This review, including photos from my games, originally appeared on my blog at: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/review-here-i-stand-by-ed-beach

I first played Here I Stand five years ago at a time when I was far less familiar with wargames. In fact I had recently purged my small game collection of every wargame I owned but Here I Stand because I had given up on finding time and people to play them with. Despite this, in 2018 I made the effort of gathering six of my friends and spending the entire day playing Here I Stand. It was amazing. It took us over eight hours. In the end I emerged victorious as the French, securing an instant victory moments before the Ottomans won on VPs earned mostly through piracy. I spent the next 24 hours buzzing with excitement and exhaustion after that phenomenal day of gaming. I had to get it back to the table, I needed that experience again. Finally, a child, a pandemic, and five years later I managed to play it again and let me tell you, it was just as good the second time!

I finally managed to play Here I Stand again thanks to Chimera Con - a single day board game convention in Dublin dedicated to long multiplayer games. Unsurprisingly, Here I Stand is a perennial favourite and this year there were two tables of it running at the con. Instead of playing the full scenario which starts in 1517 and lasts for hours and hours, we were playing the tournament scenario which begins in 1532 and lasts for three game turns; turns four through six of the main scenario. I also wanted to change up my experience by playing one of the religious factions, since France had been pretty much pure military, and so I was assigned the Protestants. We played for the much more manageable time of just under five hours - still a long game, but short enough that many of us managed to play other games in the afternoon. Once again, after finishing the game I was buzzing with excitement and exhaustion for at least 24 hours. I may have only played two games of Here I Stand, but I’ve spent thirteen hours of my life playing those games and many more obsessing over it. I cannot imagine that my opinions will change substantially no matter how many more times I play it, and I have some thoughts I need to put down on (digital) paper.

SOME NECESSARY BACKGROUND

Here I Stand is a six-player card driven wargame about European conflict between the years 1517 and 1555. Each player controls one of six major powers: England, France, the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Empire, the Papacy, or the Protestant Reformation. As befits a game with this many players covering such a wide topic, Here I stand is a game of substantial complexity. However, that complexity can be a little misleading. While the game as a whole is full of many different systems for modelling a range of potential actions, no player will interact with every one of these in a single game. The only person who really needs to know how every aspect of Here I Stand works is whoever has the onerous job of teaching the game to the rest of the table.

As an example, I was the Protestants in my most recent game. As the Protestants I had no access to ships, and thus I never needed to know how the several pages of naval rules worked. In contrast, my neighbour (both geographically in the game and at the table we were playing on), the Ottomans, needed to know the naval rules intimately but had no need to learn the rules for religious conflict, which made up most of my actions. Now, it is strategically beneficial to understand how each faction works so you can keep track of how they might be scoring points over the course of the game, but it is not necessary and that is a key distinction. You can play Here I Stand by only know about two-thirds of the rules, and that’s not nothing!

This asymmetry helps to keep the game manageable and is core to how it crafts an interesting experience. On their turn each player plays one card from their hand, either for the event or, more usually, for action points they can use during their turn. Each faction has a menu of actions they can spend points on but what options are available to an individual faction and, occasionally, the cost of those actions varies. This isn’t really where the game’s asymmetry comes in, though. These actions are the tools you use to play the game, but in most cases the game has just limited your actions to only those most relevant to your goals. To reuse a previous example, as the Protestant player I couldn’t build ships, but I also had no real motivation to want to do so, so removing this option was no great hindrance to me. How you win the game is where things get interesting.

The boring answer is that you generally win by getting victory points. However, how you get victory points can vary substantially between factions. All factions have some way to get VPs through controlling points on the board, but while most factions share a goal of fighting over key cities this is not universal. Beyond that, each faction generally has a way to earn their own VPs either through religious influence, building chateaus and cathedrals, having children, or piracy. Probably the most interesting element to Here I Stand’s victory conditions is how VP accumulation feels at the same time very slow and, occasionally, terrifyingly fast. This is a game where each VP can feel like a hard fought achievement but then at the same time in turn of my most recent game (a turn being approximately 5-7 card plays for each faction) the English player picked up like eight victory points, going from last to tied for first.

