Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog

I have made no secret of my affection for Jon Peterson’s study of the origins of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), both in its original single volume form and in the new two-volume second edition from MIT Press. I reviewed the revised first volume at the end of last year, and having now completed the second volume I have a greater appreciation of why it was split in two. I am one of the self-confessed sickos who really liked how in the original Playing at the World you were somewhat unceremoniously dumped into extended chapters on the history of fantasy and early wargaming after a brief introduction to D&D, before the story returned to the main arc of D&D’s creation. In the new second edition, all these chapters have been split away from the core narrative of the more personal story of Gygax and Arneson’s gaming histories and the collaboration that led to the creation of D&D. This creates a cleaner first volume, and that is probably the book that most people should read, while volume two is essentially three books (or Pillars, as Peterson calls them) stitched together. The first “Pillar” covers the development of fantasy literature, particularly those works that influenced D&D; the second examines the history of wargames from Chess variants through kriegsspiel and up to the state of the hobby in the early 1970s; and the final one studies how the idea of players role-playing a single character came to be, primarily through the Science Fiction and Fantasy fandoms of the mid-twentieth century but also through wargames campaigns and other interesting avenues. The final product is a massive tome that took me probably two months to read, and it’s not something that is for everyone, but for weirdos like me who are interested in this stuff I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If there is a group I would be a little hesitant about pointing towards volume two, it would be those who are just interested in the history of fantasy section. As Peterson himself notes in the opening pages, a lot of excellent work has been done on the history of fantasy literature over the past decade or two. Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy is a particular favorite of mine, and Peterson name drops it among others in the opening of this pillar. My point being, if you are only interested in the history of fantasy literature there are more focused works on those topics that will probably serve you better. However, if you are interested in the specific origins of a strand of sword and sorcery fantasy and its impact on the creation of D&D, then you are the kind of person that this pillar is for. By picking his niche Peterson manages to add more information to an increasingly rich area of scholarship, but it is a niche. I particularly enjoyed all the moments where a magical effect from a story is directly linked to a spell from early D&D – that’s the deep nerd shit that I come to Playing at the World for.

As someone who routinely writes about wargames and history, few things are more directly attuned to my dork brain than a history of wargames. I’ve read some abridged histories of the hobby over the past few years, usually in the opening sections of a book on studying contemporary wargames, but there is no denying that this is by far the most thorough I’ve yet encountered. It starts with early Chess variants and then explores simultaneously the history of German (and then English) kriegspiel alongside the development of miniatures wargames, before moving on to how they came to create the concepts that would arrive in D&D. It is arguably a little light on information about Avalon Hill and its competitors, favoring instead the earlier history before the rise of commercial wargaming, but then much of that information was already in the first volume as it had a more direct impact on the gaming scene that Gygax and Arneson were participating in. This is maybe the one chapter where I wish this information wasn’t split between the two volumes, but I can still appreciate that I’m a minority audience. Really, I just want a Playing at the World (or maybe Game Wizards) level study of the history of Avalon Hill and SPI. Wishes aside, this is a great deep dive into a thorny history that has is easily overlooked despite its wide reaching impact on our culture and history.

The final pillar is in some ways the least well defined but also the most interesting. In this section Peterson examines how the idea of role-playing as a character came to be, from early psychoanalytic techniques, through experimental theater, and finally to RAND political games and the SFF fandoms of the mid-20th century. What is most striking is all the near misses; things that were almost D&D but not quite there. Most prominent among these is the Midgard phenomenon, a play by mail campaign that looks a lot like an RPG but didn’t quite have that special sauce to attract a wide audience. Peterson does an excellent job arguing that while the idea of the role-playing game was probably inevitable, there was something in the air at that time that meant many people were experimenting with similar ideas, the exact combination in D&D was distinct from its competitors. In a way this is the book’s thesis at its core: that D&D is the product of many different influences, which we can identify through careful study, but also that D&D is more than the sum of its parts and it took that combination to create the phenomenon that is the TTRPG. That’s not to say that had Gygax and Arneson not created D&D there would be no RPGs, someone else surely would have done it in their stead, but also that finding an earlier example that has part of the D&D formula is not the same as finding the real First RPG. It’s a precise argumentative line to walk, and Peterson does an excellent job walking it.  

I must pay some tribute as well to the appendix, in which Peterson writes an extended essay about sources. Playing at the World is not particularly dense in terms of references, but it has a mammoth bibliography, and this appendix essay goes a long way to helping the reader understand what sources were used and many of the challenges involved in working with them. I love history and I love it when historians explain the weird sources they must work with, so Peterson describing the challenges of working with fanzines was right up my alley. My greatest joy, though, came with the extended aside on the challenges of oral history. D&D is recent enough that many individuals involved in its creation are still alive, and even more were when Peterson first began this project many years ago. He has spoken to many key figures and read their oral histories published in various volumes over the years, and in this section, he explains why he doesn’t rely on them very much. This is very much a historiographical argument for those who like discussing history as a process, and I was so here for it. Great stuff.

While I would happily recommend Playing at the World, 2e Volume 1 to pretty much anyone with an interest in D&D, I’m not sure I can do the same with volume two. I probably enjoyed them both equally, but volume two is targeted more at the niche weirdo audience that I am a member of rather than wider D&D fans. I think that Peterson would probably agree, although maybe not in exactly those words. This is one of those reviews where if the book I described above piques your interest, you should go read it, I swear it lives up to that potential. However, if the prospect of nearly three hundred pages on the history of wargames, including details on multiple generations of nineteenth-century Prussian military officers, sounds like an unpleasant way to spend a week then you may be better served reading something else. Couldn’t be me, though, I loved it.

I didn’t quite click with Mark Herman’s SPQR, the second volume in the Great Battles of History (GBoH) series that he co-designed with Richard Berg, but I’m nothing if not willing to give a series a second shot. With the recent reprint of Hoplite, volume 15 and the most recent entry in the series, I decided to give it another shot. I was drawn to a few things about Hoplite that I hoped might fix elements that hadn’t quite worked with me in SPQR. Firstly, this is a Richard Berg design and I’m nothing if not a Berg fan. I have had bad experiences with Berg games, but even when I don’t like them, I am generally fascinated by Berg’s takes on history and game design. While I have enjoyed several of Mark Herman’s games in the past, my taste and his are not exactly aligned. The second thing that drew me to Hoplite was that it promised to be a little simpler than earlier entries in the series – stripping out some of the complexity that Berg felt didn’t apply to ancient Greek warfare – and that it was now a chit-pull game. Something I admire about GBoH is how it seems to change significantly between volumes – taking the core but adapting it to each new topic. For that reason, I felt it warranted a second shot. I’m happy to report that I have enjoyed Hoplite quite a bit more than my first dalliance with SPQR, but I’m also still not entirely sure I’m a fan of the series yet.

Hoplite simplifies and changes several elements from previous GBoH games, something that Berg is up front about in the rulebook. As an aside, I love how these games all have their own rulebook rather than a series rules and a game-specific rules. I hate series rulebooks. I would love to give you, the reader, a comprehensive list of differences in Hoplite, but I don’t have nearly the level of mastery of GBoH I would need to be able to spot all the differences. There are, however, a few changes that I did notice and really appreciate. Berg is quick to note that for the most part these changes are to adapt the rules to the ancient Greek world, often discarding rules that might have made sense in Rome but not Greece, rather than a complete redesign of the system, but there are a few rules that can be applied backwards to earlier entries should you so desire. There were two changes that stood out to me as the most impactful: the change to TQ checks before combat and the choice to use chit pull activation.

GBoH is also chock full of markers, so expect to spend a fair bit of time updating them on each unit.

One of the things I found most tedious in SPQR was resolving the endless TQ checks when two lines of infantry clashed. TQ, short for Troop Quality, represents how good your units are and also how many cohesion hits they can take before they rout. In SPQR, and I believe other entries as well, before resolving combat you had to resolve a TQ check for each unit that was involved in the fight. This meant rolling a d10 and if the die roll was higher than the unit’s TQ, printed on the counter, you added a cohesion hit for every point of difference. This took forever, especially at the huge scale of some of those battles, and while I could appreciate that to some degree it was trying to represent the impact of differing troop quality on combat at the time, it was tedious to resolve and not very interesting in its result.

In Hoplite things work a little differently. In a clash of lines, when one side has advanced a section of their army adjacent to their opponent, the attacker doesn’t have to make these TQ checks, only the defender does. This really incentivizes you to be the aggressor, at least for the final stretch between the two armies, which creates some interesting decisions about how to position your armies. It also ties in really well with the movement rules for hoplite units (more on that later). The only time the attacker has to make a TQ check is if they already start adjacent to an enemy unit and not already Engaged (a marker that indicates that these two units fought last turn but neither side routed), then they need to make a TQ check to see if they can actually attack or not. Most of the time only one side in a combat will be making TQ checks before resolving Shock Combat, which already halves the amount of TQ checks you need to make. It also creates more interesting choices since it introduces a little asymmetry. If you are behind a good defensive position, you may want to stay there, but if you advance out at the last minute you could force TQ checks on your opponent and avoid them yourself, but lose that position in the process. I like this change a lot.

 As someone who mostly plays these heavy hex and counter games solo, I appreciate the change to chit pull. It also adds that little extra dose of randomness that I love to see in my historical games. In SPQR you could mostly know the order that commanders would activate in, with some potential for unpredictability and the all-important Trump rules being crucial (although I never really mastered how to optimally use them). Trumping is still here in Hoplite, but to my mind it is a bit simpler in how it works. The chit pull itself is pretty basic, each wing of your army has a chit and activates when it is pulled from the cup. The most interesting element is the addition of the Momentum chit. When you pull your Momentum chit you pick one of your commanders and roll a d10, if the roll is less than that commander’s Initiative stat then the wing under their command gets to activate. This is in addition to their activation from their standard chit, so you could potentially get two activations in one turn. This reminds me a bit of the Continuation mechanism from Berg’s Men of Iron, and it has a similar tension to that. I think the Momentum chit is a brilliant addition, bringing that little more unpredictability and worry into the game. It also ties into the Trump mechanic, because if you fail your one Trump attempt this turn your opponent gets to put their Momentum counter back into the cup, potentially giving them even more activations (but not guaranteeing it). All of this feels like peak Berg in terms of including just the right amount of unpredictability in the system.

There are some other elements to Hoplite that have endeared it to me. One of these is that the battles are, generally, quite a bit smaller. There is Plataea, which is a two map beast of a thing, if you want your ancients battles to be huge – and I will admit that the terrain and scale of that does tempt me a little. However, for a system with this much going on I prefer it to be a bit smaller. I don’t really want to be playing a GBoH scenario for 4+ hours, if I’m honest, and I appreciate that with Hoplite I could set up and play a scenario in an evening. It’s a much more manageable scale and as the parent of a small child I appreciate that.

The initial set up for Marathon. All that pretty terrain, none of it going to be relevant as we fight in the one big open space available.

I also really like the rules for moving hoplites. Naturally in a game titled Hoplite the hoplites take center stage. The most fun of these are the phalanxes which (excepting the comically large Theban one that is used in one scenario) are two hexes wide. I love counters that are wider than one hex, and the irritating movement challenges they inevitably cause. There’s something wonderful about the constraints that they introduce that just fills me with joy. Turning these unwieldy formations causes cohesion hits, so you have to debate whether you really want to risk wheeling this unit to try and flank the enemy because there are times when doing so could cause the phalanx to break and rout. If I have one minor criticism here, it’s that there are two different types of turning movement for phalanxes, one is more punishing than the other, and it feels a little too fiddly and at times confusing. It’s not the most complicated thing, and I can see the logic behind it (it’s generally harder to turn the formation when near an enemy) but it is an example of GBoH pushing a little beyond the level of complexity that I’d like.  

The hoplites quickly fall out of formation, while the Persians await their approach.

What I really love, though, is determining the hoplite movement rate. When you first move your hoplites towards the enemy, usually on the first turn, you have to roll to see how fast they move. Normally they will advance at a trot, moving four hexes forward each turn. But maybe they’re slower, and they walk at a rate of three hexes, or maybe they are running at five hexes a turn and earning a DRM bonus to combat when they reach the enemy but potentially suffering cohesion hits along the way. Once they start moving these units must move their maximum movement allowance each turn, so you can’t choose to slow the faster units down. Across a wide open plain between armies your hoplites will quickly fall out of order and no longer be the neat line you had hoped for. It also makes it hard to control when they will reach the enemy lines, which is important when you remember that being the side that advances into that initial combat will spare you having to make TQ checks and instead force them on your opponent. But your opponent can’t exactly calculate the right distance to stay away from your hoplites because they don’t know what order units will activate in. This is a case where the actual rules aren’t too complicated, but the implications of these rules are really interesting.

