Any long running game series faces the risk of stagnation. While Levy and Campaign is only on its fourth volume, there are near countless future volumes in the works and it could easily expand to equal it’s predecessor COIN in terms of size, and so naturally we begin to wonder do we really need all these games? Can each new addition sufficiently differentiate itself from what came before? Plantagenet answers this question by being far more than a simple rejigging of the core system, this is practically a ground up rebuild. It takes mechanisms designed for the thirteenth-century Baltic and reshapes them to suit fifteenth-century England, casting off several core systems in the process and adding whole new ones. The final product is, surprisingly, probably the most approachable Levy and Campaign game yet and a stunning marriage of mechanism and theme. While Plantagenet fails to top the post in terms of my own personal preference for Levy and Campaign games, it is a phenomenal design and has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Levy and Campaign as a whole.
Plantagenet makes substantial changes to the Levy and Campaign core, so many that I found it harder to learn than I expected as a series veteran. For Almoravid and Inferno I was able to skim the rules, picking out the highlighted differences, and use my knowledge of Nevsky to propel me into my first games. This did not work for Plantagenet; the changes were too foundational. I gave up and just read the rules in their entirety, only then did I grasp what I was doing wrong. That is not to say that Plantagenet is more complex than earlier entries. For new players coming into the series without any baggage I believe this will be easier to learn but for series veterans I would warn you to prepare to challenge your assumptions about what a Levy and Campaign game can be. This is a good thing, though! Much as I’ve enjoyed Almoravid and Inferno, having the system shaken up like this is positive – as long as the final product is good of course!
One of the best decisions that designer Francisco Gradaille made in Plantagenet was in considering the mechanical weight of his design. What I mean is that he did not just bolt new ideas and mechanisms onto the Levy and Campaign core, instead for everything he adds he takes something away which helps prevent the game from becoming unwieldy. Consider first what is taken away. There are no sieges in Plantagenet. For those unfamiliar with Levy and Campaign that might not seem like a big deal, but the rules for sieges in this system are involved and removing sieges also removes rules for sorties, castle walls, garrisons, and arguably the main way players earn victory points. This is a huge chunk of the system to strip away, but it not only allows the addition of new systems it also fits the history. The Wars of the Roses were not entirely without sieges – several Welsh castles, most famously Harlech, were the scene of several major sieges – but by the mid-fifteenth century it had been a very long time since England had faced any kind of internal warfare so where previously there had been many fortified castles and walled cities, the former had mostly turned into residences for the wealthy and the latter left to decay as the cities expanded well beyond them. Unusually for a medieval war, the Wars of the Roses were defined by field battles, and so it makes sense to remove pages of siege rules that would only be necessary in a few niche situations.
Also befitting the battle heavy nature of the Wars of the Roses, the rules for battle have been subtly tweaked. Gone is the ability to endlessly avoid battle and there is now the potential for Lords to intercept any enemy force moving adjacent to them, which nudges Plantagenet towards a more aggressive posture. Instead of avoiding battle by marching away a Lord may choose to go into Exile – fleeing to a foreign haven where they can muster forces for a new invasion on a subsequent turn. Knowing when to choose battle and when to Exile is core to Plantagenet’s ebb and flow. Losing a battle runs the risk of a Lord being killed and permanently removed from play, so choosing to stay and fight carries even higher risks than in other Levy and Campaign games. Additional changes are the inclusion of special units like the Retinue, which is extremely powerful but if it is routed you lose the battle, or Vassals that you recruit from the map who act as a special unit themselves rather than adding more wooden unit pieces to the Lord’s mat. Hits in combat are now simultaneous, so it is no longer quite so advantageous to be the defender. Lastly, Lords have a Valor rating that gives you a limited number of re-rolls for armor saves in combat – this helps to mitigate the random luck element in Levy and Campaign’s core combat, but it does also add yet more dice rolling which will do nothing to win over anyone who already did not like how Levy and Campaign handles combat.
