Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done

Crusaders, Thy Will Be Done, wins the personal award that I just made up for a game that plays much faster than it looks. (I should note: I have only played this with the expansion. I have heard that playing this without the expansion is a Significantly Worse experience, so caveat emptor.)

For all its ponderous appearance, when this gets moving, it’s fast and brutal. Like the board game equivalent of the 1919 Boston Molasses disaster.

Crusaders has you playing as one of the knightly organisations in the crusades, conquering your way East as you build out your infrastructure and influence governments, until King Philip realises this growth has taken all his beautiful little metal victory point tokens, decides you’ve all become too powerful, and disbands you all. The DJ Khalid ‘suffering from success’ meme, 400 years ahead of its time.

You will start with a single solitary knight and a Big Pie of options with tokens on it. During your turn you can take a piece of the action pie: move your knight, influence a territory (read: take its bonus tile), power up your knight, build a building, or fight. That’s your turn, with the power of the action determined by the number of tokens on it. And then all the little tokens on that space get spread onto the following pie pieces, with each token powering up the action. 

But beware! - you don’t get a bonus for exceeding the power of the action, so if you want to move two spaces but have five tokens, or build a three cost building but have six, all the surplus are effectively ‘lost’ as they spread back onto the board.

It clicks easily and narrows the possibility space - you want to take actions in a way that allows you to efficiently do follow-on actions. If I move here, then build a monastery, then influence here, I will have enough to move again here and fight off the Saracens here, my perfect astrolabe of action economy neatly spinning around a victory point core.

Easier said than done, when there are up to three other knights galavanting over the same map spaces you’re eyeing. I am sure there are people who can go very deep into their mind palace here, but for most of us with only a 1700s chivalric templars education to go on (peaked at basic literacy and then got the swords out), you’re going to be looking two to three turns ahead while surreptitiously eyeing anyone close enough to you to be a threat. In this regard, it is a lot like planning a route home on the NYC subway after a night out.

This is enough to let you feel that you are being a little strategic without feeling overwhelmed, and the constant little math of trying to optimise actions and pivoting around others is a nice little hum of thought to the brain juice.

And then before you can say ‘is this game problematic in 2022’, it’s over, with everyone at the table lamenting that they were Just One Turn away from getting that last church, battle, or influence token. All those upgrades and pieces laid out in the original picture? You’ll get through a third of them, if you’re lucky, leaving you to wonder for next time. And then there’s all the different little rule breaking abilities of each order to try out.