Background

Fantasy Flight Games' Britannia is a new edition of a game from the 1980s. The first edition was done by Gibson's Games in the UK in 1986, and in 1987 Avalon Hill published a slightly modified version of the game. After having been out of print for over a decade, the game has now been republished in a strongly revised form by Fantasy Flight Games in cooperation with the original author. I have played all three versions, and I will make a brief comparison between the new version and the older versions.

Short overview of the game

The game depicts the invasions of Britannia (England, Scotland and Wales), starting with the Romans in AD 43 and ending a few years after the Norman Conquest in AD 1085. Each player takes control of a subset of the 17 different nations over time, normally having 2-3 active nations at any one time. Each nation has its own objectives and ways to score points.

The game is designed for four players and works best that way, but it can be played by two to five players.

The game components

The game comes in a square box of the type used by FFG for their medium-sized games. The box contains a game board, the rules, 17 nation cards, 5 dice and over 500 game tokens of several types. Additionally, there is a plastic insert in the box, but this does not appear to be made for this game, as the throughs have the wrong size and shape to fit the components. From what I heard, the game manufacturer originally made an insert for this game, but due to technical problems, FFG threw it out and used an insert from some other game. Most people will anyway just throw away the insert and use Ziploc bags to hold the pieces, so it matters little.

The board is quite large, about twice as large as the board from the previous editions. It is beautifully coloured and quite sturdy. It depicts the main part of the British Isles (England, Scotland and Wales) and parts of Ireland and Normandy. The latter two are not used in the game, though. The board also has a list of nations in the order of play (though there is an error in this, see later), a Timeline (showing when new invaders arrive) and a population track (used for keeping track of population increase points).

The game units are of thick cardboard and also quite beautifully made. The main unit type is infantry, which shows a picture of a soldier of the nation in question. Since some of these pictures can be hard to distinguish at a glance, identification is additionally helped by a symbol and a background colour. While the symbols and colours are not unique, each combination of two is. The background colours correspond to the distribution of nations among players in the four-player game. The colours red, green, blue and yellow are used. This is the same as in the Avalon Hill version, except that purple has been changed to yellow. There are other tokens such as cavalry, leaders, Roman forts, Saxon burhs and population increase tokens, each coloured and marked to reflect the owning nation. Additionally, there are victory point tokens and a sword-shaped round marker.

Each nation has a nation card that shows when units appear for that nation and how it can earn victory points. The nation cards are identified by picture, sombol and colour in the same way as the army units, but unlike these the name of the nation is shown.

The 24-page rulebook is in full colour and in addition to the rules also has a short historical guideline and some strategy hints.

Overall, the quality and design is far better than the two previous versions, but you will need a larger table.

Unfortunately, the board has a serious misprint: The order of play of the Jutes and Saxons is reversed. The rule book also suffers from numerous misprints. Fortunately, you can download errata from FFG's website for Britannia. If it was not for these misprints, I would give top marks for the components.

Playing the game

Each game round in the main consists of each nation taking its own turn in the order listed on the map, but some rounds additionally has selection of Bretwalda (overlord) or King of England or a victory point phase, where nations gain points for occupying territory.

Ech nation turn consists in the main of gaining new units (both invaders and by increasing already settled population), moving and fighting. During movement, a unit can normally move up to two areas away from its starting point, but there are numerous special cases that complicate the rule somewhat. Combat is basically having each unit roll a dice and killing opponents for every roll of 5 or 6, but again there are many special cases. A battle can end either by one side retreating from battle or by elimination of one side (or both). I find the combat to have a large random factor, a bit too large for my taste, but I can't see how to reduce this without considerably complicating the game.

Victory points can be scored in many ways, and it is normally different for each nation. The main source of victory points (VP) is by occupying territory at the end of rounds 5, 7, 10, 13 and 16, but some nations also score for occupying areas at other times, for killing selected opponents (mostly Romans or enemy leaders) or for being elected Bretwalda or King.

Though all these special cases and differences between nations complicate an otherwise simple game, it is in main these that make the game interesting: They add flavour and strategic choices. Some people have criticized the game by being "scripted" by forcing each nation move in certain ways to maximize their score. I don't find this a problem, as a nation will rarely be able to achieve all of its potential victory points, so it will have to choose between what it can get. Also, there is a choice between scoring now or building up strength for later scoring, and the random element of combat also adds variation.

Playing the full four-player game will take at least four hours, considerably more if the players aren't experienced or if they insist om micro-management, extensive deal-making or whining. There are shorter scenarios, but the full game is clearly the best. There is a sizeable number of people who play the game by mail over the Internet to deal with the long playing time. A guide for playing Britannia over the Internet can be found at the designer's E-zine for Britannia-like games.

Comparison to the older versions

FFG's new edition of the game has much higher quality of components and a more pleasing graphical design. The decision to change purple to yellow seems a bit strange, though, as the yellow colour is less distint against the background of the map.

The rules do not to the same extent as the older versions suffer from underspecification, which made different people play quite different games even when using the same rules.

The rules are changed on a large number of points: Some rules are simplified, some rules are changed to better reflect the designers original intent and several new rules are added to add flavour, bring in more historical characters and events and to add more strategic choices.

It is possible to play the new game using the old board and components. The rules can be downloaded from FFG's webside and the components that are missing from the old game can be replaced by "borrowing" units from nation that are not in play. But if owners of the old game want to play more than one or two games, I still suggest buying the new.

Overall, I find the new game much superior to the older versions, though it is recognisably still (a variant of) the same game. The designer and publisher has refrained from "Germanising" (i.e., simplifyig and shortening) the game, which would have made it drastically different. A Germanised game inspired by Britannia would be interesting, but as a supplement to the classical game rather than as a replacement for it.

Conclusion

Since I bought the Gibson's Games version of Britannia in 1987, it has been one of my favourite games. The new version has not made this any less the case.

It is, however, not a game for everyone: The long playing time and the relative high complexity will not make it a game for casual play, and some of the more serious players may find the random element too high. For this reason I give it only four out of five marks for content.

The game production quality is excellent and it is quite beautiful. There are, however, some misprints that prevents me from awarding full points for style, so again I give four out of five.

The price ($39.95) is very reasonable for a game with the production quality and large component count of Britannia.

In consulting DriveThruRPG we've come up with a number of products which we think might be related, but some might be inaccurate because the name, Britannia, is so short. Nonetheless, take a look, as purchasing through the RPGnet Store helps to support RPGnet.