Pax Pamir Second Edition - How to Play Solo (with 2nd printing rules)

i'm pete krauss with modern cardboard and in this video i show you how you can play pax premiere second edition anytime you want meaning we're going to look at how to play it solo if you missed the first video in the series which focuses on how to play this game multiplayer i put the link to the playlist in the description but if you've seen that or you already know how to play the game multiplayer style then let's get to it so for the solo game of pax premiere you're going to alternate turns with an automated opponent you operate called the wakan the wakan uses what i like to call a logic tree approach to the decision she makes which will learn and she also has some rules which differ from the human player to give you the feeling a bit that you aren't just playing against one player but maybe two other players so on the wacom's turn you'll draw a card which lists the actions she'll try to perform and this card also has selectors which show which market card she'll choose which region she'll choose from or what coalition she needs to be loyal to if any of that's needed she also uses a separate card priority reference you refer to anytime she needs to choose a card from her court or even sometimes from your court so i said the wakan differs from you in the way that she plays a bit before we talk about the differences let's talk about what's the same first so some things that are the same is the wakan has to have enough rupees to purchase cards from the market pay bribes and to pay for actions you'll see that dominance checks and scoring work the same for her as well she gets two actions on each of her turn and can take bonus actions from cards in her court that match the favored suit just like you where she's different though is that she uses an action called radicalize which combines the core actions you take of purchase and play into one action this seems really overpowered at first but it balances out by some automated things she does that are maybe not quite as smart as what a human player would do another difference of the wakan is that she is loyal to every coalition so thematically she's supposed to be like a radical new religion sweeping through the land and she does not discriminate between russian british or afghan by always being loyal to every coalition this means that she'll always score during a successful dominance check and she can hold patriots and prizes from each coalition and doesn't ever have to abandon an old loyalty lucky right well again these things are offset by some of the not so smart automated decisions the wakan makes from time to time the wakan will need to choose a loyalty to make decisions about what block she places on the map or what blocks she'll battle or move but always think of her as being loyal to all coalitions now there's a few smaller differences with the wacom that i'll point out as we go but i think this is enough info to get started by the way the wakan can also be added to a two-player game to spice it up a bit as an option we'll focus on the solo game here but i'll point out how the wakan would work in a two player game as we go there's just a couple small changes you'll need to make when adding the wakan to your game when putting your market deck together treat the wakan as a player so for the solo game each of your six piles will get seven court cards and then add your dominance check and event cards to this market deck the same as you would for the multiplayer game so make some space for the wakan a little bit more than you would for a normal player because at least in some of my games i keep having to shift the wakan around as its court can get quite big at times with the radicalized action shuffle the wakandak that looks like this and place him face down the wakan gets a player board and cylinders but no loyalty dial since she's loyal to all coalitions so you ask pete where the gifts go well they get placed on this wakan card that goes next to the player board and then you also want to keep the wakan's priority card close by the wakan always takes the first turn of the game for a two-player game the wakan is placed next to the player who chooses their loyalty last and the wakan still gets to take the first turn of the game [Music] so we're all set up and the wakan starts the game on her turn like you the wakan gets two actions and then she'll take any remaining bonus actions from any of her unused court cards she goes through cleanup and then returns over so i'll start by explaining how the wakan works when there is no dominance check card in the market and then we'll look at what changes a dominance check card in the market makes for her to take the wacon's turn you flip over the top card from the wakans deck and then take the top action if you can or skip to the next one if you can't if you get to the bottom of this list and the wacom still hasn't used her two actions then start at the top again the actions in the center of this card are made up of both card-based actions where the wakan will need to have a card in her court in order to take the action or the actions are variations of her core action of radical eyes remember that radicalize is a special action for the wakan that combines purchase and play into one action the wakan will almost always be able to use her two actions as you'll see with the radicalize action so for an example we look at this card and see that the first action is billed since the wakan doesn't have any cards in her court she won't be able to take any of the card-based actions yet so she skips to the next action of move she'll skip this action as well for the same reason as the first action and then moves to the bottom action of radicalize to take the radicalize action for the wakan we first refer to the red and black arrows along with the top of the wakon deck card to determine which card she'll purchase from the market the black arrow lets us know what column she'll purchase from and the red arrow lets us know what row she'll purchase from so for this example the wacon purchases a card from the second column bottom row so we go to the market and see that the second column bottom row is this card and this is one she'll purchase she'll spend two rupees and instead of adding this card to her hand it'll get added to her court and she doesn't have to pay a bribe because i don't rule her next she resolves her tribe impact icon here by placing one of her cylinders on the herat region if there were more than one card in her court then she