Europa Universalis Board Game Rules Pdf

[Elisa Rathrock]

Europa Universalis is a board game created by Philippe Thibaut and released by Azure Wish Enterprise on 27 April 1993.[1] It is a geopolitical strategy game in which players compete as the powers of Europe during the period 1492 to 1792. In 2000, Paradox Interactive released a computerized version, the first in a series of four games.

This atypically long board game has an official playing time of 6 hours according to the game box, but games can last for weeks; Board Game Geek estimates the playing time to be 15 days.[1] About 1,000 markers are used, as well as two 56 cm 86 cm (22 in 34 in) maps: one for Europe and one for the rest of the world. The English rulebook is 72 pages long.

The players have extraordinary freedom of choice regarding economics, military, maintenance, discoveries, and colonial investment. One drawback is that there is a lot of calculation and management required during the game regarding computing income, price changes, maintenance and purchases of military resources.

A first official extension was released and introduced new rules for forts and missionaries, as well as a new set of objectives.[2] A second extension has been widely circulated on the internet. It introduced yet another set of rules, such as palaces, including historical monarchs with predefined characteristics and a faster combat system that could divide by ten or more the time for one battle, as well as many new minor countries and counters. It was never published officially.

Two more variants have also been circulated: the event rewrite by Risto Marjomaa[3] and the Europa8 version[4] by Pierre Borgnat, Bertrand Asseray, Jean-Yves Moyen and Jean-Christophe Dubacq, which introduces two more players, revised counters and maps, and is not finished yet. Both of these can be obtained for free either by download or by asking the authors. There is also a mailing-list which is quite responsive in suggestions and advice about the rules.[5]

This is not much of an issue if you are playing Solitaire, where the only action is moving cards, or Super Mario Bros., where the bulk of the game can be reduced to running and jumping. But if you are playing a Tabletop RPG, or some other game where the players should have a great deal of freedom, you need to deal with all sorts of unusual special cases.

Clever game designers will design a set of fundamental mechanics that are flexible enough to handle all sorts of unpredictable action. Naive and/or ambitious game designers will attempt to construct a new rule for every possible case. Thus, even an apparently simplistic game system can develop Loads and Loads of Rules.

Games that fit this trope tend to be favorites of Rules Lawyers. They will often require Obvious Rule Patches. See also That One Rule, a localized version of this, Cricket Rules for a trope dealing with this and Calvinball which is a dynamic version of this trope in action.

Anime & Manga

• Prosfair, a fictional game from Blood Blockade Battlefront, resembles chess but gets exponentially more complicated the longer it's played.
• Destroy All Humankind. They Can't Be Regenerated. is a story revolving around the card game Magic: The Gathering, which is chock full of rules that are explained and utilized throughout the series. Each new expansion pack gives the characters access to cards full of new abilities and mechanics to play around with.
• One Piece has Hit and Dead Ball, which is similar to dodgeball but has hundreds of extra rules to cover pretty much every possibility. Among other things, there is a rule that covers what happens if someone eats the ball (they get eliminated).

Board Games

• The US Chess Federation's Official Rules of Chess (6th edition, which is the current one) is 416 pages. The world chess organization FIDE somehow manages to get by with just a couple of fairly large (but not excessively so) web pages.
• Nomic often winds up this way. Depending on the rules about rule numbers, it can look even worse than it really is; Agora Nomic has rule numbers well into the 2000s, but due to repealing old rules when the players get tired of them, the total number of rules at any one time tends to hover around 150 or so.
• Magic Realm is a fantasy realm adventuring simulator with 88 pages of rules (depending on edition). The complexity is part of the charm - and part of the reason it's been out of print for 30 years.
• Here I Stand is a 2-6 player historical game that covers the war of reformation from 1517 to 1555. As you might expect from that description, there's a lot of content in there, with the rulebook running to 48 pages, covering everything from sieges to exploring the New World.
• Europa Universalis was famously turned into a complex computer game by Paradox Interactive. Removing all the automated computer bits does not make it less fiddly.
• While less complex than many on this list, Dominant Species is no slouch. It is said to be the inspiration for Cones of Dunshire, and seeing it set up it's not hard to see the resemblance. Often met with some mix of "oh my god I love it" and "oh my god that game".

Comic Strips

• A World War I wargame in Knights of the Dinner Table features these. It came in a genuine military surplus footlocker, features at least three different table-sized maps, and has enough rules and variable factors to choke a small horse. The entire game cost $400, which was split between ten or so players who would be in on the first game with the winner getting to keep it for himself. Four years later (i.e. as long as the actual war), the first game is still going (though only Weird Pete and Brian are still actively playing). The game itself is an exaggerated (though not by much) version of Advanced Squad Leader, requiring over twelve hours to play a single turn involving two players, with such factors as weather, politics, population growth, food supplies, and so forth. And that's only what's shown on screen.

Literature

• A fictional example is "Dragon Poker" from Robert Aspirin's Myth Adventures series. Variables based on almost everything. Rulebooks tend to be published per dimension, at most.
• One of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels gives the short version of the rules for Brockian Ultra-Cricket, and a mention that the only time anyone ever compiled a complete set of rules, it immediately underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole.

Radio

• Parodied in I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, in which teams play a round of Mornington Crescent, a game of impenetrable complexity in which none of its many rules are stated to the listener.

