The Anarchy

A boardgame inspired by William Dalrymple’s book The Anarchy — The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

Game Design by Robert Laing, robert.joeblog at gmail.com

This boardgame is a hobby project of mine shared freely on Google Drive via pdf documents I update as I get feedback from playtesters and my Inkscape skills improve.

The game components are separated into 11 files, including 7 A3 pages with 18 “poker sized” (2.5 x 3.5 inches) cards each, giving a total of 126 cards.

6 A4 pages of rules. The rules are also available in German.
An A3 colour area map of India circa 1740
First A3 page of cards
Second A3 page of cards
Third A3 page of cards
Fourth A3 page of cards
Fifth A3 page of cards
Sixth A3 page of cards
Seventh A3 page of cards
An A3 page of half size money cards. Play money are cards to allow secret, simultanious bidding in the war phase
An A3 page of poker chip sized counters with the historical logos of various East India Companies

I’ve attempted, without much success at time of writing, to get discussions of the game going on various Reddit forums.

Overview

Two to six players take on the roles of European East India Companies circa 1740. It’s a business game in that the winner is whoever has the most money at the end of the game. This is achieved by installing puppet governments via political coups and wars rather than trading.

It’s a hybrid card/boardgame based on a system I first encountered in The Great Khan Game designed by Tom Wham and Richard Hamblen which is essentially Rummy. The basic draw, meld, and discard phases are made a bit more complex with the addition of an area based wargame.

1 Start

Pick a starting player, seat order and dealer by whatever convention you favour. Each player needs tokens to mark the areas on the board they control. This pdf includes a page of standard poker chip sized counters with the historical logos of various East India Companies, but borrowing coloured markers from another game is probably easier.

Set up the game bank by stacking the money cards face-up by denomination, which is in ₹ rather than $ since the setting is India.

For play balance rather than historical accuracy, none of the players start with any areas under control or game money.

Remove the “End of Game” card from the deck and shuffle, and then place the “End of Game” card at the bottom of the pile, face down like the other cards.

Deal six cards to each player face down.

2 Turn Phases

Players do the following in their turn:

Collect money from the bank
Replenish open draft cards
Pay for extra cards
Draw cards
Meld cards
Discard a card
Make war

2.1 Collect money from the bank

On your turn, your income is based on the following formula:

income = ₹1 + counters on the board + treasure symbols on melded cards

On turn 1 a player has no counters on the board or melded cards, so their income is ₹1.

2.2 Replenish open draft cards

As is usual in Rummy-style games, you can draw from either the face-up discard pile or face-down stock pile. This game uses open drafting, aka discard market, to broadern a player’s choice of known cards. The number of face-up cards to choose from at the start of your turn equals the number of players in the game.

At the start of your turn, the number of face-up cards will depend on how many the previous player drew. The face-up cards form a queue as explained in the discard rules. In this phase, turn up cards from the stock and add them to a queue headed by the discard pile until the face-up cards equals the number of players.

At the start of the game, there’s no discard pile yet, so a line of face-up cards equal to the number of players is created from the stock pile.

2.3 Pay for extra cards

A player may choose to pay the bank to draw extra cards which get increasingly more expensive. The first extra card costs ₹1, the second ₹2, the third ₹3 etc. The total cost is the cumulative sum. Here’s a table to simplify the arithmetic:

Cards	Price
1	Free
2	₹1
3	₹3
4	₹6
5	₹10
6	₹15
7	₹21
8	₹28
9	₹36
10	₹45

So on their first turn, players can elect to draw two cards rather than take their ₹1 income from the bank.

Players have to pay the bank for extra cards before drawing.

2.4 Draw cards

The player draws the number of cards paid for, taking cards to their hand from the face-down stock pile or the face-up queue as desired and available.

2.5 Meld cards

The cards are grouped into 16 suits with background colours corresponding to 16 areas on the board. The area name is also printed on the top of the card in case players are using black and white printouts or the colours of different areas are too similar.