With all that having been said, I’m still not entirely sold on Hoplite. The combat still feels just a bit too tedious for me to ever love it. Combat in Hoplite isn’t incredibly complicated, but it sure isn’t simple. My main complaint is that it has too many steps. In ranged combat, the simpler of the two types, each weapon type has a value based on the range, e.g. composite bows at one hex are six and at two are four. At its simplest, roll a d10 and if the number is equal to or lower than the value you deal one cohesion hit. However, make sure you also check the table that compares weapon system to unit type to get the die roll modifier (DRM) to the ranged weapon roll.

This is basically the core experience of combat in GBoH: checking multiple tables. In Shock Combat you first must check if one side has superiority, first positional superiority (e.g. is someone flanking or being flanked) and if that’s not relevant then you check the table that determines weapon superiority. Having superiority will double or triple the number of cohesion hits inflicted in the combat, so it’s important. After that, you compare the attacking and defending unit types on another table to determine which column on the combat results table (CRT) you will be using. Having more attackers or defenders in the combat can cause shifts in which column you use. You roll the d10, find that row (including any DRMs, of which there are only a few) and find the crossover point between that row and the column and that will tell you how many cohesion hits the attacker and the defender receive. These hits are distributed among all participating units, so if you have more units in a given combat, you can spread the hits around more widely. This allows many weaker units to hold their own against one strong unit better than you would expect, unless someone achieves superiority because those doubled or tripled hits will add up quickly.

If you’re prepared to just go through it step by step every time it isn’t very complicated to resolve. No individual step is that complex, it’s just that there’s a lot of them. I imagine this will be a point of disagreement among players based on their taste, but where I am generally happy to factor in a lot of DRMs in a combat (say, for example, in Berg’s Men of Iron system) I find this jumping from table to table to be incredibly tedious. Because Hoplite doesn’t have a huge variation in unit types I slowly learned the table in a way I struggled with in SPQR, but I still never loved this combat. I just feel like I’m spending too much time resolving a process and not enough playing a game.

It doesn’t help that the combat results themselves contain no real decisions. All the combat results are just numbers of cohesion hits, and the only decision is how to distribute those hits – something that is usually trivial and isn’t even a free choice as the rules restrict you (not without reason, though). My favorite combat systems are like those in the Operational Combat Series (OCS), which are quick to resolve and generate multiple interesting decisions as a result. I spend so much time resolving combats in GBoH and I never feel like I’m doing something fun or interesting in the process.

A little bit of terrain honestly goes a long way to making these battles more exciting. Yes it adds a bit more to the rules, but sometimes it’s the spice that I feel like the combat is otherwise missing.

I appreciate, to a degree, what the game is trying to model with this combat. It captures a grinding and slow style of warfare. I really love that units suffer damage to their cohesion, not to their health or strength. These units usually aren’t suffering casualties; they are instead getting tired, losing morale, and falling out of their tight formation that is necessary to their function. The deciding moment is when they ultimately flee the battle, and it is when one side breaks and runs that the battle is decided. This is a great representation of how pre-modern battles often went, with most of the casualties happening after one side fled rather than in the fighting proper (I speak more for medieval rather than ancient, as that’s my area of expertise, but I believe they shared this to a degree). However, that doesn’t make this fun to play as a game, and it can’t help but make me wish that it tried something more interesting.

The combat system feels like it’s core to the argument that GBoH in general makes about historical warfare. It highlights two threads as the most important to warfare: troop quality and weapons systems. I have to confess that I am somewhat skeptical of this analysis. Before digging in deeper, I want to note that one of the reasons why I enjoy Berg so much as a designer is that he generally lays out an argument in his games and he makes this very explicit. These are the Berg interpretations of what he has read and what he thinks about it. I rarely feel like Berg is trying to give me some kind of “objective history” take. Even when I think his version of history is weird, I can appreciate that he is making an argument and it is an argument that is interesting to engage with. Now, I’m no certified expert in ancient warfare, but I do specialize in pre-modern warfare and the history of military technology so I feel at least qualified enough to ramble about the topic in a blog post like this.

Troop quality is a tricky thing. I think in terms of making an interesting game it helps to have a way to differentiate different units from each other. Some games manage to make functionally identical armies interesting, but it’s challenging. It is generally more interesting if there is some asymmetry between units and armies. However, evaluating the quality of soldiers from thousands of years ago is basically impossible. None of these people were professionals – no, not even the Spartans. The Spartan elite didn’t do a job other than fighting, but they didn’t actually train for combat (no formation drills every morning, for example). Sometimes troop quality can be connected to something we can kind of measure, like how in the Battle of Marathon scenario the center line of Greek hoplites have a slightly lower Troop Quality because Herodotus says that the line was thinner there – so the lower quality reflects fewer troops. Things get more difficult when you try to assign one type of unit as more elite than another. Sometimes ancient sources will tell us that X unit were veterans, or were more elite, but what do they really mean by that? We bring with us a lot of baggage around what an elite unit looks like in a modern army, and that’s not necessarily the same as what it meant in the ancient world.

Now, I don’t think Hoplite makes a bunch of egregious errors in this regard. However, as a core argument for a series this does still make me a little wary because it’s very easy to take things too far and start making value judgements on the different qualities of troops across regions. In particular to ancient Greek warfare, in popular media there is a lot of borderline (and sometimes not borderline) orientalism in the portrayal of Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars. You can see notions of Strong Manly Western Greeks vs. Effeminate and Sneaky Eastern Orientals in many depictions of this period. I think Hoplite flirts with this idea, and the inclusion of Victor Davis Hanson in the bibliography nudges things in this direction I believe, but I also don’t think Berg completely buys in, which helps keep the game interesting.

Berg’s frequent insertions of little design and play notes, often tongue-in-cheek, also does a lot to endear me to his arguments. He is clearly having fun and knows the limitations of his medium and our own ability to understand history.

As someone who spent way too long studying medieval weaponry, I have so many opinions on how we understand the history of military technology. I believe that we are far too obsessed with the idea of new weapons replacing old ones, and the notion of one weapon “system” being superior to another in an elaborate rock, paper, scissors relationship. It can be tempting to try and seek out an “objective” way of measuring historical strategy. A core problem with trying to understand pre-modern warfare is that we often just don’t have that much material that describes the battles, and what we have is often frustratingly vague. For a modern battle we can often study exact troop movements and the fighting at specific positions, for ancient and medieval battles we do not have the luxury of this specificity.

This is something that historians, both popular and academic, have tried to find ways around, and an obsession with technology offers a potential solution. If we can create a hierarchy, or a complex relationship, between different “weapons systems” we can make arguments about what probably happened when people using these systems fought against each other even if we don’t have a description of that engagement. I am sympathetic to this goal, but I am also suspicious of it. It is far too easy to link together a chain of suppositions and “this probably happened” to create what feels like a logical conclusion, but which has no foundation in the historical record. History is also incredibly messy, and for every example that supports a position there is generally at least one that confounds it as well. On some level the past cannot be understood. None of us have ever fought as part of an ancient Greek phalanx, and we never will, and that experience will be forever alien and unknowable to us.

A problem I often see coming out of this process is the question “well why didn’t X just use Y weapon system, since it was obviously better? Were they just dumb?” This is an extreme case, but I also think it is a pretty natural question when you are being presented with a situation where a system seems to be objectively better than the others available at that time. It loses the nuance of history. People in the past were as rational as we are now, and they had more expertise in the warfare of their time than we ever will. If they were using a type of weapon, then there was a reason behind it. That’s not to say it was a good reason, even now we know that our society doesn’t always make good decisions. These factors can be lost when we distill a complex political and military culture down to just what weapon they happen to be using.

However, one of the challenges that game designers face that historians don’t is that they do kind of need to achieve a level of specificity that a historian can hand wave away. These hex and counter games demand a certain granularity to be playable as games, so the designer must make decisions about what happened, or was likely to have happened, without the ambiguity allowed to a book or article. They are also not the best system for examining wider cultural and political systems that might have a major impact on why a given army looked the way it did. But that doesn’t mean we should just hand wave away the arguments it might be making just because it is a game. These are worth taking seriously, and no work of art is exempt from analysis and criticism just because it is also meant to be fun.

I don’t really have a neat conclusion where I can say “GBoH good” or “GBoH bad”. It has its take on history and what was important in ancient battles. It is a position I am certainly skeptical of, and it doesn’t necessarily convince me that it is correct. It is not a fringe perspective, though, and I’m not prepared to say that it is invalid nor do I feel like I should criticize a ten year old game because it doesn’t incorporate the latest scholarship into the most nuanced picture imaginable of the ancient world. At the same time, I do want to flag that it is but one take and there are reasons to doubt that it is the best way to represent this period. I sometimes encounter the viewpoint that the more complex games are better representations of history, and GBoH, as one of the most complex ancient warfare games, must to some seem to be the most accurate. I think this is a fallacy and that we should hold the same skepticism that this is the best example of history as we would if this was a simple dudes-on-a-map dice chucker. I think even Berg would agree, maybe not that his interpretation could be wrong but that we must be prepared to see the flaws in the works of all designers no matter their prestige.

I am still not convinced that GBoH is a system where the juice is worth the squeeze. There are a lot of rules in this box and there is a lot to keep track of. When I play a wargame I’m looking for a good balance between playing the game and resolving the systems, and for me GBoH has too much resolving the system and not enough playing the game. Hoplite is a step in the right direction in terms of this balance, at least compared to SPQR (I can’t speak to the other thirteen volumes), but I’m not sure it’s a big enough step. I still spent lots of time in the rulebook, and even if I got faster and better at playing Hoplite it was never that fast. It has made me interested in giving Simple GBoH a shot, though. I have heard that this is an even more Berg take on the core system and pushes it closer to something like Men of Iron, my personal favorite Berg system. It is possible that Simple GBoH is the game that better strikes that balance for me, and I’m planning to try it next.

So, for the moment I don’t know how eagerly I will revisit GBoH, original flavor. I enjoyed my time with Hoplite, and I think if you are GBoH curious this is a great place to start. The slightly simpler rules and the smaller scale of the battles makes this about as approachable a game as a system this heavy will have. At the same time, when I look at the games on my shelf this is not going to be one that I am eager to pull out again – at least in its original form. There are just so many other games that I enjoy more and that are closer to my ideal ratio of systems to game. It is possible that Simple-GBoH will change my mind, stay tuned to find out, but for the moment I think I might be done with this set of rules at least.

(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon so I can keep doing it.)

I mostly write about historical wargames on this website because that’s what I have the most thoughts and opinions about. However, I also love me a classic mid-weight Eurogame. Something German and from the early- or mid-2000s can really get me going. I would love to write more about them, but I don’t have anything interesting to say. In the words of a great philosopher, I just think they’re neat.

When I moved to Korea, I was interested to learn what, if any, games were being made locally. I had previously dug around a little in the Japanese board game scene when I visited there in 2019, but I had very little idea what to expect in Korea. I cannot understate my excitement at discovering Korean publisher Playte. This small operation has published several games for the first time, but it also republishes many classic German-style games with brand new art, usually lovingly made by artist Wanjin Gil. They are also known for their L-Board boxes, where the box itself unfolds into the game board – something that is sometimes brilliant and sometimes feels a bit gimmicky.

My Playte collection at time of writing. I have played all but one of these games.

I have bought and played many Playte games over the past nine months. I don’t feel qualified to write a full review of each and every one – both for my aforementioned lack of opinions and because in most cases I’ve only played these games a couple of times. However, I do want to share my love for this publisher and its games, so I’ve decided to make a tier list! For those who don’t know, this means I will be ranking these games by assigning them a letter to indicate how good they are (see the ranking scale below). I will also be ranking the quality of the L-Board using the same letter scale. These rankings are deeply rooted in my own taste for simple games that give me an opportunity to make interesting choices without overstaying their welcome. Your tastes may differ significantly, and you may not like these games nearly as much as I do. I’ll forgive you that flaw.

The Ranking:

S: An amazing game, I will play it at literally any time.

A: Great game, I will frequently suggest we play it.

B: A good game, I’m generally happy to play it.

C: It’s okay, I had fun but I’m not eager to revisit it.

D: Not fun, probably wouldn’t play again.

Pueblo by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kisling, art by Wanjin Gill and Jiyeon Lee

The wooden pieces are just so satisfying to play with. I have since bought the sticker set that makes the blank blocks look more like actual pueblo buildings and I’m excited to play it again.

Pueblo feels like a Platonic idea of an abstract board game. You take it in turns to place identically shaped wooden pieces on the grid, slowly creating an odd building in the middle of the board. Your pieces come in two colors: one for you and one blank. After placing a piece you advance the chief between one and four spaces around the board’s edge. He awards points to any colored pieces he can see in a line from his stopping point, with more points going to pieces on higher floors of the building. Points are bad, you don’t want these.

