I’m very interested in pretty much all things medieval warfare but I have to admit that within that category the Wars of the Roses would rank near the bottom. I am not totally uninterested in the subject, but an assortment of miserable nobles all killing each other to see who gets to be King of England isn’t my preferred topic. It has some interesting moments, and I find Edward IV to be an interesting monarch, but overall it doesn’t fill me with excitement. This meant that while Blood and Roses promised to be a very interesting entry in the Men of Iron series, I haven’t been rushing to get it to the table. However, with the whole Men of Iron series having been chosen for this month’s Club de Jeu on the Homo Ludens Discord I decided to take a plunge and try and play a battle from every (published) entry in the series, which meant finally trying Blood and Roses. I picked the First Battle of St Albans as my entry point in part because it was a small battle that plays in under an hour and in part because the idea of more urbanised combat in a Men of Iron game was really appealing. I’m glad I did because I think First St Albans (as we’ll call it from now) is a great entry point into the Men of Iron series and a fun little battle in its own right!
The opening of the battle from the Yorkist position. In the far back of the Lancastrian lines is King Henry VI. He can’t move and if York can reach him they win the battle automatically, but first there’s Lancastrian infantry and a big ol’ ditch.
First, a confession: I don’t really pay much attention when wargames tell me what scale the game is. I don’t know how many individuals each counter is supposed to represent, and I don’t particularly care. I’m interested in the general idea of the scale (i.e. is it grand strategic or operational) but beyond that I’m not checking in the rules or the back of the box to track the size of each formation. That having been said, I quickly noticed that Blood and Roses is on a slightly different scale than the rest of Men of Iron and this carried some interesting gameplay implications with it. The Wars of the Roses was populated more by skirmishes than major battles. The smaller size of the armies isn’t too surprising since both sides were effectively pulling from the same population to form their armies. First St Albans was the start of the conflict, although nobody knew it at the time, and it was essentially an accidental battle - an escalation of hostilities that neither party was necessarily prepared for. This meant that these weren’t proper armies formed for battle but more like the forces you would see on a raid or a policing action. This made for a much smaller engagement than something like Crécy. As a result, it’s not surprising that Blood and Roses might choose to zoom in a bit and look at the conflict at a different scale.
This was probably my first mistake - using the same tactics in Blood and Roses as I did in other games. I should have used York’s longbows to soften up Lancaster more before closing. Fighting over that ditch is hard going.
The small counter count was an obvious indicator that First St Albans was a small battle but there were two other elements that had an impact on my experience of Blood and Roses. The first was what drew me to this battle in the first place: the urban setting. While in previous battles I played a town might only be a few hexes, at the small scale of First St Albans the town of St Albans has clear buildings and roads you have to navigate. Only certain units are able to pass through the buildings (and at a high movement cost) which gives this scenario a feeling I associate more with World War II skirmish games than medieval battles. That said, the buildings only factor into the battle very briefly because if the Yorkists have reached the edge of the town the battle must be near its conclusion. The movement choices felt different than in other Men of Iron games, which was great because I think having interesting movement choices is probably what I like most in hex and counter games. This makes me very excited to try the Second Battle of St Albans which was a larger engagement and uses the same game map so it could potentially provide even more interesting choices!
The Yorkists achieve an initial breakthrough in the middle, including a big Continuous Attack, but most of Salisbury’s Battle are disordered in the process.
Obviously, we eventually have to talk about archery and in Blood and Roses archery is very different from Infidel or Men of Iron. The smaller scale really struck me when looking at the tables relating to missile weapons. In Men of Iron and Infidel no missile shoots further than three hexes, whereas in Blood and Roses longbows can shoot far beyond that. This isn’t because the missiles were better during this period, the bows were pretty much the same, but rather that we’re looking at the conflict at a smaller scale. The bonuses for shorter range are also much less than in Men of Iron and the penalties for long range are pretty extreme both of which change how the game plays. The lethality of longbows at point blank range is gone, to my joy, and even with bad odds the possibility of shooting enemies from 4-5 hexes away is exciting. In my game I didn’t really grasp the potential of this change and still played it very much like it was classic Men of Iron. Going forward I am excited to see how it affects my playstyle and experience of the game. Longer range harassing fire from missile weapons encouraging you to close the distance and try to fight it out in close quarters is a dynamic of medieval warfare I find really interesting. My first instinct is that this version of archery aligns much closer to my understanding of how it worked based on my research and I’m excited to see how Blood and Roses handles it in the larger battles.
