Having gotten a handle on the rules of Richard Berg’s Men of Iron with my fabulous French upset last week I decided to try a scenario that was on a slightly larger scale but still didn’t up complexity too much. I chose Courtrai, also known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs because of the loot that the victorious Flemings took from the dead French nobles, in part because I’ve always found it fascinating and because it once again sees a French army trying to attack a strong defensive position – historically with disastrous results. I won’t totally spoil what happened, but I will say that things did not go as well for the French this time.
The calm before the storm. The French are about to begin their attack.
I should probably talk a bit about how Men of Iron plays, because it is interesting and unlike anything I’ve played before. Instead of being divided into strict turns, the starting player as designated in the scenario chooses one Battle – a group of units with a single commander – to activate. As an aside, I love that the game uses the medieval term Battle instead of a more modern designation like company or squad. The selected Battle can then move and shoot or engage in melee combat – usually “shock” combat but mounted units can charge instead for an extra bonus. After activating that Battle the active player can pass or instead they can choose to try to activate another Battle. To successfully do so they must roll under that Battle’s commander’s Activation Rating on a d10 - most commanders have a rating of 2 or 3 so this isn’t particularly common but it happens often enough to keep things interesting. As an aside, in Men of Iron the 0 on a d10 is actually a zero and not a ten like I’m used to from D&D, something that frequently causes me to go from elation to disappointment whenever one is rolled. Each activation after the first imposes a -1 penalty to the roll, so it’s harder and harder to activate subsequent Battles.
The initial French attack meets fierce resistance.
The other factor to consider is the Seizure Counters, which allow the non-active player to attempt to interrupt continuation rolls. There’s an interesting mechanical balance here where the more continuation rolls one side makes the more tempting it is to interrupt them, but the more likely it is that they’ll fail the next roll meaning it feels less advantageous to use one of your limited supply of tokens. Or at least, that’s how I imagine it. I have to confess that since so far I’ve been playing solo, I haven’t been bothering to use Seizure Tokens – it’s just one extra thing to juggle and I’m happy to let the dice decide when control switches between the two sides.
The Flemings push back, but Guy of Namur gets a little overeager and pushes his attack over the river.
Most of the rules in Men of Iron relate to resolving combat. At its core you just roll a d10 and compare the result against the tables handily contained on your player aid. What makes it a little fiddly, but also more of a game, is in totting up all the benefits and penalties to your roll to figure out what the final result is. This is the one area of the game where I really wish the rulebook had more examples. Most of these are straightforward, but there are a few where I struggled to understand exactly how to implement the modifier. These never added up to more than the occasional +/- 1, so in the grand scheme of things they were hardly earth shattering, but it would have been nice to have a little more clarity in the rules for people new the genre like me.
French mounted men-at-arms cross the river en masse to fight in the ditches. One unit of Fleming pikemen are forced to retire back to the standard.
Probably the most interesting rule to me is the fact that if you successfully force an enemy unit to retreat or otherwise vacate a hex, you almost always have to move in to the just cleared hex even if that puts you in a distinctly disadvantageous position. I think this really captures some of the chaos of medieval battle, plus the enthusiasm for looting that drove many soldiers – an act that often seems irrational to modern rulers but reflects how poor the pay was for a soldier and how valuable looted equipment was. On more than a few occasions I saw riotously successful attacks result in units wildly out of position and ripe to be crushed by a counterattack from enemy soldiers lurking just behind the front lines.
The Flemish counterattack is swift and brutal, several French mounted men-at-arms have either retired to the standard or been killed.
I liked the layout of French and Flemish soldiers chosen by Berg. I do of course have a few historian’s nit-picks which I’ll outline in a moment, but I really liked the inclusion of the tiny French garrison in the scenario – it’s an aspect of the battle I’m not sure I was aware of before. In my game the garrison never sortied out, but they still had an impact because I wanted to keep them closed inside, but I also wanted the pikemen standing guard to still be in Command which limited how far I could move my overall commander, which in turn limited how I could manoeuvre the rest of his Battle – something that caused a few of them to be out of command a couple of times. It was a really interesting element to consider throughout the battle. A great addition that I might have overlooked if you tasked me with laying out a game board version of Courtrai.
