With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
#100: KSM from Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games
Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games is a 2-player asymmetrical Card Driven Game that pits the mighty and powerful United States military and all of its various antiterrorist agencies against the Jihadists in the Middle East whose sole goal is to spread terror, sow the seeds of deceit and ultimately destroy Western civilization. The game is a Card Driven Game where the cards contain Operation Points or Events and each turn the player must strategize and use their cards to their best ability in order to effect the state of the board and further their individual and asymmetric victory conditions. But the game is raw and is tied to the actual events of the early 2000’s as the United States was reeling to recover from the terrorist attacks in New York.
In the game, the Jihadist player is working to destabilize the Middle East through a series of clandestine activities such as destroying stability, toppling governments and forcing the US to react to their actions. One of their biggest strategies is to work to place what are called Plots out on the board in order to destabilize but also to generate local support and funding for their activities from the populace. If left alone, these Plots will go off at the end of a round and cause trouble that will then have to be cleaned up by the US player over the next turn. In order to uncover these Plots, the US player will have to play a 3 Ops card to take the Alert Action and different from most other actions there is no die roll required and the the Plot removal is automatic. But, the cost is steep as a 3 Ops card is pretty rare and spending it on this action is very painful. Jihadists use these Plots to force the US player to have to stamp out fire after fire rather than working to reform and stabilize governments to create allies. And when these Plots appear, the player’s long-term strategy will have to be put aside and a focus will have to change from managing regime change and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) posture to dealing with urgent plots. The KSM card is a very powerful tool in this game as it allows for the US player to remove Plots from an Ally or non-Muslim country but also to replace this investment with drawing 2 cards to replace it. This is specifically tied to the intel that was obtained from the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammad and how it was then used to defuse several ongoing plots. The Jihadist player also gains a pretty large benefit as they will be allowed to place a Plot Marker into a non-Islamist Rule country with a cell. The process of successfully placing a Plot can be very challenging for the Jihadist player as it takes the play of a card for Operations points, uncovering a cell in a country and then rolling a die equal to or less than that country’s Governance Level to then place a face-down Plot Marker. This takes the need for a roll away and makes the placement of a Plot an automatic success.
I think that one of the other important distinctions and differences with the KSM card is that it is a 3 Ops Neutral Card that can be played by either side but when played by the US player for the event, it will be removed from the game while when being played for the Jihadist portion of the event it will remain and be able to be used in a later turn when it is drawn again. This reflects the important role that KSM played in al-Qaeda’s plans and if allowed to stay at large he will continue to plan and execute plots across the globe.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a member of Osama bin Laden’s militant organization al-Qaeda, and was specifically in charge of leading al-Qaeda’s propaganda operations from around 1999 until late 2001. Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003 in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi by a combined operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Immediately after his capture, Mohammed was taken to secret CIA prison sites in Afghanistan, then Poland, where he was interrogated by U.S. operatives. By December 2006, he had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Sensationally nabbed in Pakistan, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was photographed for the world in a disheveled state immediately after his capture—symbolizing an apparent laying low of the once mighty al-Qaeda network. According to his US captors, he later provided information that thwarted other attacks.
Mohammed is widely regarded as the chief planner of the September 11 attacks. The United States government has alleged that he further participated in planning Richard Reid’s shoe bombing attempt to attack an airliner, the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl and various foiled attacks as well as numerous other crimes. These claims have been criticised by others, such as military prosecutor Moe Davis and journalist Andrew Brown, as inadmissible due to being obtained through torture. He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which could carry the death penalty if convicted. A 2008 decision by the United States Supreme Court had also drawn into question the legality of the methods used to gain such admissions and the admissibility of such admissions as evidence in a criminal proceeding.
This image shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks, photographed shortly after his capture during a joint raid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003.
In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at Constantinople Sends Aid Core Event from The Shores of Tripoli from Fort Circle Games.
From time to time, we assist designers with getting the word out for them as they are looking for playtesters for upcoming designs. Recently, I was contacted by Douglas Walker who is working on 2 designs, one named Rubicon and the other Basileus, and was in need of assistance. He has created a Discord server for potential playtesters called “Doug Walker Playtest Server.” Here is the invite, which won’t expire: https://discord.gg/gSsQRWjPWp.
Doug has provided the following descriptions of the games:
Rubicon is a strategy game about political competition in the late Roman Republic. It is 133 B.C. The Republic of Rome overshadows the Mediterranean world, but internal discord threatens to derail its growing empire. Two political factions vie for dominance—the aristocratic and conservative “Optimates” and the populist and revolutionary “Populares.” The fragile consensus holding together Rome’s elites erodes as conflict grows ever more violent.
In Rubicon, players control a faction of Roman senators belonging to either the Optimate or Popularis faction. More than one player belongs to each faction—but only one player may win the game. Players use their political influence to win elections, gain glory in war, and shape the laws of the Republic to suit their ideology and interests. Rubicon involves simultaneous blind bidding, negotiation and hand management. A thematic push-your-luck mechanic involves violating the unwritten customs of the Republic to unlock powerful actions, at the risk of provoking a deadly pushback. Winning requires carefully balancing cooperating with one’s faction partners to advance shared objectives, such as passing laws, while simultaneously competing with them to advance the glory and reputation of one’s own characters.
It is A.D. 568, and you live in the East Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire.) Three years ago, the great emperor Justinian died and was succeeded by his nephew. As the heirs of Caesar Augustus and Constantine the Great, the emperor—or “Basileus”—enjoys total control of the Byzantine state. Yet it is clear that Justinian’s repeated attempt to reconquer lost territory in the west has overextended the empire. He succeeded in re-taking North Africa, Sicily, and Italy—but at an enormous expense in both money and soldiers. Wealthy landowners and small farmers alike are burdened by taxes. The “powerful ones” or “magnates”—men who are educated, own land, and serve the government as high-ranking officials or generals—are unhappy. Justinian’s prestige made him untouchable while alive, but his successor enjoys no such immunity.
Basileus is a card-driven strategy game for three players that simulates politics, war and diplomacy in the East Roman Empire in the 500’s AD. Players take one of two roles: one player—the “Ruler”—controls the emperor (Basileus), while the other two players—the “Magnates”—control both the wealthy and powerful Roman courtiers and non-Roman nations. Players take two actions per turn. There are a certain number of actions available every turn, while strategy cards give extra event and action possibilities to the Magnates. Action cards are chosen simultaneously and resolved in a semi-random order, making gameplay quick and unpredictable. Victory points are awarded for winning battles, conquering territory, and completing literary or artistic achievements. But there’s a catch: the Basileus-Player automatically gains a certain number of victory points each turn. The Magnates must try to make life difficult for the Ruler by lowering the Basileus’s popularity, devastating the Roman economy, leading foreign nations to victory over Roman armies, and building up disloyal characters. If they get lucky, they can initiate a rebellion against the Basileus, depose him, switch roles with the Ruler to become the new Ruler. The Ruler player must try to ensure that the Basileus remains popular with the Romans and successfully defends against foreign threats. But in a world where any failure can be interpreted as divine punishment, the margin for error is razor-thin. Basileus is a tense game where success can be fleeting and danger lurks just around the corner.
A few years back, we backed a very interesting looking miniatures based board game set in World War II called Aces & Armor from PKB Games. We played it last year and very much enjoyed the combat system as well as the way units gain experience and become more effective. That game did very well on Kickstarter and PKB Games is back with a new addition to the series called Aces & Armor – Spitfire: Battle of Britain & North Africa We reached out to the designer Philipp K. Berger to see if he could give us a look at the game and answer our questions and he was more than willing to accommodate our request.
Grant: Philipp, welcome back to our blog. What is your upcoming game Aces & Armor – Spitfire: Battle of Britain & North Africa about?
Philipp: Thanks for having me back!
Aces & Armor: Spitfire is a tactical World War II strategy game where players command infantry, tanks, artillery, and aircraft in exciting battles.
This time we’re taking the action to two very different theaters: the Battle of Britain, including the evacuation of Dunkirk, and the North African campaign.
The game combines accessible rules with quite a bit of strategic depth. You need to maneuver your troops, coordinate different unit types, capture strategic positions, and make the most of your resources. Your individual units also gain experience throughout the battle, so a rookie Spitfire pilot might eventually become a highly effective war hero!
Spitfire works as a standalone game for 1–2 players, but you can also combine it with the original Aces & Armor for battles with up to five players.
Grant: Why did you want to take your Aces & Armor System to the skies of Britain and the deserts of North Africa?
Philipp: One of the things I love about the history of World War II is how different the various theaters of war were. The original Aces & Armor focuses on land warfare in continental Europe, while the Battle of Britain and North Africa presented completely different strategic challenges.
The Battle of Britain is particularly fascinating because air superiority was absolutely crucial. Suddenly, protecting airfields, intercepting bombers, and coordinating your fighters become central elements of the game.
North Africa, on the other hand, is all about mobility and logistics. You might have the strongest tanks on the battlefield, but they’re not much use if you’ve run out of fuel and ammunition!
I also wanted to introduce the British as a playable faction. Their iconic units, especially the Spitfire, were simply too good to leave out of the series.
Grant: What is your design goal with the game?
Philipp: My main goal has always been to create games that offer meaningful strategic decisions without requiring players to spend hours studying the rules.
I love complex strategy games, but I don’t particularly enjoy unnecessary complexity. Ideally, players should understand the basic rules within 10–15 minutes while still discovering new strategies after many games.
Another important goal is making every unit feel valuable. I don’t want players to simply throw endless disposable troops at each other. Individual units can gain experience, become more effective, and develop into veterans you really want to protect.
And, of course, the game needs to be fun! Historical accuracy is important to me, but whenever historical detail and enjoyable gameplay conflict, I try to find a sensible compromise.
Grant: How have you modified the Aces & Armor System to tell the story of WWII in the Battle of Britain and North Africa?
Philipp: We kept the core mechanics that players already know from Aces & Armor, particularly the combat system, combined-arms tactics, and individual unit experience.
However, we introduced new gameplay elements to capture the distinctive challenges of each theater.
On the Battle of Britain map, aircraft play a much more prominent role. Players fight for control of the skies, defend airfields against bombing raids, and can play scenarios inspired by the evacuation of Dunkirk.
North Africa introduces an entirely new supply mechanic. Your units need access to supplies to operate effectively. This makes supply depots and supply lines strategically important, opening up possibilities such as cutting off enemy forces instead of attacking them head-on.
The result is that the two maps feel quite different, despite using the same underlying game system.
Grant: What elements do you feel are most important to model from the period?
Philipp: I believe it’s more important to capture the strategic realities of a historical conflict than to simulate every technical detail.
For the Battle of Britain, that means air superiority, fighter interception, and the importance of protecting infrastructure such as airfields.
For North Africa, it’s the enormous importance of logistics, mobility, and controlling vital supply routes across a vast desert.
Another major element is combined-arms warfare. Tanks, infantry, artillery, and aircraft become significantly more effective when working together.
I also wanted the different types of equipment to feel distinct. A heavily armored Churchill tank should play differently from a fast Daimler armored car, just as a Spitfire should serve a different purpose from a Junkers Ju 88 bomber.
Grant: What major design challenges did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
Philipp: One of the biggest challenges was introducing two very different theaters without making the rules significantly more complicated.
For example, supply logistics are fascinating from a strategic perspective, but I certainly didn’t want players to spend half their turns calculating fuel consumption and managing spreadsheets!
The challenge was to reduce these historical realities to mechanics that create interesting decisions while remaining easy to understand and manage.
Another challenge was balancing air and ground combat. Aircraft need to be powerful enough to reflect their historical importance, but not so powerful that ground forces become irrelevant.
I approached both challenges by keeping the successful core mechanics intact and adding specific rules only where they meaningfully change the gameplay. And of course gameplay testing and testing and testing!
Grant: What new units are included in this version of the game?
Philipp: Spitfire includes two factions with six different unit types each, represented by 24 detailed miniatures.
The new British faction includes infantry, the Daimler Armoured Car, the Churchill tank, the Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun, the Hawker Hurricane, and, of course, the legendary Supermarine Spitfire.
The German faction features infantry, the Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track, the Panther tank, the famous 8.8 cm Flak, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, and the Junkers Ju 88 bomber.
I particularly like the selection of aircraft because it creates some interesting asymmetry between the factions. The British have two different fighter aircraft, while the Germans combine a fighter with a dedicated bomber.
Grant: How have you differentiated the capabilities of the units from those in your great game set in Europe?
Philipp: Every unit has its own characteristics, including movement speed, combat effectiveness, armor, and cost.
The original Aces & Armor includes some powerful late-war equipment, such as the German Tiger tank and Me 262 jet fighter, the American B-17 Flying Fortress, and the Soviet Katyusha rocket artillery.
Spitfire introduces a different selection of units and therefore different tactical possibilities.
The British Churchill, for example, emphasizes protection, while the Daimler Armoured Car provides mobility. The Spitfire is an excellent air-superiority fighter, whereas the German Ju 88 is particularly useful for attacking ground targets.
The German 8.8 cm Flak is another very interesting unit because it can threaten both aircraft and armored vehicles.
I wanted each faction to have its own strengths, rather than simply giving every nation the same units with different miniatures.
Grant: How can this game be incorporated into the original Aces & Armor?
Philipp: The two games are fully compatible!
You can play Spitfire completely independently, but you can also combine its factions, miniatures, and gameplay content with the original Aces & Armor.
The original game includes American, Soviet, and two German factions. Spitfire adds the British, bringing the total to five playable factions.
This creates opportunities for much larger battles, additional combinations of units, and entirely new scenarios.
I particularly enjoy the flexibility of the system. Players can recreate historically inspired confrontations or experiment with their own hypothetical battles.
Grant: How does the combat system work?
Phlipp: The combat system is probably my favorite mechanic in the game.
Each unit has an individual combat profile that determines how many dice it rolls, its chances of hitting, and how well it withstands incoming fire.
When two units fight, both players can roll their dice simultaneously, provided the defender is able to return fire.
The number of dice depends on how much damage a unit has already suffered. As units take damage, their combat effectiveness decreases. However, as they gain experience, their probability of hitting improves.
Another important element is combined-arms warfare. If your tanks attack an enemy position while supported by infantry, artillery, or aircraft, they can receive additional combat dice.
Finally, terrain and armor determine how much actual damage the hits cause.
So combat involves much more than simply comparing attack and defense values. Positioning, experience, damage, terrain, and supporting units can all significantly influence the outcome.
Grant: What drove your decision to use 12-sided dice for combat? What advantages does this give your system?
Philipp: I wanted a combat system that offers a lot of differentiation between units without requiring complicated calculations.
Using 12-sided dice gives us twelve possible outcomes, allowing much finer distinctions in hit probabilities than conventional six-sided dice. This is particularly useful because combat effectiveness changes as units gain experience. Different units can have different hit probabilities, and improving from rookie to veteran or war hero can make a noticeable difference.
Also, a higher number of dice (you roll up to 15 in one attack) and a higher number of sides per die (12) creates roll results closer to the statistical expected value which rewards players estimating the odds well and limits pure dice luck.
At the same time, resolving combat remains straightforward: roll your dice, check which results count as hits, and determine the damage.
I also think rolling a handful of D12’s simply feels great!
Grant: How is experience gained and tracked for individual units?
Philipp: Every unit begins the game as a rookie and gains combat experience by fighting.
When a unit damages an enemy, it gains one experience point. If it destroys an enemy unit, it receives two experience points instead.
After gaining enough experience, a unit advances from rookie to veteran and eventually to war hero, improving its combat effectiveness.
What makes this system special is how we track the experience. Each miniature has a small transparent holder attached to its base, where players insert colored markers for experience and damage.
This means you can immediately see the condition and experience level of every unit directly on the battlefield, without having to consult separate unit sheets.
It also creates some wonderfully memorable moments when an experienced unit survives against overwhelming odds!
Grant: What type of economy does the game use? How is money produced? What can players spend their money on?
Philipp: The game uses a relatively straightforward economy built around controlling strategic production facilities.
Players earn money from factories they have captured. These resources can then be used to recruit new units or repair damaged ones.
This creates an interesting strategic dilemma. Do you spend your resources replacing casualties, invest in additional troops, or repair your experienced veteran units?
Capturing factories is therefore important not just for victory, but also for strengthening your economy and maintaining your army.
I particularly like how the economic and military aspects interact. Sometimes capturing a strategically important factory can achieve more than destroying several enemy units.
