Crécy is a battle I am both fascinated by and terrified of. I have read so much about this battle, and yet I still feel like I have only the most tenuous grasp on what happened that day in Ponthieu. It is one of the most famous and best recorded medieval battles, but the abundance of sources has produced such a confusing mess of contradiction and myth that untangling it could be the work of a lifetime. Many historians have offered their opinions on what happened, but there is still significant disagreement on elements of the chronology, the array of both armies, and even the battle’s location. Still, for all the hair pulling that thinking about Crécy causes me, I can’t help but be fascinated by it and the attempt to understand what happened at what might be the Hundred Years War’s most important battle (potentially rivaled only by Poitiers a decade later, really). If the English lost Crécy it is likely that they would not have been able to afford to keep the war going, but their dramatic victory, while it yielded only moderate success in its immediate aftermath, did much to sustain the war and encouraged Edward III to continue pursuing his claim to the French throne. With that fascination in mind, I decided to play a couple of games on Crécy that I had sitting on my shelf. Below are my general thoughts on both. As a note, I’m going to try and keep this brief because my options are really to skip over this topic lightly or to lose myself to it for months, and as much fun as the latter could be I simply haven’t the time.
Black Prince – The Battle of Crecy
Published in Strategy and Tactics magazine number 260 and designed by Dick Vohlers, this version of Crécy uses the medieval battles system first designed by SPI back in the 1970s – it is even packaged with a reprint of a game on Nájera, using the battle’s alternative name of Navarette, which uses the same system and was designed by Rob Mosca and originally published by SPI in 1979. So, this is a venerable system updated to use for a new battle.
So far, I have only dabbled in game designs from the 1970s, so I’m no expert in design trends of the era, but what I saw in this system has me really intrigued by it. It’s quite a light system that plays quickly and has far less table referencing than I expected. Combat is resolved by referencing the attacker’s armor type versus the defender’s armor type using a matrix that reminded me very much of Men of Iron, and presumably helped inspire that game. This will give you a range of numbers, like “2...6”, this is the range you must roll between using 2d6. Success means dealing a hit to the unit, who then rolls a d6 and compares it to a column on the morale chart that lines up with their morale rating. This will yield no effect or add a number of Rout counters to them.
The initial set up for Crécy. There was no turn track for the game so I have made an impromptu one on the top left with the various French reinforcements units that are due to arrive.
We’ll get to Rout later, for now let’s consider this system. It is light on dice roll modifiers and that means that it resolves quite quickly. I could see it getting bogged down if there are too many different unit types in play at a time, but Crécy had blessedly few, and I found it pretty easy to learn off the various tables without even trying. This meant that even though I spent a lot of time rolling dice, the game clipped along at a good pace because I wasn’t constantly referencing a play aid or combat results table. This is far from a perfect system, but for something light and quick I really liked it and would be curious to see how it has been used elsewhere.
Apologies for my slightly wonky photo of the initial archery duel. The Genoese approached and did very little. Some English troops have engaged them in melee while the longbowmen plink at them at range. Meanwhile the French knights maneuver - I really like moving double-sized counters around on a map.
Rout is another system I quite like, and one that reminded me of this game’s approximate contemporary Manassas. At the start of each turn, both players rally any units stacked with a leader – removing all Rout markers from them – and then all units who still have Rout markers flee a number of hexes (usually equal to the number of markers on them) towards their board edge. This is much simpler than the system used in Manassas, and I think a little poorer for it, but I still really like the tempo of trying to rally units and send them back into combat. I also think it does a good job representing how in medieval warfare, victory was often determined more by who was prepared to stay in the field longer rather than by inflicting enormous casualties on the enemy. It’s a good start and I think with some tweaking this could be a really cool system.
The second turn brought far more dramatic results, the Rout counters have multiplied with the Genoese scoring a few successes but far more losses.
