I must confess to feeling some trepidation when I wrote in my review of Almoravid that while I liked Levy and Campaign’s Iberian excursion, for me the original Baltic flavour was superior. You see, at time of writing I had just wrapped up several months of playing Almoravid and I hadn’t so much as opened Nevsky in weeks let alone played it. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was viewing my experiences with rose tinted glasses. After all, I’d only played a few games of Nevsky, all of them solitaire, and hadn’t even written a review of the game. I was thus very excited when news came out that Rally the Troops would be adding Nevsky as the site’s next game. Now I could finally give it the thorough exploration it warranted and determine with certainty whether the sentiments I felt so keenly after playing Almoravid were still true months later. I’m happy to report that they are! While I do have some quibbles with Nevsky, which we’ll get to, I’ve fallen in love with it all over again and found new depths to its design that I hadn’t appreciated before.
The release of Nevsky on the thoroughly excellent free online tabletop gaming platform Rally the Troops, now with revised second edition rules, was the perfect opportunity to revisit the game and finally log some serious playtime against real human opponents. If you take nothing else away from this review please remember this: the implementation on Rally the Troops is amazing! Nevsky, and Levy and Campaign games more generally, pose a challenge to playability in terms of both table space and length of game and having an excellent digital implementation like this makes it much easier to play this excellent game. You can even play on your phone, although I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The interface is a little worse on mobile, but the real problem is that it represents a grave potential risk to every other aspect of your life should you find yourself playing four games of Nevsky simultaneously while trying to cook dinner. To choose an example entirely at random.
The implementation loses none of Nevsky’s beauty and offers an excellent player experience, including enforcement of the game’s rules. No better way to learn!
If you are not familiar with Levy and Campaign games at all, I will do my best to summarise. They are operational level games of medieval warfare designed (so far at least) by Volko Ruhnke and published by GMT Games. They emphasise the more mundane elements of medieval war such as the limits imposed by military service from vassalage, feudal relationships, and the logistics of feeding and paying an army as it marches through both friendly and enemy territory. In this review I won’t be going over the basics of how Nevsky actually works, if you are interested in that I recommend reading one of my previous articles on the system or, if reading about how games work isn’t your thing, I personally recommend this video. In this review I will be focusing on the elements of the game I think are interesting or worth writing about rather than covering literally every aspect of the game.
What I Love About Nevsky:
A game of Nevsky is a logistical nightmare and that misery makes my heart sing. An excessive assortment of transport including Carts, Boats, Ships, and Sleds spread across three seasons each of which comes with its own limitations makes for a very challenging puzzle that is constantly shifting as you play. I love having to balance my transport and the requirements of feeding my army across multiple turns. I must balance the needs of the present season with ensuring that my lords are adequately positioned and provisioned for when the weather changes. Winter lets you use just sleds to take any path you want, so you can invest heavily in them, but come spring the rasputitsa renders all those sleds (now carts) worthless and restricts you to just waterways should you plan on bringing any food with you. Suddenly you’ll wish you invested in some boats or ships. All these transport options make the game’s Levy phase feel tense as you have more things you could use than you can reasonably add with your limited Lordship values. You want more vassals but more vassals means more demand for Provender which means you need more Transport but you really wanted to get some Capabilities to improve your other options. It’s frustrating in the best way - which may be the best summary of Nevsky overall.
When I first played Nevsky I wasn’t entirely impressed with its map. Sure it was gorgeous, of that there is no doubt, but I worried that the limited crossing points between the Rus and Teutonic regions could cause the early stages of each game to feel repetitive. With only a few potential opening gambits the first few turns of the campaign could grow stale. As I’ve played it more I’ve really come to appreciate how complex the map is. In particular the distribution of roads and waterways creates some very thorny problems, especially in the rasputitsa when it is impossible to transport food by roads. More than once I’ve had an army get stranded with nowhere to go because the river I thought they were safe on actually dead-ends on a crossroads and I’ll starve if I try and march down the subsequent roads. In my first games I’d also focused too much on how the map handles movement from east to west and hadn’t fully appreciated the complexity of north to south movement. Sure in the very first turn of the larger campaign game the Teutons will need to push east and seize territory via one of only a few available paths, but once that is over it very quickly opens into an array of thorny problems about what to do next. The range of options it creates and the complexities that come from it are much greater than I had initially thought. Also it is still very pretty.
The game is absolutely gorgeous, the map especially but also all the other pieces. Just a joy of a physical object.
In Nevsky you have to feed your lords and keep them supplied because if you don’t they’ll pack up and go home - maybe forever. This has always been the part about Levy and Campaign that excites me the most: it models feudal relationships and limited military service. That’s some dorky stuff I know but it’s one of the fundamental elements you have to know about to have any understanding of medieval warfare and it’s great to see a game finally dig into that. In my review of Almoravid I said I wanted lords to go home more often and having returned to Nevsky I’m actually very happy with the frequency with which Lord’s move between game map and calendar, particularly during the grand campaign. You never have enough command cards in a given turn to use every Lord in your roster but if you ever have no Lords on the map you automatically lose so there’s a careful balancing act around how long to keep each Lord on the map. Can you afford to send them home now? What if things take a turn for the worse next season? You also have to weigh the risk and advantage of Event cards that can shift when Lords can be available again, so maybe you’re sending that Lord home now but you know he’ll be back pretty soon. Of course at the same time, what if your opponent draws an Event that sends a Lord home early? Do you have contingencies in place to manage that? You can use Coin to extend service and, especially in longer scenarios, it is possible for the Rus to build up quite the war chest, but it never felt like there was so much Coin that either player could totally ignore the service limits and need to feed their armies.