Grant: What is the layout of the maps? How does terrain affect the game?
Philipp: Spitfire includes a large double-sided, hex-based game board featuring two very different environments.
One side depicts southern Britain, northern France, and the English Channel. This allows for combined land and air battles, including the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk scenarios.
The other side represents North Africa, with its expansive deserts, roads, mountains, and strategically important supply positions.
Terrain influences movement and combat. Roads allow ground units to move faster, forests provide defensive advantages, and natural obstacles can restrict movement.
Aircraft, of course, aren’t slowed down by ground terrain.
The North African map adds another strategic consideration: supply. With fewer natural obstacles and long distances between important positions, maintaining your logistics becomes crucial.
Grant: What do you feel the design models well from history?
Philipp: I think the game does a particularly good job of modeling the importance of combined-arms tactics.
Historically, even the strongest tanks were vulnerable when operating without adequate infantry, artillery, and air support. The game encourages players to coordinate different unit types rather than relying on one particularly powerful unit.
I also like how the North African scenario illustrates the importance of supply lines. An army can have superior equipment and still lose because it cannot maintain its operations.
And finally, I think the experience system captures something that’s often missing from tactical board games: troops aren’t interchangeable. A battle-hardened veteran unit can be much more valuable than a newly recruited replacement.
Of course, Aces & Armor is a strategy board game rather than a detailed historical simulation, but I hope it captures the important tactical and strategic decisions commanders faced.
Grant: What type of experience does the game create for players?
Philipp: I’d describe it as an accessible strategy game with a surprising amount of tactical depth.
There are plenty of exciting combat moments, but the game isn’t just about rolling dice. You need to plan your movements, coordinate your troops, control strategic locations, and decide when to attack or retreat.
The experience system also creates an emotional connection to your units. Losing a rookie infantry unit is unfortunate, but losing your heavily experienced Spitfire that has survived several battles really hurts!
I also love the way the battlefield evolves. Units move, take damage, gain experience, and new reinforcements enter the fight. The situation can change dramatically within just a few turns.
A typical game takes around 60–90 minutes, so it offers a fairly substantial strategic experience without requiring an entire afternoon.
Grant: What are some general strategies for each of the sides?
Philipp: That depends somewhat on the scenario.
In the Battle of Britain, the British player should pay particular attention to controlling the skies and protecting important airfields. Their Spitfires and Hurricanes provide considerable flexibility, but they need to be positioned carefully to respond to German threats.
The German player can take advantage of the Ju 88’s bombing capabilities while using the Bf 109 to contest British air superiority. Coordinating air attacks with ground operations can be very effective.
In North Africa, both sides need to think carefully about supply. A powerful offensive can quickly become vulnerable if the enemy manages to interrupt your supply lines.
In general, my most important advice is to use combined-arms tactics and not spread your forces too thinly. A well-coordinated group of different unit types is often much more effective than several isolated powerful units.
Grant: What has been the feedback of your playtesters?
Philipp: Playtesting has been particularly important for getting the balance between historical flavor, strategic depth, and accessible gameplay right.
One of the main things I’ve focused on is making sure the two theaters offer genuinely different experiences without forcing players to learn an entirely new game.
The air battles need to feel exciting, and the supply mechanics in North Africa need to create meaningful tactical decisions rather than unnecessary bookkeeping.
We’ve also been refining the balance between individual units and factions.
What I always look for during playtesting is whether players are making interesting decisions, developing strategies, and enjoying the tension of the battle. That’s ultimately much more important to me than adding another layer of rules.
Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?
Philipp: There are always several ideas floating around in my head!
One project I’m currently exploring is bringing the Aces & Armor game mechanics to a SciFi scenario.
I’m also thinking about where to take Aces & Armor next. World War II offers so many interesting factions, units, and theaters that there’s certainly plenty of room for future additions. And I am getting a lot of great ideas from backers of the current Kickstarter campaign. I just love this creative community and couldn’t be more grateful!
For now, though, most of my attention is on making Aces & Armor – Spitfire as good as possible and delivering another successful Kickstarter campaign.
Thank you for your time in answering our questions Phillip and also congratulations with the game funding already. I really like the look of this one and I am sure that it will be a fun gaming experience.
ETHIOPIA VS. FASCIST ITALY 1935-1937 – A Prelude to the Second World War.
Fascist Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia set the world on course for World War Two. The failure of the League of Nations to deter Fascist aggression led to policies of appeasement, the rise of the Axis, the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler’s march into the Rhineland. In this easy-to-play, straightforward solitaire game, you are the beleaguered Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I (1892-1975). Take charge of Ethiopia’s defenses, call up troops, and call on the League of Nations as Italy tries to enlarge her empire at your expense. Send your regional “Ras” warlords into battle, organize partisans, deploy your limited elite forces, and endure Italy’s criminal use of mustard gas.
Your ancient Black Christian African civilization stands as a defiant symbol of anti-colonial resistance and as the first battlefield of the coming global struggle against Fascist aggression. Can you turn Mussolini’s Blackshirt armies back, prevent the fall of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, and change the course of history?
Trench Raid is a single-player game set on the Western Front in World War One. The player assembles a group of 10 raiders and plots their course on a map towards the enemy lines on the other side of No Man’s Land. With 12 different raid objectives and 20 random events that can take place during the crossing, no two playthroughs will be exactly the same.
The game also includes rules for campaign play — whether their raid was successful or not, the soldiers who make it back to their trench lines relatively unscathed will steadily get better at raiding, learning through experience how to survive.
Medieval Conspiracy introduces players to the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, which is divided into numberless small earldoms, principalities and bishoprics. The Ruler of the Empire is the Holy Roman Emperor who is elected by the 7 electoral princes. In Medieval Conspiracy players take the role of a mighty noble family attempting to increase their power, gain new countries, all to gain votes of the electoral princes to finally be elected the new Holy Roman Emperor.
Medieval Conspiracy is run by Action Cards and Event Cards. After collecting income, players bid for Event Cards. 3 Event Cards are displayed on their open side. Thereafter players bid for them in turn order. The player who got an Event Card can use it later during his turn. During a player turn players roll the dice of destiny and play Event and Action Cards. That card play results in numerous effects giving each game a new special course. The goal of the game is to gain new countries or conquer them by force from others in an attempt to influence the vote for the Holy Roman Emperor.
I love a different style and focus of wargame. A game that takes a look at an important but somewhat obscure or rarely addressed historical topic, such as espionage or intelligence, and creates a gaming experience tailored around the events to highlight and evoke the difficulties and tension that would have been present. In January 2026, GMT Games announced such a game in Checkpoint Charlie, which is a solo or cooperative game focused on SIS espionage missions in Berlin in the 1960’s designed by Russell Brown. We have posted an interview with Russel and it was very well received and he has now agreed to create a series of History Behind the Cards to highlight the events of the 1960’s Cold War struggle in West Germany but also to share aspects about the game play and how it models the history.
*Note: The cards highlighted in this series and their event text, as well as any pictures used showing any of the various components, are still in the design and development process and as such event effects and text might still change prior to final development and publication.Also the art and layout of the cards are only for playtest purposes at this point and the game will enter the art department as it nears publication.
History Behind the Cards – Checkpoint Charlie from GMT Games – Card #9 Daily Military Train
This is one of the cards I added to Checkpoint Charlie based on conversations with my local coffee shop spy, John (see Card #7). I had assumed most significant traffic from West Germany to Berlin used the autobahn corridor from Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt, across East Germany, to Checkpoint Bravo in Berlin. However, the military trains, of which there were three – American, French and British – ran every day, back and forth along roughly the same corridor as the automobile traffic. The US Military Duty Train, which my friend John rode, let out at the station in Charlottenburg and is the basis for this Event Card. It was primarily used by US military personnel, but other people associated with the military could get permission to ride.
Cars full of East German police, or vopos, kept vigilant watch over the autobahn access route, but it was more difficult to keep track of the train and whether western passengers were jumping off illegally somewhere in East Germany, or East German citizens were boarding the train as it slowed for one of its scheduled stops along the way, getting free passage into West Berlin. To solve this problem, all doors on the train were chained and padlocked for the duration of the four-hour journey across East Germany. In Checkpoint Charlie, the Daily Military Train Event assumes that the KGB has been tipped off to the arrival of some interesting person or item on the next train and move to intercept. Charlottenburg Safehouse is placed under surveillance and the Nugget Marker, already detected, is placed there. This can be a useful diversion for your assets, or it can draw KGB agents right into the center of your mission.
The Berlin Military Train operated by the Royal Corps of Transport.
In the next article in this series, we will take a look at Moscow Rules.
In my opinion, this game looks extremely interesting and I am very much excited to learn more about it. I am appreciative to Russell and his efforts to bring us these cards and to write these entries to share with our readers. I am also very glad that this topic is being covered in a game and look forward to playing this one day soon.
In 1539, a small Spanish garrison of troops numbering 3,500 men held the Albanian village of Castelnuovo for 22 days against the massive Ottoman army consisting of over 54,000 Turk soldiers. This siege took place as a part of the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle for control of the Mediterranean Sea in July 1539 at the walled town of Castelnuovo, which is the location of present-day Herceg Novi, Montenegro. After days of open trench warfare and more than a month of smaller combats, skirmishes, assaults and bombardments from the Turkish navy, the last Spanish defenders fell ending the siege. Castelnuovo 1539 is a wargame that focuses on this siege designed by Francisco Ronco. The defenders are safe behind sturdy walls and battlements but time and continual shelling from the Ottomans will lead to assaults over the walls. The battle is hopeless for the defenders but they can win the game by doing enough damage to the Ottomans to end their campaign and stop them from invading further into the Albania and then onto Spain and the rest of Europe. The game is very well produced using wooden blocks for soldiers, stylized walls, siege trenches and cannon along with ships and the board is also beautifully illustrated. The game is a block wargame where the strength of units are hidden from the opponent and plays pretty quickly in less than 90 minutes and really is a great representation of the battle and its history.
In Action Point 1, we took a look at the beautiful Game Board and its area movement scheme. In Action Point 2, we examined the units available to both sides and compared their relative strengths and weaknesses. In Action Point 3, we took a look at the different types of Command Cards and discussed how they are used. In this Action Point, we will take a look at the 2 different types of rounds including a Siege Round and an Assault Round and how they differ.
In Castelnuovo 1539 there are 2 different types of rounds within the structure of the game including Siege Rounds and Assault Rounds. This 2 type approach is designed to reflect the different preparations and phases of a sustained siege on a fortified location. The Ottoman player is allowed to choose the type of round for the upcoming turn during the Reinforcement Phase, which is the last phase in any round. In this structure, the Ottoman player has the chance to review the previous round, consider their losses and gains on the battlefield, identify their goals and set themselves up for success in the coming round.
Siege Rounds reflect the necessary preparations, concentration of resources of both men and materiel, the progress of mine works and siege trenches and represent 3 or 4 days of the siege. During this time there are small combats and skirmishes, probing of the enemy lines and reconnoitering but no major frontal assaults. In this type of round, each player draws only 4 cards reflecting the slower and more deliberate planning phases of a siege. The first round of the game is always a Siege Round in the main scenario. There also is another mechanic that is added to the Siege Rounds as the Ottoman player can choose to rest during only a Siege Round and no cards are played and the player also places all of their Azab and Sipahi Blocks on the board at full Strength. This reflects the buildup and preparation for the upcoming assault and is a key decision for the Ottoman player who is pushing against time and must complete the siege in their favor before time expires.
Assault Rounds represent moments of decisive assault, with a great amount of movement and activity on both sides. The action is fast and furious and each turn represents only 1 days worth of combat. In this type of round, the hand of both players increases to 7 cards in order to provide the fuel needed to sustain a planned attack. There is a price to pay for the prosecution of an Assault Round though as each time the Ottoman player declares their intention to assault, the Ottoman Casualty Track will be advanced 1 space.
The decision opportunity for an Assault Round versus a Siege Round comes at the end of the Spanish Action Phase. Before drawing any cards, the Ottoman player chooses which type of round to play next. If an Assault Round is chosen and the player has more than 4 cards in their hand, no new cards will be drawn and the player will discard down to 4 cards. One of the key decision points at this time is the makeup of the Ottoman player’s hand. If they have good cards, such as the necessary Order Cards to initiate attacks as well as a Combat Card or 2 to supplement those attacks and make them more effective, the choice is pretty simple. If their hand of cards is not necessarily setup and beneficial for a siege, they may want to move to an Assault Round where they will draw the maximum 7 cards and can continue their preparations for the next round while still engaging in smaller attacks and bombardments to weaken the defenses and demoralize and reduce the defending Spanish Tercios.
I was very impressed by this distinction in the 2 types of rounds in the design but at first had difficulty making the connection to the history and the design choice. But a siege is a very different and particular case in warfare and has some very interesting nuances that must be taken into consideration. As the game is basically decided by the mounting casualties of both sides, the presence of artillery batteries, the obsolete medieval fortifications of the city and the modern earthen fortifications built by the Spanish to reinforce them, casualties are a reality and the Ottoman player needs to be cognizant of this and take it seriously. There has to be a deliberate and planned attack on the city with the proper and measured construction of siege trenches by the Ottomans to realize the benefit of their usefulness in reducing the casualties of the besiegers.
A good Ottoman commander will play a well balanced game with a consistent pattern of incremental movement upon the city, all the while building their siege lines to form a tightening encirclement of the walls like the coils of an anaconda, inching closer and closer to the walls, using their artillery to weaken and break the defenses and create breaches where close-range assaults can be launched that will ultimately decide the outcome. Digging trenches should be one of the Ottomans first tasks, as they must protect their blocks as they are in the open field, an easy target for attack. Once the blocks are protected with trenches, there is a need to plan the advance and bring these trenches and batteries closer to the Spanish fortifications so that they can breached. Once there are open breaches, it is necessary to throw caution to the wind and take the city by assault as the Spanish attempts to repair the walls and build internal fortifications will continue to hinder the Ottoman’s progress. But, the Spanish player must keep in mind their advantages, including the well known Spanish ‘camisado’ attacks (encamisadas in Spanish) to sally forth and inflict damage upon the besieging forces to weaken their strength. The Spanish leaders are better and will provide great benefits to these attacks that should inflict maximum damage and break the will of the Ottoman as they continue the slow and arduous advance on the city. But the understanding of how to use this Siege/Assault process will take a few plays to understand but once you master the rules, you will see that these fortresses were not defended passively, but rather are in the pattern of an active defense that makes calculated sorties to hinder the work of the attackers by destroying artillery batteries and not giving the Ottomans any rest or respite from the action a vital part of the process.
In Action Point 5, we will delve into an example of combat and bombardment.
If you are interested, I was able to shoot the following review/overview/summary video with the designer Francisco Ronco after playing the game earlier this year:
With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
#99: Truman Doctrine from Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945-1989 from GMT Games
Twilight Struggle is a 2-player game simulating the forty-five year ideological struggle known as the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States which can be played in 2-3 hours. The entire world is the stage on which these two countries “fight” to make the world safe for their own ideologies and way of life. The game starts right after the end of World War II in the midst of the ruins of Europe as the two new “superpowers” of the world squabble over what is left and ends in 1989, when only the United States remained standing.
The map is a world map of the period, where players abstractly move units and exert influence through the placing of Influence Markers in an attempt to build local support and gain allies and control for their superpower. The beauty of the CDG system used here is that each decision of whether to use a card for the event or the operations value is a struggle as if it is the other side’s event, it might go off hurting you very badly. There are mechanics to allow for the ignoring or cancelling of some of the best cards for your opponent in a side game within the game called The Space Race as well as nuclear tensions, with the possibility of game-ending global thermonuclear war (Shall we play a game, anyone?). I have played TS about 30 times and love it more and more with each sitting. The game makes me sweat, cringe, jump with joy and bite my fingernails. To me, a game that can do all of that in one sitting is worth the price.
The Truman Doctrine is an Early War U.S. 1 Op Event Card that removes all Soviet Influence from a single country in Europe where the U.S. has presence. This means that the U.S. at least has 1 Influence in a space and the space must be uncontrolled. I think that players should be judicious and patient with this card and do not rush to play early in the game on Turn 1 or Turn 2 if Europe is stable and the USSR has minimal presence there. The best way to use the card is to wait for a window where you can do the most damage in a key Battleground space where each side has been fighting for control by placing Influence there such as in France or West Germany on the last action round of a turn or playing the card during the Headline Phase to wipe out stacked Soviet Influence as a precursor to bumping up your own Influence there for control. The Truman Doctrine card is such a nice booby trap in many ways and the proper use of it can be very efficient and give you a leg up in Europe.
