Welcome to our store for Senjutsu: Battle For Japan.
A tense, fast-play Samurai duelling game, with beautiful miniatures, expansive deck-crafting mechanics and memorable showdowns.
This store features the same discounts and content from our original Kickstarter Campaign. Late-Pledge here and don't miss out!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Post Kickstarter Update #11 Daimyo Cover Artist Confirmed, The First (Digital) Senjutsu Tournament, Musashi, Charging Cards, A German Publishing Deal + Russian Backers
about 2 years ago
– Mon, Mar 07, 2022 at 01:59:15 AM
Good morning, afternoon and evening Backers! A long Update for you today regarding a plethora of Senjutsu talking points.
Daimyo Cover Artist Confirmed:
I am delighted to announce that the wonderfully talented, award-winning artist Tomasz Jedruszek has been signed to produce the cover art of Daimyo! His portfolio can be viewed here and features work for Magic The Gathering, Dominion, Game Of Thrones, Star Wars and more!
Tomasz's beautiful Dominion (2nd Ed) cover
The First Senjutsu Tournament Has Started!
Playing as one of the four Core Set fighters- thirty-six brave contenders have stepped into the Senjutsu ring for a chance to be crowned the winner of the first- digital- Senjutsu tournament!
Each game is being fought on Tabletop Simulator. You can view the Standings and Match Results as they’re updated by click this link.
Paul and I are playing too, let’s see how well we do!
Painted Musashi:
Max has produced another stunning paintjob- the legendary sword master Musashi!
Charging Cards:
We're ready to kick the manufacturing process into its next gear- and for that to happen we need to get a good idea of Add-On quantities.
Cards will be charged two weeks today (Friday 18th March). This will provide Stone Sword Games with the funds and data to ensure Senjutsu ships according to its Summer timetable.
Please note: This is not the shipping charge- this is a charge for any Add-Ons and Upgrades that you have added to your BackerKit Pledge post-campaign. Pledges can still be updated and added-to after the 18th March.
Refunds outside of exceptional circumstances will not be possible after this point.
A German Publishing Deal:
Eagle-eyed Backers have spotted that Senjutsu has been appearing on some German retailer sites.
We are very close to being able to announce our German partner.
As soon as I can provide the full details I will put out an Update that reveals more! Complete with details specifically for Backers with a German language-copy of Senjutsu.
Russian Backers:
We've received a couple of refund requests from Russian Backers.
Refunds have been attempted directly using the payment card information and are not possible at this time using this payment method.
In order to make this process possible we're currently talking to PayPal, once we've got a clear indication that there is a route using PayPal that's safe and secure we will process these requests (minus any fees). This work our end is necessary to make sure that Backers do not fall victim to any developments that could potentially lead to their money being requisitioned and used as part of this awful ongoing conflict.
Much love, stay safe and stay well,
James (And Paul!)
Post Kickstarter Update #10 Updated Fulfilment Estimates, Painted Monk and a Kickstarter Award
about 2 years ago
– Sat, Feb 12, 2022 at 01:34:29 AM
Good morning, afternoon and evening loyal Samurai!
James here! Back from paternity leave with some important content for you!
UpdatedFulfilment Estimates
Paul and myself had high hopes with Senjutsu's launch- but we've been absolutely blown away by the support received for our little game, having sold tens of thousands of copies all over the world!
As our initial estimates were exceeded- the May fulfilment date is unlikely. Kickstarter has a bit of a weird quirk- the estimated fulfilment date is set at the start of the campaign and locked in before creators know how well the campaign will do.
Transparency means a lot to myself and Stone Sword Games- we are confident that with six talented staff working hard on the project, a summer release date is very likely! Many of our tasks behind the scenes have been ticked off ahead of time and we're immensely thankful to our Alpha Playtesters who have already perfected the balance of so many of the wonderful Samurai fighters featured in Senjutsu.
The Pledge Manager will be staying open until April at the minimum, which gives you plenty of time to upgrade your pledge, mix up your pledge choices or change your shipping information.
