Banish the Snakes: A Game of St. Patrick in Ireland – Solo, 2-handed
You’re welcome, Ireland! Thanks to my efforts way back in the 5th century, your lands are free of snakes!
Also… uh, Christianity. Listen, it was all going just fine until… you know what, let’s start at the beginning.
The Beginning
Way back in June of 2020 when we were all trying to figure out how this “boardgaming” thing was going to coexist with this “pandemic” thing, I spotted something different looking on GMT’s P500 list. Firstly, it wasn’t World War II – I guess maybe that day the person who greenlights games was sick and someone else was covering; secondly, a cooperative game? That’s not even a category filter available on GMT’s website. Thirdly, presumably, a reason to drink green beer? Sign me up! For… that P500.
Eventually, the P500 process ran its course and this landed on my doorstep back in February. Opening the box revealed… stickers… hundreds of them. And on some of the blocks, pairing specific stickers on either side was important – that’s something a future pillbox can deal with.
I'd also like to take a moment to mention how wonderful the box art is
(which apparently makes use of some public domain art from the 19th century)
So what is Banish the Snakes, really? It’s “5th century Pandemic”, but without the clever infection deck mechanism… or… outbreaks.
But what it does have is a clever event card system! Where the previous event card has an arrow on it that determines which effect, sometimes, will be triggered on the next event card. I’ve seen this in Automa designs before where the previous round’s card indicates which portion of the current card to activate – it’s exactly this sort of thing that’s in use here in The Big Snakeless Green.
The Rules
The Map
The map is divided into different regions; each region has a King and is further divided into two or three Areas. Each Area has a resident Druid, a Chief, and between 3 and 5 People. And at the very center of the whole thing (well, actually, off to one side) sits the High King, mostly isolated away from everything except for the Area his throne is in.
The Irish
At the start of the game, all of these people are Pagans. And each of them has a listed number that describes how they feel about Christianity. Those stats range from -1 to -6. And everyone wears that number like a badge; everyone except the Druids. They are a secretive bunch and they are the driving force of Paganism in Ireland at the time – you don’t know their conviction until you try to convince one to leave.
People, Chiefs, Kings and even the High King can be converted to Christianity; but not Druids – if you defeat a Druid, in what I can only assume is the 5th century equivalent to Political Debates, they just bugger off into the woods.
If Druids are around, the People, Chiefs, Kings and even the High King listen to what they say. If you haven’t tried to debate one yet (and its number is still unknown), that Druid’s influence makes your conversion attempts impossible (automatic failure) in the area of influence of that Druid.
The Saints
You (and your friends?) play as Saints, wandering around Ireland looking for snakes. As your desperate attempts to find any continue to fail, you make small talk with the surrounding people. You spend your turns, mostly, preparing to and then attempting to convert people to Christianity. The Saints each have a special ability; some get to build/improve Churches for free, others get bonuses to convert Chiefs/Kings, or another might get a bonus to convert People or to teleport across Ireland (this is never adequately explained, so I’ll just assume some sort of series of trampolines)
Saints have a primary stat, Zeal. Your Zeal track is both your “health” and also determines the number of actions you will have on your turn. The most Zeal you are allowed to have (by law) is 6. If your Zeal is 4 or greater, you will have 4 action points to spend on your turn (unless you’re extra, like Auxillious); otherwise if you have at least 2 Zeal, you’ll be able to Action thrice, and when you’ve nearly out Zealed yourself and have a single Zeal point remaining, you’ll stumble about with merely 2 actions.
On your turn, you can do one of… <counting on fingers> 8 things, just like real 5th century Saints:
- Move!
Move from the Area you are in to an adjacent region. If you can teleport, you can also do that instead of the adjacent thing.
- Convert!
Attempt to convert a Druid, a Leader (the generic term for Chiefs, Kings, and the High King), or People. To attempt the conversion, you look at the MRN chart (Minimum Result Needed) and based on the minuses and plusses, it’ll tell you the minimum die roll needed. If you try to convert a -2 People without any bonuses, you need to roll at least a 2 to not fail. If you tried a -2 People with a -1 modifier for having a Pagan Chief, but a +2 for having a very nice Church in the Area, that would be an overall -1, so as long as you roll 1+ on 1d6, you won’t fail. Buuut, if you don’t roll above the MRN, you won’t success! We’ll talk about that in more detail later
- Prepare!
In addition to other modifiers for Convert attempts, you can also prepare; necessarily, if you decide to, you must chain together all the Prepare actions you wish to do together and then immediately attempt the Convert. Each Prepare action gives you a +1 modifier on the next Convert. Prepare bonuses are only valid for the next Convert, and only in the same Area and on the same Turn.
- Build a new Church!
