It’s been a while since I played Men of Iron and I’d been been hankering to try some more Arquebus so I took a break from playing a small mountain of American Civil War hex and counter games for a brief holiday in sixteenth-century Italy. I decided to try the Fornovo scenario for the very boring reason that it was the first battle in the play book and I’m glad I did because this is probably one of the most interesting Men of Iron scenarios I have ever played. It reminded me of everything I really like about Men of Iron, as well as some of the elements of the system that I don’t think work so well. Those wrinkles weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying Fornovo a lot and putting it high on my list of scenarios I want to try again.
The initial set up for Fornovo - Venetian alliance on the left and French on the right. If the French can march their army off the bottom of the map they can automatically win the game.
My early impressions of Arquebus were really positive back when I played Cerignola many months ago and my second experience is equally positive. I can see the further development of the core system present in Arquebus from the original Men of Iron system. The new element that I interacted with the most this game was the Engaged combat result. This result on the CRT can lock your units into melee, forcing them to make attacks whether you want to or not and increasing the cost of withdrawing from combat. I really enjoyed putting down the Engaged markers to show sustained fighting, it gave the game a nice sense of narrative.
I liked Engaged as a mechanism, even if I felt it was perhaps a little too forgiving. Maybe this is my desire for narrative over strategy, but I would kind of prefer it if it was impossible to willingly withdraw from an Engaged marker – essentially you are now locked down and must fight until someone is eliminated or is forced to retreat. Since I was playing solitaire anyway I pretty much treated Engaged as working this way – who was going to stop me? It was nice to have more potential outcomes on the CRT, although I did find myself missing Blood and Roses result that lets the defender choose Disorder or Retreat. I don’t think Engaged, or Arquebus’ CRT in general, was a radical shift in my experience of the system, but I like the CRT in Arquebus more than I like the one in Men of Iron and Engaged results are a part of that.
The Venetians make their initial crossing, but can this lone Battle halt the departure of the French army and survive to be reinforced? Meanwhile, up top the French have moved their supply wagons to try and deny the Venetians the chance to loot them.
What I really loved about Fornovo, though, was the map. I have joked more than a few times with friends about the lack of terrain in medieval (and ancient) wargames. Quite a few scenarios in the Tri-Pack have lovely terrain scattered around the edges of the map and, conveniently, little to nothing the main play area. That’s a bummer, terrain was just as much a feature of pre-modern warfare as it has been of the modern era, and I want to see it in games more. They didn’t have large empty fields set aside for both sides to agree to fight in – the factors of terrain could be crucial to a battle’s outcome. Fornovo has a large river running straight down the middle of the map and as you play the river will rise, making it increasingly harder to manage. The Venetians have to cross the river and attack the French and as the Venetians you will be spending a lot of the game wading through river and swamp and making rolls to see if your troops are disordered as they climb up the steep banks on the far side.
The river is not particularly complex rules wise – it is governed by just a handful of extra special case rules that are easy to remember and intuitive – but it immediately defines Fornovo as a different game from what I had played before, in a good way. It really showed how having even a simple piece of terrain that the players have to interact with can really change the shape of the experience and open up many What If options for how to play differently. I really like Men of Iron but there are more than few scenarios where I’m not very interested in replaying them because the approach between the two armies will probably be almost identical in every game. Movement is the aspect of hex and counter gaming that I love most, and I want more elements that force me to make interesting decisions during my movement. The river in Fornovo is a great example of this, and while I know to an extent designers are limited by historical events I would love to see more efforts to create scenarios for this system that find ways to include interesting decisions in how the two armies approach each other.
The water level in the river rose significantly, causing significant delays to the arrival of Venetian reinforcements as foot units struggled to wade across. Meanwhile the first Battle to cross is holding on but things aren’t looking good for them.
Fornovo’s victory conditions also interact with the river in interesting ways. It uses the standard flight points system common to other scenarios, but also if the French player can move sixty flight points worth of their units off the bottom edge of the map, they will automatically win the game. Interestingly, this is if they can move sixty points or more. Moving fifty flight points gets you nothing. This creates a great decision space, because you want to move your army slowly towards the point where you can flee the map, but you don’t really want to start pulling units off the map until you are confident you can move enough to win. If you move too many units early, then you may find yourself lacking troops you may need to fight the Venetians. This also puts an immediate pressure on the Venetian player to get across the river to prevent the French player from using Army Activations to march their entire army to the edge of the map. This can push the Venetians into making some reckless moves to rush across the river. In my game some overly aggressive Venetian play resulted in several eliminated units, which eventually cost the Venetians the game without the French marching hardly any units off the map. By having multiple paths of victory to consider, and in particular having a time pressure on a scenario with large amounts of terrain to slow players down, really makes Fornovo one of the best Men of Iron scenarios I’ve played.
The Venetians have crossed in force, but they have many routed units and the first Battle to cross has been eliminated. The French must now decide if they march most of their army away to try and secure an automatic victory, or turn and confront the remaining Venetians to win on flight points.
Arquebus, or Fornovo at least, may address my periodic whinging about terrain in Men of Iron but it doesn’t fix some of my problems with Men of Iron as a system. My main problem is probably still Continuation – a system that I think comes close to working but isn’t all there. Thought has clearly been put into the Continuation values for the various leaders in Fornovo, including the inclusion of several leaderless Battles that can only be activated with a Free Activation, which is great to see. I really like the tension in the decision of who to pick for an attempted Continuation roll. However, I think Continuation is a little too unreliable to really work. I’ve had games where my opponent and I played for at least a dozen activations without a single Continuation – at which point it didn’t even feel like Continuation existed. I would really like to see a system for Continuation that makes a second activation much more likely and then drops off more precipitously after that – possibly even including a punishment for going for too many continuations rather than passing. Continuation is great when it works, I just don’t think it works often enough. I’ve even begun brainstorming some modifications to it which I will (hopefully) try and test later this year.
The final game state - France went for a bit of both. Several units have left the map, but the main force has turned and removed just enough Venetians to put their army to flight. A solid French victory.
I’ve thought about whether I want to keep my full set of Men of Iron long term or if I would be happy reducing my collection down to just one box at some stage – once I’ve played every scenario at least once of course. Fornovo makes a strong argument for Arquebus being the lone box I’d keep and pushes it towards being possibly my favourite entry in the series. There’s just a lot to like about Arquebus and Fornovo specifically. I had a ton of fun with this battle, and I need to get Arquebus more often. My complaints about Continuation aside, Men of Iron is a system that knows not to let complicated mechanisms get in the way of the fun and delivers a consistently enjoyable gaming experience – especially solitaire. I was already a big fan of Men of Iron and Arquebus has really reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the series.