As in a Rummy run of cards, all cards in a meld have to be of the same suit, ie area.

Unlike Rummy, the sequence doesn’t matter, but there has to be a leader who has to have a crown symbol which represent political power. This represents the ruling power of an area: its nawab, nizam, khan or what-have-you.

A card from the same suit follows that leader if the leader’s number in the card’s top left corner appears in the list of numbers under a card’s picture.

As cards are melded to the leader, slide them under the leader’s card from the bottom so that you can read the important information on the melded cards: the list of leaders the card follows so other players can see it’s a legal meld, along with crowns, swords, castles, and treasure chests and the card’s name. Thus, as cards are melded, you build an orderly file arranged behind the leader.

Meld Example

A meld can consist of just one card provided it has at least one crown on it. And the leader card can be changed in subsequent turns, but this may force you to take back “follower” cards to your hand if they don’t follow that leader.

If no other player has a meld of the same area’s cards, you now control that area on the board and can place one of your markers on it to show you have established a puppet-government there.

You don’t have to meld every card that can be melded. Sometimes it’s wiser to save a few cards in reserve, especially if they have crowns. A lot of the game’s strategy involves deciding which cards to meld and which cards to save.

If another player already controls an area, you cannot meld any cards from that area unless you are attempting a political coup.

2.5.1 Political coups

To attempt a political coup, create an alternative government by placing a legal meld with more crowns than that area’s existing government. The defending player responds by adding any cards from their hand that can be legally melded to their leader on the table.

For the coup to succeed, you have to still have more crowns in your meld than your opponent after they added cards.

The winner takes the opponent’s meld and creates a new government, taking any cards that can’t be melded into their hand.

If your coup succeeded, replace the area control marker on the board with yours.

2.6 Discard a card

You have to discard one card from your hand. If your hand is empty, you can choose one of your melded cards to discard.

Your discarded card forms the back of the queue headed by the discard pile.

If your discard makes the queue longer than the number of players, put the oldest card in the queue on top of the discard pile, close gaps in the line of face-up cards and place your card at the end furthest from the discard pile.

2.7 Make war

You can attempt to take an area controlled by another player by announcing you are going to attack it

Assemble an attacking force by moving cards with swords from your melds into a line. These don’t have to share a suit/area, but attacking cards must be able to get to the target area somehow. While nothing actually moves on the map, the attacking player must be able to show how his armies are traveling from their home areas to the area under attack. They must either come from a neighbouring area or cross areas you control. They can cross areas controlled by other players only with permission. Areas nobody controls yet are assumed to give permission.

The basic attack value is the number of swords in the attacking cards. The defence value is the number of swords plus castles in the defender’s meld. The combined attacking force has to have more swords than the defending meld’s swords plus castles.

As with coups, the defender may add cards from their hand after you have placed your attack cards.

Money played a bigger part in battles than soldiers in this history. For instance, the English East India Company’s Robert Clive won his celebrated Battle of Plassey by bribing his opposing general not to pitch.

The game simulates this by using a simultanious auction system whereby the attacking and defending player decide how much of their play money to commit. They secretly place money cards, possibly none, behind their hands face down. The amount of money each player has committed is then revealed simultaniously. This money is forfeited to the bank, win or lose.

Butcher’s Bill = (Attacker’s swords + bid) - (Defender’s swords + castles + bid)

Waging war invetiably leads to cards in both the attacking line and defending meld getting “killed”. These cards are placed face-down under the “End of Game” card in the stock, taking them out of the current game and making it less easy to see when the game will end as it progresses.

Killed Cards

Both sides suffer the same number of killed cards, which diminish the more decisively either side wins. The winner of a battle captures the surviving cards.

This means if the attacker wins, he takes the remainder of the defending meld to his side of the board and replaces the control counter on the board. If the defender wins, surviving attack cards go into is hand.

