Great Heathen Army made my honourable mentions list of favourite games of 2022 and was my fifth most played game last year, so you can probably assume that it’s a game I enjoy. Now that I’ve played through a full campaign of the scenarios in its expansion, Kingdom of Dyflin, I feel like I’m in a better position to share my more mature thoughts in the form of an actual review of the game. For pure playability, in terms of complexity, fun, and speed of play, I think this might be one of my favourite games on medieval warfare and I fully intend to revisit it multiple times in the years to come. I still have a handful of scenarios in the base game I’ve yet to try and there are a good few I’d love to revisit as well. That said, I do have some reservations about Great Heathen Army - it is not a perfect game and some of its problems are what held it back from making my list of favourite games last year.
If you haven’t already you may enjoy reading my first impressions of the game before reading the rest of this review. That post includes a more basic discussion of the game’s mechanics and some comparisons with Men of Iron, the other medieval hex and counter system I have played a lot of. This review will cover some but not all of that ground again, and I will mostly be focusing on elements of the game that I think are interesting to analyse in more detail. You can read my first impressions here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/first-impressions-great-heathen-army
Great Heathen Army’s order system, which it uses to handle activations of your units, remains one of the most interesting parts about the game. Each turn you assign orders to your Wings, which consist of a number of individual units, with the scenario dictating how many orders you can give each turn and the number of Wings that can receive orders. The counters are double sided which makes for an interesting decision because picking one order always limits your choices by removing that token’s reverse side from your pool. The system is easy to learn and teach others as a system but also generally makes for interesting decisions. In particularly I like how Great Heathen Army often gives you more Wings than orders and plenty of scenarios create a bit of asymmetry by allowing one side more flexibility in assigning their orders. Some scenarios even change how many orders a side can give mid-game, which can be really interesting. If I had one critique of this system it would be that I’m not totally sure about the pairing of orders on given counters. Most turns saw me selecting Move + Combat for the Wings I was activating that turn, so most of the time I wasn’t agonising over my decisions. Lots of scenarios also give you duplicates of key orders like Move so you don’t necessarily feel the pinch of not having all the orders you want. The most interesting command was probably the Bonus order which upgrades another order - in particular when to pair that with Combat. Do you want a couple of very good attacks or do you want to move first and get more attacks but they’re not quite as good? This was an interesting decision, especially because scenarios only ever gave me one Bonus order and some even took it away or restricted my access to it in other ways.
A fairly classic set of orders - the Vikings used Move + Fight to close the distance and now the Irish will use Move + Fight on one Wing to push back while the other Wing gets a Horse command because that lets the horses move and fight in one turn.
It may have made more sense if Move and Combat were on the same command, I think that would make the decisions more tense. For example, you can still make a small move if you pick Shield Wall but your attack is weaker (although so is your opponent’s on their turn) as a result so that would make an interesting decision of when is it worth pushing forward in Shield Wall and attacking. It would also mean I would have used Shield Wall more - I didn’t end up using it very often which felt weird for a game about Viking age warfare. I also basically never used Withdraw because there was nothing stopping my opponent from moving forward and attacking again. I should say that this is not meant as particularly strong critique of the game - I really enjoyed the order system overall and this is more of a nit pick. I believe The Grass Crown, the latest entry in the Shields and Swords series (albiet in a slightly new form and covering ancient warfare), may have already changed the layout of order counters. I think that the core of the order system is really interesting but I feel like it could be a little more refined. It’s also possible that because Great Heathen Army was a later entry in an existing system the orders matched the topic a little better in earlier games. I really like this system and I hope Amabel Holland, the designer, decides to return to medieval warfare with a new take on it.
The Grass Crown with its heretical squares and samples of the order tokens on the left. Image courtesy of Pierre, who actually owns it. He says it’s quite good, I haven’t played it though.
