When David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin — the creative minds behind the acclaimed Undaunted series — unveiled their latest endeavor, the board gaming community perked up. Their new project, General Orders: Sengoku Jidai, promised something audacious: a worker placement wargame.
It sounds like a contradiction — a genre about careful resource management and another about fierce military conflict. Yet, if you’ve followed this British design duo, you know they thrive on defying expectations. In their designer diary on BoardGameGeek, the two explored an idea: can the quiet precision of Euro-style gaming coexist with the intensity of battlefield tactics?
From World War II to Feudal Japan
The Undaunted series gave players a sleek, fast-paced take on historical battles of the 20th century. After exploring modern warfare, Thompson and Benjamin yearned for a different challenge — something more timeless. Their search led to the Sengoku era of Japan, an age of clans, shifting loyalties, and constant war.
For Benjamin, it was more than just a visual shift. It was a chance to capture the essence of war stripped of modern machinery — where structure, hierarchy, and human psychology took center stage. Those same dynamics lie at the core of worker placement: positioning, timing, and control.
Soldiers as Workers — A Tactical Twist
Here lies the heart of the innovation. In General Orders: Sengoku Jidai, your “workers” aren’t farmers or merchants — they’re military officers. You assign them to pivotal points on the map — fortresses, villages, and key routes — each choice triggering potential battles and power shifts.
- Lean decisions, high stakes: With only a few available spaces each round, every placement carries weight.
- Built-in conflict: Control a space, and your opponent must fight to seize it.
- Brains over luck: Strategy dominates; dice rarely interfere with your plans.
The blend is seamless. Worker placement’s structured order meets the adrenaline of confrontation, producing a design that’s both elegant and fiercely engaging.
Small Box, Big Ideas
General Orders distills everything Thompson and Benjamin learned from years of creating conflict-driven games. It’s designed as a compact, two-player experience — part of a rising wave of micro-wargames focused on psychological depth rather than sprawling maps.
The visual presentation mirrors that focus: a minimalist board, traditional Japanese-inspired artwork, and a design philosophy that prizes clarity over extravagance. Every component exists in service of decision-making.
Worker Placement, Reimagined
Despite its martial theme, this is unmistakably a worker placement game at heart. The tension emerges from timing — when to act, when to wait, and how to anticipate your opponent’s move. It’s reminiscent of classics like Caylus or Agricola, but the stakes are higher and the friction constant.
What stands out most is the high player interaction. Every placement contests the battlefield; every decision interferes with your opponent’s plans. It’s the antithesis of the “multiplayer solitaire” feel often associated with the genre.
Early Buzz and What Comes Next
Even before retail release, the game has garnered attention at major conventions such as Essen Spiel and the UK Games Expo. Critics are calling it a bold unification of design philosophies — where “Euro” logic and “Ameritrash” drama finally meet in equilibrium. Fans speculate this could be just the beginning, with the designers hinting at exploring other periods through the same model.
The Takeaway
General Orders: Sengoku Jidai is more than another historical simulation; it’s a quiet statement about what strategy gaming can be. It proves that precision and passion — order and chaos — aren’t opposites, but partners.
By turning worker placement into a vehicle for tactical warfare, Thompson and Benjamin have charted new territory. The result is a design both cerebral and visceral — a future-looking experiment in what happens when planning meets conflict.
Discussion Prompt
Could the union of Euro-style precision and wargame tension mark the next evolution in two-player strategy design? And if so, which other historical eras might lend themselves to this compact, strategic storytelling?