An Evening with Maria
This three-player take on the War of the 18th-century Austrian Succession has been lavishly praised for its innovative game mechanics. But is it actually fun?
Designer Lewis Pulsipher once described the “three-player problem” in game design as follows:
In a three-player conflict game without a definite end, the two players who are behind will usually beat on the one who is ahead, resulting in a perpetual stalemate. This can be avoided by placing a time limit on the game. However, as soon as you add a definite end to the game, such as a number of turns or a number of points, the situation changes drastically…It is frequently possible for one player (call him “A”), if he believes he will lose and cannot catch up in the remaining duration of the game, to determine which other player wins. That is, late in the game the losing player exerts all his efforts against another player “B,” which tends to let the third player “C” win.
As Pulsipher notes, this isn’t a big problem in Euro games such as Terraforming Mars, which feature fairly limited interaction among players (and, for that reason, sometimes feel like exercises in group solitaire). But it’s a huge problem in war games. As some readers know, my dominant gaming passion is Advanced Squad Leader (ASL). Some of the finest minds in the ASL hobby have spent years trying to come up with three-player scenarios (featuring, e.g., two feuding factions of the Soviet army fighting against German defenders for control of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof in April, 1945). But to my mind, these experiments don’t work, because the ASL game system—like most war-gaming systems—simply isn’t suited to triangular play.
Which brings us to Maria, an award-winning 2009 game by German designer Richard Sivél, based on the War of the Austrian Succession, which took place between 1740 and 1748 (though the actual game play in Maria is confined to the period between 1741 and 1744). This is a game that’s purpose-built for three players. (There’s a two-player variant, which I will completely ignore in the text that follows, because I haven’t played it; and from what I understand, few other people play it either.)
I know there are some gamers who don’t really care about the history surrounding the games they play. But in the case of Maria, it’s difficult to even understand the game’s structure without some baseline understanding of the historical context.
In a nutshell, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, has just died of illness (October 20, 1740 was the historical date of his death) following a hunting trip in cold weather. He left no male heir, and so Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands, and a half dozen other European holdings (not to mention the Austrian Habsburg monarchy itself) is in political and military limbo. Austria’s neighbours are ready to move in and bite off chunks of these lands, thereby leaving Austria as a territorial rump. But they all have underestimated Charles VI’s daughter, Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina—Maria Theresa to her closest friends, and just Maria to you and me—who would go on to become the only woman to rule the Habsburg dominions in her own right.
This is a three-player game, as I’ve mentioned. And one of those three players takes the role of Maria. Her forces are seeking to preserve the territorial integrity of the Habsburg imperial holdings as Charles VI left them when he died.
Facing off against Maria are two other players:
(a) Prussian king Frederick II (aka Frederick the Great), who lords over the northern parts of what we would now call Germany and various adjoining eras. (This is the era of German “dualism,” whereby German lands were divided up between Prussia and Austria—plus a bunch of other smaller principalities and independent territories left over from Medieval days.) To simplify things greatly, Frederick is seeking to conquer Maria’s holdings from the north—especially Silesia (which Prussia typically ends up trying to annex at the beginning of most games of Maria).
(b) French king Louis XV (aka Louis the Beloved). To simplify things greatly, Louis is trying to conquer Maria’s holdings from the west.
The object of the game is fairly simple: Score victory points by capturing as many fortress cities as possible in and around Austria. The first player that achieves its prescribed fortress tally wins.
Okay, so if this were all there were to Maria, we’d be dealing with a classic version of the three-player problem: As soon as Louis starts gobbling up too many forts in southwestern Germany, Frederick and Maria patch up their differences so that the Austrians can strengthen their western frontier. And if Frederick gets too powerful, Maria comes to similar terms with Louis. Otherwise, it’s just Frederick and Louis teaming up to fight their way to Vienna. That doesn’t sound so innovative, does it? How’d Maria get all those awards?
The answer is that there are many complications—the most important being that Frederick the Player isn’t just playing the role of Frederick the Prussian. The game also gives that player command of something called the Pragmatic Army, a real (if oddly named) military force formed by British King George II (in part) to defend Austria’s holdings against French encroachment in what were then called the Spanish Netherlands.
So France is basically fighting a two-front war—an eastern front against Austria, and a northern front against “the Prags” (a term that sounds absurd, but that’s what I’ve seen them called in Maria instructional videos). And since the Prags are controlled by Frederick, that player is fighting Austria (in alliance with France) in central Europe, while effectively defending Austria (and fighting France) in the Netherlands. There’s even an Austrian army that starts play in the Netherlands, and that can cooperate militarily with the Frederick-controlled Prags. So on the same turn, from one battle to the next, Maria and Frederick go from enemies to allies or vice versa. I have no idea how faithfully this game mechanic is rooted in real history, but it certainly does make for some interesting game play.
A second (not-quite-unrelated) complication is that the game board is divided into two sections—a Bohemian (central European) map that comprises most of the board, and a “Flanders” map on the left, which includes the patchwork historical relic known as the Holy Roman Empire. Austrian and French Units can move back and forth between the two maps, as they are geographically contiguous (in the south, at least), but they usually operate as separate military spheres.