The Initiative rule is another aspect of Great Heathen Army I really like but I wonder if it couldn’t be refined a little more. The player who holds Initiative can, at the end of their turn, choose to pass the token to their opponent and then immediately take a second full turn. This is incredibly powerful and I think does a great job of capturing what having the initiative in a battle could yield. The problem is how do you stop people from using it basically every turn? By default Vikings receive a beneficial -1 DRM if they hold the initiative but in my experience it is rarely worth holding on to the token for this bonus alone. Several scenarios have bonus rules that make one side want to hold initiative longer and I think these are a really positive element. In the final battle of Clontarf, which has no such rules, Pierre (my opponent, or possibly victim) and I were basically using the Initiative every turn to take our turns two at a time. This wasn’t strictly a bad experience, but it did feel like it slowed the tempo of the game a bit and I preferred scenarios where deploying the Initiative felt like a more climactic moment. On the whole I really like this system, I just don’t think it’s quite perfect.
I’ve praised it before but after many more games I remain a big fan of Great Heathen Army’s combat results table - a sentence that exudes excessive grognard energy I know. The number of modifiers are relatively few and the shifts between the rows of unit effectiveness feel consequential, both big positives in my book. However, it is the viciousness of the results that I like most. Most rows only have one space with No Effect so most of the time something will happen, and that something can be quite dramatic. The number of Exchange results, which injure both units, makes sending weaker Levy troops to attack enemy Veterans very rewarding - sacrificing a Levy to wound a Veteran is always a good exchange. I also quite like how an Attacker Retreats result forces all attacking units to retreat, which when combined with harsh rules where units that can’t retreat take a loss, can create some very bad outcomes for the attacker especially because the combat modifiers encourage you to gang up and attack with two more units. There are also very few options for recovering strength, limited to only a few special rules in some scenarios, so each result feels impactful. This makes every combat roll interesting and keeps the game moving along at a quick pace without ever entering into a stalemate of troops aimlessly poking at each other to no real effect.
The set up for the second scenario in the base game of Great Heathen Army. I like how it really gets to you into the thick of things very quickly. Also note the d8 in the top left corner. Great Heathen Army uses it instead of the more common d10 and I slightly prefer it, but for entirely tactile reasons. I prefer d8s. I’m sure it does something interesting to the statistical spread but that’s a bit lost on me.
One of my favourite small details in Great Heathen Army is how it handles kings. Kings are Veteran units that are slightly better than other Veterans - they do not lose their combat quality when injured - but they are also worth double the victory points when eliminated. Having high value troops that you want to use but desperately don’t want to lose is a dynamic I adore, but it is not my favourite thing about Great Heathen Army’s monarchs. That belongs to the fact that the crown symbol only appears on the reduced side of the counter. While you know where your kings are during set up, your opponent doesn’t know and you’re not allowed to check once the game has begun. This means that you quickly forget where the kings are and it is often a surprise for both players when a Veteran counter flips to reveal a king. I love this little element of hidden information that spices up the game and can create some very funny moments. More games should hide information on the reverse of counters.
A surprise king is revealed on the left and oh no he is not in a very good position! Meanwhile the Red King’s location remains a secret.
My play through of the scenarios in Kingdom of Dyflin finally let me try the cavalry rules for Shields and Swords and I found them enjoyably simple if not particularly exciting. Cavalry don’t move any further than normal units but they can be activated twice in one turn thanks to their separate Horse Phase (yes, it’s called Horse Phase). This can create some interesting dynamics, particularly in scenarios where you only have one Combat order since the Horse order will let your cavalry move and fight. The choice to incorporate cavalry within existing Wings rather than having their own separate one also makes for interesting choices when it comes to selecting orders. To me, though, the most interesting thing about the cavalry is the rules that let light cavalry (which is all there are in Great Heathen Army, other entries have heavy cavalry) ignore Exchange results on the CRT and retreat instead. This seems like a smaller difference than having a whole extra phase just for them, but I think it made a bigger difference in how I used them. The Horse Phase was like a nice luxury, but knowing that I could avoid a whole result on the CRT was a much more dramatic change to how I used them compared to other units. Like the hidden kings markers, this felt like a nice bit of spice added to the game but nothing that fundamentally changed my experience. They felt like Veterans with special rules rather than a radically different unit type, but I didn’t necessarily mind that. After all, the Viking age wasn’t exactly famous for its cavalry tactics!