I could espouse at length about how this happens via the chaotic nature of conquest in Here I Stand and the occasional opportunities to seize a fistful of VPs that may come along only once per game, simultaneously lurching you ahead and putting a target on you, but I think describing the nitty gritty would be a disservice. What matters more is the excitement of it! Laying careful plans to slowly pull yourself ahead a few VPs at a time is great, particularly as you know that with the slow shifts in VP that the game allows it can be very hard to claw a leading player back down once you start pushing ahead. At the same time, if you are sitting near the back of the pack watching someone creep ahead you could potentially feel dispirited because you’re stuck behind, but all is not lost! Everyone’s focus being on the leading player could give you an opportunity to jump ahead by attacking a vulnerable point that someone forgot about! Here I Stand is not like the ever-popular multiplayer wargame COIN series in this regard. In my experience, a COIN game generally features players jockeying for the lead and then, as soon as someone gets too far ahead, everyone turning on them and pummeling them into submission. The goal in COIN is usually to be within striking distance of winning, but not actually winning, so that you can jump across that finish line at just the right moment.

Here I Stand absolutely has an element of players trying to keep an eye on who is in the lead and finding ways to pull them back, but it gives players nowhere near as many tools to do that with. For one thing, you can’t just attack players whenever you want – you have to have declared war on them at the start of that turn or have one of the very few cards in the game that let you declare war during a turn. If one player is creeping ahead it often falls to one or two of the other players to keep them in check, leaving the other three to plot how best to use this opportunity to secure their own fortunes. This means that more often than one player being dragged down a huge number of VPs, efforts will be put in place to curtail their advancement only for a new threat to emerge suddenly and distract the table anew. This dynamic is made possible thanks to the number of players and the limitations imposed, both mechanically and geographically, on each of those players. In both of my games one player managed to reach their victory threshold, and thus drew the ire of the table, only for a new threat to emerge in the final turn – in one case the new threat came out victorious while in the other it came up just short but both times it created a thrilling final act for the game!

Take for example my recent game. I was pulling ahead as the Protestant player and that meant that the Papacy and the Hapsburg player had to try and curtail my advancement. The papacy could try to reduce the reach of my religious conversions while the Hapsburgs could take electorates from me, netting them VPs and denying me ones. However, in doing this all attention turned away from England who chose then to launch a major invasion of France (who had left several cities largely undefended to pursue conquests in Italy), which saw them acquire VPs in spades while no one could stop them because they were only at war with France who was stuck in Italy!

A NOTE ON GAME SIZE

Here I Stand has a deserved reputation of being a game of enormous scale. This is both deserved and undeserved and I hope to explain why. Firstly, yes, Here I Stand requires six players. Do not be deceived by the box claiming it can be played at between two and six. This is a game destined to be a six-player experience and that is how I would recommend playing it.

As to its length, however, I have some thoughts. The full scenario is a day long experience, have no doubt about that. It lasts nine turns, and each turn will take you at least an hour to resolve, possibly quite a bit more. Even though there is a decent chance that your game won’t last all the way until turn nine, usually someone wins before then, it will still take many hours. It also won’t stop you from needing to put aside a full day to play the game, because even if you finish on turn seven you need to allow for the possibility of the full nine.

However, let me point you in the direction of the tournament scenario as an interesting alternative. In the tournament scenario you start the game in 1532, on turn four, and you play for three turns of the game. For my most recent game using this scenario we played for about five hours to resolve these three crucial turns during what would be the main scenario’s mid-game. I had worried that it would feel like a truncated experience, but honestly, I felt like it gave me most of what I love about Here I Stand in a much more manageable amount of time. I was really impressed, and I would recommend that people give it a shot – whether you are someone who wants to try this game but is struggling to find the time or if you’re a veteran who is always looking to play it more. It makes very few changes to the core game – players start with a few more cards on the first turn and on the final turn a key event is placed in the English player’s starting hand rather than shuffled into the deck – and gives you so much of that Here I Stand goodness in a half day experience.

That said, I won’t stop wanting to play the full scenario just because the tournament one is so good. There are a few elements that are missing from the tournament scenario and that will mean that I want to play both. In the early game, I missed the more antagonistic relationship between France and the Papacy of the 1517 start that isn’t present in 1532 – namely that the two are at war and France has invaded Italy. The tournament scenario also gives very few opportunities for dynastic change among the players which is an element of the game I really like. You will definitely see a new pope – in our game it happened immediately – and could potentially see a new English monarch or Protestant leader but neither is very likely. These rules don’t necessarily create a radical shift in the game, but if you’re into Here I Stand for the historical narrative (and why else would you be playing it?) then you will be missing out on some of that grand scope the game provides by including dynastic change among its mechanics.

