Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 17
July 19, 2022
First Impressions: Almoravid by Volko Ruhnke
It took me longer to get Almoravid to the table than I expected. Partly it was the sheer size of the game – the board plus lord’s mats for the first scenario pushed the limits of my little wargaming corner. I have no idea how I’m going to play the later scenarios. The greater factor, however, was a personal mental block around learning the rules. I learned Nevsky thanks to Jean Michel Grosjeu’s excellent YouTube videos on it – I did later read the rules, but only once I knew how play worked. The prospect of learning Almoravid from scratch, especially tired as I was due to a very hectic few weeks in work, resulted in me postponing night after night.
What finally helped to sit me down at the table and play was San Diego Histcon’s online Levy and Campaign Fest event. At the event I picked up and played several in development L&C titles and my experience with Nevsky, limited as it is, was more than enough to get me playing without having read the rules to any of these games. When I finally did sit down to read Almoravid’s rules, it only took me like 15 minutes since I could just skim the sections where the rules were identical to Nevsky. The rulebook helpfully highlights areas where rules are new or have changed so you don’t need to pick through it looking for differences. Much like with Volko’s previous series, COIN, once you know how to play a Levy and Campaign game it really does making picking up another one much simpler.

The first scenario crammed as tightly as possible into my wargaming corner. The Christians are making a push on Toledo - can the Muslims hold them off?
I would also note here that both Nevsky and Almoravid come with quick start scenarios, neither of which I have used because I am a fool – if you are playing these for the first time, use the quick start rules. You can find them on GMT Games’ website.
The other outcome of my experience with L&C Fest was a greater desire to play this game against an opponent. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed playing both Nevsky, and now Almoravid, solitaire and I will continue to play both of them that way in the future. Instead, what I had was a shift in the reasoning behind my desire to play these games multiplayer. Previously, I wanted an opponent who would make different decisions than I would to add new excitement to the game. After playing some short games with human opponents at L&C Fest I now appreciate how much easier and faster it is to play L&C with another person.

The Muslim commanders make their way into Toledo while the Christians mass at the border of Toledo and lay down their first siege in Zaragoza in the northeast.
The Levy rounds in particular are much more tiring and involved when I have to do control both sides. There were a lot of Lords in play in the opening scenario for Almoravid and going through and doing all those Levy actions – especially in the first round – was draining. I was so relieved when a large proportion of Lords weren’t eligible for the second round. Playing with a human opponent greatly reduces the mental burden of the Levy phase, and I had not fully appreciated that until the combination of L&C Fest and solitaire Almoravid. That is partly why I’m very excited for the upcoming online Almoravid Tournament that’s being organised for later this year – I have no aspirations to do well in it, but I’m stoked for the chance to play multiple games against other people.

The Siege of Toledo has begun! Can the Christian’s sustain this many sieges? Probably not! Can the Muslim’s stop them? Also probably not. Only chaos can ensue!
I’m not saying I won’t play these games solitaire anymore, but I’m not sure if I will as a single session. If I have room to leave it set up and I can spend thirty minutes doing a Levy phase and then walk off to do something else and play the campaign phase later, I think I’ll have a much better time. In the short term this probably means that I’ll solitaire Nevsky more than Almoravid since Nevsky’s smaller board fits better in my little corner and is easier to leave set up. I can safely put all its key components out of toddler reach, which is not true of Almoravid!

The first campaign is over - time to Levy again. The Muslims are in friendly spaces but few of the Christians are so it went much quicker this time.
Enough about my play preferences, though, let’s get to the game! The big change in Almoravid from Nevsky is the introduction of Taifa politics. During the time Almoravid is set during, the Iberian Peninsula was largely divided up into several small to medium sized regions ruled by what are known as the Taifa lords. The game covers the invasion of Christian rulers from Northern Spain first into Toledo and then neighbouring Taifa regions, which then, via an invitation from the beleaguered Muslim lords, spurred the invasion of the Almoravid Dynasty, the rulers of Morocco. Volko has made an excellent introductory video about this system which is worth watch. You can find it here: https://youtu.be/A-f_hdEee1Y.

The Christians decide to storm Toledo. Their forces are impressive, but so are the walls of Toledo. How will it go?

The devastating results. King Alfonso takes Toledo, but at what cost!
In Almoravid regions have shifting loyalties and can change from friendly to neutral and then to enemy to each player depending on their status. If a Muslim Lord has been Mustered and is on the map, then his Taifa is Independent and all regions in it are friendly to the Muslim player by default. If the Lord is not Mustered, the region is usually in Parias, meaning it pays tribute to the Christians in exchange for neutrality. Finally, the region can be Reconquista, which means the Christians have conquered it. However, within a region loyalty may not be consistent – after a Reconquista some strongholds may be marked with Jihad markers, giving the Muslim player victory points, and making them friendly to that side. Similarly, the Christians can conquer individual Strongholds that will give them VPs and stay loyal to them even if control of the region changes.
The Taifa system adds a lot of extra elements to explore, and I feel like I’ve only dipped my toes into it. I really like how it adds a significant political element to the conflict and it has a very immediate impact on the decisions that both players must make. I’m excited to see how it plays out over more games.

