Britannia - The Players

BRITANNIA is designed for three to five players, but the publishers state, and the online consensus concurs, that the ideal number is four.

That certainly suits us, by whom I mean myself and my three regular boardgame opponents: security consultant Richard Johnson, serving British forces officer Andy, and 'Reg', often my nemesis in wargames with miniatures.

None of us has played the second edition of Britannia before, although Richard, many years ago, played one game of original Britannia, albeit his memory of it is hazy, to say the least (he cannot recall how it finished or, indeed, if the game was completed at all).

So what follows is a learning experience, and a review, rolled into one, and, as usual, I will write it up as we go along.

The game starts, very reasonably, by placing a snazzy round-marker at the top of the timeline, ie round one (AD 45-60)

Each player is randomly given a colour (blue, green, red or yellow), which determines which nations he will control during the coming 1,000 years.

Andy receives green, which means he will have Caledonians, Danes, Jutes and Welsh; I get yellow (Dubliners, Norwegians, Romans, Romano-British and Scots); Reg has blue (Belgae, Picts, Angles and Normans); Richard red (Brigantes, Irish, Norsemen and Saxons).

My five nations - everyone else has four 

We now place our starting tokens on the map.

That is easy for me as I simply place 16 Roman armies in the English Channel.

Tokens are sturdy and colourful

Andy (green) starts with Caledonian armies in Caithness, the Hebrides and the Orkneys - "as far from your expletive deleted Romans as possible," as he robustly, but accurately, puts it - and Welsh armies in Avalon, Clwyd, Cornwall, Devon, Dyfed, Gwent, Gwynedd, Hwicce and Powys, making a total of 12 armies.

Reg (blue) has 10 armies of the Belgae, in Downlands, Essex, Kent, Lindsey, the Mercias (North & South), Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex and Wessex, and six Pict armies, in Alban, Dalriada, Dunedin, Mar, Moray and Skye.

Finally, Richard (red) has nine armies of the Brigantes, taking up the final areas on the playing part of the board: Bernicia, Cheshire, Cumbria, Galloway, Lothian, March, the Pennines, Strathclyde and York.

Ready for the off

Another view