The Flemish have crossed the river to the north and turned the French flank. Meanwhile in the middle of the fighting Raoul de Nesle is killed by the Flemish crossbowmen and a replacement is promoted in his place.
As to my two nit-picks, the first is more general and the second is very specific and, because it’s me, concerns crossbows. In the description of the scenario, Berg wrote that the Flemish were largely peasants, but this is something of a popular myth. Most of the Flemish soldiers were not knights or nobles, unlike many of their French attackers, but they were mostly urban militias and citizens – not necessarily political elites but also not serfs. I think this is important to stress because popular images of the Middle Ages often divide society into just nobles and peasants, but medieval society was multifaceted with a range of classes, identities, and groups – just like modern society!
The French refocus their attack along the southern front, successfully fighting their way across the river - but only barely!
The other very specific nit-pick isn’t really a complaint, but instead something that I (and I may be the only one) would have liked to see. In this version of the battle the Flemish have one unit of crossbowmen and the French have two. While this accurately captures that the French had at least twice as many crossbowmen as the Flemish, I think it undersells how many crossbowmen the French had and means that it does not capture what is, to me anyway, one of the most interesting elements of the battle. A common French tactic, and one that is actually fairly reminiscent of later English tactics, was to use crossbowmen and other missile troops to try and force enemy armies to break up their formations and ideally come forward to be more susceptible to attack. This is something they tried at Courtrai, and the French crossbowmen easily out shot their Flemish counterparts, but the landscape caused a huge problem. It seems that to effectively shoot at the Flemish infantry the French crossbowmen would have to cross a small brook and some marshy terrain. This was theoretically no problem, but it ran the risk of leaving them exposed to enemy counterattack – usually ranged infantry would rely on the soldiers behind them to advance and engage the enemy if they were attacked, but with the difficult terrain there was no guarantee that their French allies would reach the crossbowmen before the Flemings did. As a result the crossbowmen didn’t advance very far, put on an underwhelming show, and were pushed aside for a French charge. That’s one interpretation of the battle anyway, as with all medieval battles there are many. I’m not criticising Richard Berg for not trying to capture this version of Courtrai, but I would have loved to have seen him try!
Flemish pikemen continue to push down the right flank, engaging with recently rallied French men-at-arms. The Left flank is hotly contested, with the Flemish overall commander joining the fray.
To conclude, while I enjoyed my time with Courtrai, I’m not convinced it was the best follow up battle to play after Agincourt. In hindsight it’s obvious, they’re both absolute grinds where one side repeatedly has to attack a largely immobile enemy position. While I did eventually get the Flemish to break their ranks and encircle the French position, that was after about an hour of playing. It just didn’t offer enough choices for me. I suspect this may be an issue with a few of the scenarios in Men of Iron, although it is not entirely the game’s fault. Many of the famous battles from this period featured one side attacking a defensive position – that’s not to say that all late medieval battles were like this, it’s mostly just the ones we’ve all heard of.
Flemish victory - French casualties are too high and they flee the field.
An interesting counterpoint to Courtrai would have been the Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle (1304). That battle was sort of a response to Courtrai, where King Philip IV personally lead an army to crush the Flemish. The battle was hotly contested and actually saw several Flemish attacks, at least one of which almost reached the French king’s position. The battle ended in nearly a draw, but the Flemings withdrew from the field which allowed the French to claim victory. A string of successful sieges and smaller engagements decided the conflict in favour of the French. I think Mons-en-Pévèle would have made an excellent comparison piece to Courtrai while also offering a more dynamic battle to play.
Having glanced at the maps it looks like there’s more manoeuvring in Infidel and Blood and Roses, but for the moment I’m just concentrating on Men of Iron. I was advised by someone with more experience with the series than I have that Poitiers and Nájera both have a larger movement element so I think I’ll try one of them next.
Further Reading:
Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century by Kelly DeVries
War in the Middle Ages by Philippe Contamine
The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages by J.F. Verbruggen