E is for Estavia

Estavia

Soldier King is a game by Frank Chadwick and published by GDW. It is a board game that uses a similar sstem to GDW's excellent "A House Divided" game, but set in a generic Horse and Musket setting rather than American Civil War. It is based loosely on the War of the Austrian Succession and Seven Years War. There are four players, each taking the role of a Elector from Arcadia, Argozia, Hravatska or Bravance, who are vying for control the the overall realm: Estavia.

The illustration above is my reproduction of the map that comes with the board game. Movement is box to box along main roads (red), secondary roads (brown), or rivers (blue.) The river boxes have a line indicating which side of the river the town is on. Those with crenelations are fortresses. The boxes are colour coded to show who owns what at the start.

We have used it once to fight a War of the Estavian Succession campaign that stalled primarily because the rules we were using to fight the battles were not very good. Then my computer crashed and I lost most of my campaign information so we couldn't continue. At the time we were playing a two player campaign: Arcadia and Bravance vs Argozia and Hrvatska. Arcadia had a very British flavour, Bravance was France, Argozia was Prussia and Hrvatska was Austria-Hungary. In our campaign Bravance was reeling under attacks from both Hrvatska and Argozia, but their ally Arcadia was about to invade Argozia with a massive army estimated at about twice her strength (such was the recruiting power of the Arcadian territories!)

I have often though about doing an "Estavia through the ages" sort of thing, setting games in different eras on the same map, or roughly the same map.