In your spare time, feel free to construct a church! But, also, in the game, your Saint can do that as well. When you build a new church, you cheekily place it in the exact spot that the Druid used to stand; but if the Druid is still standing there, there’s no room! (How big are these Druids?). The newly built church doesn’t provide any bonuses, but it does prevent new Druids from coming and standing in that spot.
- Improve a Church!
What’s better than a church? That’s right: a bigger church! A newly constructed church can’t be improved the same turn it was built; and an existing church can only be improved once per turn. There are 4 levels of churches; each level you improve a church by makes it 1-point better. You can’t, however, improve your church if there are too many other churches that are already that good; there can only be a single Cathedral in all of Ireland – a rule that the Irish are currently breaking by quite a few but it’s hard to blame them as it gives a +3 modifier! Each other type of church is also piece-limited, but to a more lenient degree.
- Give or Take a card!
As you roam about the map of Ireland, you may encounter other Saints. If you do, you can give to or take from them a card! I didn’t bother with this, but there are reasons why you might!
- Make a Relic!
After one of your friends dies, you can loot their gravestone and create a relic! It probably only works in this game, so maybe don’t try it otherwise. But… I haven’t talked about death yet! We’ll get to that. Just know that gravestones always give +1 but are stubbornly stuck in the ground and cannot be moved 
. Buuut, hidden inside is chewy nougat a relic! Relics range from being worthless 0-modifier, all the way to +3, but you don’t know what you’re going to get until after you loot your friend’s gravesite, so you may end up losing the +1 in exchange for a worthless relic. Relics, however, are a lot more portable than headstones and can be moved with you for free when taking a move action (it’s unclear if the relics can also make use of your teleportation and/or series of trampolines).
- Final Effort!
So what if you are a Saint and you’re just not as Zealous as you once were? If you are down to the last Zeal point, you can make use of a special rule; Final Effort is a combination of Prepare, Prepare, Convert, effectively combining 3 actions into one. However, regardless of the result, you’ve given your all and it’s now time to toss yourself in a bin. You’ll secretly place your most prized possession in your grave, right where you died – so secretly that not even you know what it is.
Let’s talk about the death of a Saint… IT’S GREAT!
When you succeed a Convert check, you simply flip that person over; unless it’s a Druid, who do not like to be flipped and will just go sulk in the woods, or something. A flipped Leader will then provide an bonus (ranging for +0 to +4). The bonus provided only applies in certain situations; Chiefs provide bonuses to Convert their People; Kings provide bonuses to convert their Chiefs, the High King provides a bonus to convert Kings (these same interactions are also used for penalties, by the way). The High King only cares about a Druid or Church that is in the one specific Area that is the seat to the High King (short sightedness is a valuable attribute for supreme leaders, yeah?)
Okay, so I still haven’t told you what happens when you fail. The Saint attempting the Convert loses Zeal! Exactly 1 Imperial unit of Zeal, to be exact. As your Saint goes about their saintly work, they will occasionally lose Zeal (to failures but also to events); as they become less and less Zealous, they become less and less useful, performing fewer things on each of their turns. It’s possible for events to rejuvinate a Saint’s Zeal, but it’s not something you can bank on.
So that last Action: Final Effort; that’s a great thing because you’re down to only 2 action points per turn (most likely) and if you have a disciple that’s been following you around, waiting in the wings, who can carry on your work, it’s probably time to step down, crawl into a hole, die, and let that disciple take over. Added plus that you get to leave behind a cool headstone.
But even if you don’t have a Saint-in-the-making to take your role, you can still step down and some lackey will take up your task regardless, but they may just take a bit longer before they make a name for themself.
The Events
All that other stuff I’ve talked about… forget about it – The Events are the game. Yes, yes, I described the mechanisms of the things the Saints can do and that is the core game and I spent a lot of time (a lot) talking about it. And it’s true that only actions will win the game (sounds like a life lesson?), but if that’s all it was, it wouldn’t be a game – it would be an activity.
You converted all the High King and 3 of the 4 Sober Kings? Tough luck; an event card just removed the High King and he was replaced by the one Pagan holdout King, just by chance (sometimes the luck goes the other way, and there are ways of making your own luck!).
Events will do all sorts of things; remove People (converted or no) and replace them with fresh, new Pagan People, just eager for that next midnight ritual. They will destroy churches; and if any Saints are nearby when converted People or Churches are removed, it will rob those Saints of their Zeal.
Some event cards aren’t even Events! You may draw a card that you “keep”; known as “Keeper” cards in the rulebook, but that is too evocative of Fluxx for my liking. This is how you’ll come across other Saints that will follow you around until you keel over- so that they can take your place (very kind of them).
But sometimes the Events are good for you, as well. I mentioned before that this game uses the Automa trick where the previous card activates a certain portion of the next card; depending on how the Event is activated, it could be terrible, bad, neutral, good, or great, for example. Others just range from “very extremely bad” to “kinda just partly bad”, and yet others offer a range between “kinda good” to “effin’ great!”. Some of these good effects can even grant you a special kind of card that you can “Keep”, known as Gift of the Spirit cards that are a 5th century equivalent to Batman’s Utility Bat-Belt.
