I am a certified, card-carrying Men of Iron obsessive so of course I was excited when I heard a new volume in the series was coming out. That excitement was dampened slightly by the knowledge that since original designer Richard Berg had passed away, he would not be continuing the series himself. Still, carrying on that legacy was an all around positive even if I had slight trepidations about what that would mean for this new entry. I am pleased to report that while it is not a perfect game, Norman Conquests is an admirable addition to the Men of Iron series. At time of writing, I have played all but two scenarios in Norman Conquests and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. I am saving the remaining scenarios because I like to savor my Men of Iron experience. It’s not like we get a new entry every year, you know.
I even have a custom dice tower - I’m basically ride or die for this series at this stage.
GMT Games kindly provided me with a review copy of Norman Conquests
Who is this Norman guy anyway?
Norman Conquests is in many ways a “back to basics” game for the series. It covers battles from the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – the thematic link is honestly pretty tenuous but I’m hardly going to condemn it for that – with most of them being small scale for the series. These are battles that you could easily set up in and play through in an evening, 1-2 hours tops. It is basically the opposite of Arquebus, Men of Iron volume IV, which had only one battle that played in less than two hours and included what must be the largest battle in the system to date. Instead of that volumes indulgence and excess Norman Conquests focuses on small scenarios with a limited unit pool. At times it is reminiscent of Blood and Roses with the two sides of a battle having essentially symmetrical unit compositions.
All of these elements together make Norman Conquests an excellent entry point into the Men of Iron series. The rules are not any less complex than other games, so you still need to fully learn how to play, but the actual scenarios themselves are small and won’t overwhelm you as you familiarize yourself with its systems. That’s not to say that this game is only for the uninitiated. While I love Arquebus and its borderline overindulgence in scale, I’ve really enjoyed being able to set up and knock out a game of Men of Iron in an evening without breaking a sweat. Playing a big scenario from Arquebus is almost an event whereas I can set up and play Norman Conquests on a weekday evening when I’m tired and just want to relax with some medieval warfare.
The core elements of Men of Iron are still here, in particular the system’s ability create emergent narratives from (relatively) little rules. The smaller battles help Norman Conquests avoid the major problem I have with Men of Iron, where large numbers of troops may never be activated because it’s better to keep activating 1-2 Battles over and over again than to rotate between 3-4. Norman Conquests doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and in some ways is arguably a step backwards (I’ll cover that more later), but it retains all that core Men of Iron flavor and as a fan of the series I couldn’t help but have a lot of fun while playing it. I will note that it is a little weird that the rulebook is labeled as the “Tri-Pack” rules and reproduces all the rules from those three games (but not Arquebus) with Norman Conquests added in alongside the original Men of Iron. I would have preferred a specific Norman Conquests rulebook that doesn’t clutter itself up with rules for Infidel or Blood and Roses - but then my dislike for series rulebooks is pretty well established by now.
The moment when a lucky (or unlucky depending on your perspective) Continued Attack killed King Harold and spelled doom for the center of the English line in my alternate battle site game of Hastings. If this picture gets you excited then you should probably just go buy the game now.
The production of Norman Conquests is also very nice. The counter size has been increased and it is a huge improvement to the play experience. The original games were all half inch counters, which is fine, but I always prefer my counters to be larger than half inch if given the option. The larger counters in Norman Conquests just really increase the tactile joy of moving pieces across the map. They also helped speed up the set up as I found it much easier to find the counters I was looking for in the mix given the larger size and text. I quite like the art on the counters and maps, although I do wish the leaders had more variety to their coats of arms instead of repeating the same ones for all the leaders on each side.
If you’ll allow me an indulgence, it wouldn’t be a Men of Iron review if I didn’t talk about archery. The archery in Norman Conquests remains incredibly powerful, very like the original entry rather than some of the revisions made in later volumes which I felt were a real improvement. However, the difference in the number of archers in each battle made the role they played in individual battles far more interesting. Unlike in the original Men of Iron where one side might have a dozen or more archers, in Norman Conquests individual Battles rarely have more than one archer, so a side might only have 1-3 archers total. I found that archers remained a critical part of my strategy when playing Norman Conquests, but I couldn’t be quite so blasé in how I used my limited supply, and it forced me to be a lot more careful in my application of missile fire. This created a more interesting game experience where I would use archers to (hopefully) disorder a given unit in the enemy line and then immediately try to apply melee force to that point to break a hole so I could start flanking enemy units. This is a lot closer to how archers were used in medieval warfare, so kudos to the game for that. There should have been more crossbows, though, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later.