The Truman Doctrine was a United States foreign policy established by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, which pledged that the U.S. would provide political, military, and economic assistance to democratic nations threatened by external or internal authoritarian forces. President Harry S. Truman asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” Truman declared. “If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world — and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”
In asserting that the U.S. would intervene in faraway conflicts, President Truman dramatically reoriented U.S. foreign policy. The writing of this ground-breaking message went through multiple stages. In his memoir, Truman noted that the State Department’s first draft of the speech “was not at all to my liking.” Rather than asserting a new foreign policy doctrine, the State Department writers had “made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus.” Truman returned the draft to Secretary of State Dean Acheson “with a note asking for more emphasis on a declaration of general policy.”
The State Department complied, and included a general policy statement in the next draft. But Truman was not satisfied. “It seemed to me half-hearted,” he recalled. President Truman “scratched out” what he deemed equivocations. For example, Truman replaced “should” with “must” in a key sentence that read “I believe that it should be the policy of the United States…” According to Truman, “I wanted no hedging in this speech.” Because this speech “was America’s answer to the surge of expansion of Communist tyranny,” it “had to be clear and free of hesitation or double talk.” A total of eight drafts of Truman’s speech to Congress are featured on the Truman Library’s website. Many include handwritten comments and corrections. Combined, they give readers a sense of the tremendous effort that went into drafting the Truman Doctrine as well as the importance a single word can make when crafting foreign policy.
Truman delivered his address on March 12, 1947. Over the next several weeks, Congress debated the merits of Truman’s proposed foreign policy. On April 22nd, the Senate approved the legislation to provide assistance to Greece and Turkey. The House followed suit, approving the bill on May 9th. On May 22, 1947, Truman signed the bill into law. According to President Truman, the enactment of his bill “served notice that the march of Communists would not be allowed to succeed by default.”
We have played all of the games in the Reivers and Reformers Series designed by Ed Beach, including Here I Stand (multiple times), Virgin Queen (multiple times but not as many as HIS), Tanto Monta (once) and Border Reivers (twice) with our most recent play being a full 5-player game in March while attending Buckeye Game Fest. This series is just special and I very much enjoy our experience with these games each time we play them. The card driven mechanic simply makes the series and it really is a bit of a sandbox as you can win in various and sundry ways. Several months ago, GMT announced the fifth entry in the series called Foxes and Lions:Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli designed by the duo of Paul Wright and Liz Davidson. This one looks to be epic and is set during warring city-states and dominions of Renaissance Italy during the era known as the Italian Wars (specifically, the period from 1494 to 1527). I am very keen on a new addition to the series and look forward to diving in and learning more about the game over the next year or so. My first step was to reach out to the design team to do a designer interview and Paul Wright was more than willing to answer our questions.
*Note: The pictures used in this interview showing the various components and cards, are still in the design and development process and as such rules,event effects and text might still change prior to final development and publication.Also the art and layout of the components are only for playtest purposes at this point and the game will enter the art department as it nears publication.
Grant: Paul welcome to our blog. First off, please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?
Paul: From Chicago originally, I’m a cultural historian by training, having taken my doctorate in Comparative Literature at Princeton and worked with the masterful historian Anthony Grafton. I’m happy if even a tiny percentage of his vast knowledge has lodged itself in me. My focus in my doctoral research was Renaissance humanism in Italy and England, including work on Leonardo Bruni, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Gabriel Harvey, and John Milton. I have been dialoguing with Machiavelli ever since my undergraduate days at Northwestern, when one of my mentors (the wonderful Albert Ascoli) tasked me with translating long sections of The Prince into English. I’m certain those early efforts were awful and too literal-minded, but what an instructive exercise that has only made me more admiring of great translators. Alongside Machiavelli remaining a key part of my research, I have also been working on the political and social impact of Savonarola.
I taught for three decades in higher education, including my graduate T.A. days at Princeton, as well as teaching posts at Osaka University, Villanova University, and Cabrini University. That last school, sadly, closed in the wake of all the pressures on higher ed in the last fifteen years or so. I then turned to teaching in the independent school world, which brought me to Main Line Classical Academy in Bryn Mawr, PA, where I teach English and History, as well as a games-based learning history elective funded by a grant I recently received from the Renaissance Society of America.
In my games-based learning exercises in my classrooms over the years, I have used analog board games as well as the occasional computer game (Europa Universalis in particular), but I also use role-immersion pedagogies like Reacting to the Past; I serve on the national consortium board for RTTP (for more info, see https://reactingconsortium.org/). I’m currently developing a RTTP game on Florence in the period 1494-1512, the era of the republic with the Medici in exile. In that game students may take on one of over thirty historical roles, including Piero Soderini, Da Vinci, Da Vinci’s portrait subject Ginevra de Benci, followers of Savonarola, condottiere Fabrizio Colonna, or even Machiavelli himself. Think of this as a role-playing game that zooms in even further than does Foxes and Lions. The game has been tested by professors at over a dozen institutions so far; it will be used in a high school setting for the first time this year.
My hobbies include film and media studies. I have taught film and media courses (on everything from the Coen Brothers to Kurosawa to The Sopranos) at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute for some twenty years now. I also have a screenplay (in painfully drafted form) on Machiavelli’s time spent with Cesare Borgia, which certainly informed Machiaveli’s thinking and later writing.
I also treasure any chance to travel abroad, and it was a big part of my higher ed career in international affairs. I hate how expenses have curtailed that experience for so many of us, as well as how the U.S. has become less welcoming to international students. Not surprisingly perhaps, Italy is my favorite destination, with Albania (home country of my wife) and China (home country of my daughter) tied for a close second. I also lived and taught in Japan for four years from 1996-2000, and it was one of the most formative times of my life; I treat any chance to return as a treat.
Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed most about the experience thus far?
Paul: I waded into game design after decades of intensive play of wargames, euros, RPGs, and so many other types of games that I’m clearly an omni-gamer—certainly on the heavier side of the complexity scale with a focus on historical games. I’ve always been happy to solo (even multi-handed) because playing more games teaches you so much about how games are put together and how they try to model complex realities, including the past. I’m an admirer of David Lowenthal’s classic book, The Past Is a Foreign Country, which certainly evokes how games draw me into historical eras and crises.
I’ve also been blessed in Philadelphia, my home of 26 years now, with the best gaming group anyone could ask for—a group of people who are kind, seriously competitive yet never obnoxious, while also being sharp and funny as hell. Between my own solo forays and playing with them, it has been an education that led to this first ever design for me. My Philadelphia group are truly shadow co-designers in their way.
What I’ve most enjoyed about design is the sense of something evolving before your eyes that captures the history as I understand it, but I also love designs that challenge or revise my understanding. Collaborating with an amazing co-designer in Liz Davidson and developer extraordinaire Joe Dewhurst has been an absolute treat. I’m spoiled by having these two on my team.
Grant: What have you learned about design over the years?
Paul: Like many designers, I have many designs that never saw the light of day; some of these will come to fruition, I think, once Foxes and Lions is released. What I do know is that I’m a designer by theme and subject who looks far and wide for mechanics that will capture the historical complexities that fascinate me. I know many work in the opposite direction starting with mechanics, but that’s not how I’m wired. I start with a theme or problem that haunts me, then see if a game (mine or someone else’s) can help to illuminate it—or at minimum, reframe my questions more powerfully.
I also see historical game design as a way of testing and modifying (not merely reinforcing) my own interpretive and historiographical assumptions. One of the reasons I began the journey with Foxes and Lions over a decade ago now is that I had deep questions about Machiavelli, his theories, his playful will to narrative, and the era through which he lived, an era that we all too facilely collapse under the rubric of the “Italian Wars” or “The Renaissance.” Game design can be a heuristic tool that can bear fruit eventually in a new interpretation or synthesis that we hadn’t anticipated. At minimum, it clarifies my own tortured thinking and reading of the sources.
Grant: What is your upcoming game Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli about?
Paul: Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli is the next game in the GMT series that includes Here I Stand, Virgin Queen, and Tanto Monta. Focused on the warring city-states and dominions of Renaissance Italy during the era known as the “Italian Wars” (specifically, the period from 1494 to 1527), this game zooms in on the Italian peninsula. Unlike many other games on the Italian Wars, Foxes and Lions puts the focus on Italian experiences of this era of enormous upheaval, which also saw some of the greatest cultural splendors that we now associate with the period known, not without controversy, as the Renaissance. The game depicts the political, military, economic, religious, and cultural affairs of five key Italian powers brought to life by players (Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, and the Papacy).
Players struggle to create political legitimacy for themselves while contending with both Italian rivals and non-player great powers intent on conquest of their own objectives in Italy; namely, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. For those who have played other series games, much will be familiar mechanically, but there are many new concepts and mechanics to enjoy, including experimenting with different government types, managing local sentiment, and gathering precious florins to pay for mercenaries and their fickle condottieri captains.
Furthermore, players will be faced with the possibility of collective defeat to the non-player great powers. Players will individually pursue Virtù Points, drawing on Machiavelli’s famously pliable conception of political ability and military strength, while at the same time striving to avoid collective defeat by loss of Italian Virtù Points. Dwindling Italian Virtù embodies Machiavelli’s abiding fear of great power domination of Italy. Players will each attempt to win without Italy falling into the subjection that was historically its fate, and should they fail to prevent that, the game ascribes blame to the specific players viewed as the scourge of Italy and the new lapdog of the great powers. Can you thread the needle between your Italian rivals’ ambitions and the threat posed by the great powers of Europe?
Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest in making a game?
Paul: This subject got under my skin as an undergrad as I mentioned above. I first fell in love with Dante in multiple courses with terrific and yet very different teachers. They graciously invited me to join their graduate courses as an undergrad. Milton, Spenser, and a host of political poets in the epic tradition caught my eye there too, but I fell hardest for Dante and his era. As I went on to graduate school, that love of Dante abided, but Machiavelli re-entered the chat, as it were.
After my graduate experience with Machiavelli (thanks especially to one of my teachers, Victoria Kahn), I was never quite the same. Machiavelli embodied someone both deeply troubled and somehow deeply amused by a world that was falling down around him. His political career began in the wake of the 1494 Medici exile, the rise of Savonarola, and the restoration of a republic that had long been under the Medici yoke. His career ended the first time in 1512 with the Medici restoration. It ended again with another Medici exile in 1527, with yet another republic that didn’t really trust Machiavelli anymore given his courting of Medici patronage in the intervening years. Above all, the traumatic Sack of Rome in 1527 really shook Machiavelli. He died just over a month after the Sack, witnessing exactly the kind of Italian nightmare that he had warned about for years. Someone who had lived that much life and turmoil became endlessly fascinating to me. I know Machiavelli will be a part of my scholarship and design life for the duration.
Grant: How did you come to team up with Liz Davidson on this project?
Paul: Liz has become a dear friend as well as collaborator and sounding board on everything from our shared gaming interests to our broader professional and personal lives. We met because I invited her to be a keynote speaker at a Reacting to the Past game design conference at my former institution. She was not only awesome in that role, but we immediately hit it off as people. It wasn’t long till we were talking regularly cross-country and at conventions, then talking about collaborations.
Grant: What strengths did each of you bring to the design process?
Paul: In the case of Foxes and Lions, I obviously brought the historical background and scholarly passion to the project, which I had first formulated about six or seven years before Liz and I met. But in all candor, I was spinning my wheels. I was swamped with the faculty and administration politics of a dying institution, and I was smack dab in the middle of all that drama in a leadership role for our faculty. It took Liz to help me see the real comfort of game design and of throwing myself back into my true passions, especially for Foxes and Lions.
It also helps enormously that Liz is a doctorate-holding historian of religion herself with a focus on the ancient world. And as anyone passionate about the period knows, the Renaissance was defined in many ways by its relationship to the classical world, so while Liz wasn’t an early modernist or medievalist, she understood intuitively and on a deep level why a classicist would enjoy and contribute to a game about the Renaissance. Simply put, without Liz, there is no Foxes and Lions for the world, just the game in my head. Liz also has a sharp sense of end-user needs in game design. How something will play to a more general audience and not just specialists or heavy gamers. To be clear, our game is a heavy game situated within a heavy (yet beloved) series, but Liz is working hard on materials to onboard people as only she can, including training guides, videos, and more. She is doing an amazing service with this in relation not only to our game, but also the series at large. Stay tuned for more of these things in the months to come.
I’d also be remiss not to mention the support and encouragement of Volko Ruhnke. After he visited my former university as keynote panelist for a games-as-scholarship workshop, we talked about Foxes and Lions possibly joining the COIN series in the vein of other pre-modern titles like Falling Sky and Pendragon. Liz and I even prototyped a first COIN version of our game. It was fun and quirky; it could have possibly thrived in COIN world, but at the end of the day GMT’s Jason Carr wisely suggested a retooling to the Here I Stand line. That was preaching to the choir for me given my admiration for Ed Beach and for the series. Ed became yet another guiding light as we got to know him. One of my proudest moments was having Ed participate in a play of the game at WBC this past summer. They say don’t meet your heroes; both Volko and Ed prove that dictum wrong.
Grant: What has been the division of labor between you?
Paul: Liz and I both have day jobs that are very consuming. She as creative director at Leder Games, myself as an educator (a role Liz had also previously played in independent schools). Yet we both get up incredibly early, whether we are meeting or not. We are always busy with our games at every spare moment. Liz has so many games on her plate, including with other collaborators like David Thompson, another designer for whom I’m an unabashed fanboy. I’ve got Foxes and Lions of course as my primary focus, but also a book project on Machiavelli and the Reacting to the Past role-immersion game on Machiavelli’s Florence that I mentioned earlier.
I would call our division of labor something like triage; think ER or The Pitt. We are each picking up the slack when needed, prioritizing one thing or another. If there is a functional division right now, I’m heavy into the rules and component revisions, as well as early TTS testing, about to go wider as of November 2026. Liz is contributing to the InsideGMT articles we are posting on the game; her favorite subject, not surprisingly if you know her, being espionage for an upcoming piece. Liz is also there anytime we need to vet some unusual change or some stubborn holdover of mine from earlier iterations of the game. Liz will give you her most honest take on how something plays and how it will feel in the game experience. Liz has an reliable, sure sense of that. As I mentioned, she is also developing onboarding materials for newbies that I think will be awesome.
The few times we have not seen eye to eye (and I can count them on one hand), we have always had principled discussions of where each of us is coming from, and that has always lit the way to a solution. Like myself, Liz is an omni-gamer with an historian and educator’s perspective on things. That fundamental commonality has always carried us through. Having Joe Dewhurst as our developer has been equally essential as he too is an educator and scholar, and his sharp eye for what will make a game its best is invaluable. As with Liz, no Foxes and Lions in its current exciting form without Joe.
Grant: What is your design goal with the game?
Paul: If I have an historian’s axe to grind with many games on the Italian Wars and Renaissance, they have never quite to my satisfaction captured the cultural dynamism, complexity, and sheer messiness of the period. There are success stories among Renaissance games to be sure. Many games attempt to capture the military picture and do so well; on the tactical front, Rich Berg’s Arquebus comes to mind here as well as the lesser known and under-appreciated Brien Miller game, Fornovo 1495.
Other games attempt to integrate military concerns with politics and economics on a grand scale, and of course Eivind Vetlesen’s Europa Universalis: The Price of Power comes to mind here as a masterful and inspiring example, although the cultural and political front in that game is more driven by events than player agency compared to Foxes and Lions. Pascal Ribrault’s Virtù is also an interesting euro that tackles some of these concerns in an accessible way.
And of course, we have the crowded field of games tapping into Renaissance commercialism. Brasini, Gigli, and Luciani’s Lorenzo il Magnifco and Fabiano Lopiano’s Calimala come to mind here. An underappreciated and roughhewn gem is Mario Papini’s Siena; his better-known De Vulgari Eloquentia is terrific. On the art front, Stefano Groppi’s Florenza looms large in my mind for its attention to both Florentine art and the material and political considerations behind that art; it’s also just a beautiful game to look at.