Events can also, however, advance Paganism on Great Britain (talking about the island). When the first Pagan outbreak on Great Britain occurs, you mix in some invasion cards into the Event deck, representing Pagans from Scotland coming over the Irish Sea and wrecking everything. When Strathclyde succumbs 1-to-3 of these Pagan advancement Events later, even more of these invasion events are added, representing, now, Strathclyde joining in the raiding fun. And then after a few more, England will succumb to Paganism and even more invasion Events are added to the deck.
When Scotland falls, along with the invasion cards (which don’t, themselves, advance Great British Paganism, by the way), you also add the “Arthur King of the Britons” card to the deck; if Arthur comes along, he fights back the pagan threat on Great Britain – only 1 notch worth, but that’s something!
However, eventually, if 8 of the 9 pagan advancement cards occur without the emergence of Graham Chapman King Arthur, or if all 9 are revealed regardless of strange women lying in ponds distributing swords, the game comes to an abrupt end. You can get calculate your score, but it is likely not a complete victory.
This is an Event card game with the basic player turn structure taking directly from Pandemic or Flash Point Fire Rescue.
Okay, so, I’ve written enough about the game that I can now write about my experience playing it.
Banish the Snake*
At some point in the last couple of weeks, I got Banish the Snakes down off my shelf, opened it up and remembered (vaguely) that it needed stickering, so I put it away. But I remembered this time, so a few days ago, while winding down at night, I put on a YouTube video to watch while sitting at my table, and I started stickering. I finished sooner than I thought, so I figured I’d also run through the game setup.
The next day, sitting there looking at this game setup on my table, I decide, “Hmm, I guess I’ll learn the rules.” Which took very little time, all things considered.
It’s a typical GMT rulebook, so it was actually difficult to absorb all the minutiae; but I grokked the broad strokes very quickly.
I started playing and things were going pretty good; about half way through, I started to realize that I was getting a few rules wrong here and there (usually, sadly, to my benefit – certainly makes it hard to ignore that *). And when the game finally finished with an easy victory, I figured I probably had done something else wrong – and I did! I kept missing “directives” that were sometimes present on the event cards, but at the top of the card rather than the various activation effects. Well, dang; looking through the events in the discard pile, I realized that most of my leaders that I had converted to Christianity years ago were supposed to have been ousted and likely replaced with pagan counterparts! Whoops!
Okay, so, that game was an asterisk victory – and my big takeaways were:
- it was actually pretty quick to play
- the event cards make the game very interesting
- I need to journal the event cards in order to make sure I’m reading the entire thing and not missing ‘directives’
Rebanish the Snake
So the next day, I set it up again and played again. I would guess that my first game took about 45 turns; I didn’t count the event discard pile, but that feels about right. And I would guess that’s probably pretty average.
In my second game, I lost on turn 33, through no fault of my own. By bad luck alone, I drew the 8 cards necessary to plunge Great Britain into a bleak, pagan existence. And where was King Arthur while this was happening? Who knows! I found him galivanting around at the bottom of the deck, 20 turns away.
I posted on BGG about this experience today. I’ve been thinking about it constantly since my game ended Wednesday evening. I was trying to figure out why it bothered me so much.
I’ll tell you why! Because I thought about it enough until I figured it out: there was nothing I could do to influence what was happening in Great Britain. Nothing; literally zilch. My game ended because bad card draws where no action available to me could influence the outcome.
I’d say that’s the one flaw in this game. Otherwise it’s actually pretty interesting. It’s like doing a sudoku; but the empty cells on the Sudoku are pagans and they keep erasing your progress; and also the sudoku puzzle on the other page is currently on fire (but you’re not allowed to put the fire out, because the designer thinks that’s more realistic).
Anyway, I still have the game out and I think I’m going to give it another play tonight yet. There are a few things I didn’t touch on in my rules overview (which amazes me, because I feel like I wrote quite a bit… and there’s really not a lot going on in the game… I guess I’m just inefficient at explaining things?)
You can also check out my post on BGG about the lack of agency.
It‘s a good BGA solo experience. A little fiddly on the tablet with the huge number of checkboxes that need to fit. But a very good roll & write especially when I can skip the setup and teardown 
). Pleased to see others enjoying it as much as I do. I didn’t win this one due to an awful 3rd epoch - had the lead for the first two and then accidently bid myself out of any decent bidding tokens so the 10 point swing for that cinched it 
Still lots of fun.
I didn’t saw the move, but I could have screwed them both by advancing a peacock and there’ll only be 1 spot left in the Star Exhibit, thereby ruining their agreement. But noooo! I made a stupid move and didn’t see that one. And then Player D could have moved another peacock and she’ll be the only winner.