This game is amazing, I think I’m in love. It’s also total chaos, wildly messy, and definitely not for everyone. It’s a fascinating representation of the Hundred Years War that manages to capture certain aspects of the conflict while throwing vast portions of its history into the wind. It’s a game that feels like it has been built around one specific mechanic which I’ve never encountered anywhere else, and the rest of the design has spiralled out from that decision. It’s got area control, dice chucking, unit recruitment, and, most importantly, lots and lots of leader death. I am super enamoured with this design, and I think every wargamer should play it at least once – it’s an experience you cannot get anywhere else. Let’s talk about it.
The stage is set - let the game begin!
Warriors of God was designed by Nakajima Makoto and published in English by Multi-Man Publishing. At first glance it’s a reasonably standard area control wargame. Players will have a number of leaders and under each leader is a number of units, limited by that leader’s rank. Armies are moved en masse from a single area to a neighbouring region – with limits on number based on the type of border between the two areas. The goal is to seize territory, you score victory points based on how many regions you control at the end of a turn. Battles ensue where both players have pieces. There are two kinds of battles: field battles and sieges. Sieges can only take place in the defender’s friendly territory and are resolved with a single roll of one d6 adjusted by various modifiers. Battles, in contrast, can be lengthy affairs with plenty of dice chucking. In a battle you roll dice equal to your total units in that area up to a cap determined by the Battle Rating of your most senior commander in that area – this can be as high as eight or as low as one. You hit on sixes by default but depending on the respective Bravery stats of the two lead commanders one side may get a bonus to their rolls. The bravery stats really make a leader far more than their Battle Rating, rolling fewer dice but hitting two or three times as often is often much better. The choice of when to choose siege or battle is really interesting – a single bad siege roll will cost you everything but if the odds are favourable, it may still be worth it over risking a series of battle rolls.
The game opened as it intended to continue - with King Philip VI dying at the end of the very first turn.
None of these features are bad, but none would make Warriors of God stand out if it weren’t for the best mechanic in the game: the Leader death table! At the end of every round a new group of six leaders enters the game, but before they arrive you roll for each leader you have on the map to see if they have died. Leaders can die at the end of the turn they first arrived on – meaning you got one round of actions with them and now they’re gone. That can only happen on a roll of a 1, but in my game Edward III, The Black Prince, King Philip VI, King Charles V, and Henry V all rolled 1s at the end of their first round and were eliminated. Of the various royals in the game, only Charles VI (who lasted a meagre 2 rounds) and Henry IV (made it to the premature end of the game where his side lost) were spared this fate. This phase is done after you recruit new troops, but before you place new leaders, and it injects pure chaos into the game. You just recruited a big army for that lord? Well, he’s dead, too bad! Even worse, your leader could die and be replaced by an enemy leader, who is now leading the troops that were previously on your side!
Some good rolls early on give the French control of quite a lot of regions early while the English struggle to establish a foothold. This turn neither side had a king due to staggering mortality among the royal lines. This was also the first round that saw quite a few impulses, which promised more excitement.
Warriors of God has something of an irreverent tone and the Leader death table embraces that concept fully. It’s absolutely hilarious and interacts in amazing ways with the game’s other systems. I already mentioned the problem of recruitment, but let’s also discuss captured leaders. Any leader on the losing side of a siege and many that lose a battle (depending on a roll on the Elimination Table) are captured by your opponent. At the end of the round, you first swap lords, assuming both sides have prisoners, which is not optional. If at the end of this process one player still has captured lords his opponent can choose to ransom them by removing control markers from the board – a high price to pay. Alternatively, you can leave them to rot in prison, but at the end of the round your opponent will receive a Victory Point for any captured lords they still have – if they’re still alive that is! You can gamble that the captured lord is pretty old, maybe they’ll just die and spare you the VP loss. On the other hand, maybe you just ransomed that valuable lord and right after that they just up and die, leaving you short a control marker and a lord! Some people will find this level of chaotic luck infuriating, but for me it was hilarious.
Two turns ago neither side had a king, last turn England did and France didn’t, this turn France does and England doesn’t. France has also successfully established control over much of the south while squaring up for a fight in the north.
As a simulation of the Hundred Years War, Warriors of God is hardly high in fidelity. Armies didn’t really switch sides if their lord died but a new one from the other side just showed up at the right moment, and the battles and politics are highly abstracted. In the same box is a separate campaign recreating the Anglo-French wars of the 11th and 12th centuries, a radically different period of warfare, which should give some indication of the extent to which this game simulates late medieval warfare. However, it does get a few elements right in ways I find fascinating.
