Large scale (And long!) battles with Warrior Knights

Tonight Brian kindly hosted again to play Warrior Knights, a large scale game of kingdoms, knights, armies and crushing of enemies. It had all of this in the several hours it took to play except for the crushing of enemies which came quite late in the game.
Six of us played the game, which is bound to make it longer, but also it makes it more fun as there are more people to defeat, work with, crush etc.

The game is set up - everyone is ready to start crushing and conquering!

The basic premise of the game is that it is a fantasy land of many cities ready to be conquer by the players armies and then defended against incursions by other players. Every has a starting Stronghold and 4 Knights plus a leader. Each player starts with a set amount of Troops to divide between these knights, either to defend their Stronghold or have as a set army to invade other independent castles and absorb into your kingdom. The more castles in the kingdom, the more money a player will get at the end of a turn, leading to investment in more things; such as bigger armies, mercenaries and exploration of foreign lands for trade.

The mechanic for the game is that everyone has a selection of cards that allows the Baron to move & attack, gain political strength to try to become head of the parliament, hire mercenaries and gain religious faith. Everyone reveals their cards one by one and carries out that particular task and then the card (which is marked with a colour) is put on a pile of that colour. When the number of cards in one pile reaches 12, a trigger one of four phases - such as collecting taxes, a session of Parliament, hire mercenary/pay existing mercenary stage etc.

Nigel has gained enough Religious clout to become Head of the Church! 

Building of armies in our game took quite some time and it was only Julian who was making a lot of ground until Brian started making a strategic attack upon Nigel Wood. My empire was nestled in the bottom left of the map; gradually taking out more and more independent castles, but I wanted control over the access to a river near my main Stronghold and Nigel Heather was too close for my liking. After spending time and money investing in an army, I struck out at one of his castles and took it over.

I start to make my move against Nigel Heather

The pace of the game was way too slow for me unfortunately as it took so long to grow and army to a good strength and there was a lot of risk in attacking others; especially with six of us, if a sufficient enough sized army was moved to attack one player, the rest of your empire was open to attack from someone else, so most players took little chance of doing this. It turned out to be a very long game, especially because of the number of players, each trying to decide what to do and how to do it. Perhaps it would be better played with 2 or 3 players. Not sure I'd come back to it if it was another 6 player game.

End of game - Brian (green) is making heavy progress against Nigel Wood (yellow).
 I was about to attack either Steve (blue) or Julian (red) when time ran out