Legend of the Five Rings Diskwars

In my, geeky, hopeless, money-sucking, obsession to chronicle the evolution of L5R, I managed to get my hand on a few sets of Legend of the Five Rings Diskwars., and I've also got to play a couple of games as it is.

I have a recollection of Diskwars being somewhat big for a couple of years back in 2000-2001, but I had never saw the L5R version, only becoming aware of it several years later.

Diskwars might be seen as a low cost wargame. Cardboard disk of different sizes  are use to represent military units. Each disk has an Attack, Defense and Toughness value which are used to resolve combat. Since disk size affects both movement and combat, this reminds me of Song of Blades and Heroes a lot, and I have to wonder if SBH might not have been somewhat influenced by it.

Personally I'm more of a miniatures gamer because I like the painting aspect of the hobby as much as the gaming aspect, and the collectible aspect of this game would drive me bonkers (I suspect that's the reason I never got into any kind of CCG), but I have to admit I had fun playing it.

There were two "Editions" of the game, Imperial and Shadowlands, in reality rather an Edition and an expansion. In Imperial Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Phoenix, and Unicorn were the available factions, with the Scorpion and Naga being introduced in the Shadowlands expansion.

The distribution model was a series of starter sets for each available clan, and booster packs.

Clan sets came with 5 fixed "flats", 2 common flats, and an uncommon flat. Each flat had an average 4 or 5 disks depending on disk size. Booster packs came with 4 flats, 2 common, an uncommon and a rare. Shadowlands worked slightly different, with a pool of 60 flats, but I suspect the difference is more cosmetic than anything else.

Rules are the same between both edition, Shadowlands just clarifying, adding errata and two more scenarios rather than changing anything, They probably are the same from basic Diskwars as well because there are few intances of different namings along the rules, e.g. Daisho was probably Swashbuckler, Counterspell was Surge and there are other. Many of these disappeared in the revision from Imperial to Shadowlands, but not all of them.

The rules themselves are pretty simple for the most part. I felt duels needed better explaining but I'm not sure how they would work in actual play as there was no way to initiate a duel with the disks we had. We did a mock up and my doubt is if hits incurred in the duel would carry over like missile or spell hits. I suspect it does, but it would be nice to have confirmation.

Most any other issue would likely stem from wierd disk interactions, but most disk are fairly simple so I don't know if there are obviously broken disks. In our games Soshi Bantaro did very well against the Lion army which had three shugenja forcing me to adjust my strategy, but when I played Crab with a single Kuni Yori, he didn't bothered half as much. It might just be that Scorpion pairs well against Lion, but not so much against Crab. Then again I managed to win with Lion (in no small part due to the Death Seekers ability, which also raised questions) but lost with Crab (probably because I took few elements which made the Scorpion abilities more effective).

Storywise there isn't much to add as it uses the Clan War Storyline, and only reprints one fiction from the ccg expansion of the same name in each rulesheet. In the Shadowlands expansion some of the flats also had flavour text.

The use of the Clan war storyline actually surprised me a bit, because when this game was published it had already been  wraped up for two years, so there is no reason why they had to use it. Why not explore other possibilities?

Come to think of it the same was pretty much true of the Clan War miniature rules. Every L5R branch into another market used the same storyline. I suppose that it's was a way to spare money in art and fiction, but why risk saturating the consumer with a rehash of the same basic story? The miniature game I can understand as it was released earlier, was certainly developed while the Clan War storyline was being worked and was certainly a far more complex project than L5DRW that potentially had direct ties to the RPG.

However this game was almost certainly developed with little effort. The rulebook like I said before is probably just slightly changed from the FFG original, I wouldn't be surprised the same happened with some disks, and I am absolutely sure it happened with the spells. The recycled art is no impediment and there is some art that I think is original (Iuchi Juoseng is awesome, BTW), so all in all tthere was little to lose in taking that risk here.

This is probablya moot point though because when AEG recovered all IP rigths from WotC L5RDW would probably still be one of the lines that would make sense, from a business standpoint, to cut.

Anyway here are the armies we used to test the game:

Lion Army:
Ancestral Home of the Lion
Ancestral Sword of the Lion
Scout x3
Matsu Agetoki
Medium Cavalry
Kitsu Motso x3
Akodo Death Seekers x3
Morito Tokei x2
Kitsu Toju
Gift of the Wind x2
Stiffling Wind
Gust of Wind
Essence of Water
Energy Transference
Mighty Protection x2
Delving the Earth x2
Earth Stagnation x2
Strangling Root x2

Total: 148 pts.

Scorpion Army:
Ruined Fortress of the Scorpion
Broken Sword of the Scorpion
Ninja Shapeshifter
Shosuro Hametsu
Bayushi Hisa x3
Bayushi Togai x2
Bayushi Aramoro x2
Light Infantry x2
Bayushi Supai x3
Ninja Spy x2
Soshi Bantaro
Bayushi Kyoto
Flight x2
Sure Aim x2
Path to Inner Peace x3

Total: 138 pts.

In the 2nd match:

Crab Army:
War Fortress of the Crab
Ancestral Sword of the Crab
Tetsubo
Kuni Yori
Crab Berserkers x2
Hida Amoro
Ginawa
The Damned x2
Hida Yakamo
Hida Tsuru
Hida Sukune x2
Fury of Osano-Wo x2
Path to Inner Peace x3
Mighty Protection x2
Strangling Root x2
Essence of Water
Energy Transference 

Total: 145 pts.

Scorpion Army:
Ruined Fortress of the Scorpion
Broken Sword of the Scorpion
Ninja Shapeshifter
Shosuro Hametsu
Bayushi Hisa x3
Bayushi Togai x2
Bayushi Aramoro x2
Light Infantry x2
Bayushi Supai x3
Ninja Spy x2
Soshi Bantaro
Bayushi Kyoto
Gift of the Wind x2

Flight x2
Sure Aim x2
Stifling Wind

Total: 146 pts.

Scorpion lost against Lion and won against Crab.