Painted Monk
Max: "I was able to get The Monk finished this week, this has been my favourite model since I first saw the render! Nice to finally get some paint on him, there were a ton of details on show and a chance for yet another vibrant colour scheme!"
Big K Kickstarter Award
Awards are an important part of our industry and helping small creators grow!
Please vote for Senjutsu in the Big-K Kickstarter Game Community Award for TTG! ✅
Our next Update will contain some wonderful exciting things coming this year! Damn...'yo would be crazy to miss it!
Much love, (and happy to be back!)
James (and Paul!)
Kickstarter update #9 Tabletop simulator tournament, New artwork and Onna-Bugeisha Focus!
about 2 years ago
– Fri, Feb 04, 2022 at 09:48:40 PM
Tabletop Simulator Tournament.
Signups are now open for the first ever Senjutsu TTS tournament!
This event is open to all and will include some very special guest participants.
All you need to play is a copy of Tabletop Simulator and to sign up on our Discord! Signups are open now and the tournament itself will be starting on Monday 28/02/22
https://discord.gg/stoneswordgamesIf you are matched against one of our Playtest team and you beat them you can claim a Bounty Card for the achievement. This will be a character card of your choice signed by our very own Raben featuring his stunning artwork.
The overall top player for the event not only gets the right to call themselves the world’s first Senjutsu champion, but they will also be able to make a permanent mark on Senjutsu forever and design their own card!
The winner will be able to sit with Dan and design their own card that will feature in the Core Set. To show the world your achievement the card will feature a special banner that includes your name as the designer. Head on over to the discord and stake your claim to victory!
Warrior Artwork.
Here we have our in-house artists most recent artwork for the upcoming Senjutsu launch, this time focusing on the Warrior!
Looking absolutely stunning with rage in her eye and brandishing her No-Dachi blade you can see the design queues Max and Raben took design queues off each other in both the artwork and the painted examples.
Wakou Pirate:
We now have the Wakou Pirate painted up and ready for a game!
Armed with a mighty kanobo club and a jar of Sake (I don't know which is more lethal!) he's off the high seas and ready for a drink and some carnage!
I wanted to make this model armour far more weathered, he's out in the salt and sun all day with his line of work, so no bright reds and clean blues for him! However, I still wanted some bright contrast, so I added some bright yellows on his armour and sash. In my head this is him showing off as he has raided some expensive silks on the high seas from some unlucky traders!
Onna-Bugeisha Focus:
Let’s start with her Character Card.
The Onna-Bugeisha is one of the characters in Senjutsu that comes with their own unique special rule. The More damage she takes during combat the more ferocious and determined she becomes. This is represented by the Desperation mechanic.
When the Onna-Bugeisha has taken 3 (or more wounds) she unlocks powerful additional effects on her cards. This works much the same way as being in a particular Kamae. You can play her cards as normal before Desperation, but if you hold onto them until it triggers, they become much better.
Like all Samurai in Senjutsu, the Onna-Bugeisha has a unique Core Ability Card that gives her access to a standard move and rotate and also comes with a Core Weapon Card.
Like The Ronin, the Onna-Bugeisha comes with a Naginata Weapon Card. In this case Naginata Carve. A functionally very similar attack although it trades speed and ease of manoeuvrability for a more reliable 3 Hex attack.
Her Core Ability card also follows the same design as all the other characters, it has 2 standard actions (draw cards, change Kamae) and also comes with an “enabler” for Desperation. If your opponent is playing very defensively because they do not want you to get your enhanced cards online then you can use her Core Ability Card to take a wound and switch to any Kamae to set yourself up for a big Desperation swing.
Desperation Cards
More than half of the Onna-Bugeisha Signature Cards have a Desperation triggered effect on them and here some examples:
Twisting Dodge:
Twisting Dodge is one of the best dodge cards in the game. An excellent high initiative card at speed 8 this allows you to step in ANY direction to get out of the way of most attacks in the game. However, with Desperation, once you are safely out of the way and the attack has resolved, you can then step BACK INTO the fight next turn without the need to find an attack that has movement and hopefully catching your opponent flat footed.