Yet for all those examples above, Ed Beach’s Here I Stand and Virgin Queen were the guiding lights to Foxes and Lions—alongside the interest in political asymmetry that transcends the traditional wargame fixation on “control,” a paradigm shift displayed so beautifully in Volko’s COIN series. What Morgane Gouyon-Rety attempted so ambitiously in Pendragon also figures in my original thinking about the game. Morgane and I have chatted of late about how the character-driven conceptualization of ever-shifting rulers has serendipitously shaped both her Hubris game and Foxes and Lions.
Yet for my design purposes, what Ed’s work on Here I Stand proved was that a wargame could tackle vitally important and culturally adjacent aspects of the period that impact things happening on the strategic battlefield—in Ed’s case the religious strife of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. COIN demonstrates to us that the sentiment and shifting support of an administered population is just as important as the intentions of those controlling a space—or trying to convince themselves that they do. This was very much on Machiavelli’s mind too.
In addition to wanting to make a game that captures the overdetermined messiness and intricacy of the Italian Renaissance, especially during the Italian Wars per se, we also wanted a game that “consciously uncoupled” (to riff on Gwyneth Paltrow’s marital breakup language) from reliance on “great power” narratives. Those narratives and the assumptions implicit in them are a recurring feature of most games on the Italian Wars and even of the Here I Stand series to date. We wanted ultimately to put the focus on Italian experiences of those conflicts—in the process creating a HIS series game about underdogs.
This was more than about zooming in on the map of Italy as depicted in earlier series games, something Carlos’s Tanto Monta did to a degree that left me hungry to do far more given my own scholarly interests in Italy. Yet it was above all about letting players personify powers that were otherwise total underdogs (or minor powers at best) in the context of the rest of the series and most other games on the period.
In this way, Avalon Hill’s out-of-print classic Machiavelli comes to mind for its attention to Italian powers alongside the greater powers of Europe and the Ottoman world. Our elevator pitch for Foxes and Lions remains a good formula—the old Machiavelli game brought to life in the mechanical exoskeleton of the Here I Stand system. Finally, as I get into in more detail below, we wanted a game that honored the messy contradictions and true interests of Machiavelli and didn’t simply replicate the many misleading stereotypes about him.
Grant: How have you modified the Here I Stand System to recount the story of the rise and fall of Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli between 1494-1527?
Paul: In addition to the non-player great powers mentioned earlier, the game features other significant additions or changes to series conventions.
Political traditions—These are the governments (current and past) that define the political character of any given space in the game (featuring merchant republics, feudal aristocracies, princedoms, theocracies, tribute states, and vassals). In keeping with Machiavelli’s respect for founders of institutions, lawgiving will be an available action that permits you to attempt to alter governments in your dominion. Each space under your control may have a very different political arrangement, which affects its prosperity, unit construction capability, and many other things. Your central government (that of your capital) may also change over time.
Sentiment—This captures the current attitude of the local population to the government overseeing it. The scale of sentiment reflects Machiavelli’s own terminology, ranging from “Hated” to “Feared,” to “Feared and Loved” (the latter an ideal Machiavelli thought hard to achieve, opting instead for being “Feared” whenever a choice between fear and love was unavoidable).
New unit types—Regulars are split into citizen militia and feudal levies, alongside a more detailed look at mercenaries (with elite variants including the Swiss reisläufer and the Imperial landsknechte).
Condottieri captains—Twenty of the colorful, talented, and sometimes treacherous mercenary captains of the era will be available to players in competitive blind bidding for their services, with each captain reflecting unique battlefield abilities, vulnerabilities, and other surprising game impacts. Captains are essential to success in the game, and if not properly paid and retained, will go up for auction again; they may even be suborned and taken from you by nefarious rival actions. Among the captains are the infamous Cesare Borgia, Fabrizio Colonna, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and “El Gran Capitán” himself, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Yet the captains also include those who are captains for our game, but not condottieri narrowly defined; these include militaristic cardinals like Francesco Alidosi as well as the famously defiant Caterina Sforza.
Money economy—Alongside the high-level political capital of command points (CP) already familiar to CDG players, Foxes and Lions features the cold, hard cash that mercenaries and dominions crave. Florins are collected by a trade action connected to the prosperity of the various governments in one’s dominion. The florin economy will be necessary not only to pay or bribe mercenaries and captains, but also for espionage, government maintenance, and more. Player treasuries are hidden behind a screen, so no one is ever quite sure of a rival’s wealth. Should you run out of florins for a required or desired expenditure, the banks will be available to lend to you at exorbitant interest rates, and failure to repay may cost you dearly.
Espionage available from turn one—Nefarious measures are available to players from the outset of the game, including familiar operations from Virgin Queen like Gain Intel and Assassination, now supplemented with Appeasement, Foment Rebellion, Sabotage Fortifications, and Suborning others’ employed condottieri to your cause.
New patronage systems and figures—For those familiar with Virgin Queen, patronage now features three tracks (artists, scientists, and humanists) with 10 figures of each type. Each patronage target affords unique game effects. Among the 30 patronage subjects are figures such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Copernicus, Pacioli, Paracelsus, Machiavelli, Manutius, and even a prying poet-courtesan, Tullia d’Aragona.
New ruler dynamics—Each player will have an often-volatile lineup of rulers who will transition based on circumstances in the game (26 rulers in total across five player powers). In the case of the Papal States, a conclave procedure involving all five players will determine the next pope whenever the current pope dies, however mysteriously.
Variable impulse order—Players may bid their florins to change the impulse order for a given turn, creating dynamic opportunities for surprising your enemies—or lying in deadly wait for them.
More opportunities to declare war mid-action phase—No game about Machiavelli’s era would be complete without the temptations and risks of back-stabbing rivals, even erstwhile allies, including in the middle of a turn. Great coalitions (like the historical “Holy League”) may form, but no alliance is ever truly safe.
Grant: What elements do you feel are most important to model from the period?
Paul: If there was one thing that consumed me more than anything else in formulating this game years ago, it was the desire to make the best possible game on the richness, diversity, and contradictions in Machiavelli’s whole body of work—a game that would capture Machiavelli the writer and, above all, the human being as I’ve come to know him.
I didn’t want a game that just brought The Prince to life, or that just reveled in the skullduggery so often associated with Machiavelli, even in games that somehow invoke him. I wanted a game that also featured the other Machiavelli(s). The celebrator of republics in the Discourses on Livy who also knew just how fragile republics really are, a lesson for today if ever there was one. Machiavelli the historian in his state-sponsored Florentine Histories, an example of urban history compromised by political pressures to dance around certain uncomfortable truths. Machiavelli the military theorist of The Art of War, who appreciated the potentially dangerous impact of militarism on civic life in addition to the positive virtues of citizen soldiers (there is something of both James Madison and Stephen Ambrose in Machiavelli here). And finally, even the Machiavelli of La Mandragola (“The Mandrake Root”), a viciously funny sex comedy about cuckolding with a sly political subtext commenting on the differences between classical virtues and Renaissance realities. Further down in this interview, you can see three event cards that were inspired by Machiavelli’s diverse array of writings.
In all that effort, we also want to be sure that Foxes and Lions never simply takes Machiavelli at his word or at face value. Given his own internal contradictions, that would be unwise. We instead see the game as interrogating Machiavelli’s assumptions and claims. His critique of mercenaries versus citizen militia is explored both in design and in actual play, never simply rehearsed uncritically. His appreciation for the libertà of republics is tempered by his continued recognition of their fragility and their vulnerability to other powers with more direct mechanisms of control and decision-making; think here of today’s debates about democracy and autocracy.
Machiavelli’s sense was that Italy might be doomed by great power intrigue—exacerbated by Italian powers courting the greats to their own ends rather than looking to Italy’s good. This was always balanced with a deep yet tortured belief in the possibility of resuscitating Italian virtù. In addition, we wade in this game into Machiavelli’s discussion of virtù itself, a term almost untranslatable given its variety of uses in his works. The tension between individual and communal greatness was always on Machiavelli’s mind in using that term—with a preference at last for the latter as it was most pursuant to true glory and historical legacy, as well as most compatible with republics. Lawgivers (as opposed to generals and strongmen) were always most admired by Machiavelli, I would say. The serendipity of our victory points in the game easily transmuting into “Virtù Points” was an early discovery, as was realizing that we should also track Italian Virtù Points to gauge the threat of collective defeat.
To say that this is a game of ideas in the crucible of conflict is an understatement, but even more vital to us is that the game’s ideas should be tested in a sandbox of historical conditions that confronted the historical actors, both individual and collective. We want a game that is not on historical rails, but that instead allows for historically plausible surprises and strange developments. So far testing has provided just that. Thankfully, the game allows shockers—the imperial troops of Charles V against Cesare Borgia; Savonarola arranging a cuckolding of the “Warrior Pope” Julius II; Piero de’ Medici lingering on for multiple turns as the hapless ruler of Florence. Testing has seen a lot of these unanticipated “what ifs,” and we imagine even more strange developments over the life of the game. Above all, testers have stressed just how fun and crazy the game can be. Mission accomplished, to my mind.
Grant: What major design challenges did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
Paul: I go into more detail on this below, but one of the challenges I personally faced is the same that confronts any designer—the old “kill your darlings” mantra. This is why I’m especially grateful to Liz and to our amazing Joe Dewhurst on the development end. While there are many things in Foxes and Lions that I deem “thesis-level” in importance and non-negotiable, there are plenty of things I fell in love with early on that it took me time to see were hampering the design and gameplay.
Sometimes you don’t have to kill the “darling” as much as reshape it. One example is sentiment, discussed above. At one point, we really needed to find a way to make sentiment matter more to the game mechanically. We had it as conceptually important, and it truly is, but it wasn’t doing what we needed to make players care about it. Once Liz and Joe encouraged connecting sentiment to espionage, battlefield impacts, and other power-specific concerns, I saw the light. We didn’t jettison sentiment, but we made it matter to players and to the thesis of the game. A similar thing happened with political traditions. Originally, we were tracking up to four governments (current and previous) in each space’s political traditions box. We wisely revised so that now you only trace the current government and any previous dominant political tradition in that space; that simplification kept the interest in government forms without creating a truly unwieldy board state.
In other cases, you do just need to kill the “darling” altogether, as we did with dynamic prosperity management for each space. While each space still has a political traditions box and its current government affords a trade value to that space impacting your power’s florin economy, originally I was foolishly insistent that each space have dynamic prosperity that you could spend CP to raise or lower (subject to caps by government type). That might have worked for a computer version of the game, but it was decidedly awful for a game that already has lots of moving parts and elements new to the series. Dynamic prosperity was not only killing the delicate Command Point economy of the game, but it was also just boring to players. They definitely wanted florins and economics, but they didn’t need that much granularity. Again, so grateful I had Liz and Joe to help me see the light. The game is way better for all these refinements.
Grant: How does designing a game in an established system work? Any constraints on your thoughts for the period?
Paul: One might think designing within an existing series framework is an easier task. There is a template, a style, and a set of mechanics and design assumptions. And to an extent, this is true. It’s nice to “stand on the shoulders of giants” like our predecessors in the series, Ed Beach and Carlos Diaz Narvaez.
The difficulties I encountered, however, were met and overcome thanks to a 2025 game designer retreat hosted on Beaver Island, Michigan by Central Michigan University’s Center for Learning through Games and Simulations, run by my friend and an intrepid scholar of colonial Mexico, Jon Truitt. In that weeklong retreat in a remote, beautiful setting, I spent uninterrupted days studying the entire Here I Stand series and its rulebooks. I wrote the new rules for Foxes and Lions from the ground up there, with an eye toward retaining what was essential to the series while weaving in what was of thesis-level importance to our game and its historical setting.
The real challenge of adapting to an existing series framework is not so much what you will keep, but what you will add or change altogether. If you are standing on that giant’s shoulders, you never want to annoy (let alone topple) the giant carrying you by flailing around thoughtlessly in a shared design space. In this case, the giant isn’t just someone like Ed; it’s a community of dedicated series players who have made HIS games a lifestyle choice. Many of them are making series games of their own, such as the gracious and supportive Luis Rubio, whose game Primus Inter Pares is of great interest to me.
We know this community will put Foxes and Lions through its paces. We know too that GMT is seeking a game about the complexity of Virgin Queen, a design goal we share and think we have met. Things that we don’t fret over in our game (e.g., the religious mechanics of Here I Stand) are replaced by things that we feel we must have (e.g., political traditions).
The way Liz and I have tackled any additions or changes to the sturdy, muscular frame that is this series is always to ask a fundamental question of anything new. Does it support a “thesis-level” contention or historical organizing principle of the game? Does it add something to the series that offers a new, welcome dimension to gameplay that shakes things up for the better? If something didn’t speak to one of those needs, we generally ended up revising it until it did or dumping it.
Ultimately, we never felt the series hamstrung our vision of the period, but it enriched it. What we kept our attention on was how you can redeploy series conventions to treat a more focused region that would be a mere few spaces in the larger scale games like Virgin Queen. This change of scale and perspective was a challenge, but the system opened itself to that. To borrow from my side work as a teacher of film, we think of Foxes and Lions as zooming the camera in from the eagle-eye view of the great powers in the other series games. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the Italian Wars (and as I keep stressing, the Italian experience of those conflicts) were ready for their closeup.
Grant: What sources did you consult for the historical details? What one must-read source would you recommend?
Paul: I could be here all day talking about the game’s primary and secondary sources, but I’ll keep it brief. Liz and I recently did a video about precisely this topic of sources or ancillary readings for the game and you can watch that at the following link:
The books we mentioned there are terrific places to begin. Some commentary follows the list here.
The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (translated by Peter Constantine)
Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men by Wayne A. Rebhorn
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher
The Machiavellian Moment by J. G. A. Pocock
Niccolo’s Smile by Maurizio Viroli
Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
Florentine Histories by Machiavelli (translated by Laura Banfield and Harvey Mansfield)
A History of Florence 1200-1575 by John Najemy
Fortune is a Woman by Hanna Pitkin
The Tigress of Forlì by Elizabeth Lev
Fortune is a River by Roger Masters
Mercenaries and their Masters by Michael Mallett
The Italian Wars 1494-1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe by Christine Shaw and Michael Mallett
This is very much a partial list. Of these, the most welcomely irreverent in terms of pieties about the Renaissance is Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance. Great stuff that explodes many preconceptions and has some great sections on Machiavelli. That side, the pieties deserve their day in court too though, and no one was more influential there than Burckhardt. It has become fashionable to pile on Burckhardt for his missteps, which is a shame because there is much he got right to which it is worth returning.
Mallet and Shaw are terrific on the Italian Wars proper, as well as the role of condottieri, whom they treat evenhandedly and with nuance missing elsewhere. Roger Masters in Fortune Is a River illuminates a lesser-known military plan to deploy terraforming of all things; the book explores a collaboration between Da Vinci and Machiavelli to divert the Arno River to strike at Florence’s favorite obsession, Pisa. The book puts into dialogue two of the most unique figures in the Renaissance; it remains a proud moment for me that I introduced my dissertation Tony Grafton to this book, as it is quite rare to find anything on this period that Tony hasn’t already read.
I’d of course recommend reading Machiavelli himself, but please, read widely, not just The Prince. There is as much to learn in his Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories, Art of War, and his sex comedy Mandragola as there is anywhere else. Machiavelli even wrote some historical and political poetry (Decennali) on the dramas of his day.
John Najemy offers what I view as the single best modern history of Florence in English. Pocock’s classic, The Machiavellian Moment, is a most ambitious attempt to trace Machiavelli’s ideas about republics backwards to the ancient writer Polybius, but most compellingly forward to the English Civil War and the American Founding. A truly monumental book that loomed large in the conceptualization of the game.
Grant: What are the playable factions?
Paul: The player factions are the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Florence, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Papacy. These are the “big five” mentioned by Machiavelli in The Prince. They are confronted not only by each other, but also by four non-player “great powers”—France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Some have asked why Genoa is not among the playable powers; Machiavelli’s “big five” aside, this is because Genoa finds itself under the thumb of Milan at game start. It is a minor power held hostage by a player power, but it may break free and find new allies. I do have in mind a prequel expansion in which Genoa is playable though (see below for more on that).
Grant: How did you try to differentiate them in their style of gameplay?
Paul: The asymmetry of the playable powers is deeply baked into the game, both in the event deck featuring events drawing on their histories, but also in the mechanics, victory conditions, and play styles.