The Lord mats have also been changed to allow for the many, many unique lords that fought (and died) during the Wars of the Roses. The mats are generic and Lords are represented by cards that show their stats and starting units/resources.
Everything up to now could be considered tweaks to the system rather than a radical reimagining, but I have saved the best for the last: the Influence system. Influence is effectively victory points, tracked on an absolute scale. Players can spend Influence, shifting the track towards their opponent, and you will because you need to make Influence checks to accomplish pretty much anything that will push you towards victory. Influence checks are used when recruiting Vassals and when taxing, but the most common use for them is Parleying. Parleying lets you switch the loyalty of spaces on the board. You need spaces to be friendly to do several actions, but you also gain Influence at the end of the turn if you have the most of each of the three kinds of location (Stronghold, Town, and City) as well as for several key locations (London, Calais, and Harlech). By Parleying for control, you are effectively spending victory points now with the hope that you will get more in the future.
The summary of Influence point costs from the play aid looks really intimidating, but in practice it’s pretty easy to keep track and after a game or two you’ll mostly have internalized it. It helps a lot that if you play on Rally the Troops it does the math for you as well.
Influence checks are simple. Each Lord has an Influence stat between one and five and you must roll equal to or under that number, with a roll of a six always being a failure and a one always a success. You can bolster your chances by spending more Influence, but since Influence is essentially victory points this can be a risky prospect – especially if, like me, you have an uncanny ability to roll sixes. Influence underpinning so many disparate systems – control, Vassal recruitment, tax, etc. – is a great example of using one core system across several aspects of the design. It also means you are always thinking about your Influence costs – you want to spend Influence, but can you really afford to? There is constant pressure to spend: each Lord costs Influence to keep on the board between turns, and you must pay your troops every turn or they will pillage the land, which means you need to be taxing, and taxing costs influence. All these elements combine to burden the player with a constant sense of pressure – even when you’re doing well on Influence it feels brittle, a few bad twists of fate and it could all come crumbling down. You turn on fortune’s wheel.
Should you rise too high in Influence you also risk tipping the balance in England and forcing a drastic response from your opponent. Something I admire in Levy and Campaign games is how bad they make battles feel – battles are gambles and experienced players often try and avoid them as much as possible. This reflects how medieval commanders often saw them as well. However, medieval commanders still risked it all on a battle and sometimes I worry that Levy and Campaign doesn’t do enough to nudge you towards gambling on a fight in the open field. Plantagenet has a clever solution to this problem. Defeating enemy Lords can gain you Influence and driving them into Exile can give you the time and space you need to claw back a bad position. You can, and probably will, play entire games of Plantagenet where nobody fights a single battle, but at the same time sometimes you will be faced with no other choice than to abandon the game of political control and try your luck on the battlefield. This is made particularly risky with Plantagenet’s highways, that let Lords rocket across the map, so you are never truly safe from a large army that is determined to chase you down.
The green paths are very slow - taking a whole activation to move across them - but the gray highways can be moved two spaces at a time, which allows for some very rapid advances along the east-west and north-south axis.
If you focus too much on politics and you get too far ahead in Influence you may find yourself facing the full might of your opponent’s forces – and you had better hope you were preparing to fight because armies can ramp up in size very quickly in Plantagenet. The option to flee into Exile rather than fight avoids making this too punishing an experience. In fact, sometimes you want your opponent to overcommit to a large army because when you abandon England for a few turns they’ll be stuck paying for all those soldiers and they may end up having to disband their own Lords just to avoid pillaging and losing even more Influence.
The slow attrition inflicted on England and Wales provides another motive for combat. Every time you take provender or tax a space for coin you slowly deplete it. While it will replenish after certain turns, the tendency is towards a slow attrition of the island’s resources. This happens particularly fast if you have large armies, as they demand two or even three times as much food and coin. You can even deliberately deplete areas to deny them to your opponent. If you cannot afford to feed or pay your troops they will pillage, giving your opponent a pile of Influence and, if you are truly unlucky, disbanding that Lord anyway. This means that in certain contexts you may need to throw an army into battle just because it is too expensive to sustain – but if your opponent keeps refusing you that opportunity what are you going to do?