would refer back to the red arrow to see if she places the card to the left or right of the other court cards as you see the red arrow points to right the wacon has one action left so we go to the top of the action stack again she still doesn't have a build action and she doesn't have any pieces to move even though she has the move action she can't use that so she'll have to use the radicalize action again again she chooses from column two bottom row but since this card is gone and she can't buy cards where she's placed a rupee this turn you just switch to the opposite row and she purchases the card from column two top row since i don't rule the trans-caspia region she doesn't have to pay me a bribe and then she adds this to the right of her court again this is because the red arrow points to right next she resolves the impact icon and places a spy on the transcaspia card because there's no cards in my court from transcaspia or any other cards from transcaspia on the table this ends the wakan's actions for the turn and even though this political card matches the favored suit she can't use either of the actions because she doesn't have any pieces to move nor does she have any cards that she could betray and we'll get to the betray action and you'll see why in just a minute so she can't take any bonus actions and finishes her turn by refilling the market and then she passes the turnover to you which you would just take your turn like we did in the first video not too bad so far so let's look at some other scenarios the wakan will get herself into when taking the radicalized action so at times in the game the wakan will inevitably not be able to afford the designated card in the market let's go back to our scenario where the wakan is supposed to buy the bottom card from column 2 but this time let's say she doesn't have any rupees if this is the case you keep moving to the left of the indicated card until there's a card she can afford since the wakan has no rupees she'll purchase the card from the bottom row of the zero column all right and then we'll say she gets to take the radicalize action again on this turn and she'll do the same thing except this time in the top row so she continues to move to the left until there's a card she can afford and since she doesn't have any rupees she'll purchase the zero column card from the top row if the wacom radicalizes a card where she can't afford a bribe she has to pay to you because you rule the region she must instantly discard the newly purchased card maybe a strategy is making sure that the wacom runs out of rupees so now that you know how to take the plane radicalize action let's move on to the radicalized action which includes special instructions that you will encounter when there's a radicalized action which contains a condition like radicalize a card that would place the most armies and or roads or radicalizes a card that would place the most spies and tribes then you always look for a card in the market that is the best value that the wakan can afford if there's a tie then ties are broken with the cheapest card then purchase a card with the highest card number if there are no cards that meet the condition that the wacon can afford then skip this action and move to the next for example if i were to radicalize the card which places the most armies and or roads and i have two rupees i would look only at the cards in the two column and lower find the one which places the most armies and roads and then purchase that one so the last thing on adding cards to your court when you resolve impact icons for the wacon there's some tweaks that you'll make for the add army and add road impact icons use your wacom card to determine which blocks the wakan will use for the turn look at the three coalition icons at the top of the wacom card and start with the leftmost icon if no other player is loyal to that coalition this is the color blocks that the wacom will place for the turn she'll also use those to battle or move if she has those actions if someone is loyal to this coalition then move to the next icon from the left if you purchase a patriot for the wakan then you'd also use the same method when placing armies or roads for the patriot card and ignore the color of blocks the impact icon shows on that patriot card when placing roads you determine the border they're placed on by using the region selector found on the bottom of the current wakan card match the icon is found on the selector with the icons as found on the map start from the left and then work your way to the right if you make it through all the icons and still have roads to place start again at the left and then continue to work through the icons until all of your roads are placed so for example i need to place three roads from city of ghazni and one army the first thing i need to do is figure out what color blocks i'm going to place so i go over to this pragmatic loyalty selector and i see the first icon on the left is russian if we look at my loyalty i'm loyal to british so that means that the wakan is going to place russian blocks so i need to place three yellow roads in kabul so i go to my region selector and find my icons and the first road i'm going to place is between the border of kabul and punjab because punjab has a circle symbol if i move to the right then the next road is going to go between kabul and kandahar and if i move to the right again this is the symbol for persia that doesn't border kabul so i keep moving to the right and this is the border of herat and kabul which i can place a road on and then i just need to place one army on kabul and so now russia is the dominant coalition so when placing spies and there's more than one court card on the table from the same region use the priority reference card to narrow this down just to one card so in this example there's two cards on the table from transcaspia and i need to determine where to place the spy for the wakan start at the top of the card priority list and then work your way down until there's only one card remaining in my case the decision is to place the spy either on the wakan's newly placed card or on the card in my court the first line in the list says that i place a spy on an opponent's card so i place one of the wacon spies on my card if there were two cards from transcaspia in my court i would keep going down this list until only one card remained by the way the wacon does not place spies on cards where it already has the most spies so if this card already had one of my spies on it then we would go down the list