Hi folks,
I'm curious how people are interpreting the rules for the African Kingdoms character, "The War Drum." Here are two possible ways to interpret it, and an explanation for which I think is correct.
The War Drum costs two stars, and has a pretty unusual special ability:
"Litany: At the beginning of each turn, you can exchange two Stress tokens between two groups (friendly and/or enemies)."
Note that there is no distance limitation, and you don't have to activate the War Drum's unit to use the Litany ability.
During a recent game, we allowed the War Drum's player to use this ability to select a friendly unit with two stress tokens, and move those two tokens to an enemy unit that had no stress tokens. In other words, if you picked an enemy unit for the "exchange" that did not have any stress tokens, you simply transferred our stress to them, and did not receive any in return… pretty powerful.
But reading the rule again carefully after the heat of battle, I don't think that was legal, and I think there must be an exchange of stress tokens when you use Litany. In other words, both units selected for the exchange must have stress tokens, and you must select and swap tokens between the two units. A corollary is that both units will have the same number of tokens after Litany is used, they just will have different types of tokens.
Here are my reasons:
1. "Exchange" means to swap one thing for another. For example, here's part of the definition in Meriam Webster:
1: the act of giving or taking one thing in return for another : trade an exchange of prisoners
2a : the act or process of substituting one thing for another
b : reciprocal giving and receiving
link
2. If you compare to similar abilities that other characters have, the War Drum seems under-priced, if you can use it to transfer stress from your own units to enemies without taking stress tokens back in return.
As I mentioned, War Drum only costs two stars, you can use Litany without spending an action, and it has unlimited range.
To compare, the Zanzibar Emir character costs three stars, and has the special ability: "Zamara: Before rallying, this group can take any number of Stress tokens from friendly groups with M, so long as it does not exceed the limit of four stress tokens.
The Emir costs more, and his ability is more limited in most respects: there is a range limit of M, it can only be used on friendly groups, not enemies, it can only be used as part of an action ("Before rallying…"), and the result is always that the stress is transferred to the Emir's group, which means it is much less flexible than Litany.
If you interpret Litany as allowing a friendly group to simply transfer two stress tokens to an enemy unit, and take none in return, then Litany seems overpowered, particularly for a 2 Star character. But if it is limited to actually exchanging stress tokens, then it makes more sense.
So going forward, I'm going to interpret it as requiring an actual exchange of tokens, and therefore only units that have stress tokens can be selected for the exchange