This interplay of when to play the area control game of abstracted politics versus when to risk it all in the field is Plantagenet’s shining gem. It works wondrously and really embodies the sense of the Wars of the Roses. This is not a game that will teach you in detail every aspect of the Wars of the Roses and make you an expert in its many battles and betrayals. Instead, it places you in the mindset of the two factions and poses many of the same problems they faced and asks you to figure out what you would have done in their place. In this way it is a shining gem of wargame design.
I must now make a grim confession – I don’t own Plantagenet anymore. The reason for that is simple: it’s on Rally the Troops and I just don’t see myself playing it any other way. Much as I love Levy and Campaign, I have struggled to find the time and space to play them in person. Virtually all of my games have been on either Rally the Troops or Vassal. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, the Rally the Troops implementations in particular are amazing, but it does put me in a weird place when I’m heaping so much praise on a game I gave away and don’t intend to buy again. Plantagenet has some of the best scenario variety I’ve seen in any Levy and Campaign game, but the scenarios also tend to be long. This maximizes their capacity for that glorious turn of fortune’s wheel feeling that I love so much, but it also makes it even less likely that I, personally, will play the cardboard and wooden version of this game. If this sounds like an interesting game you should absolutely try it on Rally the Troops and then maybe, if it fits your own personal preferences and lifestyle, consider buying the physical game.
While I’m making dark confessions, I don’t love Plantagenet as much as I do Nevsky. To quote Mrs. Doyle, maybe I like the misery. Nevsky is a game of watching your plans crumble around you and stranding your Lord somewhere stupid when the spring rains make it impossible for him to move. It’s got grinding sieges that will take hours of your life only to ultimately collapse due to lack of food or funds. It’s brutal and at times tedious in a way that I just adore. Plantagenet softens many of these elements – there is more potential for coming up with a plan on the fly when something goes awry. Food sources are plentiful, even if taking it depletes the land, and you can always try and Parley for a little more territorial control. That’s not to say that Plantagenet is kind – instead it is a game of compounding error. In Nevsky your mistake is often immediate, and its repercussions drop on you like a stone, whereas Plantagenet pushes you inch by inch closer to an edge, maybe you see it coming maybe you don’t. It is a series of bad mistakes coming home to roost to Nevsky’s one big blunder hitting you in the face with the force of a hammer.
These are not dissimilar sensations, because Plantagenet is after all a descendant of Nevsky and it carries that semi-masochistic DNA. I expect many people will prefer Plantagenet’s particular brand of self-destruction, including its more open play environment thanks to the added layer of area control. And, for the record, I really like Plantagenet. This is an excellent design and the most exciting addition to the Levy and Campaign yet. It has set a high bar for the games that have to follow in its wake. Francisco and the rest of the team should be very proud of what they have made.
Appendix: on Archery
I want to conclude with something I haven’t done in quite some time: a far too long analysis of a game’s representation of medieval archery.
Archery in Levy and Campaign has traditionally been very powerful. Combat resolves in the sequence of Ranged, Mounted, and then Foot combat. Since routed units won’t contribute to future combat phases, you want to get as many hits in as early as possible. Plantagenet cuts the mounted combat, as virtually everyone in the Wars of the Roses fought on foot, and further reduces the advantage to the defender by making hits simultaneous rather than defender first, but still inflicting missile hits remains very strong. Your primary ranged unit – not the sole one, but the one you’ll often rely on the most – is the longbowmen. Longbowmen deal two hits at ranged, no hits in melee, and have very poor armor (although some cards can enhance that).
There are also handgunners, but I usually fail to recruit them. Fun fact, the leftover bullets from the guns was part of how historians were eventually able to locate where the Battle of Bosworth Field was fought.