Biting Heaven:
As she has a Naginata and a similar fighting style to the Ronin I felt that it would be cool if she had a similar card to his Signature Attack Crimson Whirlwind. Since boundless rage and mega damage is his thing, I made Biting Heaven into a more reserved, but still quite deadly attack. On its own it has the same large area swing that Crimson Whirlwind has but only inflicts a single point of damage. With Desperation though, the forwardmost 3 hexes become a deadly killing ground for a fast follow up attack that deals an additional wound.
Silent Embrace:
Silent Embrace is the alternate Jade card you unlocked through the Social Stretch goals. I loved designing this card. A final last stand. An all or nothing hail Mary play to try and seize victory in the face of defeat.
If the Onna-Bugeisha has triggered Desperation she can stand firm, and strike in almost any direction for a massive three damage. This is no slow speed card either, at an impressive initiative value of 7 your opponent needs to hope they’re not standing where she can reach them or have a fast dodge card in hand. If they don’t, it is almost certainly game over for them. This victory is bittersweet however, despite her valiant efforts the Onna-Bugeisha finally succumbs to her wounds and is also defeated, using her last breath to save… (that’s a story for another time)
I hope you have enjoyed this look into the Onna-Bugeisha and if you would like to see how she plays, you can find her cards available on Tabletop Simulator right now.
------
Peace and Love,
Max (and the rest of the team)
Post KS Update #8 Retailer surprises, contact update, A Painted Onna-Bugeisha and Dans Design Diary
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 08:25:09 PM
Hello everyone!
This week an update on Senjutsu, some extra goodies for retailers a brand-new design diary and an update on contact details!
Retailers Update
We have been contacting traders who haven’t already backed the Kickstarter. We have decided to add something extra for trade partners spending over £300 with us on trade bundles!
This free add-on comes with a
· Free standard Senjutsu boxed game so you and your staff can try the game for yourselves.
· A quad fold Daimyos castle board for big games!
· Matched play set with everything you need to run organised play from your store.
· 3 A1 posters.
· 3 x season 1 Senjutsu matched play medals.
Backers who have already spent over £300 have already had their pledges upgraded with this extra set for free! Contact [email protected] for more details on this or if you would like to increase your order over £300 to get this extra set.
Contacting Stone Sword Games
James Is our usual point of contact via emails, however he has the next few weeks off as he’s had some very exciting news!
In the meantime, if you have sent him any emails and need a speedy reply or have any new questions, please forward them to [email protected] or [email protected] and we’ll be more than happy to help!
This week I’m going to talk more about balance and decision making through restriction. Specifically in this case the weapon cards.
Weapons:
Every Samurai in Senjutsu can take a Core Weapon card when constructing their deck. They each come with one automatically (The Master for example comes with the Tachi) however there are additional weapons in the Core Box for you to choose from.
While designing the weapons and some of the signature cards it became apparent that sometimes it just didn’t make sense. Take The Ronin’s Crimson Whirlwind card here as an example.
This is supposed to be a 360 degree sweep with a long reach. Which makes sense when he has the Naginata that he comes with as standard but much less sense if you were to give him a Tanto (a short sword with a 25cm blade).
There were a couple of options on how to address this. One was to have each card tied to a weapon type. In the example above we could add “Requires: Naginata” to the Crimson Whirlwind. However this doesn’t really work for numerous reasons. We would have to go through every single card adding weapon requirements to all of them which suddenly shrinks the available card pool for each character by too much. It also adds additional text to every card that then needs to be translated, it takes up room on the card and overall is just to much to fix a small issue.
Instead I opted to limit what core weapon cards each character has access to. There are now 3 distinct flavours of character/weapon combinations. We have “Reach” characters (Ronin, Bugeisha, Warrior, Monk, Ashigaru, Wakou) who are armed with traditionally longer weapons like the Naginata, or Kanabo. We have “Sword” characters (Student, Master, Musashi, Yojimbo, Yasuke) who are armed with blades like the Katana and Wakizashi and finally we have the “Other” characters (Kojiro, Sailor, Assassin, Ninja) who use a variety of weapons unavailable to the other characters.