I also couldn’t help but notice that the the Welsh at Evesham have longbows when nobody else does. Berg clearly subscribing to the erroneous but very popular myth that the Welsh invented the longbow. A slight mark against him, but more because longbows are way overpowered and I was happier without any in this game!
All is not necessarily right in kingdom
While I have had plenty of fun playing Norman Conquests it is not a perfect game and is thus not beyond criticism. My main complaint about the game is the scenario design. Many of the scenarios feature armies of near identical unit composition positioned on a mostly blank battlefield approximately four hexes away from each other. Coincidentally, the movement rate of most units of the slowest units is 4 hexes. This means that there is no approach to battle and instead games begin with an immediate clash. To some degree this immediacy is nice, it is great to get into the thick of things quickly, but at the same time it generates a level of sameness to the play experience. Those early turns of moving the armies closer together are a great way to generate alternative narratives and try new strategies. The alternative strategies available in a battle like Fulford Bridge are mostly just activate the other battle first this time. These aren’t bad experiences, but nor are they as exciting as they could be.
The initial set up for Fulford. I will say that the swamp and river do at least narrow the battlefield some and have the potential to shake things up a little but it is still two virtually identical armies facing each other from really quite close.
The scenarios also often have very few special rules or variant options to explore. One of the things I loved about earlier Men of Iron games was how Berg would include all these weird variants for what if a historical element didn’t happen or for an alternative interpretation of the history. This expanded the options for replaying the scenario and let you pick and choose a historical interpretation, something I often did when I disagreed with the default one on offer. The Berg scenarios also generally each included some variation on the core rules that made each scenario stand out. These are not completely absent from Norman Conquests but of the first four scenarios in the box only Hastings has anything in the way of significant special rules, and that rule didn’t even come up in my playthroughs because the Normans did so well in both games I played (more on Hastings specifically below). One could be forgiven for thinking that Civitate, Fulford, and Stamford are all essentially the same scenario but with different maps.
For anyone wondering, at Fulford I chose to activate Northumbria first, but maybe next time the King should go first.
There are two very noticeable exceptions to this which are the final two scenarios in the box: Lewes and Evesham. These are scenarios that were originally designed by Richard Berg for his game Simon Says, a precursor to Men of Iron as we know it. That they stretch the concept of historically what a “Norman Conquest” is can be forgiven because these are probably the two best scenarios in the box. They retain those interesting Berg elements and while not quite as involved as some of the big, weird scenarios in games like Infidel or Arquebus they stand out as excellent additions to the Men of Iron family. I just wish more battles in Norman Conquests were like them.
Evesham, giving me that Berg-ian chrome that I yearn for so badly with its fleeing Welsh troops, possible escape for the Montfortian army, and big hill in the middle of the map. Stellar stuff.
Some parts of Norman Conquests feel a bit like a step back for the series. It could be argued that this was a move to return the series to first principles, as the game seems to take most of its notes from the original Men of Iron, but I think it shows a certain lack of ambition. I already mentioned the archery, but Norman Conquests also abandons ideas like Army Activations and returns to the original Combat Results Table (CRT) of the first game. The loss of Army Activations is arguably no big deal because in virtually every scenario you start so close to the enemy as to render them pointless, but I also find that choice disappointing as discussed above so I would have preferred to have the option and to have an approach to battle for each scenario. The CRT is more of a loss – I loved how Blood and Roses introduced a “retreat or disordered” result and made it harder to inflict mandatory retreats on units. The retreat rules in Men of Iron are incredibly punishing and actively discourage making the kind of tight formations that medieval armies used. Blood and Roses introduced a quite elegant solution to this problem, and I wish it had been picked up here. To be fair, Arquebus didn’t keep this change, but it did introduce the Engaged rules which I for one am a fan of – and these rules were partially introduced to the earlier entries in the Tri-Pack release. While Norman Conquests, because it has the Tri-Pack rulebook, does include this option and comes with a handful of Engaged counters in the mix (although not many of them), it still feels a little weird that it didn’t choose to either adopt them, modify them, or simply ignore them. The other entries in the Tri-Pack rules were designed before the engagement rule and so that rule was backdated to them as an option for fans who liked it. Surely since Norman Conquests was designed after Arquebus the designer could have made a clear choice to integrate them or not instead of this halfway solution.
The CRTs from Norman Conquests, Blood and Roses, and Arquebus. While I adore Arquebus for my money Blood and Roses probably has the best CRT in the series. Norman Conquests’ is identical to the original Men of Iron.