until i found a card that it would work on i'm throwing this one in there because it has to do with impact icons and a difference for the wakan the leverage icon works the same when the wakan radicalizes the card to its court the wakan takes two rupees and adds them to its supply but when a card with the leverage icon is discarded from the wakans court for whatever reason and the wakan doesn't have any rupees to repay the supply the wakan doesn't have to discard cards like you would for the wakanda take a card-based action she'll first need to have a card in her court where the action is present and then she'll need to meet the requirements to take the action like having enough rupees or ruling a region to take the build action if the action taken is from a card that matches the favored suit it doesn't count against the wakan's two action limits same as for you if the wakan has the same card based action on two or more of the cards in her court then you'll have to use the priority reference card to narrow this down to just one card if there are cards in the wacon's court that don't get used and the wakan has used up her two action limit then she'll be able to take one action from any cards matching the favored suit as a bonus action the wakan can only use one action per card per turn just like any other player one more thing about cards is that if the wakan has a card in her court with a special ability that says you may do something the wakan always will card-based actions are mostly the same for the wakan but there's a few differences that i'll point out these probably took me the longest to memorize out of any of the rules for the wakan so you'll probably want to keep the rules nearby and these are found on about the last page of the rulebook for the wakan so the gift action works about the same for the wakan except she'll always buy the cheapest gift she can afford placing it on her player aid card by the way the gift action's quite powerful for the wakan since she's loyal to all coalitions she never loses her gifts and they count as loyalty points toward any coalition during a successful dominance check i believe for this reason the gift action is not found on any of the wacom cards so the only way the wakan can take a gift action is if she uses it as a bonus action after she's used up her two action limit for an example the gift action at the end of the wakan's turn she has city of ghazni which matches the favored suit and she takes the gift action as a bonus action she has the two cost gift space available so she spends two rupees and places one of her cylinders on the two cost space on her player aid card next we'll talk about the build action when the wakan takes the build action she only builds armies not roads and builds him in the leftmost region as noted on the region's selector on the current wakan card she also has to rule the region to take the build action just like for the multiplayer game by the way if she only rules one region then you won't need to use the region selector on the wakan card so the wakan will spend as much money as she can on armies for example the wakan rules persia and takes the build action from her bulk arsenic mine i always slide the card a little bit to show that i'm using the action from the card that way when it comes to bonus actions i can see that i've already used the card and i won't be able to use it for bonus actions if it matches the favored suit the next thing we need to determine is what color blocks the wakan is going to place so we look at her loyalty and since i'm loyal to british she will choose afghan so she'll place green blocks she has four rupees and spends all of them to place two armies in persia now let's just take a slight detour from the wakan's actions for a minute and talk about ruling a region to determine whether you rule region or the wakan does it's the same as in a multiplayer game except with the wakan you add the most populous coalition armies to the wakan's tribe or tribes so if i was loyal to british in this example the wakan would rule because she would just add the afghan armies since they're the most populous in the region and then she would have more ruling pieces in the region than my tribe and british army okay so back to the wakan's actions let's look at the betray action the difference with the betray action for the wakan is she'll only betray the highest priority card with one of her spies on it which also has a prize she'll always take the prize too by the way the card she betrays could be in her own court too for example the wakan has two cards in her court with the betray action so she determines which of the two is highest priority by using her priority card reference to narrow this down so by looking at this priority she sees opponents card well neither of those are opponents cards matches favored suits neither of those match the favored suit patriot of the dominant coalition so there's no dominant coalition this patriot does not fit that criteria has a prize that matches the dominant coalition again there's no dominant coalition so that doesn't work so then we look at other patriot and that means she's going to use the action from this afghan patriot card so since this card has a wackiness spy on it and a prize she's going to betray this card the wakan pays two rupees to the market that's the cost of the betray action and she returns this spy to her supply and takes the prize from this card right here now if the wakan had more than one spy on two different cards with prizes then you would just use the card priority to narrow down which card she would betray next we look at the battle action and for this action use the loyalty selector on the current wakan card to determine the wakan's pragmatic loyalty for the turn she is going to be afghan since i am already loyal to british so she'll battle with green blocks once determined the wakan will take this action if she has at least one army matching her pragmatic loyalty and her opponent has at least a piece she can remove like a tribe road or army if more than one region applies then narrow down the region by using the region's selector from the current wakan card the wakan removes tribes first then armies and then roads in that order if there's no region that she can battle on then she'll battle on the highest priority court card where she and another player have spies so for example let's say the wakan is now on the second action in her battle stack which is the battle action she looks at her pragmatic loyalty and sees her pragmatic loyalty will be