Venice begins the game leading the pack by a good margin. An economic powerhouse of merchant republican bent, Venice has wealth coming from its colonies abroad, especially the Balkans in our game. Yet, what was often called Venice’s “Long Decline,” which would not be completed until Napoleon’s era, was already in motion at the start of our game. The Ottomans threatening the colonies, combined with Venice’s own dangerous ambitions on the Italian mainland, would lead to disaster at Agnadello in 1509, with what must have felt like the world arrayed against Venice.
Milan begins as a powerful duchy, wherein the Visconti had been replaced by the condottieri family of the Sforzas long before game start. Milan has its thumb on Lombardy, but also Genoa. Genoa is a source of wealth and prestige, but also a constant headache and a state that might break loose. Milan is a viable threat for autowin and may expand south (as they did in the early 15th century), but it is also surrounded by great powers (notably, France and HRE), as well as neighboring Venice, their closest rival at game start.
Naples has the stability of a feudal kingdom to support its military and political cause, but it is also torn between the dynastic claims of the French and Spanish, which go back centuries. Naples is in a great position to keep what it has, but expanding toward victory is a major challenge unless it chooses to cross swords with the Papacy and others. Naples cannot rely on the status quo, even though the French armies of the time were already threatening that.
The Papacy is vexed by a roster of alternately skilled and disappointing rulers, as well as internal divisions in Roma between the Orsini and Colonna families, whose vendetta threatens both the city and papal stability. The Papacy has considerable spiritual powers with material benefits for its allies and punishments for its enemies. Occasionally it boasts military leadership to boot; think Cesare Borgia and Pope Julius II, the “Warrior Pope.” The Papacy’s advantages are often situational and fleeting though, and it is surrounded by rivals, not to mention great power intrigue (above all, from the Holy Roman Emperors, such as Charles V).
Finally, my beloved Florence. It begins with the single greatest mess of any of the powers. Piero de’ Medici, hapless and unprepared son of the late Lorenzo il Magnifico, is alienating citizens left and right. He is in the pocket of French interests and will controversially cede Pisa to King Charles VIII. In his wake comes someone no less controversial, Friar Savonarola, whose apocalyptic vision of Firenze as the “New Jerusalem” will bring it into direct conflict with the Papacy of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. Their confrontation is an early set-piece in most games. The other rulers who follow the Friar (Piero Soderini and two Medici) offer radically different political visions for Florence. Of all five player powers, Florence must wrestle with the most political instability, particularly in a difficult starting position.
With Venice, Milan, and Naples functioning as the “big dogs” (at least among Italian player powers), both Florence and the Papacy have their work cut out for them, but many avenues to victory. Florence can play the patronage game like few others, and the Papacy will have opportunities for expansion as long as they also maintain their influence over the Christian great powers and keep the Orsini and Colonna in stalemate. Florence and the Papacy also have the game’s only option for a joint victory. Provided a Medici rules both powers (a thing not always easy to coordinate), they can win the game together by one of them achieving an autowin (i.e., military victory) on the map. This assumes of course both players are interested in and capable of this coordination.
Grant: As a CDG, how does the game utilize cards?
Paul: Our game uses the classic CDG framework of multi-use cards pioneered by Mark Herman and used to such great effect in the Here I Stand series. We have added some wrinkles, however. First, there are 26 rulers in the game (4 for Venice, 5 for Florence, 5 for Milan, 6 for Naples, and 6 for the Papacy). There are two home cards for each power, available from game start. Each home card can be used for varying purposes unique to that power, but one of the two home cards benefits more from that player having allies, who will also appreciate that card’s advantages to them. The other home card tends to be best when going it alone with few or no allies, but players are free to use either home card each turn. There are some events that impact this; one (“Well Governed Dominion”) allows a player to use both home cards that turn, while another (“Confused Administration”) allows a rival to force you to pick a home card of the rival’s choosing, while also saddling you with -1 card next turn.
Finally, we introduce an important new type of mandatory event card: Captain auction cards. These 20 figures represent the condottieri and other influential figures (even ostensibly non-military figures who nonetheless have a powerful effect on the battlefield and other arenas). Captains are the subject of aggressive florin bidding wars in secret auctions (or sometimes, assigned to a player with highest influence on a specific great power). As these captains are the most decisive on-map leaders in the game, accumulating them is vitally important, especially given the vagaries of a captain’s fate on the battlefield (a captain is a potential casualty in any battle, even a victory) and off (being subject to assassination attempts or certain events). Being a power without any captain at all is the surest way to be easy prey in a land of many predators.
Grant: Can you share a few examples of individual cards with us and explain how they work?
Paul: Here are some examples of the types of cards in Foxes and Lions, especially those that break with series conventions in one or more ways. Please note that all card images here are prototypes and will undergo further graphics work, refinement, etc. Some commentary follows the images.
First, let’s consider one of our rulers: Venice’s Andrea Gritti, not to be confused with the mind-warping mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers. In addition to typical Admin and Card Bonus ratings familiar to series veterans, each ruler card also includes important additional information. Every ruler in the game has conditions for accession and removal (if a game start ruler, removal only). These conditions are almost always situational in nature, and in Gritti’s case, depends on his predecessor Doge Grimani having been removed. Doges and Popes are most typically removed by failing a survival roll at end of each turn; some, but not all rulers have these rolls. Elderly doges and popes always do. We also see here Gritti’s effects on the game—a helpful boost when paying CP for diplomatic influence. Other leaders may have disadvantages and outright weaknesses (e.g., Piero de’ Medici’s awful Admin rating of 0).
In a sense, you must endure and exploit the ruler you have rather than necessarily embodying that ruler, as is more the role-playing conceit in other HIS series games. For example, in HIS, you feel you are Suleiman the Magnificent, and that’s great for that game with all its high-level great power shenanigans. But in Foxes and Lions, it might be most helpful to think of yourself as a Machiavelli-type advisor behind the scenes, and you certainly won’t relish embodying the weaker and more problematic rulers when navigating their serious tradeoffs. I sometimes think of the role-playing conceit of this game as you portraying no mere ruler or advisor, but perhaps an entire polity, a people weathering the rulers they’ve been dealt. The conceit at last is up to you and your play group.
Alfonso II of Naples is a different ruler example. He is the starting ruler for Naples. Alfonso is awful at Appeasement (formerly “Pacify” as seen here), which is the effort to improve sentiment in your dominion; he is so poor at this that no dominion space may even reach the coveted Feared and Loved status. Note too that while he does have a survival roll, he may also be removed if Napoli (the capital space proper) is enemy-controlled. This is a situational timer on this ruler, and other situational timers apply to many rulers (in Milan, Florence, and Naples especially).
The captain examples here include one conventional condottiere, Paolo Vitelli. You bid on captains when they are played as mandatory events. Some turns there will be few or no captains on which to bid; on other turns, they will appear in great waves. Each game play is very different on this front. Our Paolo, adept at siege assaults, nonetheless has an Achilles’ Heel—if he doesn’t assault at least once a turn, he is executed by his employer! This reflects the curious history of the real Paolo, whom the Florentines accused of treacherously soft-pedaling the siege of Pisa on their behalf. His execution enraged his brother Vitellozzo (another captain in the game), who will become an inveterate enemy of Paolo’s former employer if this happens (and it might be another power that employs Paolo, not necessarily Florence).
Then we have the illustrious Caterina Sforza, scion of a family of condottieri, but not herself one as classically defined. We felt it important that our game have a preponderance of captains who do fit that classic description, but we also wanted a few, unusual “captains” who don’t, but nonetheless had battlefield and even other impacts. Caterina is celebrated in Machiavelli’s Prince as a commanding leader defending the siege of Forlì, with Machiavelli (perhaps apocryphally) crediting her with this infamously defiant statement to her besieging enemies, who had kidnapped her sons and threatened their lives: “To show them that she did not care about her sons, she revealed her genitals, saying that she still had the means to produce more” (trans. Peter Constantine). Accordingly, in the true Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spirit of “printing the legend,” our Caterina excels in siege defense alongside other advantages upon “hiring.” If she has a vulnerability, it is that she will stand down and not fight against her beloved Milan. Every captain has a downside of sorts to go with the silver lining.
Finally, we have two card types familiar to series players, but with wrinkles. “Diplomatic Maneuvers in the Dark” is in one way your typical mandatory event; the event player gets 2 CP to spend after the mandatory event fires. What is important here is the event itself reminds us that a good number of event cards will drive the activities of the non-player great powers. Some of those events are optional, but many are mandatory to ensure regular activity on the part of the greats threatening Italy. This card also nicely pairs activation of one great power with evaluation of one minor power, the latter something quite familiar to series veterans.
The Home card example pairing here is also instructive. Both are from Florence. The first, “Civic Humanism,” exploits Florence’s advantages in patronage, lawgiving, and maintenance of dominion sentiment. The second, “Lucrative Textile Trade,” focuses on Florence’s distinctive economy in wool and cloth, but it also rewards Florence and its allies with additional florin generation beyond what is typical in the trade action. As remarkably different as the home cards of the others player powers are, this template of one ally-focused and one other home card is consistent throughout. Either card can be used with or without allies, but the ally-focused cards are especially attractive to courting, rewarding, and retaining allies. Until of course, they see you as being in the way of their own ambitions.
Grant: What role does Patronage play in the design? How have you modified the system used in Virgin Queen to fit this era and your focus?
Paul: The biggest change to patronage compared to Virgin Queen is the addition of humanists (broadly defined to include literary creators of all kinds) to the original categories of artists and scientists (also more broadly defined for our game’s purposes). We now have thirty patronage subjects (ten in each category), with two figures having different potential contributions in different categories (Michelangelo in both the arts and humanism for his poetry, and Da Vinci in both the arts and sciences for his engineering gifts).
Speaking to the broad definitions by category, a few examples suffice. Among the more predictable artists of the era, off the beaten path we have Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, a chronicler commissioned by Emperor Charles V. Vermeyen eventually designed the “Conquest of Tunis” tapestry series, and in some ways can be viewed as a proto-journalist. Among scientists in our game, we have Luca Pacioli, often credited as the “father of accounting.” And among our humanists (extended to include classicizing poets), we have Tullia D’Aragona, a brilliant courtesan-poet who can function as an espionage informant inflicted upon a rival; the rival must both pay Tullia and can never shake her off.
Another significant change from VQ is that for the most part, patronage figures are available for any power to patronize. A few have some restrictions; for example, Machiavelli is for Florence only, while Pico della Mirandola is available to any power except the Papacy given his storied troubles with the Church’s reaction to his more provocative ideas about syncretism. These less common examples aside, most patronage subjects are open to all comers.
We also modify the rollout of our many patronage subjects with only three in each category randomly selected from the available pool on turn 1, then three more added each turn thereafter (with all having appeared by turn 4, albeit in a different order each game). This creates a bit of uncertainty about when your preferred patronage target will become available; it also afford players less cognitive overload than were all ten figures of each type available from game start. Each patronage figure has unique game effects, some immediate and some long-term, and the effects run the gamut of applications to war, politics, economics, other patronage endeavors, or entirely different effects.
Unlike VQ where artists offered VP and scientists VP and/or abilities, every subject of each type in Foxes and Lions has a completely unique patronage ability and the capacity to reward VP. No two figures are the same, and each effect is tailored to the historical achievements or longer term influence of that person.
Grant: How important is Espionage? Why is it available early from Turn 1?
Paul: We wanted the cutthroat environment and skullduggery of Renaissance Italy to be captured from game start. We understand why Virgin Queen delays those things, but we felt Foxes and Lions needed it right off to be a believable recreation of that brutal environment in Italy. No one held back historically, so why should our players?
Espionage is one of the most effective tools at any power’s disposal in the game, but only if you really commit to it. We have seen some players go hard on it, while others stay focused on patronage, conquest, their own victory conditions, etc. If you are to make espionage work for you, having informants and (when possible by event) the cypher key (another holdover from VQ) goes a long way toward exploitation of these tools.
In addition to classic VQ-style espionage actions such as Plant Informant, Gain Intelligence, and Assassination, we also have Foment Rebellion to cause sentiment problems and unrest in enemy territory, as well as Appeasement to address or put down such problems.
We also offer a Sabotage Fortifications action that can remove fortified status from a target space—a nice complement we think to the ability in other series games to build fortifications. Successful sabotage doesn’t change a space’s key status (if any), and it can thematically be understood as anything appropriate to the space; in other words, it could be a literal sabotaging of town walls, but it could easily represent traitors in the leadership ranks of that town, undermining of garrison readiness, or anything else imaginatively appropriate. Fortifications themselves should also be understood in our game to be thematically diverse. In Forlì, there may be literal walls at Ravaldino, but in Volterra, this may additionally represent the natural defenses of high ground. In Venice, imagine the natural defensibility of Venice’s storied lagoon.
Lastly, the espionage action Suborn Captain allows a power to attempt corruption of a rival’s captain (i.e., a battlefield leader), causing that captain to join your cause and possibly causing defection of some of his mercenaries too. Our research has shown that, Machiavelli’s opinion notwithstanding, captains did not defect quite as often as is held by some, but we certainly allow for it to happen in the game as it did occasionally take place. It just won’t be a slam dunk without significant effort and investment (including florins).
In sum, we think espionage is especially robust in our game. Many creative uses are already being discovered in testing.
Grant: How is the next Pope decided when a change is called for? What dynamic does this create between players?
Paul: Pope Leo above is a good example of how the Papacy’s rollout of rulers is different from any other player power. You will note Leo becomes Pope by accession in Papal Conclave.
The Papal Conclave process is used anytime a pope has “shuffled off this mortal coil,” for whatever natural or nefarious reason you imagine. Other player powers have a fairly linear progression of rulers, who change based on shifting game conditions and/or survival rolls as specified on each ruler and discussed above. Yet early on, Liz and I decided it would be delicious fun to allow the popes of this era to roll out in a potentially different order based on conclave intrigue.
The short version is that a conclave does favor the Papacy player with some extra voting power, and any ties will be decided by that player. Ties are rare though as each player power in the game will have some voting power, which can be modified by territories lost to or taken from the Papacy. Having high influence on the Christian great powers (France, Spain and the HRE) can help one’s voting power, but having too much Ottoman influence will hurt it since you are viewed as consorting with an enemy of Christendom.
Finally, we allow players to spend their precious florins to bribe their way to an outcome in secret bidding, wherein even the preferred candidate of a player is not known till everyone reveals their pick and any florins spent.
So while the game begins with the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, it may wind its way to out-of-order candidates of the era succeeding him. Sticking the Papacy with a weaker pope (hello, scrupulous Adrian VI, who foregoes espionage altogether) may hinder the Papacy’s efforts, while the Papacy’s desire for the “Warrior Pope” Julius II will often be transparent. That said, sometimes a wise Papacy player will support a weaker candidate in hopes of drawing out financial support for that weaker candidate, with the knowledge that a better pope will come down the road at perhaps a more opportune time. The Conclave, like bidding on Captain auctions, is one of the major “head games” of Foxes and Lions.
You will also note in the Leo example above a great example of a ruler with downsides. Limitations on dominion sentiment are paired with higher costs to trade. The latter reflects Leo’s tendency to spend papal resources on his own extravagances; the saying ascribed to him comes to mind, “Since God has been pleased to give us the Papacy, let us enjoy it.” It doesn’t help either that Leo causes sentiment problems in Roma, in part due to his refusal to take seriously emerging threats to church authority, including Luther as the game reaches its end stage. At least Leo opens the possibility of a joint Florence / Papacy victory as described earlier. As with so many rulers in our game, there are always tradeoffs and always ways to exploit even a troubling ruler.
Grant: How do players bid for Impulse Order? Why was this important to include?
Paul: Impulse order might be the most debated subject among designers, developer, and testers so far. We decided to include secret florin bidding for variable turn order to create yet another arena in which to angle toward your goals and thwart those of others. We also see it as appropriately reflecting the chaos of Italy compared to the great power canvas of other series games.
Variable impulse order also allows us to use the current order (established after bidding each spring) as a tiebreaker for just about any situation in the game. We have found our current group of ten veteran testers to be unanimously in favor of the variable order bidding. Winning a bid only allows you to move one power’s marker (it need not be your own), thereby altering the impulse order in the Action Phase and impacting the tiebreaker mechanic I mentioned above.