Bertrand du Guesclin arrives on the scene with his amazing Bravery stat and the number of English commanders in prison expands rapidly. Charles VI also becomes the first French king to actually survive the round he arrived on.
The first is the aforementioned death tables. Many games would attempt to replicate the historic lives and deaths of their figures, crafting a model that grants Edward III a long life but cuts Henry V’s brutally short. Warriors of God instead engages with the concept of what if the random cruelty of medieval life was applied equally across the entire war? Henry V did die young, but Edward III could have just as easily – fate is a fickle creature. By leaning into this concept, the notion that disease could carry off a noble warrior at any stage, Warriors of God replicates much of the uncertainty of medieval conflict. Arguably it heightens these elements, deaths come quick, and they come fast, but that can be forgiven because it is after all a game first and a simulation second. It is a great engine for generating counterfactuals while still maintaining the broad structure of the conflict as new lords are steadily arriving and the same key players will feature no matter what.
Bertrand du Guesclin lasted longer than most but he was struck down in whatever plague effectively cleared the board this round. Charles VI and Henry IV were proving remarkably long lived at this stage - at least compared to their ancestors.
I also like how Warriors of God captures shifting alliances within the war. Two of the six leaders that enter every round are neutral and can be loyal to either side. Starting with the player who went second that round, players will pick one of these to be loyal to their side (possibly along with other neutral lords who are already in play but have been routed in combat). One of the interesting parts of the Hundred Years War is the broader political landscape it took place under, with many shifting alliances, civil wars, and battles for legitimacy of rulership in neighbouring kingdoms. This system allows for the recreation of rebellions and civil wars without introducing a mountain of extra rules. It’s not the perfect replication of the full political scope of the war, but within Warriors of God’s general framework it’s an amazing bit of extra spice that helps the game shine.
With the plague having removed a large number of French commanders, the English begin to make a comeback. Henry V has turned up, so things must be looking up. Minutes after taking this photo Henry V died of plague.
If there’s an aspect of Warriors of God, I’m not entirely enamoured with it’s the unit recruitment system. Don’t get me wrong, I broadly like it – and I really like what it’s trying to achieve – but I did find it a little bit fiddly. Each round after movement, battles, and area control are resolved each area generates units equal to its value (areas are valued between one and three), and units can be recruited along continuous lines of control, so unit scan turn up several spaces away if all intervening areas are friendly. This is fine in general, but I found that I had so many units each turn that I wasn’t really sure what to do with them much of the time and it could drag the game to a crawl as I tried to guess at optimal placement for them. I think this was exacerbated by the fact that kings and royal heirs had a bad habit of dying very suddenly in my game so I rarely had commanders who could lead large armies available, which meant I had a surplus of units and a lack of commanders for them. Different Leader Death table rolls could drastically change this experience. What I did like about this system is that you have to do all of this before you place new leaders or, more importantly, see if your existing leaders have died. This makes the decision of where to place the units harder, but also creates comedic situations where you placed an army somewhere planning for a new leader to take them – but actually the king just died, and the new king needs to take over his old army or Paris will be exposed. I just wish there was a slightly faster way to resolve this round. I don’t have a solution, and it didn’t really hinder my enjoyment of the game, but it was the only blemish on my time with the game and could easily have just been a product of the circumstances of my first play.
In the end the English rally was too little too late. Despite France being once again kingless - Charles VI finally passed away, followed quickly by Charles VII - but the arrival of Joan of Arc was enough to hold off the English long enough to clinch an early victory.
There’s not a lot of games about the Hundred Years War, so Warriors of God isn’t in a very competitive field when it comes to being the best game on the subject. However, I think no matter how many other games there were, Warriors of God would always be one of the most interesting. I had an absolute blast playing it and I cannot wait to get it on the table again. Rarely do games make this strong of an impression on me the first time I play them, but this really is something special.
Recommended Reading:
For my money, the best introductory history of the Hundred Years War is David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History.
I have also reviewed several books on the Hundred Years War on this blog, including Poitiers, 1356, also by David Green (https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-battle-of-poitiers-1356-by-david-green), The Hundred Years War by Christopher Allmand (https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-hundred-years-war-by-christopher-allmand), and The Agincourt War by A.H. Burne (https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-agincourt-war-by-ah-burne).