For my deep dive into Great Heathen Army I opted to play the scenarios in the Kingdom of Dyflin expansion. I chose this for the fairly simple reason that the expansion covers Viking battles in Ireland. I live in Ireland so that had an instant appeal, plus you don’t get many games about medieval Irish warfare. The Kingdom of Dyflin adds four scenarios to Great Heathen Army, concluding in the Battle of Clontarf - the largest scenario in the Shields and Swords system as it spans two map sheets. I recruited my friend Pierre to command the Vikings as we played through all four battles. This was Pierre’s first experience with the system, but as a fairly experienced hex and counter wargamer he didn’t struggle with the rules. He did struggle with the core wargaming tactic of “rolling well” and lead the Vikings on what must have been some of their most disastrous campaigns.
In Kingdom of Dyflin uses the advanced formation rules, first introduced in Great Heathen Army as an optional variant, as standard rules and I don’t think I’d play the game any other way to be honest. In the advanced formation rules, if any Levy unit is not either adjacent to a Veteran or Cavalry or within two hexes of two other units in its Wing then it is immediately eliminated. This might sound a little confusing but it is pretty clear in play. This can create chains where one Levy is isolated and then its removal means that another one is now isolated and so on down the line. This makes your positioning very important as you need Veterans and Cavalry to keep your Levies on the map. Generally if you’re careful your formations should be fine for most of the game, but in the late game the collapse of one wing can spell the end as 2-3 units evaporate pushing one player over their VP goal. This is actually a pretty satisfying ending I think as it really feels like part of your army has fled the field and your position is doomed. Rules about the coherence of formations is also something I don’t see very often in games like this and I think it captures something that was probably pretty important to warfare during this period. These are not disciplined professional soldiers so keeping them around as things got worse and worse would be increasingly difficult. It also made formation and supporting my weakened lines an incredibly important part of the game as opposed to something like Men of Iron where being Out of Formation feels like a mild inconvenience at worst.
The initial deployment for Cenn Fuait - like all scenarios in Great Heathen Army players have mostly free deployment of their troops. This scenario is interesting because it starts with the Irish on the offensive but once those off map White Vikings arrive the Irish can choose to try and withdraw one of their wings for Victory Points
Kingdom of Dyflin includes four new battles: Cenn Fuait (917), Ath Cliath (919), Glen Mama (999), and Clontarf (1014). These battles include additional rules that made for a really interesting and mostly enjoyable experience. Cenn Fuait has what I think might be the most interesting twist of the lot. In that game the Irish start on the offensive but when the Vikings bring on their third Wing of veterans the game changes and the Irish must designate one Wing as the rear guard and the other as the withdrawing Wing. The Irish player gets a VP for every member of the withdrawing Wing they can move off the map. This creates an interesting dynamic around when does the Viking player bring on reinforcements and risk letting their enemy get away. Similarly, for the Irish you can’t win just by retreating your second Wing so you need to be aggressive to the point where you can withdraw a few units for a possible win. I would definitely revisit this scenario, it’s very cool.
Cenn Fuait: The final Viking Wing has arrived and the Irish position has changed - however retreating all their forces now won’t win the game for the Irish. They need to push what advantage they have before potentially falling back with a few troops to clinch the final victory
In Ath Cliath the Vikings must defend a hill from the Irish while in Glen Mama they must block the Irish from opening a path through the map - representing the Irish trying to clear a road to march down. These two are interesting and they have some intriguing bonus rules, but they aren’t quite as interesting as Cenn Fuait. I had a good time with them and I would definitely try Ath Cliath again - the defend the hill gameplay creates some interesting maneuvering and it played very quickly. I found tracking whether the Irish had opened a hole in the Viking line in Glen Mama a bit tedious so I don’t know if I’m eager to revisit it. It was fun, I didn’t have a bad time, but there are plenty of better scenarios in the base game and Kingdom of Dyflin to keep me occupied without playing this one again.