I got too excited by the storm and forgot to take photos. Al-Mutamid briefly besieged Toledo before moving north and ravaging his way through the Christian Kingdom of Leon. Nearby the siege of Zaragoza stalled, although al-Mustain disbanded after his attempt to stop them failed. I forgot to update Parias in Zaragoza so the scores should be a tie rather than a narrow Muslim victory.
The other obvious difference between Almoravid and Nevsky is the map. Almoravid has a much narrower range of Ways than Nevsky does, and therefore a much narrower range of Transport, which is a difference I suspect some players will really appreciate. For me, however, the thing about Almoravid’s map that stood out (besides how pretty it is!) is the sheer variety of ways you have to get between locations and how frustrating so many of them are. Nevsky kind of felt like it funnelled players through a couple of choke points. In contrast, Almoravid reminded me of how my parents described driving in my hometown: there are about five ways to get anywhere, all of them equally bad. I was spoiled for choice in how to manoeuvre my armies but keeping myself supplied while I did that was agony. It didn’t help that Forage, Ravage, and Supply are all more restricted in Almoravid so having enough Provender was always a struggle. I loved it, A+ map.
My initial impression is that I think I like Almoravid a little more than Nevsky, but it’s a tight competition. I happen to really enjoy the agony of managing all your different modes of transport in Nevsky and found Almoravid’s more limited selection a little underwhelming by comparison. However, I really like Almoravid’s map (even if it barely fits on my tiny table) and I really, really liked the Taifa politics system. I’m going to need to make time to play both some more. The Levy and Campaign series is off to a strong start!
July 14, 2022
Mary Rose: King Henry VIII’s Warship 1510-45 by Brian Lavery
It’s impossible to study medieval archery without talking about the Mary Rose. The flagship of Henry VIII’s fleet, it sank in 1545 and took nearly its whole crew with it. It’s subsequent rediscovery, first in the nineteenth and then in the late twentieth centuries, was one of the most exciting discoveries in undersea archaeology. For historians of the longbow, it was even more important because several chests full of longbows were discovered amidst the wreck. These remain the only surviving English longbows from its period of dominance in the English armies. 1545 is late in the longbow’s life, over a century after the glory of Agincourt and only a few decades before it was officially retired by Queen Elizabeth I. Still, the hundreds of surviving bows on the Mary Rose have fuelled decades of debate and discussion in the history of archery and the longbow’s role in it.
Up until very recently that was most of what I knew about the Mary Rose. I’m a historian who has generally specialised in the history of archery so while I knew the big picture of the Mary Rose and how it sank, I was mostly interested in the bows (and arrows) that were recovered from the wreck. That made Brian Lavery’s book an interesting read, as Lavery is first and foremost a naval historian and the book emphasises the Mary Rose as a ship and its importance in the history of shipbuilding and development rather than just what was found on it.
This book is part of the Haynes Owner’s Workshop Manual series, a series that I’m basically entirely unfamiliar with. I understand that they started as actual practical guides, but have expanded into other spaces, where this book belongs. I thought it was kind of entertaining that the book jacket was framed like this was an owner’s guide to a sixteenth century warship, but the insides of the book are a straightforward history of the ship. This is probably the right choice; I don’t think it would have benefited from a gimmick framing it as actually a guide to owning your own early modern warship.
I know basically nothing about ships or sailing. I break out into a cold sweat if I’m ever expected to talk about naval military history, which is unfortunate given the prominent role archery played in it during the Middle Ages. I came into this book having heard nautical terms but having only the slimmest idea what they mean in practice and often finding it very annoying how ill explained they are. It is with some relief that I can report that for the most part Lavery’s writing does an excellent job of being beginner friendly. Terms are clearly defined, and the book is full to bursting with images and diagrams. Thanks to Lavery’s explanation I now fully understand what is meant when a ship is said to have been clinker-built. I cannot stress how many books have tried to explain it to me without me really understanding it, so that’s no small achievement.
Lavery’s discussion of how the Mary Rose was built, how it sailed, who crewed it are all interesting and if you’re a fan of nautical history – particularly if you’re more familiar with the centuries after the Tudor period – there’s a lot to like in this book. What I particularly appreciated was his discussion of the military career of the Mary Rose before its dramatic sinking in 1545. There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there, including a belief in some circles that it sank on its maiden voyage. In fact, by 1545 the Mary Rose was one of the older ships in the fleet, probably weighed down by having more guns than it was originally designed for. It had already participated in raids and at least one small skirmish. It’s not the most glorious record, but then naval battles weren’t particularly common at the time and the career of the Mary Rose, except for its dramatic accidental sinking, was representative for the time.
I also really enjoyed the final sections around the excavation, preservation, and display of the ship’s hull and items. Lavery provides a great window into the methodologies and challenges in uncovering and preserving history like the Mary Rose. It also reminded me that I timed my big trip to London to be at the exact moment when they were moving the Mary Rose into its new purpose-built museum and thus couldn’t see it – and I still haven’t, which is a real shame because it sounds amazing. If you have an interest in how underwater archaeology works or in the design of educational museum Lavery provides some excellent insight into both.
This book does an excellent job covering the full scope of the Mary Rose’s life, from its initial building to its recovery and display while remaining readable and engaging for general readers. Serious specialists will get more value out of the massive tomes about the wreck and excavation published by the Mary Rose Trust, I can attest to the quality of the one by Alexandra Hildred on weaponry, but for general readers this is a great place to start.
July 11, 2022
First Impressions: Great Heathen Army by Amabel Holland
I thought it was about time that I tried another hex and counter wargame and I had heard amazing things about Hollandspiele and the designs of Amabel Holland, so this seemed like a logical next step. Hollandspiele games tend to be quite expensive in Europe, so I owe some thanks to my older brother who bought me a copy of Great Heathen Army and its expansion, which features Viking battles in Ireland, for my birthday. My previous experience with medieval hex and counter games has pretty much entirely been the Men of Iron series (which you can read about here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo...) so I was excited to explore another version of this style of game. I don’t know early medieval warfare to the same degree that I know the later period, and I’m not very familiar with the battles of the Great Heathen Army which rampaged through England in the 870s, so my ability to pick apart the historical aspects of the game is a little more limited here. Since I don’t have the same investment in the individual battles of this period, I just picked the first battle in the scenario book: Ashdown 871.

Great Heathen Army allows for relatively free deployment, so any poor decisions in unit placement are entirely my own! I think this is a clever way of adding more options to the game and reflects how little we know about the disposition of armies during this time period.
Great Heathen Army uses the Shields and Swords system and it’s a simpler system than Men of Iron – which in itself isn’t a particularly complex system (in wargaming terms, anyway!). Shields and Swords gets rid of things like unit facing, routed units, or seemingly any ability to recover from having sustained a step loss (represented by flipping your counter over to its often-weaker side). I actually really like these changes. The facing rules in Men of Iron weren’t complex, but I did often find myself forgetting to position my counters on the paper maps correctly and they had a habit of shifting around on their own – I have not gone in so deep yet as to have bought plexiglass to put down over my maps and I’m playing straight on the paper which means that sliding counters is a hazard of the gaming experience. I really like that there isn’t as much of an option to recover units and that elimination is more consistent as a result. I like the decision space in Men of Iron where you have to decide when in a battle to Rally your Routed troops – in theory anyway. Often it just feels like a way of prolonging the inevitable. If you have enough routed troops to need to Rally to avoid losing, often you have lost already. Combat results feel more consequential in Shields and Swords since you can’t just forfeit an action to flip a counter back from being disordered or spend a turn to rally your units – injuries that your units sustain are with you for the rest of the game. I prefer that, it makes each combat feel more immediately consequential.

Early in this scenario only the right flank can receive orders, the Saxons are wading through the bog to engage the Vikings.

I gave the Viking king a foolishly aggressive position and promptly forgot where he was, resulting in him being isolated and attacked early.
Shields and Swords also has far fewer combat modifiers to think about – which is great for the math challenged like myself. In my game I was rarely adding or subtracting more than a few points and potentially shifting one Combat Rating value – combat rating determines which row on the combat table you refer to after rolling the dice and calculating your final result. I also like that it uses the trusty d8 rather than the always troublesome d10 – possibly my least favourite die after the d4. If I had my way all d4s would be like they are in Pendragon: d8s that only count to 4. I’m still not a huge fan of combat tables in general, so that was a slight mark against my enjoyment of the game. I can understand their value and I get why designers use them, but I prefer results that can just be read off the dice – either by looking for certain results or via custom dice. I know that is not always a practical solution, though.

The Viking king is quickly overrun as the lines break apart and both sides suffer casualties.
I really liked how you determine your actions in Shield and Swords. Each side has a small pile of order tokens that they assign to wings of troops to determine what actions they can take. In Ashdown I could assign two order tokens to each my wings – so they could March and Fight, or March twice, or Fight with a Bonus, for example. The tokens are double sided with different orders on each side, so by choosing one order you lock yourself out of another. In the Ashdown scenario the Vikings lost two of their orders when their king died (which happened very early due to me forgetting where he was) which further restricted their available actions. All you need to do for your turn is pick from a handful of options and then execute it, which is super simple but really engaging.

I remembered that I could now give orders to both Wings slightly later than I probably should have - but now the fight has begun on both flanks.
I had initially thought that Great Heathen Army was suffering from one of my problems with Men of Iron where it is often advantageous to just keep activating one Battle over and over again to push an advantage rather than utilising the full array of troops you have available to you. However, it turns out I had just misread the rules and, after an initial event took place that brought the second half of the board into play, I could assign orders to both wings of troops. I don’t know if this will hold true for every scenario in the book, but I really enjoyed having to choose which orders to give each flank. It was particularly challenging as the Vikings since they had fewer tokens and only one flank could receive the maximum two orders.