afghan she looks at the map and sees that she has a afghan army which means she can battle and there's also pieces she could remove from me my tribe one of my armies and one of the roads i'm loyal to she also sees that in her court she has a battle action and there's only one so we don't need to use card priority to figure out which one she'll use so she uses the one from this card and i just move that forward a little bit to know i'm using the action from it and this is a rank one battle action which means the wakan can remove one piece and we go back to the map here's the wakans afghan army so she'll be able to remove one piece and since there's a tribe in this spot the tribe goes first remember tribes armies and then roads and since she removed my last spy in transcaspia due to the overthrow rule i also have to discard my political card from that region by the way if you're playing a two-player game where you include the wakan if you and the other player could both be targets for the attack the wakan will use the red arrow to narrow this down to just one player for the tax action the vulcan will always try to tax a player rather than the market if able and she'll tax a player with the most rupees ties between players in a two-player game are broken by using the red arrow on the wakan card if the wakan needs to tax the market either because there were no players to tax or she still had rupees to collect after taxing players then she takes rupees from the market she takes rupees from the left most cards and uses the red arrow on the wacom card to determine ties so if there was a rupee here and here she'd go over to the red arrow and see that she takes the rupee from the bottom card so for example the wakan starts her turn and has a tax action she has one rank one tax action from the cards in her court so she's gonna use this card from shaw's guard the wakan rules persia so she's gonna check my cards and see if she can tax me she sees over here that i do have one card from persia so that means she can tax me i currently have five rupees but i have a tax shelter on two of those meaning that there's three that are fair game for the wakan so she takes one rupee from me and adds it to her supply so the wakan has a bit of an advantage when it comes to the move action to use this action first determine pragmatic loyalty this determines which blocks she's going to move and in this case i'm still loyal to british so she'll move russian blocks she'll only move armies to new regions and doesn't require roads to do this she'll try to move armies to adjacent spaces with enemy tribes but she'll only move as many armies as the enemy has tribes so in this case one she'll also never move an army if it would make her lose the ruling token if there were more than one region which would apply then she uses the region selector here to determine the highest priority region so for an example this is a different turn and now the wakan is now on this move action here so she looks at the cards in her court and sees that the move action is on one card so she's going to use the move action here if there was more than one card in the court then she would use her card priority to narrow this down to one card so she's going to use the rank 1 move action from arthur connelly and by the way she is russian just like we showed before she is going to remove russian armies so going back to the map there's one russian army and she's only going to move that to adjacent spaces with an enemy tribe and i have a tribe in herat and i'm her enemy so she's going to take her russian army and move one space into herat now in future turns she wouldn't move any other armies here because she has one army that equals my tribe if i had two tribes here she may have the option to move another army into herat so that's a run through of the wakan's card-based actions it's very similar to how you'd play them except there's a couple notable ai friendly exceptions we'll call them for bonus actions if there are any cards in the wacon's court which match the favored suit that haven't already been used for the turn then the wakan will use one action if possible from each she'll take the action from the leftmost card and start with the left action first if she can take the left action from this card then she moves to the next card from the left if she can't take the left action from this card and there is another action listed on the card she'll try to take that action so it's the end of the wakan's turn and she's only used an action from this card for one of her actions she hasn't taken bonus actions yet and the favored suit is economic she has two economic cards she'll be able to take bonus actions from so she starts with the left card so she'll take the tax action which is the left action if she can so she rules persia and that means she'll be able to tax me if i have a card from persia which i still do so she's gonna take one rupee from me and two of these have a shelter on them and i have five rupees so she can still tax me for one so this card's done and then she'll use bulk arsenic mine and be able to take the leftmost action here which is the build action i do rule persia so i could build in persia and i have three rupees so that means i'm going to build one russian army since the pragmatic loyalty is russian in persia so i take two rupees and then build one army in persia so again just a reminder you can only use one action per card per turn so once you take a bonus action from a card you're done you can't take the other action this is the same rule that applies to you as well so after you take bonus actions then it's the end of the wakan's turn at the end of the turn if she needs to clean up any of the cards from her court because she has too many cards then you just use the bottom part of the card priority reference card to narrow down all the cards in her court to just one card and then discard that card then repeat that if necessary so for example the wakan has five cards she has one purple star which means she can only have four cards in her court so she's gonna have to narrow down which card out of these five she needs to discard we go to the card priority reference and the first thing it says is discard a non-political card and so we look at these cards this one's the only political card the rest are not political cards so we have to choose between these four the next thing it says is a non-patriot so this one's out this is a patriot now we choose between these three and find out which one we're going to discard non-leveraged none