This provides the easiest “fix” with the most flavour without eliminating options. Since The Ronin can only use reach weapons, Crimson Whirlwind makes sense regardless of which weapon you choose for him.
But what does that look like I hear you ask?
As you can see above the character cards now have an additional line of information which tells you which weapons your Samurai can use. In order to provide choice and decisions I have made sure each character (with some exceptions that you will see later) has access to about 7 - 9 Core Weapon Cards.
It also means we can create additional Core Weapon cards that use the same weapon. For example the Onna-Bugeisha who is also armed with a Naginata comes with the card Naginata Carve.
With the change to how weapons work you will notice that they no longer have character art on them and instead all share the same appearance. That’s not the only change though. Each card now states which weapon it belongs to, in this case the Naginata so you can check your character card and easily find a Core Weapon (or Core Defence card) to suit your play style (Yes I said Core Defence card).
This of course, once again, only how we envision the game to be played to allow choices to factor into character selection and keep deckbuilding a vibrant and varied thing in Organised Play. If however you decide that you really do want to Crimson Whirlwind someone with a Tonfa then you are free to do so in your home games. Speaking of Organised Play…
Organised Play
When Paul started designing the core concept of Senjutsu he envisioned a vibrant organised tournament scene to run alongside the casual home games people would be playing on their kitchen tables. One of the many hats I wear here at StoneSword HQ is Community and Organised Play Manager and I will soon be working on a robust set of guidelines to allow stores, clubs etc to run their own events complete with prizes!
Before I embark on that project though I wanted to let you know what these events may look like.
The idea (and this is subject to change) will be that these events will follow the same “levels” as the card ranks.
Wood level events will be local level events run by Friendly Local Gaming Stores perhaps monthly.
Steel level events will be a larger regional events held maybe twice a year
Gold level events would be National championships once a year
Jade level would be the World Championships once a year.
Depending on the demand for events this could very easily change but the above example is the “vision” as it were for where I would like to see organised events go.
Prizes?
In theory each event level will have a unique prize kit with hopefully alternate art cards, playmats, deck boxes, sleeves or other assorted cool goodies that we can come up with. Sticking with SSG’s stand that nothing should be exclusive, if you are not a competitive player the plan is to make sure that anything that comes in a prize kit (excluding non game related top prizes) will be available to purchase from our website a few months later. For example, if we did an event where the prizes were custom art card sleeves, you could try and win yourself some swag at an event or wait a few months and simply purchase them.
And on that note… OUR FIRST EVENT!
Starting on February 1st you will be able to sign up for our Tabletop Simulator online tournament. You will need Discord and TTS in order to take part as this will allow you to organise your games and more importantly communicate with other players.
The event will be run over several weeks and you will only need to play once per week until we have an eventual winner. How many weeks will be determined by how many players we have and further details will be available closer to the time. You can find our discord here: https://discord.gg/stoneswordgames
What can you win for taking part?
There will be two prizes up for grabs.
First: The Playtest team (and some surprise guests) are being actively encouraged to take part. Beat one of these players in any single game and our very own Raben will sign a character card of your choice featuring his wonderful art.
Second: The overall winner will have the chance to design their own card that will go in the final version of the game and their name will appear on that card.
Until next time,
Farewell Samurai
Post KS Update #7 Surpassing £1,000,000, A Painted Assassin and Dan's Design Diary #2
over 2 years ago
– Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 04:23:45 AM
Good morning, afternoon and evening Senjutsu Backers!
Surpassing £1,000,000:
We've soared past £1,000,000 of funding through incoming BackerKit Late Pledges!
Thank you so much for your support- it is inspiring and means the world to Paul and myself. We are hard at work creating amazing assets and artwork for Senjutsu, with the whole team contributing to this fantastic project to bring it to life!
As promised, Paul and I can now officially announce that there will be a signed Art Print in the box for every backer (if you've picked up at least a Core Set)... And yes we are really hand signing every Art Print!
The Painted Assassin:
Max has just finished painting the pre-production Assassin- we think he's looking beautiful! A painting guide for this colour scheme will be available from our website closer to fulfilment.