Video Games

• Dwarf Fortress has rules to govern the dwarves' psychology, the geological processes of the planet, and vomit, to name a few. And the creator isn't done yet. Even on a pretty good modern gaming rig, Procedural Generation of a new world takes upwards of an hour.
• In NetHack, each individual item in the game has Combinatorial Explosion potential from interacting with other items, and the dev team coded every single one.
• Civilization provides an in-game spreadsheet to help you keep track of the various statistics on your cities. If you want to understand how those statistics will change in some number of turns, you'll need to make your own spreadsheet.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is along the same lines, and includes a bunch of other complicated rules like Nerve Stapling and terraforming commands like Boreholes.
• Master of Orion 3 obliges, since its massive heaps of rules are literally stored as Excel spreadsheets.
• Dominions 3's rulebook doesn't even include stats for the units, and still clocks in at 300 pages, half of which is a compact listing of the game's spells. In reality, though, a massive amount of those spells are summons, stats included. The independent unit stats are listed too.
• Jagged Alliance 2:
• Upon release in 1998, the game had incredibly complex rules - but mostly "under the hood" (it was only "mildly" complex to the actual player).
• v1.13 now includes rules for recruiting and controlling mobile NPC militias, manning and utilizing special facilities, climbing through windows, deploying bipods while crouched, setting up directional explosives, hitting a moving target (while taking account relative movement angles), and many many more.
• At one point, several fans asked for a feature that allows players to load a magazine with individual bullets of mixed types, but the dev team turned that idea down due to the horror of imagining the game having to keep track of each bullet as a separate item. Still, the idea was seriously considered for quite some time, and has never fully been rejected.
• Space Station 13, especially the Goon Station version, is notorious for the complexity and depth of interactions it supports. The source code is said to be so complex that by rights it should not compile on the platform.
• Pokmon is simple at first glance, but its battle system is actually extremely complicated under-the-hood. There are hundreds of moves, some with very complex rules governing exactly how they work in certain situations (Substitute and Baton Pass, to name a few), ditto for Abilities. Then you have Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, held items, Effort Values and IVs, how the game handles draws (who wins or loses depends on what move caused the Double KO, and it varies from game-to-game), official rule options like Sleep Clause...and that's before you get into competitive House Rules such as those created by Smogon. Even the formula for calculating damage is insanely complicated.
• Played as far as they can go with the town of Facade in Nier, which has over 120,000 rules...and counting.
• Then this gets automated in NieR: Automata, where the enemy robots become fascinated with the long-dead ruins of Facade and use their massive servers to memorize millions of analog rules.
• The card game of Double Fannucci in Zork has an obscene number of rules, only one of which is ever explained (That playing three undertrumps after the other player discards a trebled fromp is an instant win). The sheer incomprehensible complexity of the game pretty much requires exploiting that one rule to win a hand.
• Tetris: The Grand Master's Grade Recognition System rules are deceptively complex for a game that's about putting tetrominos into a well to make solid lines. While they basically boil down to "play quickly and make a lot of Tetrises", the exact workings are far more complex than just "more lines means more points":
• In the first game, the grade system isn't too bad, as it's based on points...that is, until you get to grade S9. To achieve the final grade, Grand Master, simply earning points isn't enough (the game's "Next Grade" display will show the next threshold at "?????? points"), you also have to meet time-and-grade thresholds at three particular checkpoints during the game. Failure to meet these checkpoints and you're locked out of GM grade.
• The second game, Tetris: The Absolute - The Grand Master 2 and its Updated Re-release Tetris: The Absolute - The Grand Master 2 PLUS is significantly more complex with how grades work. First of all, your on-screen score doesn't reflect your grade anymore. Then, its version of GRS is influenced by several factors: Clearing multiple lines at once and making consecutive line clears, and the hidden points that contribute to your next grade slowly decrease if you don't make new line clears. And then to get the GM rank, you have to make a certain number of Tetrises in each section, complete each 100-level section within a target time, and for the second half of the game, the target time is no longer fixed but instead based on your previous sections' times. If you meet those requirements, then in the Mini-Game Credits that follow, your pieces turn invisible when they lock down and you have to survive for one minute (akin to a True Final Boss), or else you only get an M grade instead of GM.
• The third game, Tetris: The Grand Master 3 - Terror-Instinct, stacks two more sub-systems on top of that. The version of GRS is carried over to this game, and implements a new system wherein if you complete a 100-level sectionnote more specifically, its first 70 levels fast enough, you will get a "COOL!!" bonus that raises your grade by one...but every time you get a COOL!!, the next section's requirements for one will be based on your time for the section you just cleared, so you can lose COOL!!s because you keep going faster and faster. You can't dawdle in 100-level sections either, otherwise you will get a "REGRET!!" and lose one grade. And on top of that, if you make it to level 999, the credits mini-game comes back, and the lines you clear in this section contribute towards your final grade; normally each piece will vanish 5 seconds after being placed, but meet certain conditions and they will immediately turn invisible, and you will earn substantially more points towards your grades. If you master all of that, you will only get a Master M grade and not the coveted GM grade. To get that, you have to get a "Promotional Exam" for a "Qualified" MM rank, which itself requires you to (to oversimplify) maintain an average MM grade over the course of a seven-run period, then take the exam, which is randomly given out and does not give you the option to opt out and get an MM grade there, then play well enough to be issued the exam for a GM grade.

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