Look, we’ll never know how sonae fought in practice. Let’s just stop thinking about it. Maybe it will become easier if your Japanese fighting game isn’t set in Japan. Maybe it would be better for your miniature game to be set in the lands of Kensei: The Awakening… and to also feature zombies.
In Kensei, you will lead small-ish forces belonging to one of the clans vying for the control of Hymukai… including the undead hordes of Kuro-Tei. However, there’s nothing forcing you to use any magical stuff. By default, the non-zombie clans don’t really have supernatural troops (with really minor exceptions), so if you just want to have a rank-and-flank samurai slap fight, go ahead.
Kensei uses alternating activations – with a twist! The initiative is rolled for each turn, and the winner gets to decide who will activate units first. Both players then choose a unit each and roll to see how many orders they’ll have (one or two). The player who has to activate first will declare their first order for the unit. If that action doesn’t need a reaction, then the second player activates, and then activation returns to the first player.
The trick here is that one player’s action may force the other player to expend their order before they could play it. So, for example, you may be forced to activate first and have but a single order, but if you charge your opponent’s unit, he’ll be forced to spend an order to react. And if this sounds a little confusing, that’s because the book is somewhat-to-actually confusing. I just assume we played it right.
When it’s actually time to smash faces, Kensei is both fairly easy and fairly fiddly. Stabbing or shooting, you first assemble your dice pool: your unit’s attack rating, plus a d6 per mini actually fighting, and so on. Then you modify the target number – start with 4+. You take the successes as your damage pool. The target number to damage is also a 4+, but, again, modifiers exist – just far fewer. Once you roll the dice, you discard any results of 1, deal damage on equal or more, and natural 6s always cause damage, allowing to target embedded heroes. Here’s the kicker: The dice that didn’t wound but didn’t score a 1 either deal stun markers – and two stuns convert to a single damage. This means that even peasants may literally wear down the samurai as they collapse from exhaustion. Still, having to remember that you need to care about dice that aren’t successes adds to the fiddlyness.
Non-magical, non-siege-engine units all run on one of four statlines: Hero, Elite, Warrior or Peasant. Flavor is added via “titles” (samurai, monk, peasant (again)), armaments and maybe a couple special rules. In melee, armaments have their own table of interactions. For example, Swords (type 4 weapons) add a d6 to your to hit roll against type 0 weapons (sticks and other peasant shit), except when charging. Others can get even more involved! Naturally, katanas have their own category separate from swords.
I’m fast running out of space here, so I’ll cram in one big piece of criticism: however messy the system may be, the writing in the rulebook is messier. Half of the time, we were fighting the book. And sure, this is often the case, even when the rules haven’t been translated from another language. But what makes it even harder is the insistence on using Japanese terms that add just a little more of unnecessary frustration. When reading army lists, you have to remember that Kamigashira is just the term for a unit leader. Hata-Jurushi? That’s for banner troops. And then you have to keep that in mind when building an army…
In conclusion, Kensei is mostly a neat game? Mostly. Really, the biggest challenge isn’t in modifiers and such, but in reading the dang book. And yes, there’s a unit that’s peasant (statline) peasant (title), one of the two units to use those!
