When I read the subtitle “The Triumph of Archery over Armor” I knew I had to play this game. That sentence is like red to my bullish need to overshare the history of archery with anyone and everyone. That it was also a classic game from Jim Dunnigan, published by SPI, and thus a piece of gaming history made it all the more interesting. Luckily, I was able to secure an in-shrink copy from avid collector and all-around good guy Nils Johansson. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this game, I had never played a Dunnigan or SPI game before, and I was pleased to find some very intriguing design ideas in this box.
Due credit must be given to illustrator and collector extraordinaire Nils Johansson who sold me this copy of Agincourt that had been in its original shrink since 1978!
I obviously have a lot of thoughts about the version of Agincourt that is on display in this game – it is a very specific vision of what Anglo-French warfare looked like in 1415 and I think picking it apart can show a lot about how our understanding of history can change over time. At the same time, this is a game, and so it must be considered as such. As a game, it is one that makes some very interesting decisions I’ve never seen before, but that is also not without several key flaws. I had fun playing Agincourt, but then I also stopped when it ceased to be fun. Let’s start with the good, move to the bad, and then finish with the history.
Robin Hood Was Never This Good
The game is about the triumph of archery, and so it is logical that much of this review will be dedicated to discussing that exact topic. The version of medieval archery on display here is fascinating because it gets some things so very right and others so very wrong, and in the end, it yields a pretty interesting gaming experience. It was quite the rollercoaster.
How fast your average longbowman could shoot his bow has been a subject of intense debate by historians over the years. While you will still find people repeating the frankly ludicrous figure of 12 arrows per minute, popularized by Napoleon III (yes, the emperor), the much more reasonable number of 6 arrows per minute has become far more widely accepted. Jim Dunnigan clearly agreed, because in Agincourt each impulse is approximately a minute, and each archer unit can shoot up to six arrows per impulse. So, in an impulse a French unit could move one to two hexes (depending on if they’re mounted charging units or not) and then the English can choose how many volleys to shoot in response. Thankfully for playability purposes, this simply changes the table that the attack is rolled on rather than forcing players to resolve between one and six attacks per counter. There are also restrictions where once units get too close it is no longer possible to shoot six arrows, presumably to reflect the enemy speeding up and not allowing a full minute before they close to melee range. Or something like that. The CRT is such that the longbowmen are at their most effective against targets 3 or 4 hexes away, which made for some very cool gameplay decisions but which I did not understand from a historical perspective. Longbows would be at their most lethal at the shortest range, but then because the game limits how many arrows could be shot in the last two hexes of approach you only get the full six shots at that 3-4 hex range.
But why would you not shoot the maximum number of arrows every time? The simple reason is that you might run out of arrows. Every unit’s ammunition is tracked on the edges of the map. Each unit has a supply and then once deleted will receive a semi-random amount as a secondary supply, after which they will be forced to fight in melee or be rendered useless (French archers aren’t allowed to melee). There are rules for retrieving arrows from the dead that are, if I’m honest, a little too complicated for what they are but they do exist as an option. I would argue that the arrow supply is probably overly generous, but that is me nitpicking. What I really like about this is it does reflect the very real reason why debates around the rate of fire for the longbow are often missing the point. Most armies probably only had enough arrows for a few minutes of sustained firing at maximum rate of fire, and that meant that either the period of active archery was very short, or archers rarely shot at their theoretical maximum speed. Baking this into a game design that is so much about archery was very cool to see.
The initial set up of the historical scenario - you can see the many tracks along the side for line strengths and ammunition. In this photo I have set up the lines the wrong way around, something I fixed and then forgot to photograph. #nailedit
The game’s subtitle is “The Triumph of Archery over Armor” so you must have suspected that I was going to raise some objections. Archery in Agincourt is insanely lethal. Each hit, and hits are frequent, generates a marker representing the dead and a marker for fugitives who semi-randomly flee backwards, interrupting movement and generating more fugitives as they go. This creates a state of total chaos pretty quickly, as three impulses worth of archery generates corpses and fugitives, which can in turn generate more fugitives during the morale phase at the end of each player’s turn. Here’s the thing, I kind of love this except for the fact that it’s terrible history. If I close my eyes and ignore the historian of archery party of my brain the chaotic battlefield situation in Agincourt is incredibly engaging.