That said, some players will surely not like it, and we had some recently who were new to the game at conventions argue that having a set table order is just easier to keep track of with seating, and we acknowledge this is valid concern for some groups. Online it might not matter, but in person with limited table space, it really might. My group of ten is vocal about keeping variable order bidding as a unique feature of the game, but who knows what wider testing will show.
The upshot is that we are most likely to have a set impulse order as the default rule, but with two variants. In one variant, you can embrace the full “wild west” of variable order bidding described above. For groups that like such volatility, they’ll still have the option. Another variant we have in mind is that you can bid, but all you are changing is which player goes first, while the order proper doesn’t change. We are happy for play groups to use whatever approach they prefer. If fully variable order bidding is not used, the tiebreaker that mechanic affords disappears and is replaced by a dice off. The argument for fully variable order could be that its tiebreaker usage will entail less dice rolling in a game series that is already chock full of that.
Grant: I see there are more ways to declare war during mid-turn. How does this work?
Paul: We knew early on that we needed shifting alliances, betrayals, and overall volatile situations of war and peace in the game. While we love the other series games, we tend to find them a bit too stately for Italy in this period. Yes, some of the other games have a card that lets you start a war mid-Action Phase (famously, Machiavelli’s Prince card in HIS), but we wanted more of this to be possible and more of it to happen!
Originally, we had a mechanism that allowed mid-turn betrayal of allies and declarations of war on the fly at any time provided a cost in CP and florins was paid. This still proved to be too easy and common. It was more in keeping with the wildness of the original Machiavelli game from Avalon Hill, itself a nasty and rich Diplomacy variant.
When we discovered that process was making mid-turn betrayal and declaration of war too common and easy for the good of the game, we compromised. Most declarations of war and making of alliances will happen as normal in the Diplomacy Phase in Foxes and Lions. We still want uncertainty about the reliability of an ally (or the intentions of a possible attacker), so we created four event cards that involve the option of a) attempting to suborn a rival captain on the eve of a battle or b) declaring war mid-Action Phase, even against a current ally. The latter is relevant to this discussion.
There are a few other cards that might situationally create such an opportunity, but these are the big four that clearly do. And so long as you haven’t accounted for those four cards in the discard pile (or preferably, your own hand), you just don’t know who might be able to stab you in the back at any moment. This approach has preserved the paranoia that is necessary for the game, while at the same time preventing a betrayal from happening just anytime on a pure whim. Marshaling your hand effectively is always important in any CDG, but arguably even more so in Foxes and Lions. “Suborn” cards (that include the betrayal and DoW option) are worth their weight in gold, and smart players try to hold onto them for future use.
Grant: How is ultimate victory obtained?
Paul: We have a few types of victory, most recognizable to players of other series games. We have the classic, end-of-last turn race to highest VP (Virtù Point) total; our game is 7 turns long maximum. We have the possibility of the series-typical domination victory from turn 4 on, whereby if you are leading all other players by 5 or more VP at turn end, you can claim victory that way. Finally, we have the traditional autowin condition (getting all your key markers out on map), in essence a military victory, although diplomacy and the minor power influence game may play a large role in that outcome too. What we tinkered with was adding to autowin another requirement for each power. For example, for Florence to autowin, it must retain control of Pisa-Livorno, an historical objective that obsessed many a Florentine government. For Venice to autowin, it must have a certain number of Balkans colonies still in it is possession. And so forth with other playable powers. Autowin isn’t automatic unless you meet that power’s sine qua non condition too.
Frankly, the biggest change in our game is not to victory conditions so much as the introduction of collective defeat. Having all players lose to the “great powers” (France, Spain, HRE, and Ottomans) because Italian Virtù has tanked is our favorite innovation and very appropriate to the situation historically. The game also specifies in the rules which one or two players at your table the others get to blame (perhaps unfairly, but who said life or games are always fair). The lapdog in a collective defeat will be the player with the most VP at the time of that outcome. Many in Italy see the lapdog’s ambitious rush to personal glory as the cause of the great power triumph. The scourge in a collective defeat will be the player with the most influence on all four great powers at the time of that outcome. That influence will not reflect all the influence invested over the course of the game, but those looking for an easy scapegoat will find one in the player currently dallying most with the great powers at that moment. It is even possible for one player to be both the scourge and lapdog; no greater infamy in our game is possible.
One inspiration here is another Avalon Hill classic, Republic of Rome (soon to be back in print, it seems). In that game, players are Roman patricians battling each other, but they are also battling the game, which throws challenges at them like the Carthaginians, Gauls, manpower shortages, etc. We felt Foxes and Lions absolutely needed that possible outcome of collective loss. We are also working on variants to calibrate how likely that is to happen in any given play. The default will be collective defeat as a serious threat, but we will have variant options to make that outcome more or less likely depending on a group’s wishes. If a group wants the focus to be on a likely player triumph, they can reduce the impact of the greats; if a group wants players constantly on their heels, they can increase it.
One can reliably argue that the Italian Wars ended in great power triumph by 1559. As our current game ends with the year of the Sack of Rome in 1527, we allow the game to put that writing on the wall sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be that way if players stand tall against the great powers as Machiavelli wished—often far easier said than done. We are estimating collective defeat to be less common an outcome in the game, but a constant worry. Testing will tell on that front, but we will certainly allow play groups to calibrate this possibility to their tastes as mentioned above.
Grant: What are some general strategies for each of the sides?
Paul: We will have eventually have detailed strategy guides for each power in upcoming InsideGMT pieces and of course, in the eventual Playbook. For now, referring to my answer above about player power asymmetry, the short version for strategies would look like this.
Florence
Put your messy house in order early. Try to move past Piero de’ Medici, even if you must play cards and create conditions for that yourself (Piero’s awful 0 Admin rating is a killer). We did once in testing see Piero persist three turns and threaten a joint victory with a Clement-led Papacy, but Piero is overall a drain on your prospects. You will also have to adapt to each of your next rulers in turn; Florence has perhaps the most dizzying political dance to do in the game. They also begin with serious sentiment problems in their dominion (Pisa, for example, is not particularly thrilled about losing its republican liberties to Florence).
Milan
Keep Genoa under thumb at all costs and find ways to expand into the Romagna, Tuscany, or the Veneto Region at the expense of the Venetians. Alternatively, play nice or even ally with Venice until it’s just the two of you with a viable shot at victory, bearing in mind other players will have a lot to say about such an alliance.
Naples
Continue your investment in Feudal Aristocracy in your capital and beyond. While your kingdom is safe on most sides, you need to expand to win. Papal territories seem the best and nearest opportunities for that, but you can get creative. Even Roma itself is calling you, but you must remove some pesky exclaves of Milan and the Papacy from your dominion before you truly commit to broader expansion. You will also need to play the patronage game like anyone else.
Papacy
Manage the flow of your popes through the conclave process to your advantage whenever possible. Don’t rush to get Julius II till you feel you are ready militarily. It would be premature to install him as pope, then have him die due to a survival roll before you can fully exploit him. Learn to manage the weaker popes (Adrian VI and Pius III), sometimes opting for them when your enemies least expect it and may have spent precious resources trying to inflict them on you. And above, make hay while the sun shines with Cesare Borgia. He is called “Darth Vader” by our testers for a reason. He will burn out at some point once Daddy (Alexander VI) dies, but like Roy Batty in Blade Runner, he should burn “so very, very brightly.”
Venice Maintain your top dog status as the game begins. Your bigger problem is growing into actual victory, which will take playing every aspect of the game wisely lest you be overtaken by lesser lights. You must preserve your colonies in the Balkans against often constant Ottoman threats. You need to expand on the mainland where you can without courting the wrath of all others upon you; historically, this was the disaster of Agnadello, which Machiavelli said cost Venice the efforts of eight centuries. You should patronize strategically to boost your VP total and ability profile. And you should always ensure lots of florins in your treasury; each turn end that you have 20+ florins brings VP to you. Weather your weaker doges and exploit your best; above all, the incomparable Leonardo Loredan
Grant: What has been the feedback of your playtesters?
Paul: One recent tester, Stephen Franco, made a comment that was truly gratifying: “Similar to what actually happened historically, the game is a free for all in a confined space, making for entertaining and unexpected outcomes. Great game.” That “knife fight in a phone booth” vibe, which I’ve always loved in games like Cuba Libre, has been shining forth in Foxes and Lions.
There has been a similar reaction from testers both internal and external at select conventions. That said, we are about to extend TTS testing more widely, followed by Vassal testing down the road. There may be very different reactions, concerns, and suggestions there. We look forward to all of it. Like myself, my core testing group of ten people has been very appreciative of the “thesis-level” interests of the game, and they have been amazing with suggesting how to capture the game’s theses in a way that is compelling for players while faithful to the history, as much as any game can be.
The area in which testers have been the most helpful is with implementation of the non-player great powers. That took a lot of play and effort on their part, and their ideas got us to a place where we are now very happy. Joe Dewhurst has also been terrific in helping us calibrate the greats too.
Grant: What do you feel the design excels at?
Paul: Recreating the feeling of the political and cultural climate in which Machiavelli labored, and in which he continually agonized over his beloved Florence’s fate, not to mention Italy’s. The game also has plenty of the paranoia, second-guessing, and treachery that characterized the era, but as I mentioned earlier, above all it’s a game about Machiavelli’s ideas and ideals, however pragmatically or provocatively he expressed them.
That testers have talked mid-game and afterward about Machiavelli’s deepest political concerns—that they have gotten beyond the image of the treacherous Machiavel of the Shakespearean stage in Richard III or the like—is what most gratifies me. Foxes and Lions is meant to stimulate conversation, including about our own political moment when democratic republics are in grave danger indeed. The “Machiavellian moment” is that invoked by John Pocock’s great book—the moment when any state, especially a republic, realizes its utter, temporal fragility in the wake of Fortuna. And when such a state realizes its own contradictions and failings are as dangerous to its survival as any external threat.
An example of how Machiavelli remains front and center in our game is found in three event cards dedicated to his incredible body of work, not just The Prince. Here are these cards, with a brief comment following.
We wanted our game to have some events that reflect the diversity of Machiavelli’s thought and literary output. We also wanted the event effects to tie into those key works and to be usable by any player. With the first card above, the focus is squarely on The Prince and the Discourses on Livy as political explorations of de facto princedoms and republics respectively (bearing in mind that each text explores the ostensible subject of the other too). The second card puts us in the realm of military theory and historiography; the Florentine Histories are in fact the subject of a scholarly book on which I have been working for years now, so I really wanted it to appear. Lastly, the third card always generates the most belly laughs at the table, focused as it is on Machiavelli’s scandalous sex comedy, a tale of cuckoldry and trickery worthy of the ancient comedian, Plautus. The card effect puts quite a hit on a rival, but the mockery the player endures is perhaps even more stinging. This card has had some wonderfully odd uses (e.g., as mentioned above, Savonarola instigating a cuckolding of Julius II has gone down in my tester group as legendary).
Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?
Paul: My next game, a design on my own and not in any existing series framework, is called Catasto. I have a prototype now that I plan to share at Circle DC next spring. This is another Renaissance game, but about something that hasn’t been treated before in games to my knowledge—Renaissance tax evasion. The Florentine catasto of 1427 is an extraordinarily important document in late medieval and Renaissance social history. In essence a combination of census and property assessment, the catasto permitted political appointees the right to dig into their fellow citizens’ wealth and other holdings to be sure everyone was paying their fair share. This was especially important in the context of ongoing military conflicts between Tuscany and the ambitious Visconti of Milan, all of which had to be funded.
The game explores how far Florentine families would go to hide their assets, and how far their enemies would go to expose those assets while protecting their own from scrutiny. An especially influential (yet very different) design is Tyler Brown’s 23 Knives on the conspiracy to eliminate Julius Caesar. That game uses some very clever mechanics to show how Romans hid, revealed, or unwillingly had exposed their positions on Caesar. The game also allows that the assassination may or may not ultimately succeed. This has been helpful in thinking through how my Florentine players in Catasto might go about concealing their wealth (or excusing it somehow once uncovered). There will also be a tension between seeking to be the catasto investigator and effectively hiding your family’s gains, however ill-gotten.
I’m also working on outlines for a prequel and sequel expansion to Foxes and Lions—no promises and don’t take this as anything from GMT! Just exploring so far, but very much on my mind. The prequel would be set in the 1464-1493 timeframe and feature the Italy of Lorenzo il Magnifico. While military matters remain important there (and Genoa would be a playable power too), there is overall less chance of collective defeat to the great powers. There is much more focus on behind the scenes skullduggery and espionage in that one, including conspiracies like the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy to eliminate the Medici hatched by factions across Italy, including Pope Sixtus IV.
As the main Foxes and Lions game covers the 1494-1527 period, any sequel would cover 1528-1559 (the year of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis that in essence ended the Italian Wars). That era would see a very high chance of collective defeat throughout and great transformations in the situation (e.g., Florence and Tuscany morphing into an eventual Grand Duchy, Venice’s overseas position worsening, Naples finally accepting its dependent status, etc.). If this envisioned triptych for Foxes and Lions comes to pass, I imagine it along the lines of the amazing Fire In the Lake with its prequel and sequel, and the last bit of Foxes and Lions would definitely have a “Fall of Saigon” feel of desperation. Again, no promises, but lots of passion and research on my part in these early days. We have to finish the main stage drama of Foxes and Lions first!
And after (or perhaps a bit alongside) all that, I am working on a CDG game on Skanderbeg, hero of my wife’s home country of Albania, as well as a game on Savonarola and the power of Renaissance rhetoric. I have no lack of projects, but of course the contingencies of time and space remain challenges. Still, good challenges to have!
Empire of Grass: The Conquests of Gengis Khan is a solitaire card-wargame of the Mongol invasion of Eurasia in the twelfth century under Genghis (Chinggis) Khan. You play the Great Khan, commanding his armies as he conquers territories, recruits other nomads into his army, and either garrisons or razes cities.
The map of your conquests is made through placing cards which represent the regions of Eurasia that the Mongols conquered (or tried to). As you expand you have to take care as neighbouring kingdoms may appear to challenge you and your allies can desert or even rebel. An optional game allows for an uncertain world with the cards randomised.
Strategic level American Civil War on a postcard. The map of the Confederacy is divided into areas. The U.S player must strangle the Confederacy and reduce their will to continue fighting. Players use a standard deck of playing cards to activate armies (three Confederate and up to six Union) for movement and combat. Units can fight enemy armies in the same area. Combat is done by rolling 1D6, adding combat strength (for the Union) or Resistance Level (for the Confederates) and comparing results. Highest result wins. Losses are taken in retreats or in step losses. There are up to eight turns, each of which is six months. The key mechanic is the Confederate Resistance Level (CRL). As Union armies occupy areas, the CRL falls. If the CRL falls to zero before the end of turn 8, the Union player wins, otherwise the Confederate player wins.
Morgan’s A’ Comin’ is the fourth game in the Pocket Battle Games Series from LPS, Inc.
Rebel raider John H. Morgan defies orders, crossing the Ohio River in the summer of 1863 to bring war to the Yankees! All across the Midwest his incursion results in numerous alarms, property damage, and Union fears that he will link up with Robert E. Lee. While the raid succeeds in diverting a small Union army away from Bragg, the fierce pace and determined Union resistance wears the invaders away to little more than a small band, all being captured in the end. Could Morgan have tipped the balance on not one, but two fronts?
General Orders: Sengoku Jidai pits two competing daimyo against one another in a fight for control over crucial battlefields in 16th-century Japan. Deploy your commanders to seize powerful advantages, secure valuable supply lines, and capture well-defended forts — all while protecting your vulnerable HQ. This standalone game introduces new strategic waterways, ships, and devastating siege weaponry across two battle maps.
From award-winning design duo David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, this compact two-player game combines the dynamism of a wargame with the cut-throat decision-making of worker-placement games.
During the summer of 2019, we were introduced to Maurice Suckling and his very interesting design Freeman’s Farm 1777 from Worthington Publishing and really enjoyed the mechanics and how they all came together to create an interactive and interesting look at the Battle of Saratoga during the American Revolution. I was very impressed with Maurice and his appraoch to design and we have followed him every since and played many of his great designs. including Hidden Strike: American Revolution, Chancellorsville 1863 and 1565 Siege of Malta and Crisis: 1914. In this entry in the Best 3 Games with…Series I wanted to highlight the games of Maurice Suckling and share those that I have had the best experience with.
