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You wish to know where my true loyalties lie? Not with Any King or Queen but with the Meeples.
An authentic re-creation of most family game nights:
“Oops, sorry Siddy, didn't mean to hit your dude.”
“Nooooo, Don't invade me! Invade someone else, I'm your favorite child!”
“If you have to attack someone, attack Dad. He's teaching the game, he knows the most about it.”
“Smash Wade. Sure, he's in last place but he probably has a plan.”
I have long since accepted that I am the “Big Bad” at the table during family game nights. But as someone who really enjoys Area control and battle games, it still stings a little when I am the default target in almost any engagement. This is one of the reasons that A War of Whispers appealed to me: A game with all the of things I love about area control games but where you aren't directly linked any one of the factions. I mean, They can't target me if I'm nowhere on the board, right?!?
The theme of the game, playing as behind-the-scenes manipulators of realms, paired with the fact that you can shift allegiances during the course of the game means that you should have no reason to dedicate your support to one kingdom over another. What really reinforces this is that, at the beginning of the game, you take tokens for the five kingdoms and randomly place them on the support area of your board. This board has five spaces as well with different scoring opportunities: Devout x4, Dutiful x3, Affiliated x2, Unallied x0, Opposed x -1 and those are the modifiers for the cities each kingdom controls at the end of the game.
At the end of a round (except the last round), you are allowed to swap the position of two of these support tokens. The only caveat being that you must reveal the identity of the two kingdoms to everyone. This gives all the other players no doubt as to who you are reinforcing or actively working against. Since there are five total tokens/kingdoms, you can effectively do this twice during a game. So, there is almost zero reason to keep backing the Wolf Kingdom as city after city fall to the surrounding enemies....which, of course, is exactly what happens. Inevitably, you'll end up watching tribalism in action as a player will throw agent after agent into a doomed kingdom. Or maybe it's the sunk cost fallacy in action? Whatever, it's hilarious to watch.
Agent placement also has a few key twists that add to the espionage and excitement. The action takes place following a “path” around the edge of the board. Agents are placed on actions you wish to select. The twist is that, for that kingdom, if no one has selected any of the actions on the council before your action, you can also take those actions for “free.” Again, this can lead to some interesting situations. Maybe you only selected the action of a kingdom to draw one of their cards to team with a card you have in your hand in order to execute a specific, powerful action for your devout kingdom. But now, with two or three additional actions, you start considering poking your dirty fingers into their pie. Maybe you should try to push them ahead or try to set them up for failure? All, of course, risking the disdain of other players.
At the beginning of a round, you will remove an agent from the board and, in turn order, add two agents. So, the game gets tighter in an organic way. Maybe a little too tight when playing with a full compliment of four players. Which is why playing with the optional rule of letting you use one (or two) of your “agents” as a city is a must. You are allowed to place an agent directly on a location on the board, making them an additional city for kingdoms to control. You are sacrificing, at least, one action to double down on your “bet” of who will ultimately triumph. It's also putting a target on that location for all your opponents...unless, they also want the specific kingdom who is currently holding it to succeed. Then, maybe, they put their agent in the same space as well....which makes it an even bigger target for a different player. It's a vicious, delicious circle.
Alliances are inevitably, if not formally, formed with other players you think have the same objectives as you. Which is where the information you know about another player really comes into play. If you are both building up the number of banners (troops) for the Horse kingdom, you shape a informal bond....until they start throwing the same banners against a fortified enemy, reducing the Horse armies to zero. Support and sabotage can look an awfully lot alike in A War of Whispers.
As the game nears it's close, players will likely be supporting the same kingdoms for the top spots. So, it becomes a war (whisper?) of inches, with the support of the lesser-ran kingdoms and their decreased city point totals deciding who will come out on top.
My only real complaint about the components in the game is that the cities and farms are printed on the actual game board, which can lead to visual impairment when a host of “banners” (represented by cubes) are added to the board. Since there are plenty of council actions that say something like “Add two banners for every farm controlled by this empire” being able to quickly add these up really matters and, since each player can take actions for any empire, just because one player moved them around so they could see them, doesn't mean the next player sitting at a different angle will also be able to.
So, did my plan to not be the “Big Bad” actually work? Yes and No. Area Control is still one of the biggest parts of the game, even if they aren't your armies. While I wasn't specifically targeted by everyone while playing the game, A War of Whispers still gets lumped in with all of the Area Control games I adore and comes up against some stiff competition for table time when I can convince everyone to play that type of game. Maybe you'll have better luck getting it to the table. As they say, your mileage may Varys! (You didn't think I was going to be able to get that Game of Thrones pun in there, did you?)
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