It hasn’t been all that long since Matilda Simonsson wowed me with Turncoats, her handmade game of hidden influence and third-party warfare. Now she’s back with a more ambitious — not to mention riskier — follow-up in the form of Pax Penning. As its title suggests, this is a riff on the venerable (and thorny) Pax Series, importing crucial details and framing, right down to the clarifying footnotes in the rulebook.

But it’s something more than that. While Pax Penning is identifiably Pax, it’s also a more intricate take on the ideas Simonsson explored in Turncoats. This is a game of tenuous alliances, unexpected turns, and riding the changing winds of politics. And that’s before we excavate how it reveals uncommon depths of history via the language of play.

You don’t know what any of this means.

To set the scene, we need to quickly talk about the Pax Series.

Whenever the series is invoked, it isn’t uncommon for someone to ask what ties these games together. The answer is actually a fairly simple two-parter, mechanical on one level and thematic on the other.

As a system, Pax games are about markets. And not any old markets, the way you might find in an ordinary tableau builder. Rather, these are changeable and manipulable markets, as much a part of the game’s competitive space as mountain passes or trade routes or patents or whatever else the volume in question is examining. These are markets that can be speculated on, bullied, crashed, blocked, or bypassed. Meanwhile, the series returns to a singular motif, that of middle managers taking advantage of a destabilized system to promote their own interests. Whether we’re talking about landowners under an aging dictatorship, chieftains caught up in a clash of empires, Renaissance bankers or future influencers or (soon) Bavarian elites with too much time on their hands, these are games that examine how power can shift and buckle in unexpected ways.

Both of these elements are present in Simonsson’s outing. More than that, they also frame the conflict players soon find themselves swept up in. Set in the earliest years of the Middle Ages, players command the noble houses of Sigtuna, a commercial center that is nonetheless sufficiently remote that it’s disconnected from the Swedish king’s direct authority. This is a time of change. The great Viking diaspora has ended. People are returning home, kings are consolidating new borders, and local jarls struggle to maintain their traditional autonomy.

Riding the king-a-go-round.

Right away, Simonsson establishes Pax Penning not only as history, but as an entire method of ludic historiography. It’s often stated that the past is a different country. Simonsson teaches us the customs of this land through the basics of cartography and gift-giving.

First, the economy. In an effort to solidify his claim over Sigtuna, King Olof Skötkonung has imported engravers from England to mint a new currency. Rather than functioning the way we expect, as things one might exchange for chicken nuggets or an afternoon at the sauna, these marked coins are symbols of fealty. Players begin with two or three coins in front of them, arrayed like stepping stones. These are randomized, either showing a blank silver side or the face of King Olof. The King travels around the table, stopping atop these coins and temporarily obscuring their value. This sweeps us into a new mindset, for in the centuries before taxation became the standard, kings relied on hospitality customs, holding itinerant courts that roved between the holdings of their nobles. King Olof’s presence, then, is always graciously accepted before being hurried onward.

And no surprise, given the value of those coins. Depending on the coin’s face, it provides a different boon. Raw silver is useful for holding feasts. These demonstrations of your largesse are essential, providing opportunities to advance your position in Sigtuna’s hierarchy or, perhaps, fine-tune everybody’s loyalties to King Olof, represented by flipping a single coin to its opposite side. But feasts are risky enterprises. Rather than succeeding outright, silver allows you to roll dice that may or may not result in the aforementioned political maneuvers.

On the literal opposite side of the coin, silver stamped with King Olof’s face welcomes you into wider society. The roasted meat of every turn focuses on the market, where nobles are allowed to purchase two actions. Like most games in the Pax Series, opportunities flow through the market like barges floating downriver. But your purchasing power is directly tied to those minted visages, letting you nab the harder-to-reach chess pieces that permit special actions. Purchasing a king action, for example, nudges King Olof into making another visit, ushering him out of your territory and into the household of one of your rivals. Pawns emphasize the commercial importance of Sigtuna, sending merchants along the roads that are the map’s centerpiece and generating income as they stop at established posts or reach the city. Rooks seed the countryside with brigands, blocking those trade routes entirely and undermining the king’s authority, while knights — not yet a formal class, but the inklings of the landed warriors that would eventually dominate our romanticized understanding of Medieval society — perform the opposite role, keeping the roads clear of danger.

And then there are bishops. But to understand what they’re doing here, we need to talk about favors.

Tending the competing influences over our household.

Because currency is still in the prototype stage, most of the trade in Pax Penning is conducted via intangible but crucial exchanges: gift-giving, fealty, favors, noble marriages, exchanged sons, land loans. That sort of thing. These myriad trades are represented by colored stones that are swapped between players and soon form the core economy of the entire game. They’re used for nearly everything. When merchants pass your trading posts or enter Sigtuna on your say-so, you deposit stones in the city to strengthen your position. When you want to throw a big feast — or in game terms, when you want to roll lots and lots of dice instead of only a couple — you supplement your silver by withdrawing those same stones back into your household.