It's a game of passive aggression and trying to outwit your opponent in three dimensions. It’s not the kind of game that blows your mind, but you can play it with almost anyone and have a good time. I’m a big fan.

Rank: A

L-Board Rank: A

Can’t Stop by Sid Sackson, art by Kim Hong-Do and Wanjin Gill

There are actually two versions of Can’t Stop from Playte. I opted for the one that used a traditional mountain painting by Kim Hong-do as the background. The fact that it came with pink pieces was a happy coincidence for my pink-obsessed daughter.

This is a classic dice-rolling push your luck game designed by Sid Sackson in the 1970s. Honestly, that alone should tell you if this is a game for you. I play it all the time with my five-year-old daughter, and we have a lot of fun. The L-Board is a little clunky, but the art is beautiful and who doesn’t love rolling dice?

Rank: B

L-Board Rank: B-

Zombie Dot!, Game and art by Tetsuya Nishimura

The thin cards don’t quite lay flat and it created a slightly wobbly grid. I do like that it’s easy to read at a glance, though.

This is an odd sort of tile-laying game with video game-ish pixelated art. One player is the Zombies and the other one to three players are survivors who are trying to flee. Players must put down tiles, really big square cards, to create a grid. The cards are double-sided with survivors on one side and zombies on the other. The zombie player wants to block off all possible legal placements for the survivors before they empty their hands by playing all their cards to create a path of escape for their survivors.

It's reasonably fun but doesn’t quite manage to be exceptional. I don’t particularly care for the art and the physicality of the cards leaves a bit to be desired, which I think is important in a game like this. I haven’t ever played anything quite like it, and I would play it again, but I’m not sure I would recommend it.

Rank: C

L-Board Rank: n/a

Potato Man by Gunter Burkhardtand Wolfgang Lehmann, art by Wanjin Gill

It’s actually really hard to photograph trick takers during play, as the cards cycle so quickly, so please enjoy this photo that is mostly just the scoring cards to Potato Man.

A pretty classic must not follow trick taker (i.e. you must play a color that has not yet been played this round). Each card color has a different range of card values and you win different points for winning a trick with a given color (the colors with higher value cards award fewer points), but if you can empty a color’s pool of available points you can get one of the highest scoring prizes for winning with it again. The highest value cards, in red, can be defeated if someone plays Potato Man, the lowest value cards in yellow.

I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of trick takers, and I tend to be pretty bad at them, but Potato Man hits a good spot for me in terms of remaining fun without burning my brain too much. I really like the can’t follow rules, and that if someone can’t play a card it ends the round immediately. If you’re ahead you might want to try and get your hand down to just one color so you can end the round early while your lead is intact. It has interesting decisions without being overwhelming.

Rank: B

L-Board Rank: D

Mino Dice by Manfred Reindl, art by Wanjin Gill

Speaking of trick takers, Mino Dice is a trick taker where instead of cards you use dice. Each round you blind bid how many tricks you think you will win, and you only get points if you’re right. Being wrong will cost you points, often many of them. When you play into a trick you pick a dice, following the established color if possible, and roll it to determine its value. The dice all have different values printed on them based on their color, and there are a few monster dice that trump other dice (and each other in a slightly hard to remember rock-paper-scissors type situation), so you may have some idea what you’ll roll but you can’t guarantee it.

Definitely a trick taking game for people, like me, who want their trick takers to be a little bit dumb. I really enjoy it, but some people will hate it.

Rank: B+

L-Board Rank: n/a

Linko by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kisling, art by Ans Kim

It’s got stacks of cards and a market in the middle! So many cards, just sprawling everywhere. It’s great.

Where Pueblo is a Platonic idea of an abstract, Linko feels like that for a card game. The game is a big deck of cards of different values with lynxes drawn on them. On your turn you play a number of cards in front of you from your hand. They must all be the same value, but that’s the only real requirement. Then you look at the cards in front of other people and depending on what they played you could steal their cards or make them take them back into their hand. At the end of the game, every card in front of you is worth points and every card in your hand is worth negative points. It’s simple and plays incredibly quickly. Just a great card game.

Rank: S

L-Board Rank: n/a

Meow Meow Dice, Game and art by Sunhyuk Chae and DODAM

This is a pretty straightforward yacht game with a very cute little cat theme. You roll four dice and can re-roll one fewer dice than your previous roll until you have locked in your final set of dice. The dice have 5 unique sides, one is repeated, all of which represent parts of a cat. You can then use your set of dice (hopefully) to buy a card from the market which will score you points. The whole game only takes like 10-15 minutes, it’s adorable, and it’s a lot of fun. Will it blow your mind? Absolutely not, but as a fan of yacht and Yahtzee type games, I really enjoy this one.

Rank: B

L-Board Rank: n/a

Hội Phố (Second Edition), Game and art by Toàn Nguyễn and Mẫn Trần

In some ways I feel the least secure in my current ranking of this game. Hội Phố is a relatively simple game. You get a hand of cards each with different values and then you all play one card face down into the middle of the table. When revealed, the two cards with the highest values get money (the amounts are printed on the cards) and the lowest ranked card triggers its power, which can be pretty powerful or pretty meh. The round ends when the hands are empty, and whoever has the most money wins a contract. The most contracts at the end of several rounds will win the game. There are a few more nuances than that, but that’s the core of the game.

I played this one asynchronously on BGA which may have colored my opinion, since I think this game is probably much better if it is played quickly all at once. I think the bidding is fun and the decision space around trying to track everyone’s money (which is hidden) and also when you can trigger your powers is interesting. I’m not sure it all quite hangs together, though, and there are probably better games that do something similar. I’m not sure, though, so maybe my opinion will change with time.

Rank: C+

L-Board Rank: n/a

Big Shot by Alex Randolph, art by Wanjin Gill

I just think this game is really pretty. Love the little money tiles, the card with your player color, and the experience of putting cubes on boards. It’s great.

You got auction on my area control game! You got area control on my auction game! Players accumulate debt to buy cubes that they place on the board in an all-or-nothing area control game. My favorite aspect of Big Shot is its “highest untied” rule – when an area reaches 7 cubes whoever has the most cubes in that area wins it. However, if there is a tie for first place all tied players are discounted, which creates some really interesting decisions around placement. It has the potential to be a bit of a brain burner, and it can be pretty punishing if one player makes a major mistake, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome and has plenty of interesting decisions. Just a good board game.

Rank: A-

L-Board Rank: A

Sardegna by Stefan Dorra, art by Wanjin Gill and Jiyeon Lee

Another gorgeous game with wooden bits on a pretty board. The cards are small but not too small. It’s just such a nice tactile little game.

Sardegna is an area control game that reminds me a bit of El Grande and a bit of Concordia (both great games). Players play cards from their hands to add or move pieces on the board, but you can only pick up your played cards when you play the card that triggers scoring. You can see what the next two areas on the map that will be scored are, and have some potential to adjust future ones (within limitations). I’ve only played it at four players, and it feels like it is a game that is designed for this player count. Without players tripping over each other on the island I’m not sure it would feel as competitive and interesting. But at that player count, it is phenomenal. Peak area control gameplay that plays in under an hour.

Rank: S

L-Board Rank: A

Rose King by Dirk Henn, art by Wanjin Gill

You have to keep the cards oriented in the same direction, shown by the crown on the board, and I keep playing this game upside down as a result.

Another excellent abstract game. Use cards to move a little crown piece around a grid, placing pieces of your color wherever it lands. It must land in an empty space, unless you spend a card from your limited pool to flip an opponent’s piece. Points are scored for continuous connections of pieces. Rose King is just an excellent and fast playing little abstract game. I keep coming back to it, it’s a blast.

Rank: A

L-Board Rank: A

Venice Connection by Alex Randolph, art by Wanjin Gill

I absolutely bought this game just because it’s so pretty and I’m a sucker for laying tiles. No regrets.

Abstract, but this time it’s tile-laying! Venice Connection feels most like a puzzle game, as you put down identical tiles from a limited pool until one person places the final piece closing a loop or declares it to be impossible to do so. I didn’t expect very much from Venice Connection, but I was pleasantly surprised. It only takes about five minutes to play and it’s easy to make a weird little meta with your opponent over the course of half an hour, which I always find interesting. It could potentially drag to halt if players sit down and math out potential moves, but if you play it quickly it’s good fun.

Rank: B-

L-Board Rank: n/a

Yut Nori, traditional game, art by Wanjin Gill

Yut Nori is a traditional Korean board game whose origins are not entirely clear but it’s definitely over a thousand years old. When you play a game that old, you should set yourself some expectations. It’s basically a classic roll and move with elements reminiscent of Sorry! and its ancestors. You move your pieces and if you land on someone else’s they go back to the start and you get to go again. The game’s board, which is traditionally made of cloth, gives you a few potential divergent paths if you can land on the right space. You have four pieces you need to get all the way around the board, and you can even stack them if they land together to move faster (but risk worse outcomes should someone else land on you). To move your pieces, instead of rolling dice you throw sticks and the combination of face up and face down sicks tells you how far you move. It’s fun!

This is a pretty classic board game. Not the kind of thing you should drop everything and seek out, but I play it a lot with my daughter. Sometimes games that last this long do so because they’re just fun.

Rank: B-

L-Board Rank: n/a

Part 2?

Several of Playte’s most popular games are obviously missing from the above ranking because I don’t own them and haven’t played them. There are also a few Playte games that I own but have not yet played, and so they are also not included. Let’s be honest, my Playte obsession is nowhere near finished and it is entirely likely that nine months from now I will have another pile of games I want to gush about. I may even revisit some of my rankings from this post. In the meantime, if you love classic Eurogames like I do, and if you appreciate games that come in small packages, you should check out Playte. They’re probably my favorite publisher at the moment and I’m excited to see what they’ll do next.

My current unplayed collection of Playte games. I’m still missing some of their more famous games, but I’m trying to pace myself so that I’m not buried under a pile of tiny board games.

(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon so I can keep doing it.)

Back before I was a Big-Time History Dork (the technical term for anyone with a PhD in history), I studied Philosophy as well. I loved it dearly, but not enough to pursue it into a postgraduate degree for… reasons. There’s an alternate history version of me that took that path, and I’m sure he had a great time. One thing I’ve struggled with after leaving formal academia, and thus having the time and impetus to read it, is diving deep into philosophical reading. Now, Games as Text is more literary criticism than philosophy, but the two topics share a lot in that they’re generally hard to engage with as a casual reader. Thankfully, Games as Texts is doing its best to fix that problem by being a thoroughly approachable introduction to basic literary criticism and showing how it can be applied to games. Well, video games at least.

Games as Text bills itself as “a practical application of textual analysis to games”, which means that this is more than just an explanation of various critical lenses. While it does serve as an introduction to the most popular, and in some cases newest, critical lenses, it also applies them to the subjects of video games. I’m not sure this always works.

There are places where the book lands in the valley of not quite delivering on either topic - being neither a thorough introduction to the critical technique nor a satisfying deep dive into how that technique can be applied to games. For the most part, though, it manages to blend its goal of being a general introduction with the ambition of providing concrete examples of how to use these critical lens introduced in that chapter. The case studies included in each chapter are the best example of this strategy, as it is in these sections that the book has time to dig a little deeper into one game rather than feeling the need to give a broad picture at the cost of some of the valuable detail.

The chapter on games and queerness is easily the strongest, which is probably no surprise given the authors advocacy work outside of this book. This chapter does the best job of marrying the book’s two goals. It explains the history and development of queer theory, the limitations of how it has been applied at times, and the path forward for future work. It also samples a wide array of games and gives nuanced takes on each one of them. If you only read one chapter from Games as Texts it should be this one (but really you should read the whole book).

While the chapter on games and queerness is the strongest, I think the chapter on games and race may be the weakest. To be fair, it is also maybe the most ambitious as it tries to cover both race and postcolonialism in one brief chapter. These subjects are, of course, deeply intertwined but they are also incredibly complex - especially postcolonialism which has had several decades to develop its many threads, none of which are easy to untangle. I think the chapter does a decent job at introducing core concepts like postcolonialism and orientalism, but I think it struggles somewhat in terms of how to adapt these to video games specifically.

I think a crucially underexplored dimension to applying postcolonialism and orientalism to video game criticism is the role of Japan in the game’s industry. Japanese publishers like Nintendo, SEGA, Sony, Capcom, etc. are among the biggest and most prestigious publishers in the history of video games. The book, coming from a more literary criticism background, takes as its foundation the Anglo-American lens when discussing orientalism and postcolonialism. This makes sense for literary works, as those two countries dominate English language publishing and so have a huge influence on what books get published. However, this doesn’t feel as valid an approach in terms of the video game industry.

