game and play a full turn solo. Based on my experience, a properly equipped VQ-experienced GM can teach the rules in 60-90 minutes; a game-experienced GM can do it in, say, 90-120. As with any complex game, mistakes will be made the first time.
In teaching the rules, I recommend setting up and walking through examples of the eight most complex parts of the rules:
Naval movement, interception, and combat
Land movement, siege, and assault
Spring deployment
Wintering
Unrest
Religious conversion
Protestant rebellion
Minor power activation (including special rules for Scotland, Ireland, and Portugal)
Once these are understood and demonstrated, that is ~60% of the total rules and over 80% of the areas that can cause frustration for not understanding in advance of a game situation, with the remainder coming from the historical context list mentioned above. And following this, it is very helpful to provide at least initial strategic guidance to each power, along the lines of what I described with England’s general game options. Simply describing the victory conditions is too high-level for the first play.
Second, ergonomics. I commend to anyone sharing any of my obsession with this game the following retrofits:
(1) Reprinting the board on neoprene. The map file here on BGG isn’t hi-res, but it worked out fine to create a higher-quality, less slippery playing surface
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(2) Replacing plastic standees with stable cylinders for military/naval leaders. They now virtually never fall over.
(3) Off-board leader cards to hold accompanying land units. This displays the size of the stack, simplifies the board, and makes all manipulation of pieces much easier.
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(4) Treasure tiles glued onto wood blocks. These tiles are small and are always face down, which makes them annoying to inspect and draw at random without looking accidentally. This solves both issues.
(5) Mounting tiles representing VPs, sea captains, royals, and everything else onto colored wood blocks. This makes them easier to see and manipulate, as well as being more visually appealing than the tiny cardboard chits.
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(6) Black cubes to represent unrest and white cubes to represent Protestant religious control. This is a vastly better system than using the (inexplicably limited supply of) Unrest markers and flipping the hexagonal control tiles to represent religion.
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(7) Reimplementation of the off-board charts for VPs, marriages, religion, diplomacy, and artist/scientists. The game’s charts are wasteful of space and have a lot of superfluous text and graphics. Even with the space allowances necessary for the mounted blocks, you can save considerable table space and improve visibility with this redesign.
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(8) Compact player aids summarizing game phases, and all the easy to forget rules/procedures for the games subsystems.
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As I mentioned some ~6,000 words ago, only for VQ have I undertaken any close to this level of effort. It has been worth it but was more than I would have undertaken had I known at the outset. To facilitate the path for others, I will upload the files for (7) and (8) — and eventually, also a manifest of components to do the retrofit, a teaching script for use over the board, a thematic inventory and explainer of the historical content elements, and a list of easily overlooked rules.
In closing, I return to the list of seemingly terrible attributes with which I began. A dull historical setting? No, a fascinating period of intellectual, religious, and cultural foment in the first century of the Renaissance, whose struggles reverberate into modernity. An excessively complex ruleset? No, a logical and complete harness to support phenomenal tactical and strategic clash. An intolerably long duration? No, a uniquely immersive and satisfying multiplayer experience rewarding almost every form of skill in boardgames. An annoyingly fiddly pile of cardboard chits? Well, yes, but that’s somewhat fixable!
I declare it my favorite 5p+ game by far and in my top 3 overall.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