Cenn Fuait: The final Irish positions - you can see the already dead pile on the maps edge (the Viking dead are off map). While their position has entirely crumbled, retreating those five remaining soldiers over the black and white line will be enough to secure victory.
Clontarf is a monster of a scenario (for this system at least) spanning two maps and using most of the game’s counters. It has a high victory threshold and no special rules to impact it, so it sets up two fairly equal sides to slug it out for supremacy. It’s an interesting scenario due to its scale and I had a lot of fun playing it, but I don’t know that I’d set up Clontarf all that often. Pierre and I used the Initiative token on nearly every turn we had it so more often than not we would each be taking two turns back to back. Given the size of the armies involved this sometimes created pretty substantial downtime, which is something that I think Great Heathen Army generally does a good job at avoiding. I enjoyed the game, but one of the things I really like about Great Heathen Army is that it’s very easy to play in an hour and Clontarf is definitely not that. Without any special rules flair to get me excited to try it again I’m not sure I’ll play Clontarf very often, but since it’s sheer size gives it something of a unique feeling I can’t say I won’t play it again either.
Vikings and Irish square off in Clontarf - it should be noted both that almost all of the map terrain has no affect on gameplay and that the light green horses are part of the Irish Red Wing. I wish the quality of the aesthetics of Great Heathen Army matched the gameplay a little better.
The one big special rule that Clontarf adds is a significant revision of Great Heathen Army’s archery rules. In default Great Heathen Army, archers - who only shoot in the separate Missile Phase and otherwise act as normal Levy troops - cannot inflict any kind of wound on enemy troops. Instead they can suppress enemies which reduces their mobility and makes them more vulnerable to attack. While suppression is a cool mechanism, in practice I never used the Missile Phase. You generally need to roll a 7 or 8 on a d8 (there are some bonuses you can collect to improve that a bit) to successfully suppress an enemy and shooting happens before movement which given that bows barely outrange unit movement makes being in range a challenge. This means you need to carefully align your archers so that they can get shots while also having melee troops nearby to take advantage of the result which will only happen about a quarter of the time. It’s a lot of effort for little to no result.
What Clontarf changes is that instead of suppression you do actual hits on a successful roll. I liked this a lot more. Your chances of hitting are still pretty low but it’s worth trying because the result is so good. Particularly in the mid-game of our battle I started taking pot shots at enemy kings in the hopes of getting lucky (which I did a few times). This rule is probably a little strong to be made default - I would propose maybe just letting missile attacks reduce but not eliminate enemy units - but for the first time I actually used my archers like archers. I was also using the Missile Phase order which gave me more choices on my turn which is always good. Going forward I may try and play a few scenarios with amended archery rules to see if my positive experience applies to other battles as well.
Clontarf: This moment, late in the battle, is when the archers really began to swing the tide. The Irish archers in bright red started taking pot shots at Viking kings, starting with the light blue one on the left, and some good rolls eliminated quite a few Nordic monarchs securing 4 VPs each for the Irish side. As the casualties on the right side of the river show it was reasonably close at this point but those big losses were hard to recover from.
