Pax Pamir Second Edition Review

do you know anything about Afghanistan's history nope do you know just as well that today we're reviewing packs premiere at the second edition a board game all about the conflict in nineteenth-century Afghanistan known as the great game shall we go and learn yeah let's go in to learn this is the Palace of Westminster which is obviously not Afghanistan but a we can't really afford to go to Afghanistan and be for the purposes of reviewing pax premier it is fairly reasonable to say that the conflict depicted in it started right here sometime in the early 19th century Britain from here onwards referred to his imperial estate number one controlled a chunk of Asia and its resources at that same time Russia will call it imperialist state number two just to distinguish them a little bit held control of another chunk of Asia and its resources meanwhile a dynastic struggle was already taking place in Central Asia a space between Imperial estate one and twos holdings and the decisions of the few men in suits some were in the offices of this building forever warped that conflict this is of course an oversimplification but thus started centuries of paranoia proxy wars and puppet governments officially the great game ended on the 10th of September 1890 but that is just a relative marker for peace that not everyone was happy about and one does not need to look far back into history to know that peace in Afghanistan is perhaps the most precious commodity you know I honestly didn't expect things to get so heavy in a board game review I know but this is a game with a heavy subject and thus it deserves its due diligence but PAX premier is still very much a board game so let me tell you what about it has captured my imagination it would be reasonable to assume with PAX premier being a war game or as I've been schooled by my wargaming friend more accurately a consum meaning conflict simulator and having pieces representing the armies of Imperial estate one two and also Afghanistan that will be taking control of one of those armies and deploying them on the map wait a minute are these real are these actual board game components yes it's very pretty but look I'm trying to tell people about the complicate do you know what just just tell people about your thing have you ever played a game with a cloth board before probably not unless you've been playing traditional board games from East Asia and let me tell you now you have been missing out aesthetics are one thing but there is something so delightful in rolling out something this beautiful I can practically hear the history woven into the fabric oh wait no that's just affordable Chinese manufacturing Africa you can do your bit now ah yes the subversion nothing I've expected from PAX premier came to fruition the more I've learned about Afghanistan's history the more I felt like I knew less than when I began at first I thought the image seemed clear to colonial forces vying for the control of a key territory except it was less to do with countries and more to do with companies in the same way that in the future you might have the Samsung versus Google wards except the companies are far too small to brand wars after themselves except it was also about countries and the more I read the more conflicts and contradictions that I found including from the information sent to me by the designer of this game himself called wall-e who is not only an academic but spent three years studying this subject it reminds me of Adamas Miscavige's a famous Lithuanian poet who was also Adam Miscavige a famous Polish poet if you ask anyone who's polish and famous Belarusian poet if you ask anyone who's from Belarus and once again it turns out that the truth is more complicated than any of those versions which brings us to the game itself where one might expect a stuffy war game with blocks and complicated rules about movement based on which direction the wind is blowing and what the soldiers had for dinner that day instead refreshingly you take on the role of Afghani warlords who are desiring to bend the conflict for their own Vantage and imagine my delight when I've read in the rulebook that the word for these invading foreigners is in fact Ferengi yes the idiot space goblins from Star Trek came much later but that just reinforces the imagery okay baby gloves are off get ready for quite a hefty rules explanation at the start of each game each player will pick a faction they are allied with any combination is fine here and more importantly any combination is potentially very interesting in a free player game two players could be allied with the British one player allied with Afghanistan and no one allied with the Russians alternatively all three players could be allied with the Russians and no one else and neither is wrong and neither is static but let's pivot for a second this is the game's card market and each time your turn comes along you can essentially do one of three things either buy a card into your hand paying a coin for each card you skip along the track play a card from your hand or activate one of the bonus actions available on the cards you've played once again paying the cost don't get greedy you can only do two things here's the trick four times per game a dominance card will appear imagine