Rindis.com

I did a second round of Sekigahara with my dad last Wednesday, the day after our first game. We stuck with the same sides, but things went different from the beginning, partly because I had trouble forming a decent siege force as Ishida at first. Also, Maeda stayed in place for a while, so I grabbed Miyazu in the north during week 2, and then sat for a bit.

My dad slowly bottled up and reduced all resistance in the west, gaining an early lead on resources that lasted the rest of the game. He didn’t immediately take Aizu castle, but Uesugi was bottled up there, and he took Ueda. I sent an ‘efficient’ siege force into Anotsu to take it, and regain a lead in castles… and then had to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to shuffle forces in there, with the goal of taking out Fukushima in Kiyosu, and holding it to prevent any reinforcements from mustering there, and then taking Okazaki castle.

With the net drawing tighter around Uesugi, I drove south towards Edo, forcing troops to return there, and they then forced a battle with me. It was a bloody affair that I won, since I had a good four-block army that I could use to full impact, since I finally had some Uesugi cards, and I managed to successfully use a Loyalty Challenge to end the battle tied at 16-16. It was a Pyrrhic victory as I lost two of four blocks in the process, and kept the two three-mon Uesugis as a force that might possibly kill a block.

My dad also sent Maeda out to retake Miyazu, and I sneaked a four-block army into Kanazawa and took that in a seige. Despite trying to go first and have another battle at Kitanosho (or Tsuruga, I don’t remember), Tokugawa won the bid, and forced a follow-up battle at Kanazawa, which he won, leaving me one block. What he didn’t realize was that the one survivor in the castle, which had not deployed, was Ishida himself! I force-marched another army up there at the start of Week 7 and won that battle, driving his army out and retaining control of the castle.

I burned three cards in force marches on the ‘B’ turn of Week 7 to get everything juuust right and block my dad from getting far. He tried another fight at Kanazawa as the finale, but didn’t have the cards to deploy much and couldn’t win that fight either.

The VPs were 16 (6 castles + 4 resources) to 11 (3 castles + 5 resources), only 1 point closer than the first game. But in reality this was a tense game all the way through, as I never built up the really large hand I got last time (partly because of a number of forced marches), and more and more blocks were going to Tokugawa. I nearly lost the game at the first battle in Kanazawa, but had the foresight to keep Ishida hidden. Also, the successful Loyalty Challenge in Oyama kept Uesugi as a threat a bit longer, when my dad really needed that area wrapped up.

Situation at the end of the game.