Believe it or not, our game of Here I Stand by email is still going on! As I write this, we're in the second round of impulses in Turn 3's action phase. We're really enjoying the game, but one of the problems I mentioned in my introductory post has come up again: the board is starting to get very cluttered in places.
Here, for example, is Calais: we need to fit an English square control marker, fleet and three army tokens onto that space on the map, and it's a little bit challenging.
I mean yes, we can stack all three armies on top of each other, at which point no-one can see what's in the stack. This is highly inconvenient when playing by email, where everyone except the Sublime Porte is relying on pictures of the board. Even stacks become a challenge when, for instance, an army made up of regulars and mercenaries is besieging a key.
We've decided to implement a solution. Now, the Here I Stand board already has these nifty holding boxes for many of the capital cities on the board, as shown below.
War of the Ring did something similar: it basically had a box like this for every stronghold on the map, but also something ingenious: army boxes.
The square boxes are for strongholds: when one is placed under siege, very much like a key or fortress in Here I Stand, you put the garrison models in the stronghold box. The rectangular white boxes are army boxes. If it becomes difficult to fit all the models in an army on the board, you put them in an army box instead, and use the associated counter. You can see a Free Peoples army counter next to the number 1 box, and a Shadow army counter by the number 3 box. It's a really good system, and we're replicating it for Here I Stand.
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Here's the army boxes and counters my partner made:
Here are the counters on the board:
And here's the corresponding units in their boxes.
We'll see how this works, but I'm very optimistic it'll make the game board much easier to decipher.
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