I've played a few more games of
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, which is chess, but you play the black king, a bad and unpleasant ruler, and you have no other pieces, but do have a royal shotgun. Each round, you get to choose a set of one card that improves your abilities, and one that improves white's abilities. For example, you might want to choose Nightbane, a sword that improves your melee abilities, but if your opponent would get the Red Book, which lets their bishops move (but not capture) horizontally and vertically as well as diagonally, and you've already given them a bunch of bishop boosts, it might be wise to choose the other set instead.
I suppose I should also mention that your royal shotgun can fire at range, and white's pieces have a set number of hitpoints (3-8, usually), whereas the primary danger to you is being checkmated. Thanks to the dynamic rules, there are also some creative ways to get out of a checkmate, as well as a creative way to snatch checkmate from the jaws of not even being in check, so it's only the
final one that ends the game.
The secondary danger to you are your own royal grenades. I'm pretty sure that in the games where I've used royal grenades, I've lost to their explosions more than I've lost to checkmate or won. Proceed cautiously.
It's a fun game. You have to know the rules of chess and it helps a bit to not be a novice at chess, but the rules are much more dynamic. I find I like the melee abilities, but when I let my shotgun's range reach the negative numbers, it proved to be a mistake.
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Back in CKII...
The "Lord of Mosul" did not last much longer after the last update. In his quest for the Philosopher's Stone and immortality, he wound up losing his life. How ironic.
His 9-year-old son, Mozaffar II, took over, and has proven to be a good and virtuous ruler. After uniting the last of the lands of Niniveh, he formed the Kingdom of Assyria in 904, 1515 years after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Pro tip, create all the duchies you can right before creating the kingdom so they are
de jure part of it.
With that task complete, he next set about forming a Nestorian secret society, which was his focus for the next 20 years, with side jaunts of conquering most of Georgia and Byzantine Trebizond (both while Georgia/Byzantium were fighting civil wars, of course). Finally, on his 40th birthday in 924, he revealed the big surprise - 50 leading nobles, courtiers, mayors, and even imams were secretly Nestorian, and Assyria was now a Nestorian state. The coup went remarkably smoothly. The few remaining Sunni vassals were either persuaded to convert with a bag of silver, or surrendered their lands without a fight.
With the faith revealed, he turned to his other passion - accumulating knowledge and building monuments. He restored the House of Wisdom, which has seen great investments in the late 700s and early 800s, but had suffered some damage around 825 and had never been fully restored, and once it was restored, added many wings to it. Simultaneously, he commissioned his successor to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Mausoleum of Mozaffar in Irbil. If his was to be a great dynasty, it deserved to be commemorated in the most grand way.
Finally, he sought to secure his name, and that of the Barmakid dynasty, for history. If all he did was found a kingdom and restore and expand a great library and start making a great tomb for his dynasty, would that really be enough? No, not necessarily. He decided that the way to secure his name in the history books was to borrow a favorite technique of Alexander the Great - found a bunch of cities, and name them after himself. Alexandrias everywhere, later Caesareas everywhere, he would make it so there were Mozaffareas everywhere. If only it weren't so expensive to found cities... but he would persevere. It helped that Assyria was already richer than Byzantium or Arabia, thanks in part to its control of Silk Road trade routes.
But before he could found a Mozaffarea in every province, the age of jihads started. The Shias declared a jihad for Anatolia, which appeared to have dubious prospects, but the Sunnis launched a jihad for Arabia - remember, the former Caliph was now Yazidi, and more and more of the Islamic heartland was converting. Sixty, seventy years on from the great conversion of 865, it had been looking more and more like the Yazidis had the moment, and while they hadn't converted the Hedjaz yet, a serious challenge appeared unlikely.
Now there was a serious challenge.
The Uyammads, once more in charge of the Caliphate, albeit the Caliphate of Asturias, were leading the jihad. Umayyad versus Abbasid again, in force, in the 930s. On paper the Abbasids had more troops, but countless lesser emirs and sheikhs brought their entire levies in support of the Umayyads, as well as the recently-converted Kanem Bornu state. Mozaffar II watched from Assyria with interest. Was it better to root for the rival he knew in the hopes the next jihad would also be for Arabia, or was it better to jump in while the Abbasids were distracted and take some of their land? Decisions, decisions...