An extra wrinkle that is interesting it that all these losses do not impair the combat effectiveness of any of the units – on the attack at least. Instead of steps, each unit has “lines” which are tracked along the map’s edges. Each time you take a hit you lose a line, but a new set of fresh troops advances forward and so combat effectiveness is not reduced. Loss of lines will cause problems during the morale phase, but a unit is in theory at full fighting strength until it is completely eliminated. I’m always on the lookout for alternative systems for tracking injuries in hex and counter games beyond just full strength on one side and somewhat impaired strength on the reverse. This is a cool example, although like with the archery I’m not really sure if it reflects the history. Medieval formations generally broke all at once, after hitting a critical mass of disorder, rather than melting away piecemeal like in Agincourt. Also, while the game includes penalties for “crowding” when counters bunch up near each other, the benefit of soldiers in the rear preventing troops from breaking is absent.
Overall, though, many of the core systems in Agincourt are interesting and unlike anything else I’ve played before. The game state is constantly shifting and it had that feeling of barely being in control that I love in hex and counter games. It also has some glorious aesthetics and graphic design, which makes it a delight to spend an afternoon with. But. There’s always a But isn’t there. I have some problems with this design.
Leaders and Melee and Admin Oh My!
My time with Agincourt ground to a halt the moment the armies clashed. The French had survived a brutal storm of arrows to finally reach the English line, some miraculously unscathed, only to fall at the hurdle of the rather crushing melee combat CRT. The problem was that the French had no opportunity to inflict any archery combat of their own on the English men-at-arms which meant that the two sides were pretty much equally matched, and nothing really happened as they fought. The archery and morale systems were far more lethal than anything done up close with blades, and that was really disappointing. I know the game is about the triumph of archery, so perhaps the historical perspective on display shouldn’t have surprised me, but it also left me feeling deflated. I had enjoyed the tense game of pushing forward and allocating archery fire to French attackers, but once the lines hit I wanted some excitement that the game really failed to deliver. A more chaotic and potentially lethal melee system could really have elevated this game.
The moment when the lines clashed - you can see the many fugitives, in white, and dead, in blue, scattered across the field.
The leader combat system was probably meant to provide that spice that I was looking for in the melee combat. Leader combat happens before melee combat is resolved whenever two leaders are in adjacent hexes – so in my experience it will happen often as both sides have an abundance of leaders and a strong incentive to stack them into melee combat for their leadership bonus. Leader combat is fought over five rounds with each player picking one of the far too many available posture options and then rolling on a table to see which, if either, leader receives a hit. If a leader receives more hits than they have strength in a round, they are captured – removing them from the map and awarding victory points to the opposing player.
This is kind of tedious to resolve and most leaders have 3 strength or higher, so usually after the first two rounds you will know if it is possible for one side to lose or not. It’s basically a whole mini-game unto itself that interrupts the flow of the main game to disappointing results. It’s also very poor history. Medieval commanders postured a lot about challenging each other to single combat in letters, but almost nobody ever actually fought those combats. It was part of a wider political culture, a way of shaming your opponent and showing off masculine bravery, not actually how they thought wars should be resolved. I like that the game emphasizes capturing nobles and taking ransoms, a key aspect of medieval warfare, but how it approaches it is flawed and, worse, not very fun.
The leader combat is not the only excessively tedious piece of admin in the game. While I broadly liked the morale system, especially that the game put such an emphasis on morale as a subject, resolving morale checks can quickly become tedious. To resolve a morale check for a unit you must first add up how many points of negative morale it is suffering. These can come from how many lines it has lost, how many fugitives and friendly dead there are near it, and the placement of neighboring units. As the board quickly fills with corpses and fugitives, this can become very time consuming to calculate for every unit. Technically not every unit has to make a morale check, but one of the triggers for determining if you need to do one is if you moved this turn, so in practice most will. If you have more than 10 negative morale points, and in many cases you will, you must roll on the table multiple times. So, you might find yourself making 2-3 rolls for half your army. It’s a lot of admin, and it spawns more fugitives, which will increase your admin next turn. The system at its core is interesting, but it needed more tweaking. In its current form it wanders into excess, which grinds the game to a halt.