The left flank is going a bit better for the Vikings while the right is completely falling apart and the Saxons are overrunning the few remaining units.
That was definitely not the only rule I got wrong. Shields and Swords is not a very complex system, and the rulebook is quite short, but like a lot of wargames you need to wrap your brain around how it differs from other things you’ve played before to fully understand it. I could see habits from Men of Iron creeping into my decisions and I need to go back and revisit the rules now that I’ve played it to try and push those out of my head and fully situate myself in the rules of Great Heathen Army.
I haven’t even talked about the Initiative system which is very simple but very clever – like a lot of this game honestly. In Ashdown 871 neither player started with the Initiative, and it only entered play when one player chose to give it to their opponent. Doing so unlocked extra orders and ended a rule where dead Vikings were worth double VPs. If the Viking player had Initiative, they got a -1 to all their combat rolls (which is actually a bonus, rolling low is good), but at the end of a turn either player could give their opponent the Initiative token and then immediately take a second full turn. This is super powerful, but to do it you must surrender it to your opponent and give them the chance to do it back to you. It’s very simple, but I really liked it and it really feels like it captures the essence of having the initiative in a conflict. You’re using your initiative to push yourself further, but in the act, you are surrendering that control. It’s very cool.

The Viking player surrenders the Initiative to take two turns and push home a surprise victory despite the disastrous right flank battle. At the top you can see the piles of dead units. The death of the Saxon king clinches the Viking victory.
Playing Men of Iron feels a bit like running a simulation – I find it interesting but only occasionally is it genuinely fun. I enjoy my time with it, but I wouldn’t like it nearly as much if it was about a period of history, I was less interested in. In contrast, Great Heathen Army was a lot of fun as a game in addition to being interesting history. Whereas I’m generally content to play Men of Iron solitaire and rarely repeat battles, I would really like to sit down with someone and play Great Heathen Army against an opponent. I would also happily play Ashdown 871 again, there was a lot of fun game to be had here. I’m definitely looking forward to digging deeper into this game!
If you’re interested in further reading on this subject, while not focused on the battles and military side of things as much Cat Jarman’s River Kings includes some fascinating information about the composition, movement, and evidence for the Great Heathen Army. You can read my review of her book here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/river-kings-by-cat-jarman
July 7, 2022
Trial by Battle by Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War is nothing short of epic. This volume is 600 pages long and only covers the first ten years of the war, ending with the Siege of Calais in 1347. For the rest of the war, you’ll need to read the next four volumes, all equally massive, the final of which is still not finished. Research projects of this scale are exceedingly rare these days, and that makes this a particularly interesting and important book, but there are also reasons people rarely tackle projects this large. It’s hard to know where to begin when tackling something as enormous in both scope and impact as Sumption’s series and there’s a lot to talk about with this book, both its context and its contents, so let’s jump into it!
At the very start of Trial by Battle Sumption makes a passing remark that narrative history has somewhat fallen out of style and notes that his book is a bit of an outlier. Comments like these from historians tend to get my hackles up a bit, because they are often written by hacks who object to the fact that history is now telling more diverse and complex stories than just the lives of kings and their amazing accomplishments (or dramatic failures). They also usually ignore that narrative history is alive and well, it is just rarer in academic contexts. Now, Sumption isn’t a hack – although he has not exactly covered himself in glory with his comments on Covid responses – but I do think his lament is interesting, in part because his own work kind of answers why these histories have disappeared. He's not wrong, you don’t see narrative history on the scale and with the detail Sumption provides as much as you would have in, say, the mid-19th century. There are several reasons for this. Trial by Battle was published in 1990, the final volume of Sumption’s history is still not out over 30 years later. Most people don’t have time to devote themselves to a single research project for over three decades. More than that, while Sumption’s books are no doubt among the best-selling histories of the Hundred Years War I’d be highly surprised if he makes enough from book sales to support a family. Many of the classic multi-volume epic narrative histories of yore were by people who did not need their writing to pay dividends. Edward Gibbon’s famous (or infamous depending on your discipline) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a six-volume history of Rome from 98 AD – 1590 AD published in the late 18th century, is the archetype for this kind of project. Gibbon was no wealthy lord, but he was a member of an elite political class that gave him significant advantages and time to write – he wasn’t exactly trying to fit writing time in between his work in the fields, he was a Member of Parliament. These massive narrative projects by and large tend to be the product of an elite class (Sumption sat on the UK’s supreme court and now has the title Lord Sumption) and so it doesn’t particularly surprise me that they aren’t very common. History, and academia generally, still has an elitist problem, but it is much more diverse than it was even a century ago, and with that comes changes in the types of stories that are told and how they are told. In that regard, Sumption’s series is something of a relic.
But how is the book itself? I found Trial by Battle to be deeply impressive, kind of frustrating, and a little boring. Let’s start with the good. When I said that this book only covers the war up until 1347, I was being a little misleading – Sumption’s history actually starts in 1328 with the death of Charles IV, King of France. Charles died without a male heir, and it is this fact that would eventually cause the core dispute of the Hundred Years War. Philip VI of France was Charles’ cousin while Edward III of England was the son of Charles’ younger sister. Most histories of the Hundred Years War will explain this, but Sumption goes even deeper, devoting nearly half the book to events pre-1337. He sets the context for why the English and French kings were so often in conflict, including a very close study of the political situation in Aquitaine and its role in kickstarting hostilities between Edward and Philip. The depth of background here is stunning and very important if you want to fully understand the Hundred Years War. I really like when books do this. While I’m quite familiar with the origins of the Hundred Years War, many readers won’t be and providing this context is crucial to helping people understand what is to follow. It reminded me of Peter Wilson’s history of the Thirty Years War, which devotes over a hundred pages to explaining the context of that war before the conflict even starts. It’s great, I love when big histories do this.
When Sumption ventures beyond the Hundred Years War his commentary gets a bit…messier. He will at times seemingly ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the exact point he wants to make. As an example, at one point he criticises King Philip IV of France for ceasing trade relations with Flanders between 1302 and 1305, neglecting to mention that Flanders was in open rebellion after their victory at Courtrai in 1302 and would only return to the French fold after Philip led a successful invasion in 1305. There’s no reason why Philip would have been maintaining trade with a region he was at war with. This isn’t essential knowledge, and once the book passes 1337 these issues largely disappear, but when it happened it always felt a little sloppy and rubbed me the wrong way. I think because the rest of the book achieves such depth, the fact that on the peripheries I could see the shallowness bothered me.
The thing that makes Sumption’s book so impressive, and the reason I probably wouldn’t recommend it to people, is the level of detail he captures – particularly after the outbreak of the war in 1337. Sumption has spent a very long time studying this war and he lays out exactly what is happening at each stage of the conflict in plain and easy to read language without losing any detail or complexity. It’s impressive how simple and readable, excusing the occasional needlessly obscure word, this book is. That is an achievement. If what you want is for a very detailed and very thorough blow by blow account of the Hundred Years War than Sumption delivers that better than anyone else. However, my question would be: do you really want that?
Don’t get me wrong, for scholars and dedicated amateurs of the Hundred Years War the work Sumption has done is very useful. Having an easy and reliable reference for the order these many complicated events happened in, especially given the war’s many diverse theatres, is super useful. For a general reader, though, it’s all a bit much. You don’t really need this level of detail and while Sumption’s writing is clear I wouldn’t call it particularly engaging. I’m really into this stuff and I still found it kind of boring in places and wanted him to skip to the good stuff. For this reason, I think I might prefer this volume as a reference work, something to dip into when I have a question to answer, rather than as a cover to cover read. The one problem I have here is that Sumption’s referencing is a bit sparse. I fully believe he did his research so I’m not worried about the veracity of his statements, but there are more than a few interesting anecdotes that I would love to follow up on but he offers little in the way of a guide as to where I could find it among the sea of fourteenth century sources.
I think there is a general perception that epic histories like this are the final word on their subject. People still read Gibbon despite him being hopelessly outdated historiographically because it’s long and famous and so it must be good. Trial By Battle is a great narrative of the Hundred Years War, but it’s also thirty years old. It doesn’t have the benefit of thirty years’ worth of research. This is particularly apparent in its discussion of the Battle of Crécy, an area where our understanding has expanded enormously in the past two decades. This is a huge challenge for a project like this – when the final volume comes out, I have no doubt it will be one of if not the best account of the end of the Hundred Years War, but the series beginning will be largely out of date by then. Reading Sumption’s histories will fill you with lots of information about the Hundred Years War, but it still won’t tell you anything, which gets to another issue I have.
Trial by Battle suffers because of what it is: pure narrative history. Sumption isn’t nearly as good at explaining the more complex questions around the why’s of the war as he is at explaining the how and when of its main events. This is very political history. While he dabbles in other areas, particularly economic, legal, and diplomatic history, there is so much of the Hundred Years War missing from its pages. You will learn very little about the culture of the fourteenth century. The roles of women and peasants, unless they are directly engaged in fighting, are largely left to the side which is disappointing. The church also largely exists within the political sphere in this history, the role of spirituality is not something Sumption is particularly interested in including. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that Sumption can’t include all of this. Trial by Battle is a massive book, there isn’t much room for more, but at the same time I prefer something like David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History which while it doesn’t go into nearly the depth of Sumption does a much better job at providing a holistic view of the Hundred Years War.
That all having been said, most of my criticisms are more a critique of the kind of book I think Sumption should have written and are unfair in that they don’t consider the work on its own terms. By that measure, Trial by Battle is a success – it’s a readable and very thorough narrative history of the opening act of the Hundred Years War. I wouldn’t recommend it to any but the most diehard of Hundred Years War enthusiasts, many of whom have probably already bought and read it anyway, but it is an impressive scholarly achievement of that there is no doubt. I’m glad I read it even if I’m not particularly looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
July 4, 2022
First Impressions: A Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train
Before playing my latest COIN game I didn’t have to learn how to play it because someone else had to teach it to me instead! At the end of May I had the opportunity attend Chimera Con in Dublin. Chimera Con is a one-day convention dedicated to playing games with other people who relish the opportunity of spending all day playing the one epic game. The organisers seek out volunteers in advance of the event to bring a game that they are prepared to teach to a table of potentially new players, and then players are allocated to those games for the day. I got a space playing A Distant Plain, Volko Runke and Brian Train’s COIN game about the Afghanistan War, covering the period of the war from 2001 to 2013. This would be my first time playing the game, but my third COIN game overall so I was reasonably confident I could pick it up pretty quickly. When I had played Andean Abyss at the start of May, I had been the government player, so this time I requested an insurgent faction and was given the role of the Taliban. The game organiser was the Warlords and the other players, both totally new to the system, were the Coalition and the Afghanistan Government. In the end the game took us about 7 hours, and I had an absolute blast playing it. I also have a few thoughts about it which I hope you will indulge me by reading!