I’m also on the fence about the length of the battles. The flight points for battles in Norman Conquests are quite low – several are as low as 15. The end result is that these battles came to an end very quickly. This has the benefit of meaning that the scenarios are quick to play, which I am a fan of. However, I often found that the scenarios ended before I was ready for them to be finished. Things would be getting really exciting and then one side would collapse, and the game would end when I really wanted to play a few more activations. Now, I absolutely prefer for games to finish early rather than for them to overstay their welcome, but I can’t help but feel like the scenarios would be a little more satisfying if the flight points values were 5-8 points higher. It just felt a little off, the endings just that smidge too abrupt. It left me wanting more.
These are minor criticisms and didn’t ruin my enjoyment of Norman Conquests. However, they did seem to indicate a lack of ambition in the design choices and that is not something I would ever have credited the Berg designs with (or maybe any Berg design really, he certainly had ambition you have to give him that). For Norman Conquests itself this was far from a deal breaker, but I hope it is not an indicator for what the series looks like going forward. I really like Norman Conquests as a slightly simplified and smaller entry in the series, but if volume VI is like this, I don’t know that I will be as interested. I love these bite-sized scenarios but going forward please give me more Arquebus style madness!
Case Study: Hastings
Unfortunately, the history in Norman Conquests is not stellar. Men of Iron is not a series I would describe as having particularly deep historical context – you usually get some paragraphs describing every scenario but not much more. Norman Conquests continues this tradition, although to my eyes the paragraphs seem a little bit shorter and less detailed. Other entries supplemented this background with the individual rules for the scenario and optional variants, each of which usually contained a few nuggets of history. What I would say about the history in previous Men of Iron titles is that while I wouldn’t always agree with the historical version on display, I did always feel like I was getting a very specific Berg-ian take on the battle and I respected that. Those games felt like arguments Berg was making whereas the versions in Norman Conquests without those extra bits of chrome and variants feel a lot more like reading the historical summary off Wikipedia. To hopefully show what I mean, I want to dig a little deeper into the battle in Norman Conquests that I feel the most qualified to discuss as a historian: Hastings.
Hastings set up with the traditional battle site (Battle Hill) chosen. You can see the large space to the right which will go essentially unused in this scenario.
There has long been an obsession among medieval historians, often rooted in early historians like Charles Oman and especially A.H. Burne, to focus on medieval battles as decisive clashes in medieval military history. In reality, sieges were dominant and few battles, no matter how famous now or at the time, could truly be said to be decisive. However, among the rarified group of truly decisive medieval battles Hastings stands at or near the very top – truly a day when history bifurcated. It should be no surprise that 1066 and Hastings have been defining moments in English history ever since and arguments over the narrative of the battle a major part of English historical writing. As with all medieval battles, pinning down exactly what happened at Hastings is a challenge. As a major battle there were several key accounts written soon after – nearly all by the Norman victors – but they are generally not as detailed as we would like and in the way of medieval sources sometimes contradict each other.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t not here that Norman Conquests uses the labels Norman and Saxon for the two sides in Hastings, which is a very old-fashioned terminology. Modern scholars would almost universally label Harold Godwinson and his supporters the English, not the Saxons. Even those who wouldn’t use English would use Anglo-Saxon – the separate label of Saxon has been out of favor for decades as overly simplistic and failing to appreciate the mixed cultural status of the English monarchy at this stage. However, while it remains common in popular and academic works, even the term Anglo-Saxon has been challenged recently. This is still very much an ongoing debate that is a bit outside my traditional area of expertise, so I don’t want to weigh in on it definitively, but there is certainly a taint of nineteenth-century race science to the label Anglo-Saxon, and as such it has a lot of cultural cache with modern white supremacists, which has led some scholars to argue that since it is rarely attested in medieval texts we should be using English instead of Anglo-Saxon. Regardless of where you fall on this debate, the term Saxon on it’s own (without the Anglo-) is very dated and points to the age of many of the sources listed in Norman Conquests bibliography.
To give credit where it is due, the scenario in Norman Conquests gives two alternative set ups that let you fight the battle on either of the hills generally accepted as the battle site. This is great and is the kind of detail that has made me a fan of Men of Iron. However, it does come with a bit of a cost. By including both hills on the map there isn’t a lot of spare room and in practice with the scenario set up these play like two smaller battles that happen next to each other and not two very different experiences on the same shared geography. It would be far preferable if the map covered more area to the south (there is some empty space on the far right of the map sheet that could have been adopted for this purpose) so that the set ups could have allowed for more approach to the battle. Beyond my own preference for having more of an approach, this tight framing to the history does not really allow for the difference between the fairly static English army to be contrasted with the more mobile and elaborate movements of the Normans.