That’s my praise for the system, as for the game itself I am less positive. I’m not convinced by the scenario design present in Crécy. I, of course, must object to just how terrible the crossbows are – I can acknowledge that the Genoese had a bad day at Crécy but the disparity between them and the longbows is kind of ludicrous. There is also some pretty classic pro-longbow propaganda, which besides annoying my history of archery brain also makes for a mostly frustrating play experience. The French don’t really feel like they have much of a chance here. They are badly hampered by rules restricting their movement and effectiveness while they get machine-gunned by English longbows. Yes, the game played quickly thanks to the light system, but I just didn’t feel like it was a very interesting game.
The French knights finally charge and suffer very badly at the hands of the English longbowmen. After this point the game kind of lost its steam - with so much of the French army in Rout even if a few could be rallied and more troops brought in there wasn’t much chance of clawing anything back.
As a game about Crécy it very much traded in old myths and simplistic understandings of medieval warfare. The arrogant French ride down their own Genoese to charge the English men-at-arms, ignoring the archers as much as possible. Meanwhile, the steadfast dismounted English outperform the snobby French in every way. While it is possible to find primary sources that will give this narrative of the battle – as I mentioned there are many accounts of the battle – it represents a lack of serious source criticism to simply replicate those highly biased accounts. That this makes for an unsatisfying game means that this doesn’t even feel like a very interesting choice to me.
Playing this system got a lot of gears going in my head. There are some very cool ideas here and I’m definitely interested in exploring it further. I think with a little development this could be a great set of rules for some light medieval wargaming. I’m now very curious to try Navarette/Nájera to see if that game’s scenario design excites me more.
Men of Iron - Crécy
It will probably surprise no one that my second game was Richard Berg’s Men of Iron. I’ve written about this a few times in the past, to put it mildly. Crécy was the last scenario I had yet to play in the original Men of Iron box, so I wanted to do something a little special for it. I’m not going to bother repeating my thoughts on Men of Iron as a whole, instead I’m just going to jump straight to my thoughts on the Crécy scenario.
Initial deployment for Men of Iron’s Crécy. You can see already that the English formation is quite different from in S&T’s version.
Overall, I had fun playing Crécy but I also feel like it leaned in to some of Men of Iron’s most prominent problems. Notably it has far too many individual Battles. As I’ve said before, I find Men of Iron’s Continuation system really struggles when there are lots of options for who to activate as it’s usually just more worthwhile to keep activating the same two to three Battles over and over again rather than trying to bring a new force into play. I really felt that in Crécy, where I didn’t even both bringing on a single off-map French reinforcement. Philip VI sat back and watched the Genoese pretty much win the battle for him.
After a few turns the French manage to punch a hole in the English line. Edward III moves forward some reinforcements to try and plug the hole, but the Genoese are lethally effective.
I chose to use the variant rule that removes the penalty to Genoese archery, since I remain unconvinced that rain really impeded their missile performance that much. As a result, the crossbowmen ended up overwhelming their English opponents. The larger number of crossbowmen allowed them to overcome their inferior DRMs by sheer weight of numbers against the English longbowmen. Archery remains incredibly powerful in Men of Iron and having more archers was pretty critical for the French success.
The end of the game - the English kind of managed to form a new line but suffered too many casualties, including many leader casualties, and flee the field without Philip VI ever showing up.
While Crécy did remind me of all my criticisms of this system, I did have fun playing it and I think it’s a perfectly fine scenario. But I think there’s more to consider than just Men of Iron’s foibles and I want to dig a little deeper and consider Crécy’s historiography and how the game’s interact with that, at least a little.
Crécy: The Highlights
The very brief narrative of Crécy is that Philip VI succeeded in trapping the English in northern France as they ravaged their way across the kingdom, forcing the English to fight a pitched battle. That battle went disastrously wrong. The initial attack from the Genoese was repulsed and the French men-at-arms charged the English line to disastrous results. Why the French assault’s failed, what the English did to secure victory, and even where the battle happened are still contested. That presents an interesting challenge for anyone trying to design a game about the battle.