The third complication is that France and Prussia both come with geopolitical sidekicks—Bavaria and Saxony, respectively, which have their own armed forces but which are entirely subordinate to the main powers who run them as parallel operations. (Bavaria remains a French sidekick from beginning to end. But Saxony can become neutral, or even join with the Austrians, as happened in the game I played, depending on the Politics cards that get played between rounds.)
I played Maria with some friends earlier this month. While we enjoyed it, I’m not sure how deep we got into the strategy—because I think a lot of the game (as it’s supposed to be played) involves diplomacy and horse-trading among players…I’ll let you take Breda, but you have to promise not to cut supply to these guys down in Bavaria-type of thing. Since my friends (Mike and Lawrence) and I didn’t know the game outside of reading the rules and watching some instructional rules, none of us felt especially comfortable proposing (or accepting) these kinds of deals. So we didn’t make any. (The game rules makes in-game deals enforceable, which suggests to me that such deals are supposed to be a major part of the game.)
My friends and I played the “advanced” version of the game, which meant that there were some added subplots involving the changing fortunes in the parallel war taking place on the Italian peninsula, as well as another subplot involving the 1742 election for the post of Holy Roman Emperor. But these are add-ons that put only one or two victory points at play. The real heart of the game lies with the multilateral balance of military power among Prussia, France, Austria, and the Prags (and, oh yeah, Saxony and Bavaria). The game mechanics are not especially difficult, but the strategy is highly nuanced, and hardly obvious.
One reason why this is a hard game to learn is that the rules force players to make fairly important strategic decisions early on. In particular, if Prussia gobbles up all the forts in Silesia (a border area nominally controlled by Maria but coveted by Frederick), then Prussia can offer peace terms to Austria—which, if accepted, ends the shooting war between these two belligerents for a full game turn, thereby allowing Austria to (temporarily) focus its efforts on France, while Silesia gets annexed into Prussia. France also has a version of this gambit at its disposal. My sense is that these are critical tools for players to use in order to prevent an opponent from becoming too powerful—but the question of when such offers should be made or accepted would seem to require a lot of game experience. So, again, this doesn’t seem like the kind of game that a new player and his two friends could just pick up on their own, start playing, and fully appreciate on their first go-around.
That said, even novice players can appreciate the game’s innovative mechanics. Maria is a unique mash-up of (1) a traditional area-control war game, (2) an exercise in diplomacy, negotiation, and horse-trading, and (3) a Bridge-like card game in which players manage a hand full of traditionally marked playing cards corresponding to hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs.
That third element gets us into the combat-resolution mechanism of Maria, which is highly abstract: When armies fight, their strength in battle is largely determined by the “tactical cards” played by the corresponding player from their (secret) card hands. The map is overlaid with a grid that separates the action into different zones that are marked in one of the four suits. And when you’re fighting a battle, you can only play a card whose suit corresponds to the location in which your fighting army is located.
By way of example, illustrated in the image below, the battle strength of an army in Dresden can only be increased by cards in hearts. An army in Prague (bottom centre) would require diamonds. An army in Bautzen requires spades, and so on.
I should also add that opposing armies can never occupy the same spot, so combat always takes place from adjacent locations. This means that two armies can be fighting each other in different suits. For example, if an army in Prague (marked Prag on the map segment below) were fighting an army in Schlan, then the former would play diamonds while the latter would play clubs.
This system can be fun and interesting, as players maneuver for battle in zones where they are flush with the corresponding suit, while doing their best to avoid battles in areas where they are dry. (Or they can do the opposite as a form of bluff.) Cards are refreshed on a turn-by-turn basis, and the level of card income that each nation gets can go up or down as the tides of fortune dictate. (Countries can also offer each other “subsidies,” whereby part of their turn-by-turn card income is diverted from one nation to another for a set number of turns.)
This isn’t a system that dedicated wargaming purists will like much, as it makes combat feel something like a crapshoot. There are no combat tables, geographical modifiers, odds columns, or any of the other staples of wargames. Players just play cards until they run out or see a good opportunity to retreat on favourable terms. And then it’s on to the next battle (which may be taking place in the same suit, meaning that one or both players might come to this second battle having exhausted their inventory in the first one—you quickly learn to take this sort of thing into account).
All of this makes for a very clever game, in part because of the way it addresses the age-old three-player problem. In particular, because of the complicated “frenemy” relationship between Frederick and Maria—enemies in Bohemia, friends in Flanders—the structure of the game can make it difficult for one of these two players to turn decisively against the other in one theatre without also compromising their fortunes in another. Moreover, the hidden information embedded in one’s tactical-card stack can make it difficult to know who is on the cusp of winning and who is not. And finally, since the game allows players to enforce deals between players, a shrewd player can lock in his advantage by duping an opponent into a one-sided arrangement, which cannot be reneged upon even when the outcome of the game becomes clear.
But is it fun? I think I’d have to play it again, this time with a more informed state of mind, to answer that question. But at the very least, the game helped teach me about a complicated European military conflict—one whose dynamics I would have had a difficult time understanding from reading a book or listening to a podcast.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina as the widow of Charles VI, instead of his daughter. This error has been corrected. Thank you to user Pongo2 for pointing this out.
Maria Theresa was Charles VI's daughter, not his widow.
Jonathan, how hard is it to pick up a new game like this, especially with all players being new to it?
I wonder how often the juice is worth the squeeze.