When taken all together, these elements combined to generate a historical scenario that felt too on the rails. I learned the game’s systems playing the historical scenario, and now I can’t help but wonder if the free deployment scenarios are how the game part of this experience is meant to be played – with the historical option really being more like watching an interactive movie with a preordained conclusion. Which brings me to:
The History
The game wears its intention on its sleeve – this is game about triumphant archers defeating the French knights. The historical scenario feels like a pre-programmed game to show you why the French failed tactically, with the free deployment giving the French player the option of exploring alternative strategies to improve upon the historical commanders. This is a version of Agincourt very much rooted in certain somewhat nationalistic understandings of the history. You can see it in how the rules deny the dismounted French men-at-arms the possibility of attacking archers through their stakes, as they would view attacking such peasants as “beneath them”, but then the cavalry can because, of course, historically they did. It also leans in to the notion of a vastly outnumbered English army, with fewer than half the strength of the French, securing an unexpected and overwhelming victory. A triumph not just of the longbow, but of the common Englishman over the snobby French. Anne Curry has made a very strong case for the French and English armies having been nearly equal in number, actually, and there has been plenty of recent scholarship that has helped us gain a much better understanding of the types of men who fought in the English army.
The idea of the longbowmen as the common English “yeoman” has its roots in modern understandings of English histories. Sure, some archers probably were yeoman, but many archers recruited for the Hundred Years War were members of the lesser nobility – often younger sons who were joining their elder sibling or richer relative who was serving as a men-at-arms. Other archers were probably semi-professional soldiers, not farmers who had been given bows and sent out into the field to fight. But then, the cited expert in the historical analysis is Sir Charles Oman, who was writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. I almost expected the game to make the classic comparison of the English archer to the “Tommy” in WWI, which was a very popular and deeply flawed understanding of the history of both wars.
The game is rooted in classic examples of longbow triumphalism. Lethal arrows penetrating plate armor, something that has been pretty substantially refuted by now, as well as the rapid rate of fire and the fact that they can fight in melee as well. The French have short bows as well as their crossbows, which is another notion that has fallen far out of favor – bows are bows, there was not some magical technological evolution in bow technology that made the English weapon mysteriously superior to those available to their continental opponents. This game is as far from Kelly DeVries notion, in his excellent article “Catapults are not Atomic Bombs”, that archery was primarily a support weapon used to disrupt enemy formations and make them vulnerable to defeat by the melee soldiers. Not that DeVries’ view is the exclusive perspective of historians, but even the most ardent supporter of lethal longbows would stop short of endorsing the level of death on display in Agincourt.
Also, look at these lovely coats of arms on the counters. Just some gorgeous but not too complicated counters - you love to see it.
I don’t want it to seem like I’m damning this game for not being up to date with the latest scholarship – it is 45 years old after all! While I would suggest that it was probably a bit out of date even for its time, the lack of reference to A.H. Burne’s work from the 1950s is a bit unusual, overall it is a fascinating lens into a specific view of history and I want to highlight how much our understanding of these events has changed in the past four and a half decades.
Despite what some angry people may shout at me on the internet, history is not “what happened.” What happened is the past, history is our attempt to understand something that is fundamentally unknowable. We can never know everything about the past – even if one of us had been at Agincourt, we would only have firsthand experience of the small part of the battle that we participated in. Historians try and pull together all the available evidence, including accounts written by people who were there, to put together a best possible argument for what happened and, importantly, both why it happened and what that means. As we uncover more evidence, or apply new methods to existing evidence, we can often construct better theories about the past and these changes in historical arguments are interesting and important! Agincourt is a fascinating example of wargame historiography, and while it is deeply flawed in many ways it is also thoroughly engaging and utterly spellbinding to someone like me.
Conclusion
I’m so glad I played Agincourt and I fully intend to play it some more. Not all of its pieces clicked together, but I have not played anything else like it, nor have I seen obvious examples of games that have modelled themselves on it in the intervening years. There are some really interesting design ideas on display in Agincourt, some better than others, and as an example of design and historiography it is fascinating. I wouldn’t encourage everyone run out and buy a copy – for one thing it’s very out of print – but for people interested in the design of medieval grand tactical games or just interested in the historiography of Agincourt it is one worth looking into. I can’t promise you will have the best gaming experience of your life, but I can promise an interesting one. I for one will be thinking about how it handles archery and morale far beyond when I’ve stopped remembering how many different leader combat postures there were. There is a gem in this design, I just don’t think the final product is constructed quite right to emphasize that. I’m still so glad I played it and I fully intend to pull it off the shelf periodically to try it again and show it to others.