this as a speedy locomotive except you're tied to the tracks and there is no Superman because at any point during the course of the game any player can just pay the money and purchase this aka push the pedal to the metal as soon as this card resolves one of the games for scoring phases will commence with me so far okay there's levels to this Alliance business just by being loyal to that faction you have one influence with them but if you have agents of that faction that's more influence for each of them if you dispatch an enemy of said faction that is extra influence and finally if you're going to bribe sorry I mean give gifts to that faction more influence you get the idea all right I have all the influence I will Evan need do I win the game now no you are loyal to the Russians and currently its Afghanistan that is dominant because they have formal roads and all armies than anyone else and influence is only important if your faction is dominant when dominance is checked but I don't understand I have all these people here I have murdered that has to be good for something well that's the central conundrum each time dominance is checked out of the people who are loyal to the dominant faction the person with the most influence will score five points second most will score free points and third most will score just a measly point I understand I get it how did you say I scored points again I'm kidding I get it not only do I get it I think this is potentially genius imagine this vagabond has an allegiance to Russia pork has a loyalty to the British and turtle here has an allegiance to Afghanistan currently there are more Afghan blocks on the map than anyone else pork could spend time and resources populating the map with more armies and inevitably everyone else will follow suit all pork could do the smart thing jump ship and change allegiance to Afghanistan leave poor turtle here in the dirt but that is just the tip of the iceberg Pat's Pamir is essentially a game of shifting betrayals if I share an allegiance to the British with another player and technically we have mutual interests by buying and playing cards that per armies and roads on the map we're furthering each other's chances of scoring points but it's still a competition because that person is not me I don't want them to win I want me to win all this time that I've been helping myself I've also been helping them and that means I need to betray them but you know what that sucker over there they're thinking exactly the same thing finally this conundrum is rounded out by a couple of design tweaks that really make it sing first if no faction is dominant then players will still score points except now it's the player who has deployed the most disks and the amount of points they score will be fewer if yourself in an utterly unwinnable position two dominant factions are vying for control and neither of those factions is yours you could change allegiance to the one that is going to win and eat the table scraps because of your negligible influence or you could join the underdog and shift into a position where no faction is dominant and then you would be the only one feasting on those tasty tasty victory points of course we saved the best for last the final dominance card will always score double points making sure that no matter what position you are in this is still anyone's game but also opening up this system to some seriously devious machinations in my first game of pax premier I was on 0 points not only was I'm losing but I was stuck with a faction that had absolutely no board presence what everyone didn't realize though was that all the members of my court were the enemy of the dominant faction so I killed them all of them this not only switched my allegiance automatically but it now meant I was the most influential in the dominant faction scoring me a whopping 10 points and putting me in the lead wait did you just do the red wedding in a board game I did better than that I did the red wedding and I won you know what they say in a game of perhaps premier you either packs or you Pamir that makes no sense I know from a purely mythological perspective pax premier has got a fantastic premise supported by a very clever design let's look at points for example in most games points are a measure of our achievement as if some sort of a do you know I'm just not gonna go there seriously though when I play a euro game such as Great Western trail points show me how well I've done as opposed to another player or as opposed to another play it's the yardstick of the effectiveness of my efficiency impacts premier whether you come second or fifth or third is meaningless because points a representation of the opportunity seized at the right time with the right tools effectiveness matters but only marginally impacts for me you see the trappings of your games such as that card selection mechanism you place a coin on every undesirable card you pass creating little piles of treasure that eventually become too tempting not to snap up look at this William hay Macnaghten look mechana --then McKenzie it's a jump in a top hat he's from the East India Company he is an administrative failure it says so right here who would want him but look he comes with four rupees gone then take the chump all the cards having