In addition to 10 normal Order tokens, each House also has five Special Order tokens. A player may use any of his 10 normal Order tokens during the Planning Phase, but may use only as many Special Order tokens as he has stars on his King's Court Influence track position.
For example, in a five or six-player game, the player on the highest position on the King's Court track may use up to three Special Order tokens per game round, while the player in fourth position may only use a single Special orders, etc.
The capabilities of the Special Orders are described here:
Defense +2: Gives the defending player in its area +2 Combat Strength.
March +1: Gives +1 Combat Strength to the attacker when combat is initiated by this Special March Order.
Support +1: The supporting Combat Strength from this area is +1.
Raid: This token can be used as a normal Raid Order, or it can instead be resolved to remove any one adjacent Defense Order (remove both tokens).
Consolidate Power: This token can be used as a normal Consolidate Power Order token, or can be used to initiate mustering in its area following the rules for mustering. Only the area that was assigned the Special Consolidate Power Order is mustered. If there's no Castle or Stronghold in the assigned area, no mustering can take place.
While special orders are purely better than their regular counterparts, they have an additional subtle advantage: Having access to three instances of any order type (rather than two), can be of tremendous benefit to many strategies (such as launching a major offensive, quickly accumulating power, etc).
Continue Reading