The alternative set up on Caldbec Hill. I think I slightly prefer this one, the curved lines and the swampy terrain make for a more interesting battle.
Here is where we get into the meat of things. The narrative of Hastings is open to some interpretation and has been pretty widely debated for centuries, so I am by no means declaring an infallible analysis here, but it is worth considering generally how most people reconstruct the battle. I would point people who are interested in this subject to Stephen Morillo’s excellent book The Battle of Hastings which includes key primary sources, interpretations of those sources, and a range of excellent articles on the history of the battle. It is far from a new book, and I think it is an oversight that it is not included in the game’s bibliography. While I don’t expect every wargame designer to be a master of primary source material, the core primary sources for Hastings are incredibly accessible to non-academics and books like Morillo’s make them very approachable and affordable. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in studying Hastings in any detail.
The bibliography from Norman Conquests. Kudos for including one, although some demerits for not including publication dates for the works (a huge pet peeve of mine). There are some good books on this list, but many older works that have long since been superseded.
In the battle of hastings the English took up a position on a hill (which hill we’ll ignore for now) and formed a shield wall to blunt the Norman attack. The Norman attack could be interpreted a few ways, but generally it is thought to have had three waves: first the archers lead the way shooting at the English, then the infantry attacked and were largely ineffective, and finally the cavalry charged in. However, it was certainly more complex than just that. Some sources suggest that Norman wings were routed, and William had to rally them himself – removing his helmet to prove he wasn’t dead by some accounts – while others describe the Normans engaging in feigned retreats to pull the English out of formation before wheeling their mounted troops around and attacking the weaker formation now. This idea of multiple waves of mounted charges is one of the most popular versions of Hastings even if there are some doubts about the veracity of the account that describes them. If we believe the story that Harold was shot in the eye, an open debate among historians, then clearly the archers continued to contribute to the fight even after the second and third waves engaged with the English lines.
What disappoints me is that the Hastings scenario does not take many steps to incorporate the specifics of the battle – for example, rules around a potential feigned retreat by the Normans or rules for the English housecarls acting as a special bodyguard for King Harold. Instead, it has mostly generic units, nearly identical for both sides except that the English get a few axmen and the Normans have some mounted men-at-arms. I would also, because I am who I am, note that the Normans have no crossbowmen despite the fact that William of Poitiers, probably the main source for the battle, clearly states “In the vanguard [William] placed infantry armed with bows and crossbows”. My point is not so much that the Hastings scenario does not have crossbowmen, but that there is a vast potential for alternative interpretations and interesting twists on the Men of Iron formula to be used in Hastings and what Norman Conquests chooses to do with it is far less ambitious or exciting than I would like. It includes the alternate battle site, albeit without any approach to the battle, and it includes rules for a Norman initiated lull if things go badly for them (and I want to emphasize that I do like this rule even if it didn’t come up in either of my plays), but that is all it does and there is potential for so much more. It doesn’t feel like a scenario created by someone working hard to untangle the primary sources – it feels too generic, like the version of the battle you’d read in a textbook. That’s not to say that Ralph didn’t read primary sources, but if he did I don’t think he committed fully to representing their complexities in the design.
The thing is, Hastings is one of the more interesting battles in the box, with many others having even fewer twists on the core model. Overall, what this does is make the battles feel far more generic than they should. All that weird Berg-ian chrome and variants were not superfluous but in many ways were one of the ways that Men of Iron engaged the history in interesting ways. Without that chrome the scenarios in Norman Conquests, while still fun, feel a bit bland and don’t teach me very much about the history. The version of medieval warfare shown in these scenarios are just two lines smashing against each other and one side winning, it lacks the nuance of a serious attempt to engage with the history and it leaves me disappointed. Even when I disagreed with Berg’s interpretation, I knew that he at least firmly believed in it. I’m less sure of that in Norman Conquests.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a lot of fun with Norman Conquests and all my complaints, criticisms, and nit-picks should be seen as a sign of my love for this series and how I want it to be the best possible version of itself. Norman Conquests is an excellent entry point for Men of Iron if you have been interested in the series but haven’t taken the plunge and it has a lot to offer series veterans looking for more medieval warfare in their life. Its greatest flaw is a lack of ambition, particularly in its scenario design, and I hope that going forward Ralph Shelton (and anyone else who may come along to design for the series, I personally would love to see a variety of designers continue the Men of Iron legacy) lets his inner Berg out a little more. I love that there is now a lighter and smaller Men of Iron entry, but here’s hoping the next volume includes some truly phenomenal Berg-ian indulgences as well!