The opening of the game, everything is very much not peaceful in Afghanistan and it’s about to get a lot worse.
First things first, I enjoyed A Distant Plain quite a bit more than Andean Abyss. That’s not a nock against Andean Abyss, which is a great game. In fact, most of the mechanics in A Distant Plain are largely identical to those in Andean Abyss, it’s just a few tweaks to the game that made me enjoy it significantly more. The most significant of these was the different roles the players took. The Taliban, which I played, along with the Warlords could have fit in with the insurgent factions in Andean Abyss – they weren’t exactly the same, but they were very much of a type. The big difference here was in the Coalition and Afghan Government (Government from here on) players. In Andean Abyss there are three insurgent and one government player, while in A Distant Plain two players take on the role of governing powers – but they don’t exactly see eye to eye.

End of the first Propaganda Round, at this point it’s still very much everybody’s game and most of us are only beginning to grasp how the game works.
Our game was an amazing illustration of the Coalition-Government relationship. Early on the two players were learning to cooperate and then quickly found that they worked best in tandem. Often the Government player would Sweep a region to expose Taliban guerrillas so that the superior Coalition military could eliminate them. Cooperation was key to keeping the insurgent players in check. The problem arose as we kept playing and they started thinking about how to actually win the game. The thing is the two sides don’t actually have identical victory conditions and only one of them can win. The Coalition wants to boost support for the Government (in direct opposition with the Taliban who want high opposition) and then to remove as many troops and bases as they can from the country. In contrast, the Government wants to control large parts of the board, something made easier with significant Coalition presence, and to boost their own Patronage – which decreases Support. The extra wrinkle that makes this phenomenal is that the two players share one pool of Resources – the Coalition spends Government Resources to take several of their actions (some of their actions are free, so long as they only use their own pieces. They are also able to move and use Government pieces on the board). That meant that as we progressed through several phases, their cooperation began to degrade into the bickering of an old married couple. The Government player being increasingly frustrated as the Coalition spent all their money buying popular support that they didn’t care about. I wasn’t even playing one of those factions and this aspect greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the game. I can see how this dynamic was repeated and modified in Pendragon and it makes me even more excited to play a four-player version of that game – that bickering just isn’t the same as a solitaire player.

Start of second Propaganda Round and I am one point shy of winning - almost winning is a dangerous place to be in a COIN game. I expect to be punished for sticking my neck out.
I also preferred how A Distant Plain only has one big city to fight over instead of Andean Abyss’s many distinct cities. The push and pull on who controlled Kabul, whether it supported or opposed the government, and just generally the chaos in that area was a lot more interesting to me. It also meant that we never had to use the overflow boxes, since Kabul could take a lot of pieces. In Andean Abyss if anything goes down in one of the cities, you’ll quickly find yourself struggling to fit everything into the relevant space. The struggle for Kabul felt like it more easily created a narrative than the scattered and occasional conflict in Andean Abyss’s cities. That said, that could just as easily be down to how my two games played out, and in another game of Andean Abyss it’s possible that there would be significantly more urban conflict. I find it hard to imagine a game of A Distant Plain where Kabul isn’t a pivotal spot on the board, though.

End of the third Propaganda Card (it came like 4 cards after the second) and I’m holding it together better than I’d expected. Things are heating up in the East, though.
I now feel like I’m really beginning to come to grips with COIN as a system, and I’m excited to revisit Pendragon in that light. One thing that keeps occurring to me is how the Events don’t work exactly how you would expect them to, or at least not how I did. I’m a little more used to events in classic Card Driven Games, where often the Event is better than the actions you could take using the operation points instead, but it’s also usually a lot narrower in application. Obviously, that’s a big genre of games and this is a bit of an oversimplification, but my experience made me think that Events in COIN games would often be the best choice if their situational application fit your plans.

Deploying in force was a Taliban specialty - all of my guerrillas were on the board a lot. The Warlords were very good at filling the board with bases. You can see how it can be overwhelming trying to quash the insurgents.
In practice, I don’t think Events are actually meant for the first player of the turn. Most of the time anyway, sometimes the perfect Event does come up and you have to take it. In my game the Warlord player had an even that benefited him greatly, prevented one of the players from playing the next turn, and didn’t cost him his ability to act on the next turn – which coincidentally also saw him going first. That was a good run of Events. Most of the time, though, if you’re going first the Event is just not as good as taking a big action with a special ability would be. That’s where I think the actual cleverness of the Events comes in. You see, if you take that big action, the second player can take the event or a limited action, which is almost always underwhelming. You can choose to block the event, but that means no special ability. That, I think, is what the main Event calculus is – it’s something the first player has to decide if they’re happy to let another player have rather than something they decide if they want. It’s a subtle difference, but a really clever one.

