I’ll tell you right now that I do not like Braveheart, and I haven’t liked it for some time. It’s not just that it’s egregiously historically inaccurate, even looking past that I don’t like it on its own merits. Like why did they put in that romance between William Wallace and Isabella – wasn’t the whole reason this rebellion kicked off due in part to the tragic death of Wallace’s wife? Kind of harsh to fridge your wife and then in only a few years you’re off shagging French princesses – who while not the literal child that she would have been historically does seem a little young for Mel Gibson. Sorry, I got distracted there by my loathing for ‘classic’ film Braveheart – I’m supposed to be talking about the new book game from Worthington Publishing! I’ll try to stay focused; I promised my family that I wouldn’t rant about Braveheart anymore.
This was my first time playing one of Worthington’s book games and I had a reasonably good time with it, but I’m not sure I’ll be picking up any others – a least not immediately. The premise of the book game is that you have a scenario on a single open fold out of the book – two approximately A4 size pages. One side shows the layout of the battle, while the other has the tables and results you need to resolve the actions taken by the English at the battle. On your turn you pick a Scottish formation to activate and an action – usually an attack on a specific enemy formation – then you roll a die to determine what action the English take, resolve the English side’s action, and then all going well complete your action. All rolls are a single d6 with fairly minimal modifiers, which makes calculating the odds relatively straightforward. You can’t activate the same formation twice in a row and formations only have a certain number of activations total in the game. This causes you to leap between sections of the battle juggling different goals simultaneously while also working against the clock.
One of my successful Scottish defenses at Falkirk. Stewart and Graham were wiped out, but in exchange for Lincoln, Surrey and Durham. This game featured a lot of English archers, which makes things much harder for the Scots but whether they show up and do anything is pretty random.
There is also a table of Bad Stuff (not what it’s called) that you sometimes have to roll on that can dump a little more misfortune on the Scots. For the most part these are fine. One just kills a Scottish unit, which isn’t very inspired but is fine. I really like the one where you have to mark off an activation on one of your formations – making you decide who is a lower priority for you this game. I really dislike the one where you action just fails to happen, every time I rolled that it was just miserable. I would have much preferred something that just imposed a penalty on my next roll, even if that would probably be a worse result for me since you can lose your own units on an attack it would still feel better than losing a whole activation for no effect.
The inability to activate units twice in a row is probably my favourite element of the game. It forces me to think strategically and plan a few turns down the road, but also remain flexible because those English actions could throw a real wrench in my plans. It also makes me invested in the outcome of each action because if this one fails it will be at least two turns before I can take another – if I still have actions to take on this formation! It’s enjoyable, but it more closely resembles a puzzle than a wargame which may bother some. I actually kind of wish they’d found a way to print it in a smaller book, more like a puzzle book. If it were smaller, I might carry it around in a bag and play it on the train.
My lone Scottish victory at Bannockburn. This is also the one time I committed the Reserve to the battle instead of using them to resupply other units - I think my good dice rolls made more of a difference to the result than they did, though.
That said, for a puzzle it is both a bit too random and somewhat lacking in variety. The book contains two battles – we’ll talk more about that later – and each battle comes in two different difficulties. You get six pages for each difficulty, for 24 total battles in the book. I can’t really see myself playing each difficulty level of each battle six times. At the end of my second play of Falkirk on the standard difficulty I thought I had kind of seen most of what it had to offer. My later play of the more challenging Falkirk scenario did little to mix up the experience, and thanks to some good rolls I won it on my first attempt. The scenarios aren’t particularly challenging, so if you’re someone who likes your solitaire games extremely difficult I would definitely steer clear - I’ve lost games of Braveheart: Solitaire but I’ve won most of my games, which I don’t mind but I know is not to everyone’s taste.
The game also has bit more luck than I would like. I don’t think it’s imbalanced, all of my games were very close – so much so that I would say it was actually remarkably balanced for a game where enemy actions are determined purely by d6 rolls. It’s more that I don’t find myself particularly interested in trying out new strategies because my strategy is mostly reacting to what the game throws at me. For some people this might be enough to keep them going through 24 scenarios, but I would have liked to have seen more variety and mechanics at play across the variations on the battles. Even the more advanced battles just seem to tilt the luck a little more against the Scots rather than adding new mechanics or complexity.
The battles themselves also strike me as odd. I should say that since it’s mostly a puzzle the experience playing it is very abstract. Nothing about the game really evoked the battles of Falkirk or Bannockburn, and they could really have been about just about anything. Which makes it even more odd to me that the two battles are Falkirk and Bannockburn. Falkirk makes sense, that’s one of William Wallace’s famous battles, but why Bannockburn? Wallace was well dead before Bannockburn happened. Bannockburn is also the second battle in the book and in my experience the slightly harder one. It’s hard to say because it could have just been the luck I had, but I pretty routinely lost Bannockburn as the Scots while I have yet to lose at Falkirk. That this is so dramatically the opposite of the historical outcomes really hammered home how abstract this game is. It also just feels like a really weird choice. Surely the logical choice would have been to make the first battle Stirling Bridge – Wallace’s famous victory, notoriously depicted sans bridge in the movie – and then make Wallace’s disastrous defeat at Falkirk the more challenging second battle. I am very confused by this choice.
Overall, I’ve had a fun time with Braveheart: Solitaire. It only takes 20-30 minutes to play a battle and I enjoyed the time I spent with it. That said, I won’t be playing all 24 battles in this book. I had kind of seen enough of it at around my fifth or six play of the game. Instead of finishing the book I’ll be sharing it around with some friends and collectively we’ll probably play all the battles eventually. Since this game is so abstract, I don’t particularly see a need to play other games in the series, I feel like I’ve seen just about all this has to offer and it isn’t quite enough to keep me playing. Others may disagree, though, and I hope that fans of this series continue to enjoy them.
Update: As of the 28th of April, 2022 it seems that Braveheart: Solitaire has disappeared from Amazon and is not currently available for purchase. I haven’t seen any official word from Worthington, the publisher, so I don’t know what the cause of this was but thought I should include this information here.