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

Product Information

All Forts, Farms, Cities are multi-state to make switching colors easier. Thanks goes to tracerterent for the suggestion. A War of Whispers allows you to play out an accurate representation of Game of Thrones, where spies hold the key to success and actually hold most power in this jostle for control. Be sure to manage your influence wisely and befriend the factions that will yield you most points. Despite this I find myself entranced by the game. The interplay of trying to work out what your opponents are doing works so well. The game plays in under an hour and every choice feels important. Obviously you need to bluff your opponents so they don’t torpedo your favourite empires, but unless you grab an advisor in those colours early there is no guarantee you will get one at all. 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.

Another suggestion from Sarcasm: I added a second set of Loyalty Tokens in everyone's hand. After completing the Loyalty step of setup, players can rearrange these tokens to match their player board and have a constant, visible reminder of their Devotion level to each Empire.This is NOT an official mod. I am not the owner/creator of this game or any of its components. I simply modded the game into TTS because I enjoy it immensely and more people should know about it! If you like the game, please support the real creator(s)!*** As the rounds progress, players will add more agents to the council positions, which is a nice progressive mechanic that makes things feel tighter as decisions start to matter more. Because council positions can get overcrowded, with players increasingly unlikely to benefit from 2 or more actions from each agent, the option to switch allegiances is an excellent self-balancer. Maybe you were supposed to help the eagle empire spread its territorial wings, but other players took those council positions so you ended up controlling most of the bear empire’s council. You can switch those 2 on your board so you have more of a fighting chance. Sure, other players will know where your loyalties lie, but it’s better than guaranteeing yourself a loss.

As soon as the game starts, you can almost hear the collective cogs turning in brains around the table, as they form their diabolical machinations. You’ll find your first instinct is to play it cool. Don’t make it obvious you really want yellow to win, for example. The trouble is, the rest of the table is doing the same thing. So then you might think “Okay, let’s get clever. I’m going to go all-in on my preferred colour, and let them think I secretly want another.” And as sure as day follows night, that double bluff turns into a triple bluff, and then a quadruple. In one game I played, I’d convinced myself I wanted to red to win, and ended up bluffing myself out until it was too late to do anything about it. High IQ play, I’m sure you’ll agree. 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. Building strategic empathy – By assuming the role of “Red” (the adversary), strategic leaders can better understand the enemy’s capabilities, intentions, and likely courses of action. In addition, this firsthand experience helps players anticipate and counter the adversary’s strategies and tactics during real-world operations. So, I wanted to love this game. I heard the basic premise of it and just went bananas. My entire group thought it would become one of our new favorites based on concept alone. Boy...were we wrong.

Mark the Turn

The next round will begin once the Cleanup Phase is complete. The gameplay will continue in this manner until four rounds have been played. END OF GAME On each Council, there will be 1 or 2 positions with unique actions. The actions available to these positions differ in some way from their non-unique versions- typically by either reducing the actions available or by modifying them in some way. Here are explanations for the modified actions: 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 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: Now, this problem can be easily sourced and fixed. I found a solution for 12 dollars on Etsy which makes the game great but I will note that without some form of marker, the table presence and actual functionality of the game is slightly diminished. I would have loved for those items to be included. Truth be told though, that is it for my critiques. That speaks volumes about how much I enjoyed this title if a big concern is just about some aesthetics.

Scripted Empire Control Scorecard. The amount of cities/forts/farms each Empire controls is updated in real-time and easily visible to all players. Using the state changes now automatically updates the Scorecard. Makes final scoring and performing certain actions a breeze! During setup, you and your opponents will each need to place your initial loyalty bets on the five Empires. To do so, shuffle your five loyalty tokens and randomly place them face-down on the five indicated loyalty slots on your player board.The wooden cubes themselves are fine and likely better suited to the constant moving about than the upgraded plastic flags. But the punch board is average and not cut neatly, the player boards are flimsy and there is not actually much in the box. In fact your first thought upon ripping off the shrink will probably be ‘I paid how much for this?’ Despite this, and some up coming gameplay worries, I still love it. A Gaggle(?) of Whispers The last step is the Cleanup phase where players make sure they do not have more than 5 cards in their hand. Each player then removes 1 agent they control from any one council space. For each icon present across all regions controlled by this empire, add 1 banner to any region(s) controlled by this empire. Steward Lastly at the end of every round bar the last, you may swap your loyalty between two Empires – but only if you now have those tokens face up. This gives your opponents a lot of information with which to deduce which Empires are move valuable to you. A Game of Two Halves This covers the main overview of A War of Whispers, but the real fun is in the actions you can take and how they affect the Empires and the map, so let’s take a moment to discuss these in more detail. It’s All About The Actions

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. The map on the game board is broken down into different colored regions which are further broken down into empires. If any region on the map contains a small banner image, it indicates that a banner of the color matching this empire should be placed there G (example: a yellow region with two yellow banners receives two yellow Lion empire banners). First Player

Welcome To High (Secret) Society

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.