The Taliban are largely wiped out in the East of Afghanistan, but a series of Ambushes wipes out Coalition power in Kandahar in the South and imperils control elsewhere. The fight for Kabul is particularly fierce.
That’s all the stuff I loved about A Distant Plain, let’s talk a bit about what I didn’t like quite as much: the theme. That’s not quite the right way to put it. I think the US led coalition invasion of Afghanistan and the war that followed is really interesting, and I think it’s a pivotal moment of the 21st century and something that looms very large over my own life. I was twelve when 9/11 happened, I finished my childhood in a very different world from where I started. It’s not that I think the War in Afghanistan is off limits – it’s very much something we need to understand and a game about counterinsurgency is a good way to increase understanding of the conflict and its dynamics. I just felt like it was missing the human element. Now, this criticism could just as easily be laid at the feet of Andean Abyss I think, but I suppose I’m not as intimately impacted by that conflict. The Colombian Drug War was something I was aware of, but it didn’t loom over my life like Afghanistan did and I’m not as viscerally familiar with it.

Game end - Taliban victory on final scoring. I once again finished just one point shy of my target, but this time it was good enough as no one else was closer to their win condition.
I was the Taliban player and throughout the game I used the Terror action quite a lot – it was essential to achieving my victory. My actions were clearly based on the historic egregious acts of terror that have killed thousands of innocent civilians. When we played the game, it wasn’t that heavy, though, it was a game. We cracked jokes; we had a good time. Now, I’m not saying that my game of A Distant Plain should have been a sombre affair, where we all reflected upon the human cost of war every time we took an action. It was a game, it was designed to be fun, we had fun playing it. At the same time, though, I’m trying to process how I feel about playing the Taliban, especially given my eventual victory. I think it would be a little too easy to just view it entirely as a game and not really think about the actual suffering that was caused by these people in history. The people of Afghanistan are once again living under Taliban rule, and that’s pretty depressing when you think about it.
I don’t know what A Distant Plain could have done to rectify this – I think it’s a pretty fundamental challenge to all wargame design. Any time you’re making a game out of something that featured vast human suffering, you run into the problem of how to balance making the experience into a game that is meant for entertainment with the need to do justice by the suffering those people faced. I’m not even necessarily saying that A Distant Plain was a complete failure in this regard – it was just the part of the experience that left me feeling the most uncomfortable days later as I write this. That’s it.
As a play experience, though, A Distant Plain was great. My experience at Chimera Con was easily the best time I’ve had playing a COIN game. I even got to establish contact with some people who play COIN semi-regularly, so when I hopefully manage to move back to Dublin, I’ll be able to play these games more frequently. I’d love to get Pendragon to the table with them, and they have a copy of Fire in the Lake which I hear is amazing.
June 13, 2022
First Impressions: Saladin from Shakos Games
Few medieval figures have captured peoples’ imagination quite as much as Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, more widely known in the western world as Saladin. His successful military campaigns in the mid and late twelfth century, along with his reputation for charity and mercy toward defeated foes, have inspired much discussion and debate ever since his death. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that his famous battles against the Crusader States and the Third Crusade have inspired quite a few wargames, including several battles in GMT Games’ Infidel, which I wrote about previously. The latest addition to the canon of games about the sultan and his military career is Saladin from French publisher Shakos Games.

Opening set up for my first solitaire game of Saladin. The board is gorgeous but with questionable colour choice for people with colour blindness.
Saladin is the first entry in Shakos Games’ En Ordre de Bataille series, which I believe will be a collection of smaller games that depict famous battles from history. Saladin includes two battles in the box – Hattin and Arsuf – one on each side of the board. While I was more interested in trying Hattin, a battle that seems weirdly unpopular in historical wargaming despite its importance to history, the rulebook was very explicit that I should play Arsuf first to learn the system, so that’s the one I played. I initially set it up to play with a friend, and we successfully completed the first round of the game before our respective parenting responsibilities intervened and we had to take a rain check for the rest of the game. I set up Arsuf again a few days later and played it solitaire this time. The game has no hidden information, so it plays reasonably well solitaire, but I did feel like I was missing out on some of the experience without a human opponent.

The opening of the game did not get off to a great start for the Crusaders. Two successful charges were launched, but they have suffered significant casualties as a result.
The core of the system is that each player has a pool of order tokens and a selection of cards representing each of their commanders at that particular battle. Each card has a list of actions that it can take which each cost a particular number of order tokens to use. When you choose an action on your turn you flip that card over to its Activated side. Most cards have a smaller pool of actions they can still take once Activated should you wish to spend more order tokens on them – but you must activate all your commanders in a round and each card as a zero-cost action that is very bad, so you have to conserve your orders to make sure you can activate everyone. The other main feature is that available actions depend upon the commander’s status. Commanders (and their units) can be Committed, i.e., in melee, or Uncommitted, i.e., waiting to charge. Generally, the way a commander becomes Committed is by using the Charge action (either via the good Charge action or the not good Reckless Charge action), but the Ayyubid units have Reaction abilities that can cancel a charge action while still causing the Orders to be spent so the Crusaders have to be tactical about waiting for the right time to charge.

Bourgogne and Richard I return to their starting position to hopefully charge again. Unfortunately the entire left flank has been wiped out and the desperate charge on the right could be going better. They have at least successfully driven the Ayyubids from Arsuf.
This mechanism of Committed vs. Uncommitted and having the Crusaders time their charges, then withdraw, then charge again feels much more suited to the Battle of Hattin than it does to Arsuf. As a model of Arsuf there is very little to represent how Richard I’s goal was initially to march through the battle zone and not fight. It was only when the Hospitaller rear guard got sick of the constant harrying from the Ayyubid archers and charged that Richard was forced to commit the rest of his army to the fight. I couldn’t help but think of my experience with the Arsuf scenario in Infidel (which you can read about here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo...). While Infidel is a very different system, and not exactly a perfect model of Arsuf itself, that did a much better job at capturing the dynamics of Arsuf by representing the fighting march tactics of the Crusader army on that campaign and the distinct goals of the two armies. The version of Arsuf in Saladin did feel like a crusader battle, if one that leans a bit too heavily on Muslim light horse archers without also including the heavier melee troops that were also a core part of warfare at the time, but it did not feel particularly evocative of Arsuf to me. The reason I think the system may suite Hattin better is that battle did see multiple charges by desperate crusaders, who would then rally and charge again, failing to break the Muslim line each time. The Committed/Uncommitted system feels better suited to that battle than to Arsuf which didn’t see nearly as many repeated charges.

Both Crusader flanks collapse and the core is suffering under a barrage of arrows. Richard and Bourgone have successfully charged again but are making barely a dent in the Ayyubid lines.
There are several aspects of Saladin that I really like. The fact that all the actions that involve melee fighting involve rolling both player’s dice, and thus risk inflicting injuries on both sides, is great. It’s a very simple way of capturing how even if you launched your big charge, you’re going to take losses. I also like the dice themselves – the distribution of no hits, one hit, two hits, and a loss of command point really work for me. The committed/uncommitted status is also interesting, although I’m not in love with the fact that the available actions when committed are kind of boring. As the Christian player it kind of forces you to pull back your troops and try to charge again, which doesn’t really feel very realistic to warfare at the time, and I found a little frustrating as a game mechanic. I like the fact that each unit has a clear specific commander that I can complain about when my dice come up blank after ordering them to assault Arsuf yet again, Guy! The game itself is fun to play, it has interesting decisions to make, and the dice chucking is fun. It’s also gorgeous, but hopefully the pictures are conveying that sufficiently – although I would note that it is not colourblind friendly, which is a shame. There isn’t really an excuse for making a game inaccessible like that.