A truly heroic counter attack, including two Continuous Attacks, drives Salisbury back and eliminates most of his Battle but on the other flank things are collapsing for the Lancastrians and these York troops are still fresh. Also the road to the King is looking pretty insecure.
Blood and Roses also seems to have a slightly narrower pool of units, at least for melee. Dismounted men-at-arms and infantry were the only melee troops in First St Albans and from looking at the counters there doesn’t seem to be many more types than those two. Certainly it doesn’t have quite the same variety as Infidel. This reduced number of melee troops does make room for more missile troops, including handgunners, and the addition of artillery which didn’t show up at First St Albans but I’m looking forward to trying the new gunpowder units in the future. I think to some extent this reflects the increasing professionalism of medieval armies over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The English in particular created a much more systemic method of recruiting and equipping armies during the fourteenth century and while the political situation was in total chaos during the Wars of the Roses the effects of this process would still have been visible. It also reflects that this was a civil war and the two sides were pretty symmetrical in terms of the types of troops they could recruit.
Salisbury makes a run on the King but meanwhile on the right flank Lancaster leads a powerful counter attack.
The Lancastrian counter attack eliminates York himself and drives the Yorkist line back across the ditch. But can they stop Salisbury from getting to the King?
The reduction in melee types could also be the result of the more widespread use of the technology that actually would change warfare forever: gunpowder. While guns first appeared in Europe in the early fourteenth century, it took at least a century for both guns and gunpowder to become staples of the battlefield - first dominating siege warfare in the mid-fifteenth century and later taking over the battlefield in the mid-sixteenth century. The Wars of the Roses sits somewhere between the two. Late medieval and early modern gunpowder offered a much more lethal ranged weapon than what was previously available but at greater monetary cost, slower reload time, and reduced reliability and accuracy. A long list of downsides that are made up for by the ability to routinely penetrate plate armour. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of thoughts about how Men of Iron tackles these weapons, but in the meantime I suspect I’ll be encountering them first in my play of Arquebus, the most recent volume in the series and one not included in the Tri-Pack.
York stalls out in the face of the lone Man-At-Arms defending the King and Clifford circles around and attacks Salisbury from behind, eliminating his unit and securing victory!
Lancaster manages to seize victory by the narrowest of margins (in this battle the random die roll isn’t added to Flight Points, instead you must reach the target number)
Overall Blood and Roses felt noticeably different from the previous two games in the series. I felt like I could tell that this was a later entry in the series, it felt slightly more refined and polished, but it’s too soon for me to say anything definitive, I’ve only played one tiny battle, but I was a little surprised at how simple it was to learn. I think having played all three games in the Men of Iron Tri-Pack now I would say that Infidel is probably the most complicated while the other two are comparably complex. Blood and Roses features slightly more rules than the other two games but the fact that both sides are fairly symmetrical - this is a civil war after all - makes playing it easier than Infidel with it’s drastic asymmetry between sides.
I also think that First St Albans may be the best battle to learn Men of Iron on as a system. It is relatively low in number of counters but includes most of the key concepts you’ll need to know to play the rest of the battles. Really only mounted units are missing. It also emphasises how important terrain is to the system. However, I think what matters most is that I really enjoyed First St Albans and would happily play it several more times experimenting with some of the optional rules. There are several battles in the base Men of Iron box that potentially make a better learning experience in terms of teaching you all the mechanisms of the system but that I don’t think are as much fun. Falkirk, for example, is a great battle to learn the full rules of Men of Iron in and is very solitaire friendly but I also didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed First St Albans. If you own the Tri-Pack but haven’t been able to get it to the table yet, maybe try St Albans!