Daimyo of the South - "I'm going to spend 6 Pass Tokens"

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.

Daimyo of the South 2019

I have made plans to play in Daimyo of the South at the end of the month.  I’m planning to bring my Prefecture of Ryu down in order to test things out and see how the warband functions against a wider range of opponents.  My main issue is getting all my models painted in time.

Towards that end, I am frantically painting in my spare time.  While my warband only has Kenta and a pair of Yarimen to paint up, I've just realised that my warband can use a sideboard so I should probably get some Goshi done too.  The Yarimen are horrific miniatures by modern standards, but I’m getting them done since I can guarantee they’re going to be in 95% of all my Prefecture warbands.  They should hopefully get resculpts in the not-too-distant future, and I'd like to replace them with some more modern sculpts.

The Risen Sun profiles are now effectively locked.  Overall, I feel we've done an excellent job of refining and tuning the profiles to bring them to a state where they should all be useful.  I'm sure there is a dud or two in there (Fai-ginn, I'm looking at you), but we've tried to make everyone have a purpose and be in consideration for a spot in each warband.

Testing Base

There appears to be a noticeable increase in the number of testers for Risen Sun, which can only be a good thing.  More feedback is always better at this stage, though some of the feedback is directly opposite my own.

I'm really enjoying painting my Prefecture, which is something I wasn't expecting.  I'm usually not a fan of painting armour, but something about the samurai armour just works for me.  Iiju has some awkwardness going on with how his hands join at the wrist, so I might end up using a plastic version from Rise of the Kage instead if he doesn't come out as well as I'd like.  So far though he's coming along pretty well.  Once he's complete I'll have done all the Hare clan models.

Given that there are more playtesters, there still isn't anyone else testing out the Jung Pirates, so I've been putting my Prefecture aside to test out the Jung.  So far I've found that Queen of the Waves is a very good theme for the Kami of the Morning Dew since you can place it in BtB with a friendly model and reliably get the heal off.  It’s often a bit of a trade off between getting a Heal off or being able to surprise an enemy model.  Next up for testing of Hibiki.  Could be interesting.

With new terrain deployment rules I'm finding that smaller warbands can quite easily function just as well as the larger ones.  This may be a reflection of the test scenario I’ve been using, since it encourages a simple punch up in the middle of the board.  I’ll have to design some new scenarios to help spread out warbands, preferable some that utilise the large based objective.