Crusader defeat! The casualties were quite one sided in the end as the Crusaders just were not able to deliver a crushing blow to the Ayyubid lines.
Where the decisions get really interesting is in the mid to late game. Each round after the first you have to discard a number of orders back into the game box – so while you start with plenty of choices and can ignore the terrible zero cost actions in the early game, as the game progresses you have to prioritise certain units and take bad actions with others. This to me is the most interesting aspect of the game – deciding what to prioritise with a limited action budget. That said, it’s also where I think the game’s biggest flaw sits: its victory condition.
You win a battle in Saladin by being the last player with order tokens left. The easiest way to take order tokens from your opponent is by killing units - every six units costs them an order - and by completely wiping out a commander, which will cost them one extra order at the start of each round. Since having few orders makes it harder to fight back, Saladin seems like a game that could have a situation where it is clear the game is over a few rounds before victory is actually achieved. Now, games in Saladin aren’t very long, so it’s not like you’re going to be slogging through hours of unwinnable game, but even playing 10 minutes of game where you can’t win isn’t a great experience.
I also just don’t find this victory condition very inspiring. What does it really represent? I get that diminishing order pools as the game progresses represents loss of command, diminishing options, and general fatigue at the battle as it drags on, but what does no orders mean? I would have significantly preferred a more dynamic and possibly asymmetrical set of victory conditions that weren’t quite so attrition focused on top of the constant drain on orders affecting both sides’ ability to meet those goals. That said, I still have only played Saladin one and a bit times, and I haven’t tried the Hattin scenario at all, so it is far too soon for me to pass judgement on it. For the moment, I like the system, but I’m not entirely convinced that every aspect of its application here works. I’m going to play it some more, though, and we’ll see how that changes things!
Recommended Reading:
Saladin by Anne-Marie Eddé
The Life and Legend of Sultan Saladin by Jonathan Phillips
The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge
The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades by Paul M. Cobb
June 9, 2022
River Kings by Cat Jarman
I have often felt like a fake archaeologist. I did my PhD on the development of the bow and the crossbow in the later Middle Ages and for much of my evidence I used surviving medieval weapons. I took measurements of five-hundred-year-old crossbows in a Swiss castle and examined an early 15th century crossbow in the basement of the Met in New York. This was, by any reasonable measure, an archaeological study. However, I’ve never been to a dig site or participated in any of the usual archaeologist activities most people picture when they hear the word. I kind of regret that I’ve never been hanging around when someone pulled something old and cool out of the ground and I am a little jealous of those who have. I really enjoy archaeology and I’m fascinated to learn what interesting nuggets of information have been dug out of the earth. That is roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed how deep into the archaeological woods Cat Jarman’s River Kings goes in places and reading it reminded me a lot of my time as a PhD student – where I was surrounded by people doing Viking age archaeology in Ireland.
River Kings is a new history of the Vikings that takes an archaeology heavy focus on its subject. Cat Jarman is a researcher primarily in osteoarchaeology – meaning the study of human remains. With modern scientific tools we can learn a lot about a person’s diet, genetic makeup, possible locations where they lived and grew up, and much more just from their bones. Newer developments in this field have opened up a wide range of avenues for historians and archaeologists to explore when it comes to expanding our understanding of the past. Since the Vikings have left us so little in terms of written records – the most famous Viking accounts, the sagas, were largely written by Christian authors centuries after the Viking age ended making them challenging to work with – these new archaeological tools have been particularly valuable in interpreting the abundant physical evidence they left behind.
I will say here that while I am fascinated by the new insights that we are getting via osteoarchaeology, it does often bring up one of the elements of classic archaeology that I find somewhat distasteful. Many of the bodies that have been dug up in archaeological digs are just kept in boxes in museums or university vaults, waiting for someone to come along and poke and prod them with various testing apparatus. In many cases we have dug up their grave, and we may even be displaying the possessions they were buried with in a museum while they sit in a cardboard box in a basement. We are essentially grave robbers, and I think there are ethical questions here that are not interrogated often enough by the institutions that hold these items. If you exhume bodies in a mass grave, victims of a massacre perhaps, that is one matter – you can’t exactly make the case that they were buried as they desired and wished to be left undisturbed for the rest of time. However, digging up purposeful graves and keeping the individual unburied – not returning them to any sort of final rest but instead keeping their bones for our own purposes – has always struck me as an act of disrespect. Since River Kings contains so much discussion of skeletal remains, including descriptions of where they are now held, I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading it. I don’t mean this strictly as a criticism of River Kings, Cat Jarman has fairly minimal control over these burial remains, but it is a topic I would love to have seen discussed within its pages. I know it is an area of debate among archaeologists, but I think it is something worth bringing to light and sharing in more public theatres of discussion.
River Kings begins with an examination of Viking remains in England, starting with a mass grave near Repton. What it does from there, however, is what makes it such an interesting book. Slowly River Kings pushes further east as the book progresses – starting in England but eventually ending near Baghdad (with a short epilogue in India). It does an amazing job of showing the scope of Viking travel and the wide networks of Viking trade and relationships that followed. In modern terms we might call it a Viking diaspora. The focus is often on Vikings as traders, moving material and people throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East – but Jarman never lets their role as raider completely disappear from the narrative. We are reminded that conflict was never far away in the Middle Ages and the Vikings never seemed to be afraid of switching to violence when it suited them. It also contains fascinating discussions of how we conceive of Viking identity and the problems with linking cultural identity to genetic evidence
I must confess that I preferred the parts of the book focused on the Baltic and further east – in part because I was less familiar with it but also because it felt like that was where Jarman was offering a lot of excellent new insight. The sections covering England and other parts of western Europe were not without insight, the new evidence Jarman brings to bear is very interesting, but it often felt like it was providing a more solid foundation to what we had kind of already thought might be the case. This may be reflecting my own background, though. As someone who spent quite a lot of time around archaeologists studying the Vikings in and around Ireland, I may have just already known a lot of this material and thus it was less exciting for me to hear Jarman reiterate it with yet more compelling evidence.
As an introduction to the use of archaeology to increase our understanding of Viking history this is an amazing book. As an introduction to the Vikings in general, for most people I think it is still excellent, but some people may be a little disappointed with it. Jarman is not trying to provide a chronological history of the Vikings, nor is it really a narrative history – there is something of a narrative to the book, but it is hardly what you might call a standard historical account (and that is something I like about it!) If you want to greatly expand your understanding of who the Vikings were and what their impact on history was, then this is an excellent book. If what you want is an account of what the Vikings did between X and Y year and descriptions of their great leaders, raids, and battles then you had best look elsewhere. River Kings will at times cross into that area, there is quite a lot of discussion around the movements of the Great Heathen Army for example, but warfare, tactics, and political history are not really the purpose of the book. On the whole I really like River Kings and I would recommend it if you have an interest in the Vikings or in early medieval archaeology – I do kind of wish it had a bit more Irish history in it though!
June 6, 2022
First Impressions: Andean Abyss
I managed to get Andean Abyss to the table less than a week after learning it, which must be a record for me – it definitely beats the years I owned Here I Stand before I finally played it. I bought it largely because while Pendragon has been fascinating to learn, there’s no way I can teach that game to four people who have never played a COIN game before. It took me days to learn it – and I’m still not even sure I totally get it! The internet wisdom around learning COIN is to start with Cuba Libre, but for whatever reason the Cuban revolution doesn’t really grab me, so I went with the original COIN instead – Andean Abyss and the Colombian drug war. After all, if it wasn’t possible for people to learn from the original game then there wouldn’t be a series, would there? I’ve already documented my learning process on this blog (www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/learni...) but what that didn’t cover was teaching and playing the game, which is what we’re here for!

A few turns into the game, I’m playing the government and there are insurgents everywhere! The Cartels destroyed my only base, the jerks! The FARC action cylinder has been briefly stolen by a passing toddler (it was recovered and no one was harmed)
Teaching Andean Abyss was actually relatively straightforward. It helped that the three friends I was playing with are all long-term gamers with a lot of experience of board game systems. We’ve even played Root several times before, so asymmetric wargame is at least a little familiar even if COIN brings a lot that’s different to the table. I also simplified things for myself by playing the Government. For those who don’t know, in Andean Abyss the three insurgent factions (Cartel, FARC, and AUC) all share the same main actions with only some minor differences, and some of the factions also share special actions. This means that when teaching the game, I only really needed to go into detail on one set of main actions, and then run through the differences after. The Government plays very differently, so I gave everyone a rundown of what I could do and how I did it but didn’t need to go into quite the same level of detail.

