Description
1 cardboard box measuring 15.2 x 10.5 x (h)5.35 cm including:
218 cards what the “FHQ” story game consists of and :
3 game aid cards which include some elements from the rulebook
A rulebook in French
A rulebook in English.
Total: 615g
This strategy game for 2, 3 or 4 players of medium complexity can be played in around 2 hours once the rules and the different cards have been understood; It can take up, spread out as much as possible, a surface area of approximately 100 x 80 cm.
The game aims to reproduce the conditions of rivalry between Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V during their reigns, a period of strong opposition but not exclusively military, hence an ad hoc mechanism.
However, although the objective is to simulate the way in which different historical events occurred or could have occurred in the context of Europe in the first half of the 16th century, it can be played even if you are not interested in historical references or if you are unfamiliar with history.
It is a card game and only a card game, that was the challenge: no need for dice, pawns and markers, pencils, note sheets. Shuffle the cards and you can begin immediately: ready to play and to think.
Each player, during successive rounds, exposes in front of him territories, colonies, artists, explorers, his sovereign, castles, armies, generals, his administration, his possible descendants, hires mercenaries, participates in the elections of the Holy Roman Empire; tries to influence the papacy, the Turks or the Protestants whose role is growing; obviously he can also fight battles. Victory is measured at the end of the final round and not gradually. Each player’s hand can include few or many cards; controlling this fluctuating number to reserve them for key moments is part of the strategy.
The rules of the game are rather short when you consider that you are dealing with a historical strategy game; nevertheless the booklets are enlarged due to the presence at their end (in the appendix) of a catalog which allows you to know the properties of each card. First the generic‘s one (their name is grayed out in the catalog but they do not bear the Roman numbering: military, territorial maps including “colonies”, Sovereigns, state maps, embellishments from the beginnings of the Renaissance etc.); then the stratagem’s one, the Roman numerals on the frame of the various stratagems refer to the number of the card catalog which explains them. Iconographic symbols on these cards serve to fix the memory (they are presented synthetically at the beginning of the catalog).