3. Freeman’s Farm 1777 from Worthington Publishing
Freeman’s Farm 1777 is the first in the Battle Formations Series from Worthington Publishing that are designed for both solitaire and two players. The focus of the system is on the individual formations that appeared on the battlefield and places the players in the role of overall commander to make decisions about which formations to activate and how to use those formations to position themselves to attack the enemy. The key to these decisions is the morale of those formations as each command utilizes one of their levels of morale and if pushed too far, through attacking or being attacked, the formation will be forced to take a morale test to see if it will break.
There are a couple of things that I really liked about this one as I felt it told the story of the style of fighting of the time and incorporated some elements that were very important. This series has centered the focus on formations and how they can interact with each other on the battlefield. It simply looks at how the relative positioning of the formations opens up opportunities for attack or provides advantages or disadvantages to one side or the other. If you are above an enemy formation on high ground or have a superior firing angle on a formation in battle, shouldn’t you gain an advantage? And furthermore, if you are relatively inexperienced green forces and are facing the smoking gun barrels of your enemy’s cannons, don’t you think that your attempts to return fire will be less effective than if firing with hardened troops from cover? This spatial element is a major inclusion in the design and really feels right and makes your choices as commander that much more difficult as you decide how to activate your troops to take advantage of the situation. I really have enjoyed this spatial relationship during my plays of the game and think that the approach is very novel.
The other element that I really enjoyed was the concept of morale. The design has the player controlling several different Formation Cards that represent their troops on the battlefield and each has their own set of actions they are able to take. The key for these Formation Cards is that each time they are activated through the play of the corresponding Activation Card they have to pay for this activation. The payment comes in the form of paying 1 point of Morale from the Morale Track by moving the cube marker down one space. The formation may also lose Morale as they attack and are attacked throughout the game. The moment that a formation’s morale reaches 5 on the Morale Track they have to conduct a Morale Test to see if they will break and leave the field. This Morale Test is conducted by rolling a single d6 with any modifiers from Tactics Cards that the player controls and then comparing that result to the current Morale of the formation (i.e. where the Morale marker is currently on the Morale Track). If the die roll is higher than the marker location, the formation has failed the test and becomes broken. If the roll is equal to or less than the marker location, the formation passes the test and remains on the battlefield. Each successive reduction in the Morale of that formation will trigger another test which will be harder and harder to pass as the number decreases. Soldiers spend their strength and will to fight in each skirmish and as they are pushed more and more, and in the face of losses and exhaustion, reach a point where their will to fight is gone and they break. I like how the design dealt with this issue and it feels right.
The game uses wooden cubes, disks and sticks to mark formations on the board and it looks like those pictures in text books showing the location of troops during these historical battles. This was a nice thematic touch for me and helped me to get into the mind set of a Revolutionary War battle.
I wrote a series of Action Point posts covering the various aspects of the game. You can read those at the following links:
Action Point 1 – Game board that represents the locations and roles of both sides’ formations as well as their relative positions on the battlefield.
Action Point 2 – Formation Cards and how the Activation Cards are used to command and how Morale Tests work.
Action Point 3 – Momentum Cubes and how they are used to purchase the all important Tactics Cards.
Action Point 4 – Examples of combat and discuss the way the dice are used.
Here is a look at our video review of the game:
2. Chancellorsville 1863 from Worthington Publishing
While the next game on this list uses the same system, this entry in the series is definitely improved and matured and I very much liked the blind movement aspect which was added. Chancellorsville 1863 covers the Battle of Chancellorsville during the American Civil War using a similar system to Freeman’s Farm1777.
At the start of the game some units on each side are visible, which is mostly because they are adjacent (units adjacent to enemy units are always visible on the main map.) Other units are hidden, placed on spaces on their respective mini map hidden behind a screen, in one of a variety of spaces. The mini map is a smaller representation of the main map, with the same movement arrows and nexus points but with the same scale for ‘spaces’ so the same blocks fit on both maps. Each side has their own mini map. If units move into a space on the mini map that is adjacent to a space occupied by a unit on the main map, that unit becomes visible and is transferred to the main map.
There are also some spaces found deep inside the enemy’s lines of communication and moving onto those spaces on the mini map compels an immediate transfer to the main map. In addition, there are some spaces where the lead Union units are visible. This represents Jeb Stuart’s cavalry tracking the Union advance on the Confederate left. This added aspect really makes the game and creates a sense of tension for the players as they simply don’t know where all of the enemy units are located and have to play for those units coming up on their rear even as they are engaged in major battles along the front lines.
Activations are also slightly different from the Freeman’s Farm game as each side only has 15 activations per game but each activation card identifies at least 2 commanders to activate and move. This is very necessary because the Union side has more units to move, and farther to move them to put pressure on objective locations. This has been balanced with the addition of fortifications that allow the defender to set one die per combat at the number desired. This makes for some very interesting decisions about whether to attack or not and how. I have really enjoyed this one as the system is obviously evolving and introducing new elements. I am glad that the designer has decided to take the system to the next level as there are lots of opportunities and applications to various battles for the system.
Crisis: 1914 is a game of international brinkmanship meaning if you back down too soon, you lose. If you back down too late you lose. But you have hawks and doves in your cabinet and in your government, and out of these conflicting views you must somehow formulate a coherent response to the crisis to win the day and prevent war. The game is played with players building a tableau of event cards that will score them a certain number of points, some building off of each of the type of cards played, with some of the cards increasing the Tension level of Europe at the time. If the Tension gets too high The Great War will break out and the player causing it by the play of a card will lose with the others winning based on their total Prestige Points. It sounds really simple, and the game is not overly complex, but there is a lot of strategy to how you play your cards, when you play them and how are you are willing to push your luck each round.
There are 3 concepts at the heart of Crisis: 1914 including Prestige, Tension and Diplomatic Pressure. Diplomatic Pressure is how you score Prestige and reflects the skill at which you play your cards to keep your faction moving ahead of the others while simultaneously balancing the level of Tension. Tension is how you lose. Every card has a DP value and you apply DP by playing cards. The player with the most Diplomatic Pressure at the end of a turn earns Prestige points. There are other ways of scoring Prestige points too, but this is the most important one. Prestige is how you win. The player with the most Prestige at the end of the game is the winner.
I have played this one 3 times now and and I cannot wait for the next opportunity to play. It is best with 5-players so make sure you get the right group and give yourselves a chance to really learn the game as each faction’s deck is completely asymmetrical and repeated plays will help you understand each faction’s strengths and strategies. While this game is not necessarily a wargame, but more of a war themed Euro game with a bit of negotiation and tension as you build your tableau of cards, we had a great time with it and really feel that the game is a bit under the radar of folks and should be one of those games that is played at conventions as it seats up to 5 players and is really quite good.
Here is a link to a RAW video we did after our 2nd play while attending Buckeye Game Fest in 2024:
There you have it. My Best 3 Games with…Designer Maurice Suckling! He has done so many good games and the narrative and historical immersion of all of them are top notch. He is definitely a designer to keep an eye on and I know that he has multiple games currently in design including Rebellion: Britannia from GMT Games, Peace 1905 from Fort Circle Games (we played a prototype of this one at SDHistCon a few years ago and it is top notch) and The Emperor’s Choice from Worthington Publishing (I played a short game of this at WBC and it is very good).
What are your favorite games from Maurice Suckling?
In 1539, a small Spanish garrison of troops numbering 3,500 men held the Albanian village of Castelnuovo for 22 days against the massive Ottoman army consisting of over 54,000 Turk soldiers. This siege took place as a part of the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle for control of the Mediterranean Sea in July 1539 at the walled town of Castelnuovo, which is the location of present-day Herceg Novi, Montenegro. After days of open trench warfare and more than a month of smaller combats, skirmishes, assaults and bombardments from the Turkish navy, the last Spanish defenders fell ending the siege. Castelnuovo 1539 is a wargame that focuses on this siege designed by Francisco Ronco. The defenders are safe behind sturdy walls and battlements but time and continual shelling from the Ottomans will lead to assaults over the walls. The battle is hopeless for the defenders but they can win the game by doing enough damage to the Ottomans to end their campaign and stop them from invading further into the Albania and then onto Spain and the rest of Europe. The game is very well produced using wooden blocks for soldiers, stylized walls, siege trenches and cannon along with ships and the board is also beautifully illustrated. The game is a block wargame where the strength of units are hidden from the opponent and plays pretty quickly in less than 90 minutes and really is a great representation of the battle and its history.
In Action Point 1, we took a look at the beautiful Game Board and its area movement scheme. In Action Point 2, we examined the units available to both sides and compared their relative strengths and weaknesses. In this Action Point, we will take a look at the different types of Command Cards and discuss how they are used.
Command Cards
In Castelnuovo 1539, there are 72 Command Cards with 36 unique cards per player side that are used to drive the tactical asymmetry of the siege. Players will draw hands of 4 cards during Siege Rounds or 7 cards during high-intensity Assault Rounds to be used for maneuvers around the board, bombardments and various special events. The Spanish and Ottoman factions utilize distinct and asymmetrical decks meaning that their available action options differ to reflect historical realities of the forces and their roles. I have already said this in previous posts on this game but the asymmetry is so very well done in this game and each side truly feels different from one another which creates a really interesting tactical challenge as players have to understand not only their own deck and its capabilities but those of their enemy to be able to effectively prosecute or defend against the siege.
There are 5 distinct types of Command Cards in the game, which include Action Cards, Order Cards, Combat Cards, Reaction Cards and Immediate Effect/Event Cards. Each has their own purpose and place in the game and I very much like the way the cards create opportunities for each player. Let’s take a bit of a deeper look into the types of cards, give a bit of a background on their general use and provide some examples.
First off are Action Cards, which are used by the players to execute specific actions such as engineering, trench-digging or board-manipulation tasks, such as generating Trench Points to advance through or destroy Spanish bastions. The cards basic purpose is to activate units to take actions on the board.
Order Cards typically dictate the movement, repositioning and coordination of military units, marches, and artillery batteries across the board. These are the most common of the card types and are frankly the most important as you cannot use the other cards to attack until you are in position to do so.
Combat Cards are the force multiplication cards and are played during combat resolution to enhance striking power, modify dice roll or trigger pre-combat attacks like the specialized Ottoman volley actions. These Combat Cards are best used as a hold in your hand to use them when they most benefit the player. This can be challenging as holding too many will mean you are not drawing the Order Cards that you need to advance on the enemy.
Reaction Cards are played out of turn during your opponent’s Action Phase to counter maneuvers or provide mid-combat support for engaged troops. These cards can be lifesavers and are important to any good strategy.
Finally, there are Immediate Effect/Event Cards that are used to inject the historical narrative into the game and to replicate the historical action. These cards can also be focused on environmental factors such as the faith of the defenders/attackers, fire devices or the like that will change the flow and pace of the battle instantly.
Each of the 5 different type of Command Cards have a unique color coded icon to assist the players in understanding the capabilities of the card and the appropriate phase to use the card in. These 5 icons are as follows:
Keep in mind though that several of the Command Cards will have 2 icons listed which means that they belong to either of the types and can be played as either during a play. You cannot play the same card again and use its other icon though. This duality provides the players with a bit more flexibility and creates a more engaging and free flowing game. In my opinion, sometimes games which rely on cards to activate units for moves or attacks can suffer from poor draws. While that can still be an issue in Castelnuovo 1539, the dual icon cards make this a bit less of a problem.
Here is a look at the makeup of the Command Cards by type per faction. Keep in mind that dual icon cards will count double in the categories they represent.
As you can see, the Spanish have more icons represented on their 36 cards than the Ottomans demonstrated by the Total Type of Card icons for the Spanish being 50 (1.39 icons per card) as compared to only 44 (1.22 icons per card) for the Ottomans. This is not a huge difference but does give the Spanish player a bit more flexibility in their cards draws and they will be able to be a bit more nimble than the attacking Ottomans. The Spanish have the advantage in the number of Action icons of 18 to 16. Remember that Action Cards are typically used for specific actions such as engineering, trench-digging or board-manipulation tasks. The Ottomans have the advantage in Order icons which means they have more move and march cards than the Spanish. Keep in mind that the onus to attack lies with the Ottoman player as they will have to move their units on the board to be able to attack the Spanish defenders. Also keep in mind the Bombard is an Order and the Ottoman has more of these type of card icons than the Spanish player 5 vs. 3. One of the most glaring differences is the high number of Reaction icons that the Spanish player has. These type of cards are used in response to your opponent’s card play and include things like Counterattacks, Arquebusiers, which gives a free attack when Ottoman units come adjacent to any Arquebusier unit on the board or Friendly Fire, which allows free rolls against Ottoman units located in between their firing artillery and the Spanish.
Another key card for the Spanish include Cheveaux de Frise, which allows the Spanish player to place a chevaux-de-frise cube in a Wall area or a Bastion. Each cube allows the Spanish player to ignore 1 hit in combat. These cubes are not destroyed by absorbing the hit. In addition, if a combat is tied in an area with these cubes, the Spanish player wins the battle. This card is a huge advantage for the Spanish and these should be played as soon as possible in order to minimize the damage taken from the Ottoman onslaught. If the Ottomans occupy an area with chevaux-de-frise and no enemies, the cubes are automatically destroyed. Another very important card for the Spanish player is Comisado. This Action Card can be used as a normal attack or, during a Siege Round, to make a special attack called the Camisado. The Camisados were night raids carried out by the Tercios troops in reduced numbers, specifically intended to sabotage and attack the Ottoman camps, trying to eliminate the enemies while they slept and to inflict material damage to the camp. The Spanish player selects a group of Spanish units, which may include the Leader Sarmiento, and these units can attack an area that is a maximum of 2 areas away from the selected group. This is a hit and run type of attack that gives the Spanish the powerful opportunity to sally forth from the walls to enact damage and then retreat back to safety.
The Ottomans have their own tricks with special cards including For the Faith. This card can only be played in combat if there is at least 1 Azab unit involved. When used, all dice rolled by Azab units (not Janissaries or Sipahi) in combat have a +1 bonus to hit, but at the end of the battle, the Ottoman player must eliminate 3 points of strength from the Azab units. This card is a tradeoff but the price paid can be very much worth it if the dice are kind.
Both sides have access to cards that perform special attacks or provide bonuses like Fire Devices which is a Combat Card that allows the player to roll 3d6 against enemy units at the start of Combat, when the card is revealed. Any result of 5 or 6 counts as 1 hit, to be assigned by the opponent. It can only be played in areas that contain, or are adjacent to, Walls or Bastions built by the Spanish player. These type of cards are very important to the game and its combat system as the weaker units are the fewer dice they will roll and the chances of hits are lessened.
The Command Cards are very well done and truly create the setting for the asymmetry of the game. These cards serve as a highly effective, dual-purpose engine of the game’s dynamic card driven design and I think that the designer did a fantastic job in creating a very balanced and playable game that provides an opportunity for “victory” for both players. The Command Cards are highly effective because they completely abstract command and logistics into a tight tactical choice with units only moving or initiating combat when activated by a card.
In Action Point 4, we will take a look at the 2 different types of rounds including a Siege Round and an Assault Round and how they differ.
If you are interested, I was able to shoot the following review/overview/summary video with the designer Francisco Ronco after playing the game earlier this year:
With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
#98: The Balkan Wars from Imperial Elegy: The Road to the Great War 1850-1920 from VUCA Simulations
Imperial Elegy: The Road to the Great War 1850-1920 is a massive card driven game that blends diplomacy, warfare, and statecraft and feels a bit akin to games like Here I Stand and Virgin Queen from GMT Games, which are both grand scale sweeping epics that play multiplayers and take a day to play. Players play as 1 of 6 major powers in the game including Germany/Prussia, the United Kingdom, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The game is quite grand and ambitious as it covers 70 years near the end of the Victorian Era and the Progressive Ear and sees quite a lot of global change and competition between the great powers of the time. The game is a Card Driven Game and uses Action Cards as a type of currency to spend for their Command Points or the printed event to take actions such as recruiting armies and navies, industrialize, moving fleets and armies around the globe, influencing minor powers and establish colonies in Africa, India and the Pacific Ocean. The cards are all tied to the history of the period but the game can be played very much as a sandbox allowing players to explore strategies by trailblazing new horizons or following history.