The first Propaganda Card was at the bottom of the first stack, making me begin to worry I’d forgot to put one in! I was so distracted by it finally arriving that this picture is actually from a couple of turns later. Government successfully kept all the LOCs safe, but then spent all my funds on Civic Actions and spent this round desperately poor.
The other reason I chose the Government is that the Government in Andean Abyss is crazy hard to play competently – and I was definitely not going to be playing very competently. When teaching your friends, a complicated 3+ hour wargame, always choose the faction that is going to have the worst time. Don’t make your friends suffer so you can feel cool by winning a game you brought. I certainly did not do that. I didn’t do terribly – at final scoring I lost by one point – but it was tight for the whole game, and I was never that threatening. I basically just holed up in my cities making infrequent excursions into the country and airstriking isolated insurgent bases (usually the AUC when they got too big for their britches). My score rarely shifted – either up or down – and instead the main action was the three insurgent groups causing absolute chaos in the country while I periodically intervened and complained about how many resources it cost me to do so.

Soon after the second Propaganda Card - I messed up and let the Farc get support in Cali and a foothold in Medellin, but things are going a little better in some of the rural regions adjacent to cities. Mostly I’m letting the AUC mess with the FARC and then airstriking their bases when they get too close to winning.
I was correct in my learning post where I mentioned that I thought the Government would be a lot more interesting with real humans causing chaos in my country than when it was just me doing everything. The time I messed up and let the FARC get a foothold in Cali had me panicking. I was pulling my hair out every time I realised it would take me two actions to deal with a problem, or when I kept running out of money each round. It was very stressful, but on the very rare occasions when I successfully executed one of my plans to even pretty good results, I felt such satisfaction. Borderline incompetence has never felt so good.
We played for three Propaganda cards instead of the standard four because I didn’t want us to be playing for too long, particularly as we were just learning and there’s always the worry that someone will have a terrible start and suffer through several hours of gaming with little joy to be found. I didn’t really need to have worried about this latter situation too much, it turns out. Andean Abyss always leaves open the option for you to claw back some territory and there’s basically always something for any given player to do. It also really discourages ganging up on an already weak player, as that will just exhaust your resources for little real gain. You really don’t want to waste your limited resources and even more limited actions kicking a player while they’re down. This also lets them recover and come back swinging in a few turns once you’ve punished whoever the new leader is (or been punished if it was you!)

Approximately halfway through our third and final phase - I’m close to victory but unlikely to be able to afford to make the final push to reaching my victory objective. Meanwhile the insurgent players have discovered that they can fight each other and have descended into violent chaos.
I will admit that we got some rules wrong – I didn’t realise you could just keep Terrorising a region and adding piles of Terror markers there, which made things a bit harder for the insurgents – especially FARC (not that I exploited that to great success). Looking back there were also some errors around effects happening in regions where they maybe weren’t supposed to (i.e. something that should be in LOCs also including a city) but nothing that had a game changing impact on the result. It’s not that Andean Abyss is particularly complicated or fiddly, but there is a lot of information to keep in your brain and it’s easy to miss something when it’s everyone’s first time playing. Such is board gaming really – I’ll do better next time.
I don’t think it’s a shocking revelation that Andean Abyss is a great entry point to COIN – it’s literally the first game – but it is probably worth repeating no matter how many have said it before. I’m glad I chose Andean Abyss as the first COIN I convinced my friends to play with me. They all seemed to have a good time, even if I’m probably more eager to play it a second time than they are. They should at least tolerate me dragging along another COIN to play with them in the future – as long as it's not to the very next get together! We may all need a little breather.