multiple uses each time you play one you resolve every ability on the top right corner this good place armies on the map orb roads these armies could walk through advancing your faction towards dominance or spies on enemy cards or tribes on the map that later help you control the region which I am so aware we've got nowhere near to actually explaining yet but oh this so much more like each card having loyalty you play it you change loyalty which could be amazing or terrible depending on the situation each card could make you feel like a proud victory pod or a hapless puppy being dragged away from their parents but then those cards become a tableau of abilities you could build more armies you could kill enemy armies you could kill enemy cards you could tax other players indulgently helping yourself to their money and once again it's easy to view this as a euro game because we've trained ourselves to think that something that looks like this is code for a suite of powers and abilities that we like and get to keep it is anything but this is an ever-changing tableau of characters that reinvents itself faster than a Shakespearean comedy is actually ingenious to see how many different ways there are of murdering things including some rules that are pretty easy to forget for example in Lane did you know that if I murdered your Lost Tribe in Punjab I would also murder all of the cards that you have with the Punjab location well that's all of them yes I'm pretty sure that's not a role in the game it is in fact a role it says so right here in the rule book in page 8 I said I'm pretty sure that is not a role in the game okay yeah that is that is not a rule again the problem with packs from there and I don't see this being a problem for everyone is in the minutia let me get something clear in the sphere of wargames and even in the PAC series of which there are many we are very much novices but this is useful because PAX premier second edition is meant to be the most streamlined and the most accessible the idea behind the PAC series is that they are a political thesis based on historical events but they are also a simulation and therefore can play out unpredictably and because they are opening themselves up to new audiences and if you are a part of that then you might want to hear this perspective especially from someone who's so well versed in board game critique it's easy to admire pax premier but it's equally easy to be frustrated by it let's examine a card again each card will have actions that are triggered when you play them actions available to you after you've played them with some potentially having static abilities its loyalty its location its influence reward for murdering it it's suit and an amount of styles that will give you benefits based upon that suit and let's not forget the historical flavor text all of those apart from that last one our game affecting and as much as we like to think of ourselves as information parsing savants when it comes down to the reality of picking one or two cards from a roster of 12 with varying costs we are far more likely to pick the one that has an effect that we want and file the rest away as circumstantial that in itself is fine perhaps even exciting we want games that surprises and give us those gotcha moments but packs for me is so unpredictable that it feels like it runs around and stabs itself in the back one of the games rules that is cool is breaking one of the tenets that you only get two actions per turn that is still true but at any point one of the suits will be dominant either diplomacy politics economy or warfare if say diplomacy is the dominant suit any card that you have that matches that suit will give you one extra action in addition to that to action limit it's fun to imagine a conflict shift all parties vying for a diplomatic solution nobody wants to fight and everyone is just trying to resolve the matter with words suddenly a mysterious figure enters the debate tainting everything with a malign intent and all those words turn into s words for swords swords you might have a good roster of economic card and spot a card that will allow you to change the suit economic allowing you for delightful scheming and manipulations but the board state is so convoluted that you might not be able to afford it or it might change your allegiance which could be capital B ad or even if you've invested yourself into buying and playing that card someone might just change the dominant suit straight back after your turn imagine investing time and resources into buying a card and the hoping to play it on the next turn only to find that someone has revealed and paid for an event that locks the dominant suit or better yet murders your entire court so essentially pax premier is the game of shifting allegiances and to do well you need to be able to seize the opportunity at the right time yes but the problem with that is that it's so flowing and unpredictable that it flies past you like a mad albatross yes and this is the end of the critique because this video has gone on for far too long already oh my no Elena's right there's more but this is not your average game and it deserves thoroughness and I am a good man and thorough this buoyancy is highly dependent on play account a two-player game reduces the cleverness