WHAT DOESN’T QUITE WORK

Okay, so I adore this game to the point of obsession, but I am not going to sit here and tell you that it is flawless. This has not stopped me from loving the game, but I must confess that the religious conflict mechanics are a little bit…eh. For context, there are two main ways that the Catholic and Protestant players can convert regions of the board to either of their religious beliefs. They can take actions that let them try and convert specific points on the board or they can engage in religious debates.

Let’s talk first about converting spaces. Converting a space is a contested roll between the Catholic and Protestant player. Whoever is attempting the conversion selects a space and then both players calculate their dice pool based on a variety of factors such as adjacent spaces, presence of troops who support that religion, adjacency of key religious figures, any card effects that are in play this round, etc. Once each player has a total number of dice, they roll looking for the highest single die. Highest result, with whoever wins ties changing over the game, succeeds and the space is either converted or remains the same. I really like this mechanic and it’s a lot of fun…if you’re one of the players involved. Only two players take this action, and the Protestant player will take it far more, sometimes resolving six or more attempts in one turn while everyone else sits around and waits. It’s very time consuming and can cause the game to drag, particularly if you’re not invested in the result. As the Protestant player in my most recent game I had a blast doing this, but I could see the rest of the table groan whenever I had a big turn coming where I was going to try and convert a lot of spaces. It’s a cool mechanic but eliciting this response in a six-player game is not ideal.

The debate rules I like quite a bit less. The Protestant and Catholic player can call debates between their two sides, and these can be used to convert large swaths of territory all in one go and potentially secure victory points by burning or denouncing the opposing debater. The debates themselves work a bit like combat, players get pools of dice and try to score “hits” by rolling fives and sixes on them, but with more steps used to determine who the two debaters will be rather than just knowing who the two armies are because they’re on the board. This mechanism is clearly central to the vision of the game’s design – the Protestant player’s home card (a card that is always available to them every turn) includes specific abilities for using Martin Luther in debates. That said, they have not played a very significant role in either of my games. The rules are complicated and there’s a non-zero chance that after all the steps involved in determining debaters and dice pools and such you will end up with a draw or a very minimal result. The promise of burning heretics at the stake lying sadly out of reach. The two religious factions also have a huge pool of potential debaters, many of whom have useful abilities for other parts of the game, and they can be overwhelming to keep track of. I can’t help but think the potential for them to die has bolstered their number creating the vast surplus of counters for the two players to track. Maybe as I play Here I Stand more I will find a new appreciation for the debate rules, but in a game that is so hard to get to the table it just doesn’t feel like the debate rules totally work. They’re not fundamentally broken or anything, but they feel off and, again, they also take up quite a bit of time and often only interest two of the players at a table of six.

These religion rules are something that was apparently significantly streamlined in Virgin Queen (the sequel to Here I Stand) and I am desperate to play it and see for myself. Tragically, Virgin Queen was already out of print back when I first played Here I Stand half a decade ago and there is still no clear timeline on a new edition going forward. Maybe some day I will decide to go mad and drop a stack of cash on one of the few copies available on the second-hand market, but until then I live in hope that GMT will finally reprint it.

TO CONCLUDE

Let’s be honest, Here I Stand is obviously not a game for everyone. It’s huge, it’s long, it has forty pages of rules, over a hundred cards, and don’t get me started on the many little counters with their own special rules you have to juggle. It’s nowhere near the most complicated game out there, it’s honestly middle of the road as far as card drive games go, but it is still a lot to take on board even before you start factoring in that a short game takes four to five hours. That all having been said, I feel confident saying that Here I Stand is one of my favourite games of all time. Nothing else I have played gives me the same feeling of excitement as it does. After each game I spend the next 24-36 hours buzzing with excitement at what I just experienced. It sucks you in to its historical sandbox and gives you the freedom to pull some levers while also helping to guide you into understanding even some of what was happening during a particularly chaotic period in European history. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But I love it, nonetheless.

If after reading this entire review you think that Here I Stand sounds like a dreadful way to spend an afternoon or day, then please do not waste that time with it. Do not let my love for this game convince you to try it if you don’t think you would enjoy it. However, if after reading all of this you think that Here I Stand sounds fascinating, then you must play it. Nothing else will give you this experience, you must seek it out. Either way, trust your gut and what it tells you about Here I Stand. Mine tells me it’s hungry for more.