Japan is, of course, a former colonial power with an incredibly troubling colonial history. The postcolonial lens is an incredibly valuable tool for examining Japanese artistic works, as is Japan’s complex relationship with orientalism. This is a challenging subject to engage with as it requires a deep understanding of Japan’s culture and history, as well as those of its neighbors, so it is a big ask. Still, I think this is a missed opportunity in the book to dig in a little more into how video games as an artistic medium differs from literature and how that might require adjustment to these tools.

For example, one of the examples in this chapter is how Resident Evil 5 uses white violence against West Africans and tries to paint over it by making the Africans zombies. This is a rich source for postcolonial dissection, but I think a layer is missing by not digging into the fact that the publisher and designers of this game were Japanese.

That may be asking for more than a small book like this can contain, which I will happily confess to. Games as Text is barely a hundred pages long and its purpose is to be a valuable introduction to students and general readers who may not have experience with critical theory, not a deep dive into those theories. As an introduction it is absolutely a success. The writing is engaging and readable, this is no dense academic textbook you will torture yourself through, and it really underlines how these tools can be used by anyone, not just academics or art critics. The book is an unqualified success for what it aims to be, and it is no real fault that it left me wanting more.

We did it everyone, we reached the end of 1862, and what better way to celebrate than by playing our first strategic game on the American Civil War? Like true connoisseurs, Pierre and Stuart have decided to pursue the Cult of the New and play a game that is only a decade old but has still acquired quite the distinguished reputation: Mark Simonitch’s The US Civil War. What will we think about strategic level ACW? Is there a lengthy discussion of a niche topic of Civil War memory? Did we use the Advanced Naval Rules? What about that rumor of a Top 5 Games list? The answer to these questions and much more can be found within this episode, so what are you waiting for?

Where do I start with something this big? I have been playing Korea semi-weekly (with a few gaps) since December last year. I’ve played it for at least twenty hours over the past eight months. In addition to my regular two-player game, I’ve dabbled in playing it solitaire. Playing Korea The Forgotten War has probably been my favorite gaming experience of 2025 so far. However, despite spending so much time with this game I still feel like I’ve only begun to dip my toes into its vast sea. In all that time we only played the game’s opening moments. We didn’t even get as far as the UN crossing the border and invading North Korea, let alone the Chinese intervention and the second phase of the Mobile War. For that reason I don’t feel like I am adequately equipped to provide a full review of Korea. I can only describe the glimpse I’ve had of its majesty. Caveats aside, this game is amazing and I love it. It is absolutely worth the time it requires.

I have already described my first dalliance with the Operational Combat Series (OCS), originally designed by Dean Essig and published by The Gamers and Multi-Man Publishing, in my review of Luzon. Sometimes it can be difficult to say new things about a series I have already played before. OCS in particular shines in how it takes its core systems and implements them beautifully across different games, rather than radically changing that core between volumes (not that the latter is necessarily a bad thing, I recently praised Men of Iron for doing just that). Inevitably, there will be some similarities between my review of Luzon and this one, but for the most part I am going to try and avoid repetition. So, if you wonder why I don’t praise some aspect of OCS in this review, maybe visit my previous one and see if I discuss it there!

The initial situation along the border in Korea’s opening moments. The North Koreans begin their attack, but for the moment it looks like we will hold (spoilers, we will not).

Based on the advice given by Matsuura Yutaka, the designer of Luzon, in Operational Matters #2, Alexandre and I opted to start our journey into Korea with the game’s second scenario (5.2: Invasion of South Korea). It begins with the North Korean’s crossing the parallel and the push south to the Pusan Perimeter, and continues on through the Inchon Landing and the push back to the parallel but stops short of when the UN forces decided to invade the north. It is 29 turns in total, a significant jump from the five turns of Luzon, and includes many of Korea’s special rules but leaves out the Chinese intervention so we didn’t have to worry about any China specific rules.

We didn’t end up playing the entire scenario. Instead, we played over half of the turns but Alexandre failed to establish the Pusan Perimeter in time and, even worse, didn’t manage to secure Taejeon, one of the key victory cities. This meant that to win all I had to do was take Seoul and I was about to receive an entire month’s worth of reinforcements in one turn. We decided that it probably wasn’t worth continuing this particular game, and were perfectly satisfied in stopping here and trying again in the future sometime. This does mean that I have yet to tackle a full scale amphibious landing using OCS’ rules, but we did see almost everything else the scenario had to offer.

The initial North Korean push was incredibly successful, resulting in me ultimately abandoning Seoul so I could hold a stronger position south of the Han river. My only consolation was that the attacks further west didn’t go quite so well.

When we started, each turn probably took us about two hours, but as we played we managed to get down to 45-60 minutes per turn without overly exerting ourselves. This increased speed was partly due to our greater familiarity with the system and partly due to the change in situation as the game developed. When the game opens both players have most of their troops lined up along the border and the North Korean player has plenty of attacks to make to cause breaches in the rather weak South Korean line. This meant that we were resolving a lot of big attacks and thinking a lot about how to position our forces for the next wave of attacks. As the North Korean invasion expanded, though, the supply limitations began to kick in and we went from having maybe half a dozen big attacks a turn to just one or two, and the game sped up considerably as a result.

Seoul falls and the South Koreans scramble to find a new defensive line. With a major breach in the middle of the peninsula we have to race backwards to avoid any of our troops becoming isolated.

Sometimes wargames can be opaque in terms of what it is you are supposed to do. They give you this big box of tools and some general objectives and say “well, get to it!” Sure, it wouldn’t be fun if they sat down and told you exactly what the strategy was, but I have in the past struggled to even know how I should be moving the pieces or how to achieve even basic maneuvers (looking at you Musket & Pike).

Korea does an amazing job at laying down a clear framework for what the two players want to achieve. The North Koreans want to reach Pusan as fast as possible. While the Sudden Death victory line is probably too much to hope for, the victory conditions are simple and easy to understand. The North needs to take Seoul and Taejeon and then hole the UN and South Korean forces up near Pusan for long enough to hold on to those two cities. The UN and South need to slow down the North Korean advance and, ultimately, retake Taejeon and Seoul (they also need to have Taegu, but the idea that you could secure both Seoul and Taejeon without Taegu seems...unlikely)

Exactly how you achieve these goals is up to you. The Korean peninsula offers several paths through which an invading army can pass. In our game, Alexandre mostly stuck to the main roadways, but when we were discussing the game’s conclusion we agreed that it would have been worth him going off-road more. That would potentially create interesting problems in maintaining his supply lines, but would also have better enabled him to threaten mine and force me to fall back without firing a shot. Instead he relied mostly on carefully coordinated frontal assaults, which could be very effective but were also incredibly costly.

Some lucky initiative rolls let me pull my troops back mostly intact. We still don’t exactly have a great defensive line here, but it’s a lot better than it was. Supply line limitations also prevent the North Koreans from pushing too hard along the eastern edge of the map.

That cost is where a lot of the game lies in Korea, and I mean that in the best possible way. I think the idea of counting supplies and resources while playing a game might sound tedious, but OCS strikes a perfect balance in terms of granularity and abstraction. Supply points represent all the kinds of supply you use: fuel and ammo, as well as another miscellaneous bits that your army might require. There’s no need to count individual supply types, which would get tedious. Instead, you spend supply to move your vehicles, in Korea’s opening turns that’s the handful of Russian tanks the North Koreans have as both armies are mostly on foot, but you also spend them to make attacks and to defend against them. Because the defender in an attack spends a maximum of 2 supply tokens, while the attacker basically spends 1 per attacking unit (it’s a little more complicated than that, but it doesn’t matter right now), it generates an immediate cost difference. The North Korean player will be spending four or more times the amount of supply per turn as the South Korean player just because they’re on the offensive. This is further exacerbated if they want to use their artillery at all. Bombarding an enemy position before attacking it can be incredibly useful, because if you Disorganize the enemy they fight at half strength, but artillery is incredibly expensive. As a result, you are going to pay through the nose to make those big attacks against weakened enemies. That’s fine for the first few turns when there is a huge stockpile of supply, but what happens when that has been burned through?

There’s some wonderful asymmetry in how players get supply in Korea. The North Korean player rolls on a table every turn to see how much supply turns up in Pyongyang, which they can then move to the front via the railways. While there isn’t an enormous variation between the rolls, it is enough that you can’t know exactly how much supply you will have in a future turn. So, when you’re blowing all that supply on big attacks you have to consider whether you will even be able to sustain this assault in future turns. Alexandre ultimately had to abandon his simultaneous two-pronged invasion and focus on just one path per turn because the supply costs were too great to be attacking in both the west and middle of the peninsula.

I finally settled into this defensive position behind rivers, which halve the strength of attacking units and so are ideal for hiding behind. We would spend quite a while in this stalemate as Alexandre had to build up supply to bombard my units before making his attacks.

Meanwhile, the UN player has unlimited supply. Sounds great, except that all the supply is in Japan. You have to bring any supply you actually want to use to Korea first, and you don’t have all that much shipping capacity. You can sail supply on boats into Pusan harbor, but your reinforcements also all arrive in Japan and need to be brought over on those same boats. Do you need more soldiers this turn, or supply? The answer is both, which creates a delicious tension. A few turns in I got some transport aircraft that would let me bring in a few more supply tokens, assuming the weather was favorable (luckily for me, it mostly was), but it only provided a small relief.

There are so many excellent little decisions to be made in a turn of Korea. For example, you need to consider where to position your supply on the map. Supply can only be used if it is near the unit that is spending it (usually via a Headquarters unit that “throws” the supply forward, but that only goes so far and the map is huge). The North Korean player needs to bring all that supply from Pyongyang to the front, which is easy along the major rail line connecting the two capital cities but gets more complicated if you branch out your attack to elsewhere on the peninsula. The South Korean/UN player also has to bring their supply up from Pusan, but needs to be careful about positioning it too far forward. Who knows how far the North Korean player will get in one turn, and if they take your supply that’s a disaster.

Alexandre successfully breached my river position north of Taejeon. I debated abandoning the city, like I had Seoul, but opted instead to try and fight for it. After all, I live there.

Individual combats also ask you to consider how much supply you can afford to commit to this attack, and the CRT plus the potential for Surprise makes it hard to predict exactly what level of commitment is safe. Ideally you want to attack with as much as possible, but can you afford to do that? Maybe you have the supply this turn, but you still need to keep attacking next turn, and the turn after that, and how much supply will you be getting in the meantime? You don’t know! Once you commit to the attack, the Options result on the CRT creates more decisions for both players.

There was never a single turn of Korea that wasn’t interesting. Even turns with just one small attack were exciting because you are thinking about what you’ll do next turn and how you can set up to maximize that opportunity. We were never on auto-pilot, just resolving rules to get to the good bit of the game. The whole experience was the good bit. Even rolling for more supply or reinforcements felt tense, and we never had enough to do what we wanted. The system, the map, the situations all created endless room for planning, and despairing when plans crumbled. It had the satisfying tempo that I’d tasted in Luzon, but it was in the greater scope (both in geography and number of turns) of Korea that I truly came to appreciate it.

I had my troops dig a hedgehog in Taejeon, and put some more soldiers behind them to make it harder to cut off the supply lines to the city. This is also when I realized that my planes were much better at bombing than I had thought, and Alexandre learned the risk of huge stacks of units when it comes to aerial bombardment.

Korea also taught me the importance of the Double Turn. At the start of each turn in OCS players roll 2d6 and the winner decides who goes first this turn. If that player went second last turn, they could potentially get two turns in a row. This is pretty typical in wargames, but in OCS it feels that little bit more impactful. Did your opponent position enough supply near the front to pay to resist two turns worth of attacks? If you manage to punch a hole in their line this turn, and win initiative next turn, you could potentially immediately exploit that gap and cut off some of their units.

The potential benefits of going twice in a row hardly need me to elucidate them, but what I appreciated in Korea was the inevitability of that double turn. In Luzon’s short five turns, it was possible that the same initiative could be kept for the whole game if one player just never manages to win the initiative roll. In the 29 turns we played Korea, and even more so should you play the full campaign, it is inevitable that if you are the second player in a turn you will eventually win initiative and be able to take those back to back turns. But, maybe, your opponent will win initiative and choose to give you the double turn at a time when you’re not set up to capitalize on it, just to remove the threat and set up their own potential back to back punch. It’s a very small tempo thing that doesn’t even use a concept unique to OCS, but when you combine it with everything else it’s such an interesting decision space.

It really is all about the decisions, and in showing you the immediate impact of those decisions. OCS doesn’t bury the lede when it shows you that you made a mistake, and similarly it’s easy to spot when something went perfectly. You rarely have to wait more than a turn to see whether your plans have worked or if it’s back to the drawing board. The immediacy of this feedback can make it quite addictive, creating something a little like the One More Turn experience of a game like Civilization. You get that instant feedback on your plan this turn, but you still don’t know if your mid- to long-term plans are working, so maybe you should just play a little longer.