of this central conceit but turns the unpredictability of the game into a cat-and-mouse show-off whereas a finite player game is a disaster on stilts in the middle of the sea during a thunderstorm and in some regards that's okay this is a simulation you are the variable and the output is appropriately wild PAX premier is like no game I've ever seen before tantalizing with delicious possibility even when you know that 2/3 into the game you've made one wrong move and you are stuck there for another half an hour pushing against the tidal wave of cardboard history I do however wish it was a cleaner design in some cases it's wonderful at a mere glance you can tell which fraction is dominant who's got more disks out and that's vital because if you can't tell who's winning then the game is a mess and that's another goal in the 5 player net in other cases it's so unforgivingly simulation is that it prefers specificity within rules to the point where and I hate to use the F word it's no longer fun to do the tacks action for example which could just be take some coins from people first you need to rule a region then you need to check forecast that your opponents have that match that same region then you can tax those and only those opponents but first you need to check whether they have any economic cards with stars that act as a buffer then you can tax them or you can alternatively tax the market but you don't need to rule any region to do that remember all of that well of course you do because I just told you but you remember all of the other rules I've taught you in this video and now consider that I've only told you the specific rules for one of the six bonus actions which seem to be not at all cohesive in terms of roles with each other but no discussion of packs premiere can be complete without delving into politics and if you happen to be one of the people who are crying for politics to be left out of board games you are really barking up the wrong dead tree here Pamir is not the only game in the pack series originally designed by Phil Eckland a man who's argued for climate change denial and in the first edition of packs premiere included an essay titled in defense of colonialism yep but packs premiere is not designed by Phil Eckland it's designed by Col Worley whom you I recognize from everyone's darling rude I've spoken to Cole about the infamous s in my discussions have revealed that not only was he opposed to having that essay included but that he saw it as completely inapplicable he wanted PAX premier to be a game that bucked the trend of putting the colonists in the glorified front-and-center and I don't need to believe cold to know that it's true and everything I told you about the game should reinforce that these are British soldiers for example they could be loyal to the British but the perspective is local not invading and the second addition is no longer published by Phil Eckland publishing company Sierra Madre games and is absent of that essay in fact the original edition of the game was supposed to have a counterpoint essay written by Cole early which was sadly eventually excluded none of this of course dismisses the fact that that first game was published and then that essay exists nor the fact that Cole in his own admission did concede to its publishing and that's not the only problem with PAX premier whilst the inclusion of a slave market cards in the game with a historical setting is a lot more appropriate than in say five tribes which for all intents and purposes is in an abstract game that has nothing to say at least a sensitivity warning in the rulebook would have been appreciated and some of the artwork on the Cubs in this game is shall we say suspect ultimately pacts feminist politics are as complex and convoluted as the game itself and I've given you just a starting point to begin untangling it and whilst it might sound like we're being dismissive of the game I have to admit that we've never played anything like this and I can't stop thinking about it everything from its unparalleled core conundrum to the unrelenting simulation ISM is an uncompromising vision and I think everything it's sacrifices it does so knowingly and for every person that's annoyed by its overbearing nature there's going to be another person enraptured by its ideas and as for us well we have the same conclusion as at the end of our route review we can't wait to see what designer Col Worley gets up to next I'm wearing a different shirt now because this video took so long to make that I had to change clothes and that's okay because these videos are enabled by you our Kickstarter backers and some people have expressed a wish to donate even though the Kickstarter is over and you can do so via no plan included comm / donate and support more of this kind of work that's in-depth but also it doesn't just tell you whether M is amazing or terrible but actually helps you make up your mind a couple of other things if you wanted a different take on PAX premier then I recommend an article from space v comm by Dan therethe another thing I want to thank our friend Ross Connell who helped us film a few of these scenes if you want to check out his website it's more games please and he does amazing interviews with board game artists finally Rodney this one is for you