While I really enjoy Great Heathen Army, and the Kingdom of Dyflin especially, I am not without reservations about the game. For me the single greatest downside is that it feels a lot more like a game than a commentary on the history. I feel like I’m playing a really interesting fairly abstract wargame rather than waging medieval warfare. Some of this is in how both sides are almost identical and how the command system abstracts away unit activation significantly from how it would be historically. Another major element is in how you move and position your armies. The punishing retreat rules motivate you to leave a space in your lines so that you can withdraw. Also the ability to move and attack in the same turn and the fact that everyone covers the same fixed distance means that aggressive positioning largely involves putting some units into your opponents threat while lining up a counter punch to hit them once they engage with your line. This isn’t a dynamic I dislike, I actually spent most of my 20s playing a miniatures wargame with exactly that play style, but it doesn’t really feel like the dynamic a Viking army would use. Throwing forward sacrificial bait to pull in a charge might make sense if you were an army of light cavalry fighting the crusaders, but for Viking age foot armies it feels weird and arguably overly complex for the limited discipline of armies of the time. It also resulted in some slightly hilarious looking formations, the kind of thing no reasonable commander would construct.
Clontarf: This formation by the Irish (bottom of the screen) may have been my most unhinged looking across the four game campaign. This is not mid-turn, I chose to arrange them like this and then let Pierre attack me. I would like to note that it actually worked really well, which I’m not sure how I feel about to be honest.
The game also isn’t very attractive. I find the art style broadly endearing, but the fact that both sides’ units mostly look the same is kind of bland and the lack of new units in the expansion to represent the Irish was kind of a bummer. Again, it makes it feel more like an abstract experience. The art doesn’t push me away from the game but neither does it draw me in and make me relate to the units. I processed it more like symbology rather than representations of actual historical humans. In the same vein, more often than not the scenario rules would tell me to ignore the terrain that was printed on the map and treat it basically like an empty board, which further contributed to feeling like I was playing an abstract game.
After your third or fourth battle that’s just this map with the same counters the appeal of the aesthetics begins to fade. This time the battle is Glen Mama, but can you tell at all from the visuals?
None of this should be taken as a scathing indictment of Great Heathen Army, but it does reduce my interest in buying other games in the series. The thinness of the theme means that I’m not desperate to see how this system models a different period of medieval history because I feel like I can kind of guess that it will be kind of similar but with different scenario rules. There’s enough content in Great Heathen Army and the Kingdom of Dyflin to keep me engaged for a while. Also I’m not sure I would play without the advanced formation rules but they aren’t compatible with every entry in the series so that further discourages my interest in those games. Similarly, the art for the units seems pretty consistent across the games which is another mild disappointment. I’m not saying I won’t play any other games, if someone set up a scenario from House of Normandy and asked me to play I absolutely would take them up on that. I’m just not sure I need another on my shelf - I live in a small European house and space is at a premium!
Beyond that, I have a few minor nitpicks, the biggest of which is probably that the CRT page doesn’t have the sequence of play printed on it. The sequence that each order is resolved every turn is very important, for example that missiles and shield wall trigger before movement is essential to the game experience. Since most turns I just did Move + Combat I didn’t memorise the turn order for quite a while so whenever I did mix things up and use different orders I generally found myself double checking what order everything would happen in. It would have saved me time if I didn’t have to flip into the manual to find it. The meanings of the command symbols are printed on the back of the manual, but they aren’t printed in sequence of play order which is a little confusing. This is the pettiest of nitpicks, though, and if I’m down to complaining about this kind of stuff you know the game as a whole is great.
Overall, really enjoyed Great Heathen Army and will continue to play it. I am very interested to see what the future holds for the series, but I probably won’t track down any of the other (now out of print) entries as I feel I have enough in the Great Heathen Army box to keep me entertained for a long time. I would say that the Kingdom of Dyflin battles added a lot to my enjoyment of Great Heathen Army. The four scenarios were among my favourites that I’ve played and I look forward to revisiting them (or nearly all of them anyway) in the future - possibly playing the Vikings this time. While I have my nitpicks about the system they are really minor things that hold a great game back from being an all time classic. I can easily imagine a future entry in the series that improves in these areas being among my favourite games of all time so here’s hoping Amabel keeps designing games like this.