I previously covered Luzon as my first experience with OCS, and I like it as an entry point, but Korea has often been suggested as another great beginner friendly game in the system. I can see why that is, and it was the perfect next step for both myself and Alexandre. While in its full glory it’s a 3 map game, you can get away with only using two maps (the scenario we played doesn’t use the furthest north map) and, more importantly, the counter density is pretty low. The armies that start on the map are relatively small and it drip feeds you more troops over many hours, so you are never overwhelmed. As the UN player I eventually achieved dramatic air superiority over the North Koreans, but my airplanes took several turns to arrive, which meant that I wasn’t worried about the air rules until I was already comfortable with the situation on the ground. Similarly, my ships started showing up even later, and initially just as platforms for more planes. This means you don’t need full mastery of every system to start playing, and you can stumble blindly a little bit while coming to grips with the game without the game collapsing. Your goals are always clear, so even if you get confused by the margins you can keep ahold of the core.

The North Koreans managed to push across the river in the middle of the map, forcing me to fall back into the hills. Thankfully, the abundance of UN air power let him Disorganize (DG) many of his units, making it hard for him to keep attacking.

Korea has relatively few game specific special rules and if, like us, you just play specific scenarios you can avoid many of them (like the rules for when China intervenes). This gives you more time to become comfortable with OCS before worrying about special rules or exceptions. The thing is, while OCS is undoubtedly incredibly complicated and has many, many rules, you as a player don’t really need to know literally all of them to enjoy it. For example, in Korea neither Alexandre nor I ever used Strat Mode nor did we use Reserve Mode very much. Was that optimal play? Categorically not, but it didn’t cause the game to fall apart. We could play OCS with sub-par strategy and still have an amazing time. You don’t need to be a master on your first outing, it’s fine to play badly. You will make rules mistakes, that’s just part of wargaming, but no rules error we made broke the game and in general the core logic of OCS provided us with guidance so we never veered too far away from the game’s intent.

With a really complicated game I always ask myself whether it earns being that complicated. To put it another way, is the juice worth the squeeze? In some cases, the answer (for me at least) is decidedly no. For Korea, though, the answer is a resounding yes. For all of its complexity and it’s dense rulebook, OCS remains incredibly fun and, perhaps more importantly, it never lets its systems get in the way of that fun. At no point did I feel like I was resolving a tedious system just so that I could get to the fun part of the game. No individual part took too long or was too confusing, and each part triggered interesting decisions which together created an amazing experience.

Normally, in a review this long I would include a section on how the game portrays its history. I have some thoughts on how Korea represents the Korean War, but I also don’t feel like I have a firm enough grasp of the game to really critique it in this way. For all the words I’m writing now, this is still very much a first impression of Korea, and a deep dive into the history feels like something reserved for a full review.

Korea concerns itself with the purely kinetic warfare, and only with the opening Mobile War phase that marked the first year or so of the Korean War. The first wave of attacks by the North Koreans in our scenario felt like it captured the history reasonably well. There were clear incentives for establishing the Pusan Perimeter and the drip-feed of UN reinforcements gave a clear narrative of an America that was caught off guard when its ally was invaded. Still, there is no political element to the game, no way of representing the civilian cost of the war, and as a player you don’t feel like you’re one particular general. MacArthur’s arrogance, chaos in Washington, and the wider geopolitical situation that resulted in the commitment of UN forces are all absent. I am interested to see if my feelings change with more plays, and as I see how Korea represents other parts of the war. I have seen some people suggest that Korea as basically OCS first and Korean War history second, and I’m not sure I agree with that entirely but I’m also not sure I completely disagree. My opinion is not yet settled.

The final position. Some progress was made in the hills in the middle of the peninsula (the screenshot doesn’t really show the losses South Korean forces suffered there), but ultimately Taejeon has not fallen and the Pusan Perimeter is not in place so there’s no real hope for the North Koreans.

I recently had a chance to dabble very slightly in Reluctant Enemies. Not enough to form a real opinion of the game (we played less than a turn) but it, along with Korea and Luzon, helped me to appreciate how different OCS games can call upon different parts of the system as core to their individual experience. In Luzon the Japanese player made lots of overrun attempts, had plenty of supply, but a limited number of units which were often too valuable to lose in large numbers. Meanwhile, in Korea we did very few overruns, especially after the first turns, as the terrain on the peninsula often made them impossible, supply was constantly tight, and UN air power created an enormous imbalance in bombardment potential. Reluctant Enemies showed me what looked like a far more equal set of forces facing each other in a position that wasn’t one aggressive invader versus a more disorganized defender trying to cling on for just long enough.

Each of these entries into the OCS system, all of which are considered on the simpler side of the series, seemed to emphasize a different aspect of the system. They all used the same core rules, but in some you will be using X rule every turn but rarely every Y rule, while in another those might be completely reversed. This helped me appreciate how the OCS rules can be a toolbox for creating very different experiences based on maps, orders of battle, and just a handful of special rules. I think that’s a testament to the system’s core strength and the work designers have done with it over the years, which in turn makes me excited to try more games in the series.

I’m still no convert to enormous East Front games, though, so rest assured my next game will not be Case Blue. Instead, Alexandre and I are discussing maybe playing Tunisia II. I still have my heart set on playing Burma at some point, and lurking the background I have to say the terrifying scale of DAK has an allure without the counter density of East Front. I don’t know where I will land yet, but I know I’m excited to go there. I am also determined to revisit Korea, because I am far from done with it. This is not a review of the full game, it is an impression of my first taste, and some day I will return for the full meal.

(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon so I can keep doing it.)

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

I’ve been fascinated with the Hundred Years War for a long time. It may have something to do with the Arthurian romances I read as a child, that are nominally set in the Early Middle Ages but inevitably use the trappings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or maybe I just always loved castles and plate armor. When I was looking for research subjects at the end of my undergraduate degree and going into my PhD I was dissuaded from studying the Hundred Years War because it was apparently overly saturated with scholars, so it would be hard to stand out. While to some degree I think this assessment was true for the fourteenth century, in my work on Castillon I found that (at least in English) there is not nearly enough coverage of the fifteenth century, especially the period after the death of Henry V. Still, I think this advice was good as my skill set (at the time at least) proved better suited to the PhD I did on military technology than it would have been in diving deep into French archives.

After I finished The Medieval Crossbow I was searching around for a new project. That book had developed naturally from my PhD research, but for a second book I would be starting largely from scratch. I was interested in revisiting early gunpowder history, something that was dropped from my PhD in an attempt to make the overall scope more manageable. There is a lot of excellent scholarship being done on early gunpowder weapons right now, work that I didn’t necessarily want to (poorly) replicate, so instead I looked for something where my background would prove useful but would also push me to try new things.

I landed on the Bureau brothers, Jean and Gaspard. These sons of the merchant class rose to nobility as Charles VII’s masters of artillery at the end of the Hundred Years War. They’re a fascinating duo, and I thought they would be a great topic for a joint biography. However, I didn’t feel like I was familiar enough with the Hundred Years War and especially its final decades to jump straight into this project. Instead, I decided to look for a good stepping stone project.

I had also always wanted to write a classic battle history. While my taste in military history has decidedly drifted away from battles, I still cannot deny a certain charm to dedicated histories of a single moment in a conflict. It elicits some kind of childlike fascination in me. At the time I started my project there was no English language history of Castillon, which seemed criminal given its overall importance in Anglo-French history. Also, both Bureau brothers were participants in the battle (some books I read even claimed that Jean was in command at the battle, but I have come to doubt that). This, then, was a project that felt less ambitious than the joint biography but would give me a familiarity with the foundational scholarship and sources for future research projects on the end of the Hundred Years War.

I foolishly thought that Castillon would be easier to write than my last book. Sure, I knew that in the case of The Medieval Crossbow I had already done a PhD on crossbows, but I also wrote that book during Covid while working full time and parenting a small baby. It wasn’t exactly easy mode. What I failed to appreciate is that actually parenting a four-year-old is not easier than a baby, and in fact is maybe more disruptive to my writing attempts. I had done a lot of writing during baby nap times, usually while gently bouncing the child in her chair. This was a quiet writing time no longer available to me, as the four-year-old was supremely uncooperative. In the end, what I imagined as an 18 month project took 2.5 years.

I started by reading a bunch of overall histories of the Hundred Years War. This was actually a lot of fun. I enjoyed seeing different interpretations of events and how scholarship had changed over the decades. While I had read some books on the Hundred Years War in the past, this encouraged me to read a lot more deeply and widely than I would for a topic I have a casual interest in. This helped me to gain a firmer grip on the basic timeline of the war, its phases, and its key characters. From there I read more focused histories, mostly on the fifteenth century or on Gascony in particular, as I quickly decided that the book should also center Gascony within the conflict since that’s where Castillon was fought and it is often overlooked in histories of the war.

At this time, I was also writing the first sections of the book. These would introduce the Hundred Years War and set the stage for Castillon. Since Castillon was the final battle of the war, I felt like to really understand it you needed some basic grasp of the war as a whole. It was also a pivotal moment in the history of Gascony, so for this section I included a fairly extensive history of how Aquitaine (later Gascony… it’s complicated) came to the English royal family and the messy history it had.

Once I felt like I had a firm grounding in the secondary literature it was time to start digging into the primary sources. First, this involved identifying what sources there were. Mostly this meant searching through fifteenth-century chronicles and seeing if they had much to say about Castillon, but I also found letters written in the aftermath of the battle and references in some other works. Ideally, I would also have been able to spend time in archives looking for information in financial records and other places, but alas the life of an independent scholar rarely provides the money or time for such work. I will have to hope that some future scholar will be inspired to do this deep digging. For this section I also acquired several books in French that covered this period or the battle, which were very valuable in directing me as the final moments of the Hundred Years War are often neglected in English language material.

Delaying my book from 18 to 30 months came with a silver lining as two very important works came out in the interval after I requested a new deadline. The first was the final volume in Jonathan Sumption’s enormous five-part history of the Hundred Years War, the one which covered the exact period I was writing about. Having my book come out after this but without any reference to it would have been…undesirable. The second was Peter Hoskin’s book on Castillon, beating me to the punch of being the first book on the subject. Again, not including material from the only other English language book on the battle in my one would have been an almost criminal oversight. 

I now feel some level of disconnection with Castillon. I can vividly remember working on it, but at time of writing it has been more than a year since I seriously worked on this project. I struggle to remember exactly what motivated me, what I found the most exciting, or even how to neatly summarize its contents. Whenever I think of trying to write a short post explaining the battle or its importance, I inevitably just want to point at the book as containing all my thoughts on the topic. As if the act of writing them down has removed any such ideas from my mind forever, enshrining them on paper at the cost of removing them from my memory.

My idea of what a history of Castillon should be changed a lot over the course of writing it. The final book is many things. In some ways it is a brief history of the whole of the Hundred Years War. In others it is a detailed examination of what we know about the Battle of Castillon and how we can try and reconstruct the events of the 17th of July 1453. It is also a book about the memory of the battle and how modern media has (or hasn’t) represented it. Lastly, though, and maybe my favorite part to work on, is the appendix, which takes a sort of prosopographical look at the battle.

Prosopography is, basically, writing a biography of a large group of people about whom we may not know very much individually but as a collective we can learn a lot about their lives as each scrap of evidence tells us more. It has most famously, for late medievalists at least, been used in the Medieval Soldier project. What I was doing wasn’t quite prosopography – I was looking at lesser nobles about whom we do know a few things rather than the common soldier or peasant. However, in many cases we didn’t know a lot about these men, and there was even some disagreement about who exactly they were, so I had a lot of fun doing my best to reconstruct biographies of the lesser commanders who fought at Castillon. It’s not quite reaching down to the common soldier and understanding their view, but I think looking at the lives of the lower ranking commanders gives a lot of insight into what this battle meant and who fought in it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify every named participant. In several cases primary sources gave titles but not names and identifying who held an obscure Gascon title in 1453 was beyond my means. Hopefully future archival research will turn up more, and those biographies can be expanded upon.

I’ve copied a few of my favorite mini-biographies at the end of this post, to give a taste of what they’re like. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them. I have picked two Gascon nobles who supported the English king and who lived very different lives after Castillon. I have also selected two Breton nobles who fought with the French, whom I particularly love because they are from opposite sides of the Breton civil war that was so important to the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century. Yet here they are, fighting side by side for the King of France.

