by RoadHouse
I believe it's highly subjective if you like the expansion or not. The initial problem of a Shogun expansion was very hard. How should be Shogun expanded? Some people seem to think it's fine as it is but I think something could be added to the game.In my opinion Tenno's Court does what is probably humanly possible to expand the game without slowing down the game significantly, unbalancing or radically changing the dynamic of the game.
It depends what you think Shogun was lacking but here are my opinions:
-Balancing the setup:
Now you get court official based on the cubes that come out of the tower. In the base game you were just in a worse situation if all your cubes came out of the tower compared to a guy who had a lot of his cubes stuck inside the tower.
-Strategic movement on the board or making better use of some armies:
Now you can effectively redeploy or make use of armies that are otherwise somewhat useless on the board by gaining cards(from Tenno's court) that let you do different things. The "redeploy" basically happens with some cards that allow you to place armies on the tray. This means you can attack with a much larger force in the following battles in an area where you need your units the most.
- The turn order is more important now:
In the base game you could ignore or not put too much weight most of the time on the turn order but with the expansion it's really important to be first in the turn order. The turn order is a tie-breaker(if you have the same amount of court officials, and it happens a lot!) for deciding who buys a card first from Tenno's Court. Sometimes the cards are really good and you want to be first to choose your pick. Bidding four chests is not that uncommon anymore.
-More options and decisions if didn't have enought already:
I think there is an interesting dynamic between the board and the court now. A lot more room for la grande manoeuvres and long term planning. Some cards let you build a building instantly which might have a staggering effect on the scoring that nobody could anticipate exactly. The game just feels more open-ended now with more options and even more interesting decision making.