Butcher’s Bill	Killed Cards
Attacker Wins
> 3	0
3	1
2	2
1	3
Defender Wins
0	4
-1	3
-2	2
-3	1
< -3	0

Wars where the Butcher’s Bill is 0 tend to be Pyrrhic, with chances that the entire defending meld gets killed if it contained four cards or fewer.

If your attack succeeds, you can add cards from your hand that can be legally melded to the captured meld. This could mean creating a fresh meld if all the defending cards were killed.

Similarly if the defender wins, he could keep the area with new cards from his hand if he holds them. Otherwise, an entirely destroyed meld means the area reverts to neutral.

If you included any meld leaders in the attack and they got killed, you may need to take melded cards back to your hand if they don’t follow the new leader, or take the entire meld back and remove the controling marker from the board if there is no remaining card with a crown symbol.

3 Game End, Determining the winner

The game ends when the “historian” card is drawn.

The player who drew the card continues to draw the cards paid for, the historian card doesn’t count.

Starting with the player who drew the historian card, all players in turn can make final melds from cards in their hands, possibly upping the number of treasure chests for the final score.

Then there’s a final income phase for each player.

Whoever now has the most money in the winner.

Designer’s Notes

Force Commitment mechanism

I put up an explanation and started a discussion at:

BoardgameDesign

Cards

An A3 page holds 18 standard poker sized cards and I’ve got 7 x 18 = 126. The Great Khan Game had 14 areas, so two less than this game. These included 20 events cards, some of them take that which I’m not fond of, even though perhaps historically accurate since India suffered catastrophes including a severe famine.

Another 20 cards in The Great Khan Game were “mercenaries”, essentially jokers which could be melded with any suit. I initially thought including some in my game a good idea, but then decided the money bids for battles already abstractly represented mercenaries.

So The Great Khan Game has 124 “area” cards, whereas I have 125 since I’ve kept one event, End of Game.

A basic principle of the system is the more cards an area has, the more likely to suffer political coups.

Some areas have a straightforward hierarchy which makes it easy to creat melds, others lots of leaders who won’t follow anyone and don’t have many followers.

I was initially puzzled by why fortification cards had political power. Then I realized they make it easy for players to take control, but hard to avoid losing to coups. And also they need a leader to combine into a meld strong enough to withstand attempted coups and war.

In my first attempt at designing cards, I went a bit wild allocating crowns (flags in Great khan) and swords to leaders. Going back to the Great Khan, I saw only one leader, Swil Swillis (the Mighty Sword), gets allocated both political and military power.

Nation	Crowns	Swords	Castles	Treasures	#
Afghanistan	3	5	1	1	6
Awadh	6	2	2	2	8
Baroda	5	4	1	3	7
Bengal	11	2	4	8	12
Carnatic	8	3	3	4	10
Gorkha	5	4	1	0	6
Gwalior	5	2	2	3	7
Hyderabad	6	3	1	3	8
Indore	5	3	1	1	7
Malabar	7	1	4	6	8
Misl	3	3	1	1	6
Mughals	8	6	3	5	11
Mysore	6	5	2	4	8
Nagpur	5	6	1	1	7
Pune	6	3	1	2	8
Rajputs	5	4	2	0	6
————-	———	———	———-	————	—–
Total	92	56	32	46	125

Afghanistan

Delhi, part of Mughal on the board, suffered several invasions from Afghanistan. In game terms, it’s militarily strong but holds little economic interest, so lots of swords but few treasures. It’s fairly peripheral to the story, so only 6 cards.

Nader Shah

Assasinated in 1747, so not particularly politically powerful, just one crown.
Keeping swords for leaders scarce in second iteration, but Napoleon’s hero deserves one.

Ahmad Shah Durrani

Accompanied Nader Shah, so in game terms a follower until Nader’s assasination.
Trying to avoid crown and sword inflation, but giving him one of each.

Ghazni

A leader/fortress providing a third crown so that Afghanistan has a kingmaker for game purposes.
A treasure chest to give some motivation for attacking Afghanistan.