Module:Tenka: Shogun Edition

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FOREWORD

Tenka: Shogun Edition is a card game for 3-8 players. Rather than have pre-defined setups for the 6 different numbers of players, I decided to make the main Vassal board (with a traditional landscape image) only a background for other windows; so any cards accidentally dropped there should be immediately recovered via undo. There are 20 windows accessible through the toolbar menu:

a) the Setup window b) the Player Order Board window c) the Main Draw Pile and Discard Pile window d) the Display Board window e) one Hand window per player (so up to 8 windows) f) one Court window per player (so up to 8 windows)

Unless you have a large screen, the following 15” screen layout is suggested:

Keep the chat area on top of the main board to the minimum practical height (a few lines).

You do not need to keep the Setup window open while playing, but you will need to access it up to 4 more times during the game after Setup when the Main Draw Pile has run out and you need to reseed it with a new set of Special Cards (Variant Rule is in effect by default).

If you keep the Player Order Board open (you may not need to, especially if you follow the advice below concerning the layout advice for the Court windows), have it overlap with the right side of the chat area (so that it does not intrude on the chat text).

Technically, you only need to access the Main Draw Pile and Discard Pile window when the Discard Pile needs to be reshuffled and the Chaos marker moved up to 4 times during the game, but you may still want to keep an eye on the number of cards left in the main draw pile, so make the window as small as possible and keep it to the right of you screen.

It is best, although not required, if you can see all Court windows including your own at all times (as they would all be on the table). If you size each Court window such that the full height (i.e., all 5 rows) is visible and the width accommodates at least 3 cards, you can then line up all the Court windows from left to right in Player Order (hence why you wouldn’t really need to keep the Player Order Board window open at all times). On a 15” screen, you can easily display up to 7 Court windows in this proposed layout (but 8 is a tight fit unless you somewhat reduce each window's width, except yours perhaps). If the number of cards in a row exceeds for, you can either make the window wide, or you can simply use the window’s horizontal slider to see what’s further to the right.

Last, you likely want to display your Hand window at all times, so you can position it below the Court windows. On a 15” screen, you should be able to see all of the actual Hand row in your hand window and most of the Draw row below (where you draw and select cards for your hand before discarding the others).

Only open the Display Board window over the Court windows when you need it and close it when you don’t. The Display Board is organized as a Vassal hand window with three rows (referred to as Display1, Display2 and Display3, from top to bottom). It can be used to publicly display or transfer cards, including to resolve battles. Each player’s hand window has a button that can send 1 random card to Display1. Each card has a right-click menu command to send it to Display1, Display2 or Display3. When resolving a battle, it is suggested that players send all cards pitched in support of the attacker to Display1 and all cards pitched in support of the defender to Display2. Then the loser can send all Casualty cards to Display3 from which the winner will seize their Spoils. Once the battle is fully resolved, click on “Battle Over” to discard the cards remaining on the board. If the board is used for transferring cards between players, make sure to first flip the cards face down if the transfer is supposed to be private. Do note that transfers to other players’s hands or courts can be automatically done with right-click menu commands.

While it is possible to drag and drop cards, it is recommended that you use the available right-click menu commands to place cards in any location. Do note that, due to an apparent Vassal bug, you may still need to click once on any one of the leftmost cards in the destination window for all the cards to be displayed.

If you prefer to drag and drop keep in mind that all windows function like Vassal hand windows. This means that you must always drag and drop cards in the left-side box outline or on top of the leftmost card already present in the selected row; when properly dropped all the new cards will then automatically be displayed to the right of the cards already in place (use your mouse cursor as reference, not the card(s) that you are dragging and dropping).

SETUP

FIRST, one player must switch to the *Umpire* role and open the Setup window. Click on the button indicating the number of players to seed the main Draw Pile, and then close the Setup window (it will only be needed again if playing with the optional advanced rule).

SECOND, the Umpire must open the Player Order Board window and click on the “Draw Player Button”. This will randomly determine the player order by displaying the 8 Clan Mon (coat of arms) from left to right; simply delete (right-click menu command) the Mon of the Clans that were not selected. When applying the Battle Logistics rule, just remember that the leftmost and rightmost Clans are adjacent.

Arrange all windows mentioned earlier as you see fit, and you’re ready to go.

OTHER

Because the designer strongly suggests to use the optional Evolving Story rule for Special Cards, I made it the standard rule. This means that when you discard/pitch the purple Special cards, they go in in the Special Card Discard Pile located in the Deck Setup window. When the Main Draw Pile runs out of cards (which causes the Chaos [Tori gate] marker to drop one level?to be done manually), one player must switch to the *Umpire* role, open the Deck Setup window, and click on the button corresponding to the number of players; this will automatically re-shuffle the discarded Special cards, and re-seed the Main Draw Pile with the right number of Special cards. Don’t forget to also shuffle the Main Discard Pile to form the new Main Draw Pile.

The optional Long Game rule can easily be implemented when setting up by seeding the game with more cards than required for the number of players (and doing the same with Special cards).

Note that it is possible to see the entire contents of the Main Discard Pile because it’s the only way to implement card effects that allow players to draw specific cards from it. This means that the Tournament Rule is in effect, but the players can pledge that they won’t look at the contents of the discard pile unless they are allowed to do so by cards (Vassal cannot be programmed to report when a discard pile’s contents are being checked).

Players

 * r_verlaque@hotmail.com@rjvonline