Take the terrain, for example. If we don’t know where the battle was, how specific can the terrain be? Both of these games took a generic approach, the English are on a slightly elevated position but there is very little terrain to impact the battle. The thing is, most historians would argue that the terrain (whether it was woods or a steep hillside depends on who you ask) funneled the French into a narrow approach for the battlefield and was far from irrelevant to the battle’s outcome.
Neither of these games makes the French attack feel forced along a specific path – the only real limits are the borders of the game map itself. Movement restrictions on the French in The Black Prince limited my ability to exploit this empty space, but in Men of Iron the French enveloping attack was very successful where a narrower one likely would not have been. One could argue that the reinforcements for the French in both games are meant to represent the fact that the army had to arrive piecemeal due to the narrow battlefield, which is a valid theory but not a particularly interesting method of handling things I think. Key elements of the battle happening off map isn’t very exciting. Perhaps this is an issue of scale, and maybe Crécy would be better captured by a game that zoomed out a little bit.
Men of Iron did include rules for potholes that could interrupt charging mounted men-at-arms. Whether potholes were used or not is contested among historians, but there has been some agreement that the English tried to do something to the ground in front of their position to make it harder for mounted men-at-arms to charge across. It is a nice touch by Men of Iron to include this and make the battlefield be more than just an empty field with a very slight elevation change at one point.
A map of the battle from Kelly DeVries’ Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century. This represents a fairly classic view of the battle geography. Here we can see DeVries arguing for a variety of ditches and pits rather than a neat row of potholes.
Another key piece of defensive strategy employed by the English was the deployment of their wagons. Both games have the wagons in the rear, which was for a long time where historians chose to place them. However, more recent scholars have increasingly favored accounts that describe the deployment of the wagons in front of the English position, providing temporary fortifications to protect the archers and further restrict the avenue of the French attack. This is usually referred to as a wagenburg, after the famous tactic the Hussite general Zizka would use nearly a century later. While not a universal point of agreement, and potentially too recent in terms of historiography for either game to have reacted to, it would be cool to see a game take this approach – or even to make the wagons into counters rather than drawing them directly on the map so alternatives scenarios could be explored.
Michael Livingston’s map from his recent book on Crécy, The Battle of the Five Kings. Note that Livingston has proposed an alternative site for the battle that is not universally accepted. You can also see at the front and rear of the English (red) position the hashed line representing the wagenberg defenses.
Another theme in the games, more prominent in The Black Prince than Men of Iron but somewhat present in both, is the incompetence of the French. Philip VI gets a lot of blame for his failure at Crécy, but there is plenty of reason to view him as a competent commander having a bad day rather than a buffoon. His command in previous campaigns and his ability to lead his army to trap the English successfully show significant military acumen at the strategic and operational scale. Whether he lost control of his men at Crécy or was personally to blame for the disaster was contested in the fourteenth century and remains unresolved, but I think The Black Prince takes things a bit far in portraying the French as irrational and foolish by forcing the mounted knights to only charge directly at English men-at-arms ignoring everyone in their path. These were rational people; they deserve more respect than this.
I want to finish by placing a little more praise on Richard Berg’s use of many variants for Men of Iron. The Black Prince includes an alternative scenario which assumes a less chaotic French attack, but I much prefer Men of Iron’s many modular variants that can be used to explore different historiographical interpretations. With so many conflicting accounts and disputed views even among modern historians, offering plenty of variable perspectives on the battle seems like the best way to try and represent this complexity in game form.
Conclusion
Overall, I am really intrigued by the system in The Black Prince and want to explore it more, but I had more fun playing Men of Iron’s Crécy scenario. That said, neither one fully scratched my itch for a great Crécy game. If people know of any interesting takes on the battle, I would be delighted to hear them. One can never have too many takes on Crécy!
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