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Starling Games - A War of Whispers (2nd Edition) - Board Game, HPSSTG1804EN

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During the Swap Phase, the players have the chance to trade any of their unrevealed tokens. All they have to do is switch the slots in which the tokens are found, flipping them up so that the empire symbols can be seen. They are no longer able to be swapped once they have been. After they have swapped everything, the players will discard any of the empire cards that they have in their hands until they have only five cards remaining.

Informing and refining strategic plans – Wargaming provides a platform for decision-makers and military strategists to develop and refine their decision-making skills. It offers an opportunity for commanders and strategists with different strategies to assess the potential outcomes of their decisions. In other words, wargaming can help our senior-level war college students refine their decision-making skills and make better-informed decisions in real-world situations. You start the game with five loyalty tokens, each corresponding to one of the five different empires, bet randomly on a loyalty value. Your primary goal is to ensure that when the game ends, the empires you are most loyal to control the most cities across the globe. Gameplay consists of turns broken down into four phases: For those seeking an immersive and strategic gaming experience in the “human dimension” of the information environment, War of Whispers offers a unique opportunity to test your skills in a world of political intrigue. Playing the game can hone one’s strategic decision-making, adaptability, critical thinking abilities, and understanding of the complexity involved in influence. Further, it allows students to practice deception in an experimental environment and better understand broad concepts in the art of persuasion. As such, it offers an opportunity for educators who want to teach information advantage experientially. So whether you are a trailblazer in gaming or just looking to create a memorable experience for your students regarding the nature of information advantage, consider using COTS wargames to teach. Our team took a chance on War of Whispers and found the payoff high for the required effort. Using War of Whispers helped our elective students (all senior joint warfighters) comprehend and apply critical concepts when navigating the information environment.

Game Play

In A War of Whispers each Empire is a bit different but functions under 3 general types of actions. The first will spawn banners. Banners are the armies of these Empires. While any regions matching the color of the Empire are automatically under their control, this can change if another Empire raises their banner in this region. Had my regular Cthulhu Wars crew over today. We usually try to start with something else (we've been playing a fair amount of Tiny Epic Crimes lately) and when talking about a couple other games, I...

Gameplay consists of turns, with each turn consisting of four phases. The board will direct the players to which phase they will complete. The players will complete the following phases: Deploy Agents Phase, Empire Turns Phase, Cleanup Phase, and Swap Phase. They will complete these four different phases completely before the next round begins. In A War of Whispers, it is whispers that will win the war fought between the five kingdoms. The players act as the secret society that bets on the results of the war, pulling strings that will put the war in their favor. A War of Whispers is a game of ever-shifting loyalties, hidden agendas, and deep strategy. SETUP Conquer cities, take forts, and subjugate the populace. However, wars are not won on the battlefield alone. In the courts and palaces, in the corridors of power, the spymasters operate. Behind the crown stand the people with the real power. Stands you.

Setup

The components are solid, and the circular board works perfectly for this game. The empires are asymmetric in set-up, which I’m glad for as it makes them feel at least a little different. The tokens and cubes representing the organizations and empires are fine, but they don’t really enhance the epicness this game is trying to capture, though they certainly don’t hinder it (a collector’s edition with miniatures is available if that’s your thing). The artwork is good, but they reuse a lot of the same illustrations for the cards, which is a missed opportunity for additional world-building.As for ideal player count, A War of Whispers is playable at 2, but best with 3 or 4. A War Of Whispers is a streamlined, fabulous piece of design. It’s brilliant, and up there with El Grandé and Brian Boru as my favourite area control games. You have varying loyalty to each of the factions and it is important for you to manage this throughout to ensure you maximise your points once the game ends. BE warned though, as once you decide to change your loyalty, other players will see where your loyalties lie and may just be able to take advantage of such information.

All that scheming, planning and manipulating is enough to cause a headache, however the satisfaction from pulling a master strike from behind the scenes, while outwitting and out bluffing your opponents around the table, just might be worth it. Executing council positions is how the empires move. As players take their agents’ council actions, empires will grow in power, invade other empires, and generally move around the board like a Risk game in fast-forward. It can be a lot of fun trying to deduce what empires your opponents are loyal to based on their actions. Some choose the blunt approach by filling their favored empire’s council positions and conquering cities left and right, while others prefer the more discrete approach, seemingly supporting an empire while working slowly to increase another’s territory. The war is the same every time. The board set in stone for the conflict to come. Our circular board tells us everything you need to know about the positions of the factions, but also how each turn will go.One of the most distinctive things about A War Of Whispers is the circular board. There aren’t too many games that do this these days, so it really stands out from a design perspective. One of the things I really like about the game is the way the shape of the board is integrated into the design. Each of the warring empires has an area around the side of the board with four slots, representing its council. Each council slot is essentially an action space, like in a worker-placement game. Thematically, this is great, because on your turn you’re placing agents into each council, influencing the direction in which that empire is going to build and grow. UPDATE 2: New game board uploaded! Minor but important changes to setup. Apparently, the original board I had uploaded was not the final print version. That has been rectified. This is how a war in the shadows evolves. When your agents are deployed to one of the 20 action spaces in the 5 different courts at the start of each round, we can proceed. Moving around the board you take actions based on your agent’s position in each court. Any spaces unoccupied before your agent are also yours for the taking, giving you multiple actions with one agent.

You seed your agents into the world, hoping they will establish themselves as the Sheriff, Steward, Marshal, or Chancellor of the various courts around the land. You place your agent on the space you want. Contemplating the actions your new position allows you to take, you smile and put your plans in motion. What’s this though? Another faction has taken the position below you and now all your plans are for nought! TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… A GAME OF THRONES: THE BOARD GAME Those who enjoy the scheming and the switching allegiances of A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, but don’t want to spend the whole day playing one game, will find what they are looking for in A War of Whispers. A small team of us at the U.S. Army War College, the service’s senior professional military education school in Carlisle, PA, recently noted how commercial games can help foster new levels of thinking. In an elective course entitled “The Joint Warfighter and the Information Environment” (JWIE), we incorporated the commercial wargame War of Whispers into the curriculum to help students stretch their intellectual muscles and apply information, influence, and deception concepts studied and discussed in bold and creative ways.Identifying potential risks and opportunities – Wargaming allows individuals and organizations to explore challenging scenarios and identify potential risks and opportunities. By simulating different situations, wargaming can reveal unexpected outcomes and highlight areas of weakness in strategic plans. Players might be able to spot locational strengths and weaknesses of each empire just by looking at the map. However, learning how to best utilise their actions and cards will take at least several turns, if not several games. Especially, since each action can be used not only to make that empire stronger, but also to sabotage it. At the start of the game you randomly place five empire tokens face down on your player mat. These are crucial to your score as they tell you which Empires will score you more points for control of cities. A War of Whispers is a competitive board game for 2 to 4 players. Five mighty empires are at war for the world, but you are no mighty ruler. Instead, you play a secret society that is betting on the results of this war while pulling strings to rig the results and ensure their bets pay off. A War of Whispers is a game of deep strategy, hidden agendas, and shifting loyalties. CDR Michael Posey is an active-duty Navy officer. Col Steven Tofte is an active-duty Air Force officer. Mr. Joseph Wheaton is an Army civilian. All three currently teach in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations for the resident education program at the School of Strategic Landpower at the U.S. Army War College.

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