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Shaka: Rise of the Zulu
A small chiefdom, a contested succession, and a rival who will not wait.
A turn-based historical strategy campaign set between the Thukela and the Phongolo in the early nineteenth century. Manoeuvre in difficult country, feed what you raise, and hold what you take.
How it plays
Manoeuvre
Hills cost a regiment its whole turn. Rivers and forests favour whoever is already standing in them. Where you march decides more than how many you march with.
Raise and feed
Settlements give you people and materials. Regiments eat every turn, and an army you cannot feed weakens wherever it stands — which is what stops you massing everything in one stack.
Fight
Losses scale with how badly a side was outmatched, so a narrow victory leaves you too weak to hold the ground you just took. Choosing when not to attack is most of the game.
Hold
The campaign ends when the Ndwandwe are broken, or when the sixteen turns run out. Every territory you still hold at the end is scored — and so is every turn you did not need.
The real thing
This game is about a real place and real people. These are objects they made, photographed by the museums that hold them — not our drawings of them.
A carved Nguni headrest. Personal, portable and inherited, it is the kind of object that travelled with a household through exactly the upheavals this campaign is about.
No likeness of Shaka kaSenzangakhona survives that a historian would rely on. This campaign shows what the region made rather than inventing a face for him.
Zoomorphic headrest — "Unobadula" · Mid–late 19th century · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 2018.356 · CC0. See it at the museum