of these cards are leveraged look for a card that has more spies than the wakan spies so none of these have spies on them look for the card that has the fewest spies well none of these have spies so we keep narrowing it down lowest rank is next they're all rank one cards then the next one is a card that's not matching the favored climate economic is the favored climate so these two are out and we're down to one card this card gets discarded if the wakan had still over four cards in her court then you would do that again then the wakan refills the market just like you would on your turn [Music] now that you know the basics of how to take the wakan's turn let's look at what happens when there's a dominance check card in the market the dominance check card changes a few things for the wakan so the first thing we'll look at is what's called the wakan's ambition so wakan's ambition is that if she is able to purchase the dominance check card and would score the most points for the dominance check or would win the game she'll always use her action to do that if this was the case she would ignore the actions as listed on the wakan card and just purchase the dominance check card so in this case there isn't a dominant coalition so we look at how many cylinders are in play and the wakan has five cylinders in play and i have four cylinders in play so the dominance check comes out and the wakan needs to take an action so with the wakan's ambition she would want to buy this card if she could she has to have five rupees it's pretty expensive right now and she does she spends five rupees purchases a dominance check card and then scores three points i would score one because i'm in second place if the wakan wouldn't score the most points or win the game when there's a dominance check card in the market then everything else stays the same except when there is a plain radicalized action on the wakan card that the wakan would take this rule i'm about to tell you would not affect a radicalized action with special instructions like this one here so when the wakan takes a plane radicalize action instead of using the arrows here to determine which card she would purchase from the court if there is a dominant coalition like we see here british is dominant and the wakan can't score the most points then wakan would want to buy the cheapest patriot loyal to the dominant coalition so she could gain another loyalty point for a successful dominance check if no patriots available then she would want to buy the cheapest card with the most armies or road impact icons if neither of these apply then just treat this like a normal radicalized action and go back to using the arrows to decide which card from the market the wacom would purchase okay so for an example the dominance check card appears in the market and in this case the wakan would not score the most points or win the game british is the dominant coalition so i have one two three four loyalty points and the wakan over here has one two and then she gets an extra point always for a loyalty dial since she's loyal to every coalition so it's three points to four so in this case she wouldn't want to purchase the dominance check card so when she takes this plain radicalized action for her turn she'll want to purchase the cheapest patriot that is loyal to the dominant coalition right here in the zero column so she'll purchase this one now if there was no patriot that she could afford that was loyal to the dominant coalition then she would purchase the card that has the most road or army impact icons on it and most likely she would if she had two rupees she'd get this one if she didn't have two rupees she would purchase this one here because it's cheaper than the one cost and the cheapest card breaks a tie if she couldn't do anything on her turn then she'd go back to using the arrows on this card and just radicalize a card the old-fashioned way now if there is no dominant coalition then the wacom would buy the cheapest card with the most spies or tribe icons from the market if there's no cards with spies or tribe icons that she can afford then she just buys a card from the zero cost column this doesn't happen often but every now and then you run into a situation where there's no cards that the wakan can afford with spies or tribes so you just radicalize a card from the zero column so for example there's a dominance check card in the market the wacom's ambition would not kick in since she would not be in the lead there's no dominant coalition so we'd look at cylinders the wakan has three in play i have three in play so we're tied she wouldn't win the game or score the most victory points so let's say she takes her plane radicalize action we go back to looking at the market and she would radicalize the card with the most spies and or tribe icons on it that she can afford in this case she has five rupees so she could afford any card in the market so we have one card with two spies one tribe two spies one spy one tribe and two tribes so this is going to be the card the cheapest card always breaks the ties since there's two spies here two tribes there or two spies here the cheapest card wins so she purchases this zero cost card and adds that to her court all right now we've covered everything with the wacom's turn so let's talk about scoring now when it comes to scoring everything is the same with the wakan for scoring except when it comes to a successful dominance check the wakan always scores since the wakan is always loyal to every coalition she'll always get at least one loyalty point as if she had a loyalty dial then you add her patriots prizes and gifts from the dominant coalition together for her loyalty points ignore all the other patriots and prizes and remember that her gifts apply to every coalition so each counts as a loyalty point during a successful dominance check so the next video will tie all the things we learned together and i'll post this to the playlist as soon as it's available you can find the link to this down in the description and i hope this helps get this game to the table for you if so share it with friends subscribe to the channel and consider supporting this channel over on patreon and we'll see you next time

Channel: Modern Cardboard

Views: 7,432

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Pax Pamir Second Edition, Pax Pamir 2nd Edition, Wakhan, Solo, Tutorial, How to Play, instructional, Learn to Play, Solitaire, Solitare, Solo play

Id: 78U2qzZtlVk

Length: 34min 59sec (2099 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020