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 77,424

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, pax pamir, 2nd edition, second edition, cole wehrle, wehrlegig games, phil eklund, pax series, sierra madre games

Id: Fu845yxoKjA

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MrCheezball]

To clarify on the overthrow rule: you dont lose ALL the cards from the region if your last tribe is lost. You only lose the cards with a political symbol.

[u/zeeaykay]

As someone who has played the game about 5 times now, I actually found this review a little disappointing. For how long it is, it doesn't actually make a strong critique of the game one way or another, and in some cases even misrepresent or overcomplicates the game in an effort to fit their angle. At the end of the day their conclusion is... it keeps them interested in Cole Wherle designs, same as their review of Root.

I would have loved a conclusion that said more about the game itself. Does it accomplish its goal? Does the game reward you for getting through the learning curve, or is it not as brilliant as it may seem at first glance? In a way the conclusion feels like a cop out.

First, some things I agree with:

1. The game is absolutely beautiful.
2. Their observations about player count. At 5 players - particularly if you're new to the game - the game is very unwieldy and unpredictable. Part of this is because...
3. At larger player counts it can be hard to keep track of everyone's tableau and abilities, especially if they're not sitting next to you. The more players there are, the more actions will be taken before your next turn.
4. The process of taxing players can be a little tedious.
5. It is absolutely a complex game – BUT, I've had an easy time teaching it than expected because of how intuitive everything is).
6. Elaine did a great job showing the type of clever play you can have in her example of betraying two of her own court to win the game in the final dominance check.

Here are some issues I had with the review:

1. The opening point the review makes is about the conflicts and contradictions found in the game compared to the history it is modeled after, but none of this is ever explained with any kind of example from the game. How do these conflicts and contradictions impact the enjoyment or effectiveness of the game? Or is it trying to say that the history itself is complex and contradicting and the game does well at properly reflecting that? It isn't clear what the points is here.
2. The concept of domination is incredibly simple and their explanation seems to overcomplicate it an an attempt to fit their slant.
3. I don't understand the multiple comments about how it is so tied to simulation. Attacks are as simple as removing a block or disc where you have armies, movement is as simple as moving one across a road you own or moving a spy one card over, etc. If anything these actions are MORE abstracted and streamlined than many games - particularly war games but even many DoaM game. The one example given agains this is the tax action - which although more complex than most actions, is still very intuitive: If I rule a region, I can tax you for employing people to your court in that region. Tax shelters will protect you taxing coins within it.
4. The explanation of shifting alliances helped illustrate that aspect of the game, but it is another concept heavily mischaracterized by the insistence of needing to BETRAY your partner, as opposed to being in a race to have the most influence while trying to maintain domination. It may sound pedantic but it leads to a completely different type of tension.
5. The "overthrow rule" is explicitly mentioned in the rulebook as something that players tend to forget although it is fundamental to the game, and even tells you to read it again, so it was strange to see it mentioned as a "gotcha" rule. It's also on the player aid. At what point do you blame a game for not remembering a core rule, simply because you forgot it? I would feel differently if the rulebook was poorly laid out or it was tucked away somewhere, but it's clearly labeled and given the attention it deserves.

[u/wallysmith127]

Nice review, glad he ended it by emphasizing that this game will not be for many (for the very same reasons that it will appeal to others).

[u/flyliceplick]

A more accurate summation of Afghanistan would be the Afghans have subverted every single invader for hundreds of years to their own ends, frustrating just about every single effort to dominate them, and draining foreign influence as quickly as they can. Afghanistan is a social quagmire every empire has regretted stepping in.

Pax Pamir 1e did a grand job and my copy of 2e is in the post. Cannot wait.

[u/Vandal_Bandito]

The truth about this game accessibility lays in that, that Philip Eklund has nothing to do with this game. Pax Reneissance or High Frontier might be good games with some very interesting ideas, but jesus the rules are written terribly, and the graphical design of the board and the cards only makes them more confusing...And this is an opinion from someone who had both and who believes a 6h wargame from GMT is a fabulous experience.

[u/avipraiz]

Sharp and insightful as always

[u/j3ddy_l33]

Man, my hype for checking out this game is increasing by the minute.

[u/[deleted]]

I've never heard of these two, but I really like their humor and pacing. Thanks for sharing!