Before we dive into today’s chosen card The Balkan Wars, I want to first make sure you know about Mandatory Event Cards in the game and how they work as they work slightly differently from normal Action Cards. Mandatory Event Cards are all lime green colored and bear a large block “M” just under the CP Value listed in the upper left hand corner. Mandatory Events, as the name suggests, must be played for their events. However, when playing a Mandatory Event Card, players trigger the event and also receive the CP to spend on various actions. The events on Mandatory Event Cards are always resolved first before the CP are utilized. If a Mandatory Event Card is discarded, the event will immediately trigger. There is no way around these cards and they are included in the game to drive the action historically and interject the various special circumstances that drove the rise and decline of these Victorian Age empires. The player that discarded the card resolves the event as if they were the active player. If two such Mandatory Event Cards are discarded in the same impulse the events are resolved in turn order.
Some of the events that occurred historically prior to 1914 were ultimately precursors to The Great War in many ways. The Balkan Wars were two conflicts fought in 1912 and 1913 that stripped the Ottoman Empire of almost all its remaining European territory and directly set the stage for World War I. The Balkan Wars saw similar levels of carnage as machine guns and artillery equipped with hydraulic recoil mechanisms were used in large numbers. Politically, they highlight the volatile nature of international politics in the Balkan Peninsula and are included as a Mandatory Event to ultimately drive up the World Tension Track on a path toward the outbreak of World War I. When played, the World Tension Track will increase by +1 and if the Ottoman player controls any territory in the Balkans other than Istanbul, or has Diplomatic Influence with countries, they will have a chance to lose their control there as a result of the chaos of the First and Second Balkan Wars. If these checks fail, and they will incur a -1 DRM for each Ottoman Army that is located anywhere in the Balkans, non-player armies will be placed in those locations and will increase the difficulty for the Ottomans to gain a foothold in this area. According to the designer Michael Lorino, mechanically this event causes all kinds of trouble in the Balkans, as intended. Similar to the Mandatory Event Card Empire of the Sun, the original event was a bit more involved and had players fight an actual war. In an effort to keep the game in the playable zone, he decided to abstract these wars through a die roll.
I very much enjoy the concept of a Mandatory Event, although they are never convenient for someone at the table as they typically have negative effects for at least 1 faction. But I very much like the approach taken here with The Balkan Wars with the -1 DRM for control of a territory and its thematic connection with the Ottoman Empire’s presence in the region generating tension and setting off these Balkan Wars.
A Bulgarian postcard depicting the Battle of Lule Burgas.
The Balkan Wars were two conflicts that took place in the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. In the First Balkan War, the four Balkan states of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war upon the Ottoman Empire and defeated it, in the process stripping the Ottomans of their European provinces, leaving only Eastern Thrace under Ottoman control. In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought against the other four combatants of the first war. It also faced an attack from Romania from the north. As a result of these wars, the Ottoman Empire lost the bulk of its territory in Europe. Although not involved as a combatant, Austria-Hungary became relatively weaker as a much enlarged Serbia pushed for union of the South Slavic peoples. The Balkan Wars set the stage for the July Crisis of 1914 and was a prelude to the First World War.
We have put out several pieces of content covering Imperial Elegy and find it to be a fantastic game. These include written posts and videos. You can visit those by following the links below:
Unboxing Video:
Video Review:
Summary of Solitaire Bots presented by our friend James:
I do love a good Napoleonics wargame and The Conquerors Series from Shakos is really very good as we have played a few games over the years. They have a new volume in that series on Kickstarter that is designed by a tandem of great designers in Brian Asklev (Baltic Empires from GMT Games and 1812: Napoleon’s Fateful March from VUCA Simulations) and Fred Serval (A Gest of Robin Hood and Red Flag Over Paris from GMT Games as well as A Very Civil Whist from PHALANX) called Napoléon 1870: The Collapse of the Second French Empire from Shakos. This game is set in a different period but uses the same system to tell the story of the collapse of the Second French Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870’s. We reached out to Brian to get some answers to our questions and he was more than interested in working with us.
Grant: Brian welcome back to the blog. What is your new upcoming game Napoléon 1870 about?
Brian: Thanks – Its nice to be back As the title hints at its about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and covers the opening weeks of that war.
Grant: Why was this a game that you wanted to design?
Brian: As a Frenchman and a Dane, Fred Serval (my co-designer) and I talked about how the wars of German unification (vs. Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870) are massively overlooked in our hobby, and we decided to go about to fix this.
I am a sucker for conflicts which had a decisive impact on history as well as wars where the belligerents have very asymmetric strengths and weaknesses at both the tactical and operational levels so 1870 fits this bill perfectly. The 2nd Schleswig War in 1864 would also fit this bill but is a far less interesting topic for a game due to its static nature. This leaves out 1866 and I might just return and do that campaign in this series
Grant: What does the subtitle “The Collapse of the Second French Empire” mean?
Brian: The opening battles in August 1870, which led to most of the French army being trapped and besieged at Metz, was a crippling blow to the French Second Empire under Napoleon III (nephew to the way more famous Emperor of the First Empire, Napoléon Bonaparte). His attempts to salvage the situation led to the remaining part of the army and the emperor himself being trapped at Sedan and France becoming a republic again on September 4th.
Grant:Why does TheConquerors Series work for this battle in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870’s?
Brian: It’s a very flexible system so it can easily be adapted to different periods. Its fatigue system and uncertain movement system is perfectly suited to show some of the difference between the French and Prussian armies in this campaign
Grant:What unique challenges to this well-tried and highly acclaimed campaign system are explored here?
Brian: We have added Objective Cards which allow each player to secretly draw one of their sides 5 Objective Cards before play begins. This card then lists some additional ways of earning VP’s for your side and thus you will play differently in each game depending on what you are trying to achieve besides the usual VP’s for losses and controlling specific locations.
In addition, Event Cards allowed us to add some aspects, such as logistics, which we felt was underrepresented in previous games in the series. As the Event Card use in the system is so flexible we could add this without any additional rules to the series as such.
Grant:Who is your co-designer on this effort? What has their experience brought to the table?
Brian: Fred Serval of Red Flag over Paris and A Gest of Robin Hood fame. We work very well together and find it easy to build upon the ideas of the other as well as stop those ideas that only worked well in our heads In addition, he has a lot of knowledge about the period as well as being able to read and understand French sources.
Grant: What was the division of labor between the 2 of you?
Brian: The design started when we lived in the same town and saw each other regularly, so it was easy for us to have brainstorming sessions and test ideas so we only divided the labor between us for the design of the various scenarios once we were sure the main scenario and the decks worked as we wanted them to. Besides this we decided it would be best if Fred did the translation into French
Grant:How does designing a game in an established system work? Any constraints on your thoughts for the battle?
Brian: I love designing in established series as I have a solid framework from the start and can do all my reading and thinking from the perspective of the series ruleset. This was also how I started as a designer (with GMT´s Musket & Pike Series). In many ways I am probably more of a tinkerer than a designer as I always start with one or more established systems as my basic framework and then expand, merge and tweak those gradually until I end up with something that is very different from my starting point.
If a suitable system is chosen for the conflict the designer seeks to model there should be few constraints apart from the basic parameters of the series in terms of what it does, and what it does not, focus on. One of my only critiques of The Conquerors Series is the lack of logistics and supply rules as I really like such rules both as a player and as a designer (as anyone who has played 1812: Napoleon´s Fateful March will know). Luckily, The Conquerors Series is very flexible and as noted above, we could easily represent the logistic challenges of the war by the inclusion of Event Cards.
Grant:What did you need to make sure to model from the Franco-Prussian War?
Brian: We needed to include and highlight the asymmetry of both of the armies involved: The French had a massively superior rifle called the Chassepot that in and of itself could have won them the war, while the Prussians had far superior artillery. In addition, the French command was very chaotic and disorganized while the Prussians were remarkably well organized and planned considering they were technically the defending side in the war.
Grant: What sources did you consult to get the historical details correct? What one must-read source would you recommend?
Brian: Fred and I consulted several sources, with Fred having the major advantage here of being French speaking. We actually made our own draft versions of the decks and then compared to see where we agreed and where we differed in our choice of focus. To me this was my favorite part of the design process as its very enlightening to see how another person interprets the same source info into card effects and special rules. I would recommend Geoffrey Wawro´s The Franco-Prussian War as a good one-volume book on the conflict.
Grant: What is your overall design goal and thesis with the game?
Brian: My main design goal is always to produce a game that is a solid model of the historical conflict, show players their historical counterpart´s objectives as well as the restrictions they operated under, while being capable of producing plausible alternative outcomes.
When designing in an existing series I naturally adopt that series’ focus and design philosophy, so here we have a system that excels at showing a lot of the friction of war that commanders have little control over and must continually adapt their plans to. Movement rates and combat performance are never certain and both sides have plenty of events that interfere in the operations and capabilities of the other side as well as Must-Play events that can upset the plans of both sides. Historically everything went badly for the French as they were horribly unprepared for the war they started. Within a few days it was obvious that they had to change their overall plan from one of advancing into Germany to one of saving their army from destruction.
I wanted the game to represent this and give the French a chance of winning a sudden death victory by advancing into Germany and repelling their advance forces (and thus shaking up the internal cohesion of the Prussian alliance with the other German states), so the Prussian player is forced to act with some caution in the early phase.
Poor French planning & coordination (represented by initial fatigue levels, pesky Prussian Event Cards and low movement values on their cards) will then often create a situation where the French are in danger of being outmaneuvered and encircled and this next phase in the game will often see the French army trying to fall back in good order and utilize its defensive advantages.
Grant: How does combat work in the design?
Brian: Combat in this series is simple, smooth and elegant. Each side draws a number of cards from their deck and checks the symbols in the bottom corner to see how many losses and fatigue points they cause to the opponent. The number of cards you draw depend on the number of units you have present, their strength and their Fatigue levels. Good defensive terrain as well as unit specific bonuses (clearly shown with icons on the units) may increase the number of cards you draw as well. The two decks are intentionally different. The French deck causes more losses to represent the effect of their Chassepot rifle while the Prussian deck causes more fatigue to represent their superior breechloading artillery.
Grant: What is the area covered by the board? What strategic challenges does it present?
Brian: The game covers only the first phase of the war and thus covers the area of France from (and a bit beyond) the border to Prussia in the east to the area just west of Metz. The fortress of Metz is a key terrain feature on the map and a lot of the late game revolves around it. In game terms it is impassable for the Prussians who have to go around it and control the areas behind it to besiege it. But Metz is not the only VP area on the map and the Prussians have to advance along several axis as well as prevent the French from advancing into their rear and capturing the VP areas inside Prussia. Depending on the Objective Cards drawn for each side some areas may have their VP value further increased, which will make them more important.
Grant:What role does Fatigue play in the design? How do you track this aspect?
Brian: Fatigue is a critical aspect of the system and each unit´s Fatigue Level is tracked on an off-map display which also serves to track its current strength. The Fatigue Track goes from 1 to 8. If a unit´s Fatigue Level goes beyond 4 you draw one less card for the unit in battle, and at the end of the turn if will lose a strength point. If Fatigue reaches 8, the Cohesion of the unit collapses completely and it is eliminated. Players can discard cards at the end of the turn to recover 1 or 2 Fatigue Levels on a unit and units that do nothing for a full turn get to remove all their Fatigue at the end of the turn.
Grant: How does the game use cards? Can you share a few examples with us and explain how they work?
Brian: The series uses cards for movement, combat, Fatigue recovery and for events during your own and the opponents turn, so it is very much a card driven system
Whenever you wish to move a stack you declare who is moving and then draw a card – the number in the upper-right corner is the stacks movement points (with some modifiers from leader presence and the size of the stack)
The icon in the upper left corner show when a card´s event (the text in the middle) is playable:
Cards with a sabre icon are battle events that are (as the name implies) playable during battles.
Cards with your side´s flag are playable when its your turn to move units while cards with the opposing side´s flag are playable in their turn.
Cards with their title in a blue box are played at the start of the turn and generally add reinforcements or effects that last throughout the turn.
Cards with their title in a red box are played immediately and usually represent bad stuff, outside the control of the historical commanders, happening. This could be bad weather but also logistical problems.
The icons in the lower right section show how many fatigue points you get to remove from a unit if you discard this card at the end of the turn while the icons in the lower left section shows how many losses and fatigue points you cause if this card is drawn to resolving a battle.
Disclaimer: The cards below are low-resolution images from the pre-proofreading so they contain small errors that have already been corrected. Blue background cards are from the French Deck while grey background cards are from the Prussian Deck.
Grant: How is victory obtained?
Brian: Victory is obtained by capturing VP cities and causing losses as in the other games in the series. In addition to that we, as mentioned above, added Objective Cards that give players options for scoring additional VP’s by fulfilling the conditions on them.
Grant: What are some general strategies for each of the sides?
Brian: The French are definitely the weaker side in this campaign and will be fighting to prevent their army from being destroyed and the Prussians from placing Metz under siege. But on a unit-on-unit basis the French are usually superior, especially when defending, and in the early game have a chance to inflict enough losses on the Prussians to win a sudden death victory. So the Prussians are on a tight schedule and have a lot to do – but also have to be careful in how they to it.
Grant:What different scenarios are included?
Brian: The main scenario covers the period from the start of the war up to encirclement of Metz and then we have a short scenario covering the battles on the border in the opening days of the war and a short scenario covering the battle of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte.
Assuming we reach all the stretchgoals, there will also be a hypothetical scenario covering the same period as the main scenario but assuming the French command and logistics were better planned and organized. All the scenarios come in a fixed setup version and a free setup version.
Grant: What do you feel the design excels at?
Brian: I think we achieved our goal of showing the different strengths and weaknesses of the two armies. The French, with their accurate and long-ranged Chassepot rifles, will usually cause more losses than they suffer but be forced to fall back to prevent their units’ cohesion from collapsing under the weight of the effective artillery and superior numbers of the Prussians.
Grant:What other designs are you currently working on?
Brian: WAY too many!
I am working on a new Operational level game series with Fred Serval which will include little gamed topics on a vide variety of conflicts in the 1900-1990 time frame. Once we launch this series, we will likely be able to put out titles quickly as we already have several games that are ready to go now.
I am both designer and developer on 3 new games in VUCA Simulation’s Marshals & Quartermasters Series, which currently only consists of 1812: Napoleon´s Fateful March but will soon include games on the 1813 German campaign (by me), 1814 invasion of France (by Pete Manning), 1796 in Italy (by Antonello Salvatucci) and 1812 in Iberia (by me).
For Academy Games I am (hopefully) finalizing games in the Birth of Series on the Vietnam War and the 2nd Punic Wars. The latter is a co-design with Jose Rivero.
I am also working on new games in VUCA Simulation’s War Chronicles Series I started with Thirty Years of Misery that is just coming out now. One of these will also be a co-design with Jose Rivero on Al-Andalus (medieval Spain).
Lastly, I am also doing final testing on The 38th Parallel in Bellica 3rd Generation’s criminally overlooked Campaign Commander Series
If you want to learn more about the game, you can watch this preview video put together by co-designer Fred Serval for the Kickstarter page:
Chicago ’68 is a game about the riots during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, set against the social upheavals of America in the sixties. After the Summer of Love, the Summer of Tear Gas. On one side: the Youth International Party (aka The Yippies) and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (aka the MOBE), on the other: Mayor Daley, the Chicago Police Department and the National Guard. The game unfolds over the course of three days during the Democratic National Convention – from the 26th to the 29th of August, culminating in the nomination of a presidential candidate. There are two victory conditions: one is to gain the most media exposure favorable to your side and the other is to influence the delegate vote and bolster your political aims. The Demonstrators may pivot between these two objectives while the Establishment, although more powerful, must fight and win on both fronts.
Chicago ‘68 supports 1 – 4+ players, featuring asymmetrical card actions and tableau activation. Typical duration of play is about 45 minutes per player.
Nightfighter Command is a WWII soloitaire narrative game where you defend Southern England against the Nazi bombers. Based at Middle Wallop or West Malling RAF base you will be directed to fly against German bombing raids to protect various Naval bases, towns and cities. At first you may struggle with unreliable equipment and inexperienced ground controllers but as you gain experience your skills and eventually the equipment at your disposal will also improve – if you live that long!
Battles of the American Revolution Tri-Pack II: Monmouth, Germantown and Newtown is the second compilation of earlier releases from GMT Games’ Battles of the American Revolution Series. These are tactical level battles at the regimental level with a map scale of approximately 200 yd/hex. We played Germantown and shot the following video review to share our thoughts on the game.
Anmelden