More importantly, you can also ask permission to claim the stones of other nobles. Or you can deposit other households’ stones in Sigtuna after a successful trade. This is beneficial all around. When another noble asks for your help in preparing a feast, or when somebody uses their trade to grow your holdings in Sigtuna, or even when somebody carves a runestone in your honor, these acts become the foundations for the game’s economy. It takes a few turns, maybe even a full session or two, before our modern minds fully grok such a business. Before long, however, it becomes as natural as speaking. As natural as wheedling or negotiation.

As natural, too, as manipulation. There’s no succeeding in Pax Penning without exchanging those glass stones. It’s how you get ahead. It’s how you establish which trade roads are likely to be blocked by jealous rivals or safeguarded by commercial allies. It’s how you host successful feasts back and forth with a partner. It’s how you heap favor on someone you’re trying to flatter by deepening their connections to Sigtuna.

It’s also how you lose.

Brigands are annoying even in the 11th century.

This is where Pax Penning most directly invokes Simonsson’s Turncoats. In that game, players concealed glass stones in their fists and spent them to enact actions on the map. When the game ended, one faction won the game, and whomever held the most stones in that faction’s color became the power behind the throne.

Pax Penning does something similar. There are multiple ways a session might end, each representing a different historical possibility. Perhaps countless brigands will swamp the countryside, throwing the region into chaos. I suspect this can’t actually happen, but it’s a nice inclusion. The other two outcomes are more certain: either King Olof is elected to rule Sigtuna or the jarls rally behind one of their own to assert their independence. These result in slightly different tallies, either assessing which player holds the most of King Olof’s coins or glancing at whomever is strongest in the local hierarchy.

Either way, the game now ends with one final check. The noble who won lifts their shield and reveals all the stones cluttered behind it — all those signifiers of favor and fealty — and whoever has the most stones back there wins in their place. Oops. Because they wielded the strongest influence over the winner, they are named the winner’s heir and become the ultimate victor.

Maybe. Or maybe the usurper lifts their shield to also reveal that their own household is indebted to someone else. Then the new new winner lifts their shield and reveals their own standing. Since the game caps at five players, this can only go on so long. Eventually the tally settles. One noble wins alone. Or else a handful of players form a perfect loop and win together, forming a noble coalition.

No matter how exactly Pax Penning concludes, this is always a crescendo. Everybody shouts when an unexpected victor emerges, or boos when somebody wins alone, or high-fives when two players who always egg each other on somehow form a coalition. Depending on which way the game ended, they might then boo all over again when it turns out the seceding jarl with the most stones trumps even a coalition.

This in turn becomes the game’s purest expression of its thesis about pre-medieval favor economies. Because the Pax Series isn’t only about shifting markets and wackadoo footnotes. It’s about how power fluctuates in unanticipated ways, sometimes rippling and sometimes surging, but always, eventually, overturning the world as we knew it and birthing something new.

The whole thing.

That’s why the bishop is such an essential piece. They all are, to some degree. The king, traveling between households and leeching off their intimidation. The pawns who form the region’s mercantile backbone. The rooks and knights locked in an eternal struggle to structure power to their liking.

But the bishop is the wildcard. When you claim this guy, you dump stones from behind your shield into somebody else’s possession. It could be a bunch of their stones, ridding your household of their influence. Or it could be a whole handful of your own stones, turning them into an investment you hope pays off with their (and therefore your) victory. Or maybe it’s a bunch of junk. A bluff.

Either way, the bishop speaks to the larger changes affecting Swedish society. This is a period of transformation. The Vikings are coming home. Kings are divvying up the land. Economies are becoming standardized. But so too are the older ways of life being supplanted, the old gods, the old rituals. There are new churches and new priests and a new god in Sigtuna. Olof Skötknonung isn’t only the first minter of royal currency, he’s the first Christian king of Sweden. Considered in the longue durée, this is the cultural force that wins the game. It lingers long after your petty noble household or King Olof have passed into memory and legend. It remains for generations. For entire historical periods.

And Pax Penning doesn’t argue that this is bad, at least not explicitly. This is no cheap flanking maneuver in some contest between Christianity and Asatru. Rather, it argues that intangible forces are quite real. That influence can be every bit as important as money. Favor, fealty, ideas, gifts, ideologies; these are real, too. Materialism, for all its preeminence in historiography, political philosophy, and even the Pax Series, is only one of many forces. In a feat of irony, by exploring the possible function of a few physical artifacts — runestones, coins, ancient maps — Simonsson decenters the literal and the physical for the conceptual, both commercially and as Pax Penning’s final victory condition. In that sense, it’s as relevant a corrective as Cole Wehrle’s Pax Pamir was to the myth of benevolent empires. It proposes that the arc of history is not only bent by clashing armies and the invention of capital, but by social affinities, by ideas taking root, by holding a vote. By people talking to one another. By throwing a really great party.

Line up for the encore.

It’s appropriate, then, that Pax Penning also throws a really great party. This thing is a hoot, with gameplay that’s as insidious as it is humorous. By dint of its relative complexity it requires more investment than Turncoats, but it’s also less abstract and more meaningful, both as a setting and as a statement. The result is a truly tremendous craft, a wonderful examination of the hidden loyalties and subtle undercurrents that drag kings and peoples from one era into the next.

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