Two hits is very powerful in Levy and Campaign, many units in the series only cause one half of a ranged hit (leftover halves round up). Longbows inflict no armor penalty, unlike crossbows in Inferno for example, but the armor values in Plantagenet tend to be lower for most units so in practice those longbow arrows hit pretty hard. Now, do I, a huge medieval archery nerd, think this is accurate? My instinct is to say that the archers in Plantagenet are somewhat over-powered, but it is actually very hard to say whether this is the case with any great degree of confidence.
Here's something that I think surprises a lot of people: we (at time of writing) have no surviving examples of a medieval English longbow. Despite being one of the most famous weapons of the Middle Ages, and one that was used in the thousands, none have survived to the modern day. This isn’t that surprising, really, when you consider that longbows were obviously made of wood and wood decays, especially if it’s not carefully preserved and there would have been no need to preserve longbows – they were weapons to be used and discarded when they were worn out. That’s not to say that no longbows survive from the Middle Ages – we have several from Ireland and a few from Denmark and other places with the kind of boggy terrain that more readily preserves wooden staves. At the same time, we do have a large collection of English longbows, recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose, but those date from c.1545 which makes them early modern longbows, not medieval.
Here's why this matters: while historians have done incredibly thorough studies of the power of the longbows on the Mary Rose we don’t know how far back that data is applicable. The handful of bows we’ve recovered from medieval Europe were all far weaker than the bows from the Mary Rose, but we have to caveat that with the fact that those bows may not have all been for military use. This has created an extensive debate among historians about what the draw weights of the average English longbows was and how that developed over time. Most historians would say that the draw weights probably increased over the course of the Middle Ages, although by how much and how frequently is hotly debated. Interestingly, this notion, drawn from the archaeological evidence, sometimes contradicts written evidence, especially in the sixteenth century, where authors bemoaned the declining quality of archers compared to those of generations before. These arguments are relatively easily dismissed as a handful of cranks whining about the kids these days, though.
I tend to be of the more conservative sort – I think many of the calculations and estimates represent a theoretical maximum, how powerful a bow used by an archer in peak form could be, and I argue that your average archer probably isn’t shooting with optimal form, especially in a battle, and may even be under-drawing their bow, reducing its power and making it easier to shoot all day in a battle. So if a calculations says that a Mary Rose bow has a draw weight of 140 lbs. at 30 inches, I always want to know what that draw weight is at 26 inches as well.
In his magnum opus of a work The Knight and the Blast Furnace Dr. Alan Williams provides estimates for what force would be required to reliably penetrate late medieval plate armor. Those estimates generally lie beyond the realm of your average longbow. This has been generally supported by some empirical tests – with some caveats. Medieval plate armor was not of universal thickness. Key areas, like helmets and breastplates, were generally thicker than limb protection, so a missile that might bounce off a helmet could dent or penetrate a limb. This has generally led me to support the position put forward by Kelly DeVries in his article “Catapults are not Atomic Bombs” that longbows were more of a support weapon – a way of breaking enemy formations and degrading unit morale/coherency in preparation for the melee engagement – rather than strictly a lethal tool in their own right.
What does this mean for Plantagenet? Honestly, not very much. From a game balance perspective, I like that longbowmen are purely ranged with poor armor, even if historically I would probably argue for more of a mixed ranged/melee unit with slightly better defensive equipment. I do quite like how in Levy and Campaign units are routed in combat and then only eliminated after the battle if they fail another armor test – so even if longbowmen are hugely effective in battles they are not necessarily meant to be lethal. This section isn’t even really intended as a criticism of the design, but rather a chance to wax on about one of my favorite historical niches and while Plantagenet may not align with my own sensibilities on the subject matter, I am perfectly able to admit that there is a lot we don’t know and my view is just one interpretation of the available evidence.
If you’d prefer your archery ramblings in audio format, I recorded an episode of my (incredibly) infrequent podcast on this subject with a special guest who has been spending a lot more time researching this than I have recently.
If you like the work I do here, and particularly if you like weird historical ramblings, maybe consider throwing me a cup of coffee on Ko-Fi? Reviewing wargames isn’t a particularly lucrative business and every contribution counts and is hugely appreciated.