 I am not sure what my next project will be. When I started Castillon I had envisioned a three book project. First would be Castillon, of course, and second would be a history of the Battle of Formigny (1450) – the final battle in Normandy during the Hundred Years War and another battle that somehow lacks an English language history. Then I would finally tackle my Bureau project. Part of me still wants to write that Formigny book, and to spend time with the Bureaus, but Castillon took a lot longer than expected and I’m now on a different continent from my research materials, so it may have to sit on a back burner for longer than I had planned. I have developed a significant interest in the study of historical memory, so I may end up doing something with that. 

If you found this interesting, my book came out this week in the UK and Europe. It is available for preorder in America with an expected release day in September. I hope you’ll check it out, I’m really proud of the work I did on it. 

order now in UK/Europe

Available now from the Pen and Sword website in the UK. Coming soon on Amazon and other retailers, as well as on the Pen and Sword US site.

Order now

The Gascons

Gaillard IV de Durfort, Lord of Duras

Gaillard de Durfort (d.1481) inherited the title of Lord of Duras as a minor due to his father’s early death in 1444. He was one of the most senior members of the Gascon nobility, a prominent landholder in the Garonne valley and in the Médoc, and a loyal servant of the Duke of Aquitaine, i.e. the English king.

He was one of the signatories of the agreement surrendering Bordeaux to Jean de Dunois on 12 June 1451.26 Three months later he swore allegiance to Charles VII, and thus kept his lands rather than choosing exile.

He was intimately involved in the campaign to bring Talbot to Gascony in1452. It is not clear whether he participated in the Battle of Castillon, but he certainly recruited troops for the expedition and was responsible for the defence of Blanquefort during Charles’ subsequent campaign to take Bordeaux after Talbot’s defeat. Ironically, his castle of Duras was held by his uncle, Aimeric de Durfort, who sided with the French and ultimately fought against him. Gaillard was named, along with Pierre de Montferrand, as one of the twenty traitors by Charles VII and with the fall of Bordeaux he was sent into exile. He was granted a pension by the English crown to endure until ‘he be restored to his said lordships in the duchy of Gascony.’

He became a Yorkist and served as governor of Calais under Edward IV and was elected to the Order of the Garter. In 1470 he became chamberlain to Charles the Bold, Duke Burgundy and functioned as a bridge between the duke and the English king. He also helped negotiate an agreement between Francis II of Brittany and Charles the Bold. In 1474 he was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of London that set the stage for Edward IV’s invasion of France. In 1475 he travelled to Calais and joined Edward’s army on its ultimately fruitless campaign.

In 1476, perhaps upset at Edward IV’s abandonment of any plans to retake Gascony, he reconciled with King Louis XI, who granted him his old titles in Gascony. Durfort died in 1481 while fighting against the Burgundians he had once served.

 

Pierre II de Montferrand, Lord of Lesparre (or l’Espaire)

Pierre II, Lord of Lesparrre (c.1410–54), was a Gascon nobleman, the son of Bertrand III de Montferrand and Isabelle, Lady of Landiras. Pierre claimed the title of Lord of Lesparre due to rights his mother had held but Henry VI granted the title to John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon. He served for some time as governor of Blaye and led the defence of the town in 1451. He was a staunch English ally and even married Mary of Bedford, the Duke of Bedford’s illegitimate daughter. He did not receive his dower due to Bedford’s premature death, which made him dependent on Henry VI for support. This dependence made it impossible for him to challenge Henry’s choice to grant Lesparre to Holland. He was captured at the Siege of Blaye and as part of his ransom he surrendered five of his other castles and had to swear an oath of allegiance to Charles VII.

He reneged on that oath and was possibly involved in the embassy to persuade the English to send Talbot to Gascony. More likely he stayed behind in Gascony and was partly responsible for opening the gates of Bordeaux to Talbot in October 1452. He was one of the principal Gascon commanders in Talbot’s field army when it marched out to confront the French at Castillon. Henry VI chose to pardon Pierre for his earlier oath to Charles VII on 24 July 1453, only a week after the disaster at Castillon and before news of it had reached the English court.

He survived the defeat at Castillon and successfully fled back to Bordeaux and served along with Roger Camoys in the defence of the city. He was listed among the twenty traitors that Charles VII demanded be punished for their betrayal of Bordeaux and was eventually exiled from France. He likely fled to England with Camoys after the fall of Bordeaux.

He returned to Gascony in June 1454 with a small landing party, hoping to stir up another rebellion against King Charles but was quickly found out and captured. He was dragged to Poitiers and placed in front of a special commission where he was quickly sentenced to death and executed.

 

The Bretons

Francis II, Count of Étampes

Francis II (1435–88) was the son of Richard d’Étampes and grandson of Duke John IV of Brittany, part of the powerful Montfort family. His mother was Margaret of Orléans, sister of the Duke of Orléans, which meant that Francis was also a blood relative of the House of Valois. He represented the Montfort family on the campaign to retake Gascony when he was only 18 years old, commanding Breton troops in place of Duke Peter II. When Peter II died without heir he was succeeded by his uncle Arthur de Richemont, who also died without heir, resulting in the title of Duke of Brittany passing to Francis II. Francis’ rule was challenging. He was frequently in conflict with the kings of France, most notably with Louis XI, and was also host to the Lancastrians when they were in exile during the ascendancy of Edward IV.

He was determined to preserve Brittany’s independence from French royal control, and steered the duchy as best he could through turbulent times. In the end, he was the last male ruler of the duchy from the House of Montfort. He had no legitimate son when he died, and his daughter Anne inherited the title. Through her and her daughter’s marriages to French kings, Brittany was eventually incorporated into the French royal lands.

I will note that I was initially led astray in identifying who was present at Castillon, as at least one source said that the Duke of Brittany was a participant. If you look up who was duke in 1453 you will find that it was Peter II. However, that’s not what the author meant. The author meant that the person who was duke at time of writing was at Castillon, by which he meant Francis II, who was Count of Étampes at the time , but Duke of Brittany later

Jean, Count of Penthièvre

Jean (d.1454), also known as Jean de L’Aigle, was probably born in the late fourteenth century or possibly very early in the fifteenth century. He was the second son of Jean I, Count of Penthièvre, and in 1404 was granted the lordship of L’Aigle in Normandy. His family was in dispute with the ruling Montfort dynasty in Brittany over who had the true claim to the ducal title. In 1420 his elder brother Olivier and younger brother Charles, along with his mother Margaret de Clisson, invited Jean V, Duke of Brittany, to a dinner where they captured him. Jean intervened to negotiate for the duke’s release in exchange for the release of his youngest brother William, who the duke had prisoner. However, Jean V eventually reneged on this agreement and William remained in captivity until 1448.

In 1433 his brother Olivier died, and Jean inherited Penthièvre as well as his family’s claim to be dukes of Brittanny. In 1437 he purchased the title of Count of Périgord from Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was still in English captivity. He eventually reconciled with the successor Duke of Brittanny, Francis I, which allowed him to claim his Breton lands in 1448 and secure the release of his youngest brother.

While his elder brother had been an Armagnac partisan during the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, it is not clear if Jean actively supported Charles VII before the resumption of the war in 1449. Despite holding lands mostly in the north of France, Jean primarily fought in Gascony. He served there in 1450 and 1451, and then he joined the campaign to reconquer the duchy again in 1453, participating in the siege and battle of Castillon.

He died without issue in 1454 and split his titles between his niece, Nicole, and his younger brother William. The former, the daughter of his younger brother Charles, inherited Penthièvre while his brother inherited Périgord.

Second fun fact, while these two prominent Breton noblemen were at Castillon, neither were leading the soldiers of the Duke of Brittany, which were led instead by Jean de Montauban and Gilles de Tournemine de la Hunaudaye, two minor nobles. These men both served with their own contingents.

(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon so I can keep doing it.)

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

I’ve been fascinated with the Hundred Years War for a long time. It may have something to do with the Arthurian romances I read as a child, that are nominally set in the Early Middle Ages but inevitably use the trappings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or maybe I just always loved castles and plate armor. When I was looking for research subjects at the end of my undergraduate degree and going into my PhD I was dissuaded from studying the Hundred Years War because it was apparently overly saturated with scholars, so it would be hard to stand out. While to some degree I think this assessment was true for the fourteenth century, in my work on Castillon I found that (at least in English) there is not nearly enough coverage of the fifteenth century, especially the period after the death of Henry V. Still, I think this advice was good as my skill set (at the time at least) proved better suited to the PhD I did on military technology than it would have been in diving deep into French archives.

After I finished The Medieval Crossbow I was searching around for a new project. That book had developed naturally from my PhD research, but for a second book I would be starting largely from scratch. I was interested in revisiting early gunpowder history, something that was dropped from my PhD in an attempt to make the overall scope more manageable. There is a lot of excellent scholarship being done on early gunpowder weapons right now, work that I didn’t necessarily want to (poorly) replicate, so instead I looked for something where my background would prove useful but would also push me to try new things.

I landed on the Bureau brothers, Jean and Gaspard. These sons of the merchant class rose to nobility as Charles VII’s masters of artillery at the end of the Hundred Years War. They’re a fascinating duo, and I thought they would be a great topic for a joint biography. However, I didn’t feel like I was familiar enough with the Hundred Years War and especially its final decades to jump straight into this project. Instead, I decided to look for a good stepping stone project.

I had also always wanted to write a classic battle history. While my taste in military history has decidedly drifted away from battles, I still cannot deny a certain charm to dedicated histories of a single moment in a conflict. It elicits some kind of childlike fascination in me. At the time I started my project there was no English language history of Castillon, which seemed criminal given its overall importance in Anglo-French history. Also, both Bureau brothers were participants in the battle (some books I read even claimed that Jean was in command at the battle, but I have come to doubt that). This, then, was a project that felt less ambitious than the joint biography but would give me a familiarity with the foundational scholarship and sources for future research projects on the end of the Hundred Years War.

I foolishly thought that Castillon would be easier to write than my last book. Sure, I knew that in the case of The Medieval Crossbow I had already done a PhD on crossbows, but I also wrote that book during Covid while working full time and parenting a small baby. It wasn’t exactly easy mode. What I failed to appreciate is that actually parenting a four-year-old is not easier than a baby, and in fact is maybe more disruptive to my writing attempts. I had done a lot of writing during baby nap times, usually while gently bouncing the child in her chair. This was a quiet writing time no longer available to me, as the four-year-old was supremely uncooperative. In the end, what I imagined as an 18 month project took 2.5 years.

I started by reading a bunch of overall histories of the Hundred Years War. This was actually a lot of fun. I enjoyed seeing different interpretations of events and how scholarship had changed over the decades. While I had read some books on the Hundred Years War in the past, this encouraged me to read a lot more deeply and widely than I would for a topic I have a casual interest in. This helped me to gain a firmer grip on the basic timeline of the war, its phases, and its key characters. From there I read more focused histories, mostly on the fifteenth century or on Gascony in particular, as I quickly decided that the book should also center Gascony within the conflict since that’s where Castillon was fought and it is often overlooked in histories of the war.

At this time, I was also writing the first sections of the book. These would introduce the Hundred Years War and set the stage for Castillon. Since Castillon was the final battle of the war, I felt like to really understand it you needed some basic grasp of the war as a whole. It was also a pivotal moment in the history of Gascony, so for this section I included a fairly extensive history of how Aquitaine (later Gascony… it’s complicated) came to the English royal family and the messy history it had.

Once I felt like I had a firm grounding in the secondary literature it was time to start digging into the primary sources. First, this involved identifying what sources there were. Mostly this meant searching through fifteenth-century chronicles and seeing if they had much to say about Castillon, but I also found letters written in the aftermath of the battle and references in some other works. Ideally, I would also have been able to spend time in archives looking for information in financial records and other places, but alas the life of an independent scholar rarely provides the money or time for such work. I will have to hope that some future scholar will be inspired to do this deep digging. For this section I also acquired several books in French that covered this period or the battle, which were very valuable in directing me as the final moments of the Hundred Years War are often neglected in English language material.

Delaying my book from 18 to 30 months came with a silver lining as two very important works came out in the interval after I requested a new deadline. The first was the final volume in Jonathan Sumption’s enormous five-part history of the Hundred Years War, the one which covered the exact period I was writing about. Having my book come out after this but without any reference to it would have been…undesirable. The second was Peter Hoskin’s book on Castillon, beating me to the punch of being the first book on the subject. Again, not including material from the only other English language book on the battle in my one would have been an almost criminal oversight. 

I now feel some level of disconnection with Castillon. I can vividly remember working on it, but at time of writing it has been more than a year since I seriously worked on this project. I struggle to remember exactly what motivated me, what I found the most exciting, or even how to neatly summarize its contents. Whenever I think of trying to write a short post explaining the battle or its importance, I inevitably just want to point at the book as containing all my thoughts on the topic. As if the act of writing them down has removed any such ideas from my mind forever, enshrining them on paper at the cost of removing them from my memory.