The end state of the game after resolving the final Propaganda Card - nobody won outright but the Cartel secured a victory on the final check, with Government coming second, AUC third, and FARC last.
Andean Abyss is a fascinating piece of game design, and I could spend pages singing its praises, but I don’t think there would be very much point in that. The fact that there are fourteen games and counting in the series that it started is greater testament to Andean Abyss’s design than any small-time blogger could give. If you have a chance to play it, you absolutely should.
June 2, 2022
A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain
I first became acquainted with Anthony Bourdain while flying Jet Blue between New York and Washington, DC. I was in college at the time and the recession had meant that the direct flight from Dublin to Washington had been cancelled, so now I had to travel via JFK. Jet Blue had (and presumably still has, not that I’ve checked) screens for every seat that played network TV broadcasts in flight. Usually there wasn’t much on, but while flicking through channels I would usually settle on the Travel Channel to watch this rude New Yorker get wildly inebriated in a series of gorgeous locales. The scene from this era that sticks with me the most is Bourdain getting tipsy in the early morning at a stall that sold a fortified beverage in Lisbon, Portugal. It was not the sort of travel programme I was used to seeing from my childhood.
When some of his shows, most notably his collaboration with CNN, Parts Unknown, were added to Netflix in Ireland I decided to become more acquainted with his work. I haven’t regretted that decision, I’ve had a lot of fun watching Bourdain over the years. I’m not a foody, not even slightly, so you would think that watching an elite chef talking about and eating all sorts of wild food wouldn’t appeal very much to me. We would both be wrong about that. Part of what I like about Bourdain is how he was great at linking the types of food you find in a country or region with the history of that place. While I may not care much about food, I do really like history. The other factor is that while I don’t have very adventurous tastes myself, I do think food is interesting and watching someone who knew what they were doing break down something I would never really understand was always fascinating. Plus, there’s some great shots of gorgeous buildings and countryside, and who doesn’t like that?
Despite watching quite a lot of his shows, I had never read one of Bourdain’s books until recently. My wife gave me a copy of A Cook’s Tour and after spending a little time on my to-read shelf I decided to pick it up to coincide with me finally watching the final episodes of Parts Unknown before it leaves Netflix here. I’ve never seen the series, also called A Cook’s Tour, that was made alongside the research Bourdain did for this book, which made the experience of reading it a little strange. It was a lot like reading a book where you know there’s a very famous film adaptation about it, except that periodically the book takes a break to complain about how miserable making that film was. It was a little surreal.
The premise of A Cook’s Tour, if we want to call it that, is the search for “the perfect meal”, but it is fairly explicitly an excuse for Bourdain to visit several countries and eat unusual food (sometimes willingly, sometimes less than willingly). It is filled with interesting meditations on nostalgia for our youth, the cuisine of various parts of the world, exhilaration at discovering entirely new flavours, disappointment at adventures not being all they were hoped for, and probably too much discussion of how much Bourdain liked smoking. In some ways reading it was like watching one of his shows but with the filter removed, but in other ways it was far more personal and intense, more than just a version of his show with more swearing and complaints about how annoying making television was.
Watching Anthony Bourdain isn’t the same as it once was. His tragic death reframes a lot of his work and makes it a much heavier experience than it used to be. The first time this really sunk in for me was in watching an episode of Parts Unknown when he visited Argentina and they have him visit a therapist, therapy being quite popular and normal in that country in ways it is not in America. This seemed like it was meant to be kind of funny, but in light of later events it was mostly harrowing and a sign of how much more Bourdain really needed help that he clearly wasn’t getting. The final season of Parts Unknown is not particularly long, but it is taking me a while to get through it as it can be quite a difficult watch. Most of the episodes are missing Bourdain’s tell-tale voiceover for obvious reasons, and it is jarring. That narration was so essential to what made his shows appealing and its absence is immediately obvious and a constant reminder of how that series ended and why it’s not there.
I used to watch Bourdain for light-hearted entertainment that could manage to be informative and empathetic as well as amusing. He was clearly an individual of great empathy, particularly for the downtrodden or those who have suffered at the hands of our mutual homeland. His visits to southeast Asia in particular do a great job of highlighting the horrors that America inflicted on numerous countries, including but not limited to Vietnam, for a wider American audience who may not have been aware of it. This is not to say that he was perfect, his flaws are readily apparent in A Cook’s Tour, but he was clearly trying to do his best and in many cases he succeeded. His perspective on the world was refreshing, welcoming, and valuable.
I don’t normally get invested in celebrity deaths. I don’t mean this as a humble brag, nor as a criticism of you if you do. I think it’s sad when I hear about it, but it doesn’t linger with me. That hasn’t been the case for Bourdain, for some reason I’m acutely aware of his passing and it still bothers me to a degree that I don’t entirely understand. Reading A Cook’s Tour was in some ways refreshing, it didn’t have the same grim spectre hanging over it like Parts Unknown does. This was a younger (but not young) Bourdain with years ahead of him. At the same time, some of the mental health troubles he clearly had are also present in A Cook’s Tour, and the knowledge that this would not improve in future years can be a bit bleak in its own right.
I enjoyed reading A Cook’s Tour. It’s very much a product of the late ‘90s (the book was originally published in 2001) and if you’re not familiar with the culture of the time parts of it may seem weird. There was at least one celebrity reference I didn’t catch, and I was alive and aware during that era. That said, as a glimpse into that time and at parts of the world as they existed then it’s really very interesting. Bourdain is also an excellent writer, something that I think most people knew even if we haven’t all actually seen it for ourselves. He first became famous for his writing after all. It’s not too flashy, but narratively gripping and often quite funny.
As I’m writing this, two excerpts from this book have been going viral on Twitter simultaneously – both takedowns of other famous figures. The first is his disparaging comments about British chef Jamie Oliver but the second, and far more famous example, is Bourdain’s scathing hatred for Henry Kissinger and what he did to Southeast Asia. That passage in particular reads just as intensely and hits just as hard now as it must have done when he first wrote it. It’s for passages like that, which combine his seething hatred with a deep empathy for the suffering of his fellow humans, that Bourdain is at his best and it’s passages like this that make it clear why he is so sorely missed.
May 30, 2022
Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War
Cutting Room Floor is a series where I share pieces I originally wrote for my book, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit To Kill a King, that for whatever reason didn’t make it into the final text. You can read the first part, on the crossbow in the English garrison of Calais here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/cutting-room-floor-the-calais-garrison.
This time the writing is about thirteenth century Norway and the military career of King Sverre. I found this anecdote around Sverre and the crossbow, which first came to my attention in Josef Alm’s excellent book European Crossbows: A Survey, really interesting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much else to say about it except “this is kind of cool” and anything I did have to add to it was already covered by discussions of Richard I and Philip II using crossbows during the Third Crusade. Still, I think it’s an interesting little anecdote and so I’m sharing it here with you! I hope you enjoy.
The Norwegian Civil Wars were a period of near continuous unrest that lasted for over a century, from1130 until 1240, and saw over twenty kings, pretenders, and claimants battling for control of the kingdom. Amidst this turmoil the reign of Sverre Sigurdson, who claimed the Norwegian throne in 1177 but only ruled as Sverre I from 1184 until his death in 1202, contains an interesting anecdote in the history of the crossbow.[i]
Sverre’s rule was one marked by near constant conflict. He had originated as a pretender to the throne before eventually achieving legitimacy through warfare. An account of his reign was provided by the Sverris Saga, a poetic account of his life probably written by Karl Jónsson, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in Northern Iceland. Jónsson died in 1213, meaning that the saga must have been written nearly contemporary to Sverre’s life. The saga says that Sverre’s initial group of followers consisted mainly of “vagrants, outcasts, and robbers who are primarily interested in plundering farmers.”[ii]
The incident during Sverre’s life of interest in crossbow history comes later in his reign, however, after he had risen to the throne and become king of Norway. In 1196 a group of nobles gathered to form the Bagler faction to oppose King Sverre and his Birkebeiner faction, with the following civil war known as the Bagler War. The Bagler War would endure past Sverre’s death in 1202, with its conclusion in 1240 marking the end of this period of civil war that had plagued Norway for so long.
The Bagler War saw many skirmishes and battles fought between the two opposed factions, each of which is dramatically recounted in Sverris Saga. In early June 1199 Sverre was in pursuit of the Baglers. Both factions had taken to their ships and Sverre was following the Baglers around Norway’s many fjords. On the 18th of June Sverre finally cornered the Baglers and engaged them in battle, a battle that is alternatively known as the Battle on the Strind-sea or the Battle of Trondheim Fjord. Sverris Saga records many individual great deeds performed by Sverre’s commanders, as well as his son, the future King Hakon. Of Sverre himself it says “King Sverri shot all day from a crossbow, and so also Earl Philippus.” Lest we believe that this was performed from a position of relative safety, the next line says “The Earl was struck in the arm under his mail-sleeve, but did not pluck the arrow out until evening.”[iii] The saga tells us that there were grappling hooks thrown between ships to facilitate boarding as well as incidents of ships ramming each other, so shooting a crossbow was not the only option for participating in the battle available to the king, but it does seem to be the one he chose.
This incident places King Sverre among the handful of monarchs known to have used a crossbow in war. Two other illustrious members of this group are Philip II of France and Richard I of England, both of whom used crossbows during the Third Crusade. These three were probably not the lone monarchs to use crossbows, and these incidents are unlikely to be the only times they did so. There is other evidence of Norwegian kings having a fondness for the crossbow, albeit not necessarily in battle explicitly. During an incident that took place right before the Norwegian Civil Wars, King Sigurd Jorsalafar (r. 1103 – 1130) reportedly boasted to his brother, and co-ruler, Östen (r. 1103 – 1123): ‘You could not span my bow, even were you to brace yourself against it with both feet.’[iv] This is clearly a reference to a crossbow despite the vagueness of the term, nobody spans a longbow using their feet, but in the context of the exchange it could very well have been a reference to a hunting weapon rather than one for war.
The two anecdotes, both of King Sigurd and King Sverre, suggest a particular fondness for the crossbow among the Norwegian kings, one which probably was reflected in the Norwegian nobility more generally given Sverre’s initial status as pretender rather than member of the royal family. Sverre was not the only member of the Norwegian elite to use a crossbow at Trondheim, Earl Philip was right there beside him shooting and being shot in turn and very likely they were not alone in that. We often assume that crossbows were the weapons of the common soldier – maybe too expensive for a peasant but certainly not the weapon of the social elite unless it was in a sporting context. The story of King Sverre and his fellow Norwegians show that this was very much not the case. If for no other reason, the abundance of naval engagements to be found in Norwegian history would encourage a familiarity with missile weapons among warriors of all social ranks.
[i] Josef Alm, European Crossbows: A Survey, pp. 23-4; Jonas Wellendorf ‘“Ancient Traditions” in Sverris saga: The Background of an Episode in Sverris saga and a Note on the Dating of Rómverja saga’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 113, No. 1 (2014), pp. 1-17; David Brégaint, ‘Kings and aristocratic elites: communicating power and status in medieval Norway’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 46:1, (2021). pp. 1-20
[ii] Jonas Wellendorf ‘“Ancient Traditions” in Sverris saga: The Background of an Episode in Sverris saga and a Note on the Dating of Rómverja saga’, p. 7
[iii] Sverris Saga: http://jillian.rootaction.net/~jillian/world_faiths/www.northvegr.org/lore/sverri/022.html
[iv] Josef Alm, European Crossbows, p. 23-4