Enlightened Warlords: A Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2011

It’s one of the stranger aspects of printing books in our own plant: They can go from final approval of the last proof to printing to shipping in less than an hour. As the newly minted resident creative genius, it makes for a very satisfying instant gratification. I’ve even had a finished book in my hand 20 minutes after sending off the book’s introduction. Sometimes, technology really rocks.

Things weren’t quite that fast for our newest book, Enlightened Warlords: A Player’s Guide to Soldier Kings, but they did come pretty close to that standard. It’s a really pleasing package, at least from my standpoint as its author/editor, starting with Susan Robinson’s cover based on a period map of the Battle of Hastenbeck.

So what’s inside?

There’s an extensive section on game strategy, with each playable country getting its own full analysis. Doug McNair and William Sariego wrote these, and they’re pretty thorough. But they sort of bothered me: The suggested route for victory for some countries takes them down what I consider pretty wildly unrealistic paths. Prussia fighting for Italy, or Austria needing to grab territory in the Caribbean, just doesn’t match up with their objectives in making war.

And so each Major Power is given four national aspirations more in keeping with their actual goals. With these in place, a Major Power can win without engaging in strange moves and the areas fought over the most bitterly, like Silesia, take on their rightful importance.

Along the same lines, I wanted each Major Power to have more unique flavor. They actually have quite a bit more than one might think even in the standard game, thanks to the relative strength of their armies and navies and the abilities of their leaders, plus the bounds of geography. But I thought they needed more, and so each Major Power now adds two special powers: faster shipbuilding, easier recruiting in some places and that sort of thing. It adds a great deal of flavor and isn’t at all difficult to add to the game.

And then there’s a little alternative history. Gamers like to ask “what if” questions, but I don’t know that the Seven Years’ War is familiar enough to most to allow very deep indulgence in this tangent. So what we have are 11 possibilities, one of which you can add to your game as determined by dice roll (with the most likely to have occurred having the numbers most likely to be rolled). Europe spent the first half of the 18th century in constant warfare, and the course of the Seven Years’ War was largely determined by the outcomes of those wars that came before. Even very slight differences would change the goals and starting positions of 1756, and so we have a touch of this available to spice up your game play.

Finally, there’s the background. The war has a surprisingly slight historiography when compared to other conflicts, even though it had profound effects on the course of world history. So we look at the course of the war in Europe, which will let readers compare the course of their games to the actual events.

What got left out? I thought about adding a small cardstock map of the Middle East, but we didn’t price the book to support an insert and ultimately I decided it wasn’t the sort of thing we should include anyway — we couldn’t include any new pieces to go with it, and no actions took place there during the actual conflict. It would make Turkey somewhat more vulnerable while also giving her scope for expansion, but it’s not a particularly good addition to Soldier Kings. I also rejected using too much of the Daily Content we’ve posted for Soldier Kings over the years, preferring to concentrate on new material as much as possible.

Now that I get to concentrate on game production here at Avalanche Press, I’d like to see us issue more such supplements for our games. Enlightened Warlords adds a lot to Soldier Kings, and games like Soldier Emperor (due for re-issue in the next few weeks) or Red Russia would really benefit from such additions. We’ve done two of them for Third Reich and Great Pacific War, with a third one in the works, and they’ve been extremely popular. Pretty much this would add the same benefits of the new Playbook-style products (strategy, variants, background) to the larger boxed games.

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