My idea of what a history of Castillon should be changed a lot over the course of writing it. The final book is many things. In some ways it is a brief history of the whole of the Hundred Years War. In others it is a detailed examination of what we know about the Battle of Castillon and how we can try and reconstruct the events of the 17th of July 1453. It is also a book about the memory of the battle and how modern media has (or hasn’t) represented it. Lastly, though, and maybe my favorite part to work on, is the appendix, which takes a sort of prosopographical look at the battle.

Prosopography is, basically, writing a biography of a large group of people about whom we may not know very much individually but as a collective we can learn a lot about their lives as each scrap of evidence tells us more. It has most famously, for late medievalists at least, been used in the Medieval Soldier project. What I was doing wasn’t quite prosopography – I was looking at lesser nobles about whom we do know a few things rather than the common soldier or peasant. However, in many cases we didn’t know a lot about these men, and there was even some disagreement about who exactly they were, so I had a lot of fun doing my best to reconstruct biographies of the lesser commanders who fought at Castillon. It’s not quite reaching down to the common soldier and understanding their view, but I think looking at the lives of the lower ranking commanders gives a lot of insight into what this battle meant and who fought in it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify every named participant. In several cases primary sources gave titles but not names and identifying who held an obscure Gascon title in 1453 was beyond my means. Hopefully future archival research will turn up more, and those biographies can be expanded upon.

I’ve copied a few of my favorite mini-biographies at the end of this post, to give a taste of what they’re like. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them. I have picked two Gascon nobles who supported the English king and who lived very different lives after Castillon. I have also selected two Breton nobles who fought with the French, whom I particularly love because they are from opposite sides of the Breton civil war that was so important to the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century. Yet here they are, fighting side by side for the King of France.

 I am not sure what my next project will be. When I started Castillon I had envisioned a three book project. First would be Castillon, of course, and second would be a history of the Battle of Formigny (1450) – the final battle in Normandy during the Hundred Years War and another battle that somehow lacks an English language history. Then I would finally tackle my Bureau project. Part of me still wants to write that Formigny book, and to spend time with the Bureaus, but Castillon took a lot longer than expected and I’m now on a different continent from my research materials, so it may have to sit on a back burner for longer than I had planned. I have developed a significant interest in the study of historical memory, so I may end up doing something with that. 

If you found this interesting, my book came out this week in the UK and Europe. It is available for preorder in America with an expected release day in September. I hope you’ll check it out, I’m really proud of the work I did on it. 

order now in UK/Europe

Available now from the Pen and Sword website in the UK. Coming soon on Amazon and other retailers, as well as on the Pen and Sword US site.

Order now

The Gascons

Gaillard IV de Durfort, Lord of Duras

Gaillard de Durfort (d.1481) inherited the title of Lord of Duras as a minor due to his father’s early death in 1444. He was one of the most senior members of the Gascon nobility, a prominent landholder in the Garonne valley and in the Médoc, and a loyal servant of the Duke of Aquitaine, i.e. the English king.

He was one of the signatories of the agreement surrendering Bordeaux to Jean de Dunois on 12 June 1451.26 Three months later he swore allegiance to Charles VII, and thus kept his lands rather than choosing exile.

He was intimately involved in the campaign to bring Talbot to Gascony in1452. It is not clear whether he participated in the Battle of Castillon, but he certainly recruited troops for the expedition and was responsible for the defence of Blanquefort during Charles’ subsequent campaign to take Bordeaux after Talbot’s defeat. Ironically, his castle of Duras was held by his uncle, Aimeric de Durfort, who sided with the French and ultimately fought against him. Gaillard was named, along with Pierre de Montferrand, as one of the twenty traitors by Charles VII and with the fall of Bordeaux he was sent into exile. He was granted a pension by the English crown to endure until ‘he be restored to his said lordships in the duchy of Gascony.’

He became a Yorkist and served as governor of Calais under Edward IV and was elected to the Order of the Garter. In 1470 he became chamberlain to Charles the Bold, Duke Burgundy and functioned as a bridge between the duke and the English king. He also helped negotiate an agreement between Francis II of Brittany and Charles the Bold. In 1474 he was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of London that set the stage for Edward IV’s invasion of France. In 1475 he travelled to Calais and joined Edward’s army on its ultimately fruitless campaign.

In 1476, perhaps upset at Edward IV’s abandonment of any plans to retake Gascony, he reconciled with King Louis XI, who granted him his old titles in Gascony. Durfort died in 1481 while fighting against the Burgundians he had once served.

 

Pierre II de Montferrand, Lord of Lesparre (or l’Espaire)

Pierre II, Lord of Lesparrre (c.1410–54), was a Gascon nobleman, the son of Bertrand III de Montferrand and Isabelle, Lady of Landiras. Pierre claimed the title of Lord of Lesparre due to rights his mother had held but Henry VI granted the title to John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon. He served for some time as governor of Blaye and led the defence of the town in 1451. He was a staunch English ally and even married Mary of Bedford, the Duke of Bedford’s illegitimate daughter. He did not receive his dower due to Bedford’s premature death, which made him dependent on Henry VI for support. This dependence made it impossible for him to challenge Henry’s choice to grant Lesparre to Holland. He was captured at the Siege of Blaye and as part of his ransom he surrendered five of his other castles and had to swear an oath of allegiance to Charles VII.

He reneged on that oath and was possibly involved in the embassy to persuade the English to send Talbot to Gascony. More likely he stayed behind in Gascony and was partly responsible for opening the gates of Bordeaux to Talbot in October 1452. He was one of the principal Gascon commanders in Talbot’s field army when it marched out to confront the French at Castillon. Henry VI chose to pardon Pierre for his earlier oath to Charles VII on 24 July 1453, only a week after the disaster at Castillon and before news of it had reached the English court.

He survived the defeat at Castillon and successfully fled back to Bordeaux and served along with Roger Camoys in the defence of the city. He was listed among the twenty traitors that Charles VII demanded be punished for their betrayal of Bordeaux and was eventually exiled from France. He likely fled to England with Camoys after the fall of Bordeaux.

He returned to Gascony in June 1454 with a small landing party, hoping to stir up another rebellion against King Charles but was quickly found out and captured. He was dragged to Poitiers and placed in front of a special commission where he was quickly sentenced to death and executed.

 

The Bretons

Francis II, Count of Étampes

Francis II (1435–88) was the son of Richard d’Étampes and grandson of Duke John IV of Brittany, part of the powerful Montfort family. His mother was Margaret of Orléans, sister of the Duke of Orléans, which meant that Francis was also a blood relative of the House of Valois. He represented the Montfort family on the campaign to retake Gascony when he was only 18 years old, commanding Breton troops in place of Duke Peter II. When Peter II died without heir he was succeeded by his uncle Arthur de Richemont, who also died without heir, resulting in the title of Duke of Brittany passing to Francis II. Francis’ rule was challenging. He was frequently in conflict with the kings of France, most notably with Louis XI, and was also host to the Lancastrians when they were in exile during the ascendancy of Edward IV.

He was determined to preserve Brittany’s independence from French royal control, and steered the duchy as best he could through turbulent times. In the end, he was the last male ruler of the duchy from the House of Montfort. He had no legitimate son when he died, and his daughter Anne inherited the title. Through her and her daughter’s marriages to French kings, Brittany was eventually incorporated into the French royal lands.

I will note that I was initially led astray in identifying who was present at Castillon, as at least one source said that the Duke of Brittany was a participant. If you look up who was duke in 1453 you will find that it was Peter II. However, that’s not what the author meant. The author meant that the person who was duke at time of writing was at Castillon, by which he meant Francis II, who was Count of Étampes at the time , but Duke of Brittany later

Jean, Count of Penthièvre

Jean (d.1454), also known as Jean de L’Aigle, was probably born in the late fourteenth century or possibly very early in the fifteenth century. He was the second son of Jean I, Count of Penthièvre, and in 1404 was granted the lordship of L’Aigle in Normandy. His family was in dispute with the ruling Montfort dynasty in Brittany over who had the true claim to the ducal title. In 1420 his elder brother Olivier and younger brother Charles, along with his mother Margaret de Clisson, invited Jean V, Duke of Brittany, to a dinner where they captured him. Jean intervened to negotiate for the duke’s release in exchange for the release of his youngest brother William, who the duke had prisoner. However, Jean V eventually reneged on this agreement and William remained in captivity until 1448.

In 1433 his brother Olivier died, and Jean inherited Penthièvre as well as his family’s claim to be dukes of Brittanny. In 1437 he purchased the title of Count of Périgord from Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was still in English captivity. He eventually reconciled with the successor Duke of Brittanny, Francis I, which allowed him to claim his Breton lands in 1448 and secure the release of his youngest brother.

While his elder brother had been an Armagnac partisan during the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, it is not clear if Jean actively supported Charles VII before the resumption of the war in 1449. Despite holding lands mostly in the north of France, Jean primarily fought in Gascony. He served there in 1450 and 1451, and then he joined the campaign to reconquer the duchy again in 1453, participating in the siege and battle of Castillon.

He died without issue in 1454 and split his titles between his niece, Nicole, and his younger brother William. The former, the daughter of his younger brother Charles, inherited Penthièvre while his brother inherited Périgord.

Second fun fact, while these two prominent Breton noblemen were at Castillon, neither were leading the soldiers of the Duke of Brittany, which were led instead by Jean de Montauban and Gilles de Tournemine de la Hunaudaye, two minor nobles. These men both served with their own contingents.

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As a card-carrying member of the Hates the Term Renaissance club, a not uncommon position for late medievalists like myself who are inclined to resent the division of our time period into dark and golden ages, I was immediately intrigued by Ada Palmer’s reexamination of the term and its time. Inventing the Renaissance promised to deconstruct one of the most mythologized periods of European history, and one that I felt warranted some poking and prodding. Palmer’s book is not a hit piece against late medieval Italy, though. Instead, as all great deconstructions are, it is a combination love letter and deep analysis of a period whose complexities are often painted over by popular narratives that just want to talk about the pretty art and clever people. Further, Inventing the Renaissance performs the magisterial hat trick of being incredibly insightful while also remaining eminently approachable and casual as it dumps a mountain of scholarship on its reader – in the most loving way. It’s an incredibly impressive work, both of scholarship and popular history, and one absolutely worthy of the time its 700+ pages require.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya “… no there is too much. Let me sum up.” Inventing the Renaissance contains what could be several books worth of material. It is a history of ideas, ranging from Petrarch in the 14th century to Francis Bacon in the 17th (and sometimes even further) – explaining how we got from medieval frameworks to modern. It is also a history of culture, of art, philosophy, and how Italian art and architecture spread around the globe (often violently). It is also a book on politics, both political thought and the nitty gritty politics of war-torn Italy, and at times even a little bit about war. It is also the story of people who lived in a disrupted and violent time and struggled to live in a better one. It is a staggering work in terms of its scope, and it manages to cover all of this while rarely feeling shallow in its detail. I could nit pick a few sentences here and there on military history (my own little niche), but those complaints don’t really matter. They are far removed from the work’s core, and one must be reasonable about what is achievable and important to a work like this. It already achieves more than I could have expected.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Inventing the Renaissance is how it is also about history as a process, and what it means to be a historian and to do historical work. Framed as the “History Lab”, Palmer does an excellent job at breaking down how research works and how historians build on the work of those who came before. She clearly elucidates why history isn’t static, it’s not just historians using the same collection of facts in a new pattern but rather a process which develops and grows over time thanks to the contributions of historians. She also explains how differing perspectives from different academic subjects interact, and how those views of the Renaissance can paint radically different pictures of the time. This is one of the best books I’ve read explaining what it is to be a historian, and it does that as almost a tertiary subject within its overall scope.

I am obsessed with structure, and I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book with a structure as interesting (or strange) as Inventing the Renaissance. It opens with a broad treatment of the Renaissance, in particular a fascinating discussion of historiography and historical memory of the Renaissance. That is approximately what I expected when I first heard about this book. It perhaps even persuaded me to be (slightly) less bitchy about the term Renaissance and made me consider ways in which it may have value as a periodization. I’m not saying I’m totally won over, but maybe I will complain with slightly less fervor next time the topic comes up in the pub.

The more interesting (structurally at least) section of the book is the core which is composed of more than a dozen mini biographies of major and minor figures from Renaissance Italy. People who made the time what it was, and whose lives offer significant (and different!) insights into that time. Each of these stories is fascinating, but through their steady repetition Palmer builds a greater understanding of Italy and the events that shaped it in the decades around the turn of the sixteenth century. By the end of these vignettes, you will be familiar with a wide cast of historical people who stretch far beyond those directly covered in this section. It’s a truly impressive feat that must have taken a staggering amount of research and time to put together. It manages to drip feed the wider context in a way that makes its complexities digestible, but it also cements the human element of the time, never letting the larger events leave behind the personal stories.

