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After wrapping up our long, long session of The Little Land, Mark and I decided to try out Congress of Vienna, largely with an eye to introducing it to the full group. With two players, one is France, and the other is all the coalition partners. There’s some interesting ideas on how to manage this, but it’s still got problems and I don’t think it’s balanced (I’m not sure you can balance it). We also went for the introductory scenario, which starts on turn 2 (May 1813), and runs until the Armistice (with a longer variation that runs until Austria is in the war).

The general idea is that everyone gets a hand of cards that they use to negotiate issues, and then can keep a few to help out in battles on the abstracted military map. These aren’t small hands, with the minimum being ten cards, and the spread here was from eleven to fourteen. As the coalition player, I got the entire hands of Britain, Russia, and Austria… less five cards. That is the main penalty for being all one cooperative group mind, and it’s not enough, since other than a few gambits, you’re not going to waste time/cards negotiating with yourself (there are reasons to do it, they’re just generally not good enough). The more clever bit is that you only have eleven of the cards face up at any one time, so you start out not knowing what nearly two thirds of your cards are, and can only do limited planning ahead.

The turn starts with a couple “initial situation” mechanics, which put a few items on the negotiating table, and kicked the War of 1812 to quite active, with four American militia units and a guaranteed battle. The heart of the game is the negotiation phase, and normally, you put out a card, use it’s value plus any bonuses, to move an issue towards your position. Then you go around the table, with everyone getting a chance to debate the issue (only one debate, first-come first-served). With the collective mind, I could just move things as I wanted, and only Mark would be debating. That costs a card as well, and he only gets so many cards. So, you can do lots of things France wants to object to, but then he runs out of resources.

The primary goal in this scenario is for one of the other four powers to overtake France’s VPs (with Russia being closest at 10 VPs behind at the start), so I successfully worked towards Russia “winning” the negotiations by having the most issues in their track, which grants a VP. Russia ended with six issues, including Sweden At War, Poland (a VP and unit), and control of a French Military Operation. That last was a surprise, as we expected foreign control to abort it, but it just forces that country to attack where you want them to.

An interesting wrinkle is that everyone has resources, and then spends them to activate the various issues, with a priority system saying what must be done (with British subsidies being the first order of business). With turn 2 being a replacement turn and everyone recruiting (this costs a VP), plenty of new units poured in (this is by design for the introductory scenario…), and there were military ops in almost every legal track/front (A/Poland being the exception). The combat system is nice for a game trying to keep things abstract—you total up modifiers (starting with your army’s size), and roll a d10 as a final modifier, and you each do casualties off that, rather like impact in Sekigahara. However, you only win by doing more casualties than the enemy, and only two places had clear-cut victories: the British got a +8/+2 (1 to 0 casualty) victory in southern Spain, taking Valencia, and a +15/+12 (2/1) victory in the War of 1812. This last moves its status to a British advantage, which gives them +1 VP per turn while it lasts.

Overall, some headway had been made towards victory, with France still at 25 VP (down 2 for losing Valencia, and up 2 for controlling Castile), while Russia was up to 17, Austria to 11, and Britain to 7.

The second turn (Turn 3) puts the Armistice issue on the negotiation table, and we had somewhat more event-ful negotiations. Or at least I did, using Liverpool to boost the Pax Britannia roll, Gambier to put a military op in the War of 1812, and Fernando VII to negate VPs for French control of Castile. Russia got the victory for negotiations again, but disaster was looming, though we didn’t realize it.

The other hard cutoff for the scenario is it ends when the armistice starts. We had long since forgotten this, and since Austria won’t get into the war until the armistice ends, I had arranged for it to be negotiated. Mark wanted the break on the drain on his resources, I wanted to create more drain, after a small pause. With the armistice signed, and an operation already in place in America, we were limited to a pair of mutual attacks in Spain, which were both draws. However, I had a pile of cards for the War of 1812 (I had mis-read them to think I could only use them there, when they just meant to say I got extra bonuses there if the war status was pro-US) and won fairly handily, shifting it to the +2 status, and a possible peace next turn.

Afterword

Shortly after that, while we were going through the end-of-turn VP adjustments, we (re-)found the scenario rule about it ending at the end of the turn of the armistice. We could have changed things, we could have gone over to the longer version that wants Austria in the war first, but we had done our primary goal of learning the main systems of the game.

As it was, final VPs were: French, 30 (including Napoleon surviving as Emperor, and considering if I had passed him, that doesn’t count, he was at 26), Russia 21, Austria 15, and Britain 10. I was definitely catching up, and at this rate needed another two turns or so to get Russia to a win.

The two-player rules work, but at best feel horribly off-kilter. Despite some diplomacy advantages, France isn’t going to get far against a really united coalition.

The game itself is good. A large part of it is going to be the interplay of four people fighting over the various issues, which we didn’t get to have, but the mechanics themselves are good. We are certainly looking forward to trying it in the group.