This game has lots and lots of components, so many components that even though the game board is quite small you will still need loads of space to spread out the toys. Warrior Knights is a game of resource management and conquest, with mini-games in it, by which I mean that determining your actions for the turn and fighting battles are resolved with clever little mechanisms that feel like an extra layer of game play.

The map is a fictional region with pseudo-European names, but there is a really nice touch in that you can sail overseas to real medieval locations like Alexandria, and send expeditions to China. The number of players determines how many cities are placed on the board, each of which has a strength value ranging from 100 to 400. The players each get a stronghold with a strength value of 400 to place on the board.

You get a Baron card representing the guy that lives in the stronghold and four Noble cards corresponding to miniature knights that you move on the board. Your nobles each have a special ability that helps in combat, or allows them to command a small army without paying its wages. You get some army cards to put with these nobles, so you can spread our troops or create one big army.

The objective is to conquer half of the game board or collect the most influence points. You get one influence for each city that you control at the end of each game turn, and some of the event cards give players the opportunity to get more influence. There is a limited amount of influence chits, so when they run out at the end of a turn the game ends and you score up your totals.

The players each get a set of action cards that define what their options are during a turn. You lay up to two cards into each of the three phases along with the other players cards and two event cards in each, and shuffle them. Then you start the turn by drawing one card, passing it to the relevant player who resolves the card and then you draw another card. It can be a bit fiddly with passing the cards back and forth. 

The cards allow you to move a noble and his army, and/or make an assault against another army or a city, or collect taxes and so on. They also allow you to draw vote tokens that you use during an assembly, or faith tokens that you use to avoid suffering a bad event card, or to experience a good event card. There is a hell of a lot going on with these cards, and your choices change during the course of the game.

Once you have played a card it goes into one of three face up discard areas, called Taxation, Assembly and Wages. When one of these decks fills up you either collect taxation, use up your votes or pay your mercenaries. You can therefore manipulate these discard areas in your favour, and force players to pay for their mercenaries more often than they intended, by playing cards that go in the Wages discard area.

When it comes to the Assembly you will be voting on three cards, which might be a title that you give to a noble, or a law that comes into play and affects the rest of the game, or a motion to remove an existing law. The voting element is lots of fun, as you hold out the number of tokens you are putting into the vote, then reveal your tokens and vote a yes or no to determine the success of the vote.

In terms of combat you draw a bunch of fate cards that might say ‘Deal 100 Casualties’ or ‘Prevent 100 Casualties’, so you resolve the cards against each side in the battle to see if one side or other is destroyed. If both sides are still alive you count up the cards that have ‘+1 Victory’, and whoever has the most Victory points wins the battle. It is a lot more involved than just rolling dice, but it is still quick to resolve.

It is easy to see who is winning the game either through influence and/or conquest, so players can easily combine to slow down the winning player. Apart from the amount of rules to get used to in Warrior Knights, targeting the leader could become a drawback to the game given that it can extend the playing time in something like Risk, but in Warrior Knights the use of influence tokens reduces that problem.

The artwork throughout is excellent, most of the cards are a bit small although you get used to them after a while. Having to keep reshuffling the event cards, building the decks for the three game rounds and then shuffling them can become a pain. We ended up sorting this stuff out as a group, which cut down the ‘paperwork’, while one player was responsible for dealing out chits and another drew the action cards. 

Our first game took about five hours as there was a lot of rule checking, and I think even when you have played several games of Warrior Knights there will always be a certain amount of rules checking. There is just a ton of stuff to think about and several strategies to use, you can go all out to attack your opponents, form alliances and so on, or avoid your opponents and just go for influence points.

Warrior Knights is ideal for gamers that really enjoy a challenge. It is an excellent strategy wargame that has plenty of game mechanisms that cover politics and commerce as well as fighting. These extra layers are what I like best, as playing the game feels like running a medieval country. Warrior Knights is quite an immersive game, an exhausting experience perhaps, but still a lot of fun.