The final section concerns itself primarily with the notion of what humanism means, and what we mean when we discuss “Renaissance Humanism”. This topic comes up in the book’s opening sections, and throughout the biographies in its core, but here readers are fully submerged in an explanation of what the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance meant, what were its consequences, and (just as importantly) what it wasn’t. This was probably my least favorite section, but not due to any real failure on Palmer’s part. I’m not an intellectual historian type, and I didn’t enjoy the deep dive as much as some others probably will. Still, this section is impressively thorough and approachable and manages to range widely across centuries of history without ever feeling like it is taking short cuts or reaching for conclusions beyond what its theories can support.

Inventing the Renaissance is a work that is haunted by the ghost of Machiavelli. No figure looms half so large in the story as old Nick and his revolutionary philosophy. He is the subject of the final vignette in the book’s core, but he is also a prominent figure in the book’s opening and throughout other stories as well. Inventing the Renaissance doesn’t limit itself to just discussing Nick’s philosophy – although it does an excellent job of explaining why that was so important, what made it revolutionary, and how it is often misunderstood – rather we meet the whole person. Machiavelli’s life teaches us about him, but it also informs us of the time he lived with its highs and lows. Palmer’s sincere caring for Machiavelli shines through in her writing and it will be nearly impossible for readers to not leave the book more sympathetic to this sometimes-notorious figure than they started (I, for one, have always had a soft spot for him since we share a birthday). It wouldn’t be fair to say that this is a book primarily about Machiavelli, but at the same time one could argue that the core thesis of this work, the thing that holds all its disparate ideas together, is that it is a book that will make you begin to understand Machiavelli, the philosopher and the person.

Inventing the Renaissance is a daunting read. It’s over 700 pages long and covers one of the most complex periods in European history. There are so many people, events, and wild occurrences to remember. Thankfully, Palmer provides a steady hand as she leads you through many (but not all) of its vast corridors. You can see the legacy of years spent teaching this subject to students in this book, as it is delivered with the care and consideration of someone used to explaining this material to people for the first time. It also shows the skills of someone who knows how to make difficult facts stick, and when to remind people about key details, or even just how to make someone memorable in a sea of similarly named historical figures. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is a book for literally everyone, but I’m also not sure who wouldn’t enjoy Inventing the Renaissance. It is the kind of popular history that other books aspire to be, a stunning piece of writing and history.

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I really enjoy playing new games and writing about them for this blog, but sometimes the pressure (mostly from myself) to play the latest game on my shelf means I don’t make enough time to revisit old favorites. I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful whiner, I really appreciate that thanks to review copies I can try so many new and exciting games and I feel privileged to play as many new titles as I do, but at the same time I find myself gazing longingly at old friends, wondering when will I play them again.

Earlier this month I decided to abandon my sense of obligation and pull one such old friend off the shelf. Men of Iron (MoI) is where I started my wargaming journey, and is easily the series I have written the most about. Of the games in the series, Arquebus remains a favorite, but also one I haven’t given enough attention to either. So, I decided to set up and play through the next two battles in the scenario booklet. I had no thought that I might actually write anything about it, this was purely for fun, but having revisited this system after a long time away from it I have some idle thoughts I’d like to scribble down. I make no promises for this to be top quality analysis, this is instead back of the envelope musings from spending time with an old friend again.

Battle design

In my review, I criticised the latest entry, Norman Conquests, for it’s somewhat bland scenario design. Too many of its battles featured nearly identical armies facing off against each other on a functionally blank map. Both sides started only a handful of hexes away from each other, so within the first activation they would collide. This criticism rang even more true to me as I was revisiting Arquebus, because Arquebus has amazing (and, at times, completely wild) scenario design.

The opening stages of Ravenna. The French army is impressive in scale, but has a slightly messy command structure and must attack a well fortified Spanish position. Both sides have ample artillery to bombard each other with as well.

I previously played Fornovo, probably the best scenario in the whole series. Fornovo has an enormous river that runs down the middle of the map that the Venetian player has to cross to engage the French before they flee the field. The water level will rise at random intervals, which makes it even harder to cross. This scenario creates such an interesting decision space and generates endless stories. It’s phenomenal.

As I’ve dug deeper into Arquebus the interesting design decisions continue apace. In this volume, I think you can see Berg getting really experimental with his design and pushing his system to see how far it will stretch. In this session I played the battles of Agnadello and Ravenna, scenarios 3 and 4 in the scenario booklet.

I, probably foolishly, crossed the trench as the Spanish to eliminate the French guns. This removed the threat of bombardment but opened up the potential for a large French counterattack. Meanwhile, up top the Spanish have entrenched to make it harder for those French guns to hurt them.

Agnadello didn’t get too spicy but it manages to do a lot with a little in terms of how it lays out the battle. For one thing, it has terrain to consider. There are irrigation ditches and a small trench that both sides have to navigate. The Venetians are initially set up in a strong position behind the trench, with an extended wing of their army available for a potential encircling attack. However, the French have artillery which can goad out the Venetians and force them to attack. The terrain is just enough to make it frustrating to maneuver and force interesting considerations on how to position your forces without being overbearing or a rules nightmare. The challenge of the terrain also makes it easy to overlook that most of the units start only two hexes from each other, since the terrain makes that distance feel so much more potent.

Agnadello also has an interesting option for the French player to consider with regards to their reinforcements. If the French reinforcements arrive, the Flight Points level for the French increases significantly, making it harder for them to flee. However, their arrival is based on a die roll and the French are under a timer for the scenario. I usually ignore the timed options for MoI scenarios, but in this case with the French failing the Reinforcements roll several times that timer pressure suddenly felt very real. None of these are brand new systems, but the way they were used in this scenario made me appreciate them more than I had previously. Overall, Agnadello is not a significant departure from the core of MoI, but it is an excellent execution of that system’s strengths.

Ravenna, on the other hand, decides to redesign a core element of the system. A mild criticism I have had of MoI in the past is that if you have large numbers of Battles to command you almost always just activate the same 2 or 3 over and over again, leaving whole wings of your army with nothing to do. In Ravenna the French have at least half a dozen individual Battles, but to allow for this Berg heavily modifies the activation system. The French now play a simple push your luck style game where they can pick 1-3 Battles to activate, but they have to roll a d10 to activate them with worse odds the greater the number. Do you really want to activate all three of those Battles? Well, yeah, but is it worth the risk? This is an excellent little adjustment to the core game, and the kind of spice that makes MoI what it is.

The French activation table for Ravenna

These scenarios also makes me excited to keep exploring Arquebus, because I’m sure there are more interesting decisions waiting for me in future scenarios. At the same time, I don’t want to rush and play them all now since with Berg’s passing I know I won’t be getting any new ones so I must savor what I have. I sincerely hope that future non-Berg entries in the series take the lessons of Arquebus to heart and don’t hesitate to play with the core systems to make each battle feel unique and exciting.

A reposition of some Spanish units helped blunt the French attack some, but it was too little too late and the French managed to kill enough Spanish units to force them to flee the battle.

Time and medieval battles

Scale is incredibly important in wargame design. It has significant implications that will shape how a game plays and what it prioritizes. This is most obvious when comparing things like operational vs. tactical scale, which in turn have an impact on the unit size represented by the counters and how many turns there can be in a game. While I enjoy discussing why a certain scale was chosen and whether it fits the topic, I think we can sometimes be too rigid with our conceptions of scale. Further, I think those notions tend to be based on an understanding of warfare rooted in modern history.

Initial set up for Agnadello. Look at all that terrain! A luxury for a medieval (or early modern) battle. Please ignore the fact that the Venetians are using the Swiss standard, I couldn’t find the Venetian one at the time and it was the closest in color.

Medieval battles are a tricky thing. We lack the levels of detail we have for a modern battle, so understanding exact troop deployments and movements is usually impossible. They also usually only lasted a few hours, so how do you take a game scale that’s designed for day long battles and use it for something that maybe lasted two hours? Or at least, how do you do that and make a game that is still satisfying and fun?

I think there is a silent brilliance in Men of Iron’s turnless structure in terms of how it captures the inexactness of time in a medieval battle. Rather than obsessing over what happened at a certain moment in the day, or comparing your progress vs. the historical timeline (which usually doesn’t exist), in Men of Iron you fight in a liminal space. You know time is progressing with each activation, but you never worry about exactly how much time. It embraces the fluidity through which we must understand medieval battles rather than trying to force a modernist perspective onto it. It’s a small touch, but I think it’s kind of brilliant.

I Like big flight points and I cannot lie

There are two little design choices in Arquebus that really help it to sing. One of them is that the core units you use most of the time, either pikemen and shield and buckler soldiers, have the staggeringly high flight point value of 5. In original Men of Iron, 5 flight points was a value reserved for if you somehow got your king killed, like an idiot, but in Arquebus most of your army has this value.

The French guns moved up along the bottom of the map to get within a closer bombardment range, while up top the French moved to behind the irrigation ditch in hopes of goading the Venetians into attacking them and suffering the negative combat DRM.

The second choice is the introduction of combination missile/melee units, think pikemen with crossbows or arquebus units included in their strength. These units are able to shoot in the movement phase and then immediately shock attack a potentially disrupted enemy unit. Of course, they could also have been disrupted by the enemy’s inherent missile units, and may even find themselves shocking a powerful melee unit where they themselves were disrupted but their enemy wasn’t - woops!

What these two things do is give Arquebus the ability to swing wildly in one direction or the other. A flank collapsing can wrack up flight points at a staggering rate, possibly ending the game, but at the same time while you may feel like you’re very far behind if you had one good push this turn maybe you can turn the tide with some lucky rolls. That feeling that you’re still in it helps to keep the game exciting while at the same time the fact that each unit is worth so many flight points can help ensure that the game doesn’t overstay its welcome when things do decisively turn against you.

Not that every game in the Men of Iron series should adopt these ideas (although some future titles might benefit from experimenting with them), but rather this helps Arquebus to stand out from its predecessors. You can see the differences in the warfare from something like Men of Iron where you really needed missile fire to disrupt the enemy line before charging in (although, arguably, given how strong the missile units were you maybe just wanted to use them for everything). The tempo of an Arquebus battle feels different and doesn’t necessarily bog down into as much of a grind as some other entries in the series. You don’t need to eliminate most of the enemy’s army, just enough of the core fighting force, and then the rest will buckle.

The Venetians opted to meet the French on their terms, leaving their initial defensive positions to attack. At the southern end they largely managed to neutralize the French artillery, while up north they proved surprisingly effective despite the irrigation ditch in the way. However, there is a big hole in the middle of their lines now, can the French exploit it?

Both of these elements help to enhance the chaotic feeling of the battles of this period, how unpredictable they could be an how insecure your position was even if it looks like you are winning. For some they might be too swingy and chaotic, but I come to MoI for the chaos so for me this is almost perfection.

In Praise of engagement

I also love the rules for units becoming Engaged. While it potentially clutters up the game as you have to place those little white counters between units, marring the game’s beauty, they are worth the aesthetic cost. At its most basic, I like that they ensure that there is no blank result on the combat results table (CRT), which I find underwhelming in any game. I want stuff to happen when my units fight.

More than that, though, I think the most important part is in the small line that says that once units become engaged you can’t shoot missiles into that combat. This seems like such a small thing, but I have complained extensively about how missile units are too powerful in Men of Iron as a whole. With the Engaged rule you can lock out missile fire and force the two sides to handle things in hand to hand combat, or at least if you want to take missile shots you have to break the engagement and disrupt your own unit first. It’s a small change, but it’s another thing that reduces the power of missiles and encourages hand to hand fighting. In that regard, it feels like another corrective to the original Men of Iron’s dominant archery, and I love to see it.

The French were ultimately unable to exploit the gap in the Venetian lines before Venice (thanks to lucky continuation rolls) was able to fill it in. A series of Retired results for the French pushed them over their lower Flight Points total as they couldn’t quite make the Reinforcements roll on their final activation.

The series’ pinnacle (so far?)

On the whole, Arquebus shows how Berg iterated on his original work in Men of Iron. He didn’t just take that core system and tinker with the edges, making very minor adjustments to units and then just setting up several nearly identical battles for them. Each new entry in the series makes adjustments to the original which adds a new perspective on both the historical subject and on what the Men of Iron system can be. Revisiting Arquebus, which was Berg’s final volume in this series as a designer, I think it is the pinnacle of the series’ design and reinforces how I felt that Norman Conquests didn’t fully live up to that potential. I forgave Norman Conquests this to some degree because it sacrifices that interesting perspective to partially gain the ability to be a great entry point into the system. However, I sincerely hope that future entries in Men of Iron remember that Berg was always making changes to the core and that they should look to Men of Iron as not just a core ruleset, but as a foundation for future experimentation.

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