I spend the Mother's Day weekend visiting my parents, and actual Mother's Day playing Bushido at the Daimyo of the South tournament. The two locations proved to be conveniently close. I brought my Prefecture of Ryu, and honestly expected to get a rather middling placement with it. There are several incredibly obvious weaknesses in my Hare clan themed warband, but no one brought the right tools to exploit them.
My final standing was... Well I won the tournament. Weirdly that makes the current Daimyo of the South (me) one of the people who lives the furthest north. All of my games were quite hard work, more of an exercise in applying a sledgehammer than a scalpel in terms of combat. Generally the superior fighting skills of my warband would win out, but I had to go full Sun Tze after a bit of greed against James Goddard’s Death & Decay went badly for me. I actually managed to pull of a tactical feint.
Here are the key features of the Prefecture that I discovered:
- You will nearly always win the Tactical Roll.
- Pass Tokens do more than you think they do.
- Learn to place terrain to maximum advantage.
- Critical Strike may not be reliable, but it is terrifying.
Reliably winning the Tactical Roll every turn gives you a huge advantage over the opponent. It was really strange to play against Harukichi and have to worry that my opponent might win a Tactical Roll. I was able to dictate where a lot of the game was being played and get off Active Ki feats before my opponent could.
I'm finding the Prefecture is very good at fighting, but you do need to have a game plan before the game starts. It's very much a case of looking at the scenario, the opponent's warband, and then working around that. You literally need a Battle Plan. Being able to decide terrain placement was stupendously useful - I mostly just jammed up my opponent's side of the board with terrain and relied on Kioshi, Tactician, and a massive Scout value to make sure I started the game on good terms.
Vanguard proved to be a mission-critical choice of Special Card. Being able to get those ashigaru up the table allowed me to adopt my usual stance on winning games of Bushido: build up as much of a scenario point lead as quickly as possible, to the point where it is impossible for my opponent to score enough scenario points to equalise in a single turn. Two of my four games reached this stage. I may have lost the ability to hold the board, but my opponent simply couldn't score fast enough to catch up.
Pass Tokens. There's something of an art to using Pass Tokens. I had a number of turns where I didn't use them, but they allow for the precise application of force (for the lack of a better word). There were times where the opposing warbands weren't quite in melee range of each other, but I held the scenario advantage, so simply waiting for my opponent to come forward without burning activations was greatly beneficial to me.
So what's next? I'm going to play about with a few different Prefecture warbands. Katusmoto and Matsu both present options I haven't explored in the faction yet.