From Paul and myself that's all for now, so we will pass you over to Dan for his second Design Diary!
Much love,
James (and Paul!)
Dan's Design Diary #2: In which we talk about Poison NPE’s, expanding defence options and we go to school.
Greetings Samurai! When I spoke to you last we went over the changes to Crippling Poison. In its final form if you had access to more than one of them this could lead to a Negative Play Experience (NPE) which is something we really need to avoid. An NPE is any card or play that is just “unfun” for those involved. The Assassin was planned to come with 3 Crippling Poison cards which you unlocked as a stretch goal. While they had the Hobble effect they were not too bad if they came out over several turns.
However imagine a scenario where he has used three of the updated ones that force you to skip a turn. 3 out of your next 6 cards could be “skip a turn” and that’s no fun for anyone.
Since you have unlocked the extra poisons as a stretch goal I wanted to make sure that we a) honour that achievement and b) provide something fun to use that still fits the theme.
Enter “The Poison Deck”.
You’ll notice that I have utilised the clock mechanic from the new Hobble so that the poisoner has a window in which to capitalise on the advantage they provide rather than just having a static ongoing effect. Think of this as the poison running its course before becoming inert.
With poisons addressed it’s on to game balance as a whole.
Early in the Alpha test most (close to every deck) simply ran “all the blocks”. This was partly due to wanting to run 11-14 defence cards in your deck, partly because some of them had really good movement on them like Circling Defence and largely due to the total number of defence cards only being about 16.
This was something that I thought we needed to address on several levels. I want there to be an element of choice and decision making involved in building a deck. Creating a fine-tuned duelling machine should be an art form.
To that end, we needed more options to fill out the defence side of the game. I also wanted to divide defence into 2 types, Blocks and Dodges. The core tenet here is that blocks block, dodges dodge.
Blocks should not dodge; dodges should not block.
Let us look at the original Circling Defence (often used as a dodge) and the latest version (right).
On the left we have the original card which has a variable initiative and some excellent positional moves. This would result in most cases the initiative being chosen as 7 and using the movement to simply avoid the attack which made the block part of the card redundant.
Since this goes against the principle of blocks don’t dodge, the movement was changed to a slower speed after the full block window. You will see this change on all the blocks with a movement effect. Circling Defence also gained a focus cost for the additional movement as it was still offering unprecedented levels of flexibility for no cost.
To offset this change and increase the variety of defence options I then created 2 very specific dodge cards. The aptly named “Dodge” and its counterpart “Sidestep”
These cards fill the 'fast initiative' movement effects slot that enable an ability to avoid the attack instead of blocking it. To counter this, Dodge and Sidestep have much less of a payoff.
Schools:
Similar to how the early test decks included “all the blocks” as an option, we also found that people tended to start their attack pool with “all the 2 damage attacks” to prevent this and try and elicit a similar decision making process to building this part of a deck I split up the most commonly taken attack and gold cards (things that were up until now almost automatically included in every deck) into 3 schools. There is a small theme within each one that you may be able to see and I hope you enjoy this more dynamic deck construction that is now available.
There will be a few other restrictions across cards coming (weapons) but of course this is just how we envision the game being played. The school system also allows us to control deck archetypes that become problematic at events. If we see a particular set of cards being used in a higher than expected number of decks we can add them to the schools lists to break up the combo.
You will always be able to find the most up to date schools list on our website and there will be a link in the rulebook that will let you check what is currently on there. In a perfect world we will not need to use it that often however even if we tested all the cards for several years there will always be something, somewhere that rears up and unbalanced the playing field. Hopefully a “living” document of changes will help us keep the organised play scene for Senjutsu a fun, balanced experience for all.
At organised play events the school system and any other restrictions will be enforced but there is nothing preventing you from building decks with the entire card pool at your disposal for all of your casual games at home. After all, this game is for you to enjoy how you wish and we want to make sure that is always an option for you.
Farewell Samurai!
Dan
Next time: Weapon changes, Organised Play - The Vision, and OUR FIRST ORGANISED EVENT!