The combination of game map and calendar is such a clever solution for how to model time limited service. It makes what could have been a very confusing concept visually clear and easy to parse at a glance.
I really appreciate Nevsky’s somewhat understated asymmetry. There are plenty of obvious differences between the Teutons and the Rus: each Lord has unique stats, the sides have different events and capabilities, and the Call to Arms is different for both. That’s great but the way things shake out is actually less dramatic than in Almoravid. The Teutons by and large pack a bigger punch - they get more units and better ones and their fortresses are harder to take. However, if the Rus fully mobilise, especially if/when Aleksander Nevsky himself shows up, they can be a force to reckon with. Add to that there are times when the Teutons really want to go fast and lean, not bringing their full army with its hungry stomachs, and you create a situation where in general the Teutons have an advantage but if the Rus pick their moment right they can crush Teuton lords one by one. Nevsky strikes a good balance for me in that it feels different to play the Rus and the Teutons but at the same time I don’t feel like either faction entirely dictates how I have to play the game. If I want to focus on fast raids with small armies I can do that with either side or if I want to summon vast hosts and crush my enemies in the field I can do that too.
We should probably talk about combat - for many people I suspect this would go down as a negative but while combat is far from my favourite aspect of Nevsky I really appreciate how it affects the gameplay. The thing about combat in Nevsky is that it’s highly random - you can tilt the odds in your favour as much as possible but in the end it all comes down to the dice and they can deliver some surprise upsets now and again. I think this is brilliant. Medieval warfare was unpredictable and battles were always a significant risk to both sides. Just like in the game, medieval commanders could prepare all they wanted before a battle but at some stage they had to cross their fingers and hope things worked out for them. The high risk of combat, and its punishing potential negative consequences should you lose a key fight, discourages players from getting into too many fights, just like how they would behave were they a real medieval commander. You have to carefully pick and choose your battles and balance aggression with pragmatism. The battles are random and not the most fun, but the point of the game is to not get into too many of them! I think it’s really quite clever.
I also really like how small the garrisons in the fortresses are. Small Rus cities are easily stormed and will swap sides frequently but the larger cities, and the Teuton ones, present an interesting challenge. They’re that little bit harder to take, but you could still storm them if you get lucky! The garrisons in Almoravid are (in accordance with history I might add) just way bigger and storming in that game almost always felt like a mistake. In Nevsky Storming is often the right call and it makes sieges a balancing act of should you wait a bit longer or just throw men at the walls and hope to get lucky.
Sadly Rally the Troops doesn’t have the Advanced Vassals rule implemented on the site. Understandably this is because it would be too much work, but it means that I haven’t had a chance to experiment more with it. Rally the Troops does have the Hidden Mats variant, though, and I took this opportunity to try that a few more times. I was pleasantly surprised with the experience!
In the Hidden Mats variant you know what Lords your opponent has on the map but not what troops, transport, or capabilities they have for those Lords. I hadn’t been too impressed with this variant when playing Almoravid, it was fine but didn’t seem worth the effort. Having tried it in Nevsky I have a much more positive attitude about the variant and I would definitely use it again.
I think the crux of why I like it more in Nevsky is that most Lords in Nevsky come with only a relatively small army initially but with vassals and capabilities (and events) can become extremely threatening. This allows almost any Lord to threaten any other so that lack of information is always tense. I found in Almoravid that quite a few Muslim Lords were never really going to pose a serious threat to some of the Christians if those Christians prepared for a proper battle. Similarly, the titular Almoravids always come with the same enormous terrifying army while the Nevsky brothers arrive with only a moderately sized army but can become terrifying if they start Levying the rest of their forces. I think this makes potential for surprise much higher in Nevsky and thus makes the experience of playing Hidden Mats more tense. In Almoravid I basically never attacked as the Muslims unless it was with the Almoravids, so it didn’t really matter if I knew exactly how big the Christian army was. In Nevsky not knowing could make a huge difference to my plans and create moments of genuine shock as a Lord I thought was travelling light actually has a massive host and is ready to fight.
I still don’t think I’ll play with Hidden Mats in every game. For the long campaign it’s a little too tense and stressful. I think I’ll just use it now and again when playing the mid-length scenarios. I think between four and six turns of hidden mats is the sweet spot for me.
The Bits I Don’t Like As Much:
There’s nothing in Nevsky I would say is outright bad - I am in love with this game. If there is one grievance I have with Nevsky it is the Events. I quite like the idea of the Arts of War cards being both Event and Capability but I have some reservations about how it fits within the broader game. It feels like too involved a system to be such a peripheral element of the game. You could spend days puzzling over strategies for how to Levy the best Capabilities to seed your Event deck for the optimal output - and I suspect someone has because that is the most logical explanation for the inclusion of the No Event cards. The No Event cards are kind of a bummer when you draw them. It’s an underwhelming play experience that feels like it is necessary only to fix an uncontrolled outgrowth of the decision to use the double functionality on the cards. I can’t help but wonder if a better solution could have been worked out if Events and Capabilities were separate decks. I like the double purpose Arts of War cards as an idea, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s the best idea for this game.
I think the main drawback of these multi-purpose cards is that you can’t really remove Events from the game once they trigger, every Event has the potential to always be in play. This creates two potential problems, one is in the narrative the game tells and the other is in the game experience itself. In the first case you get situations like the game I played where I drew the event Valdemar three times in one relatively short game. The Valdemar event represents the Danish king dying and the Danish lords Knud & Abel shift their service and can’t Levy or be Levied that turn. As Events go it’s not too bad, but from a narrative experience it is really weird that three Danish kings died in this one year alone. It kind of felt like maybe Knud & Abel weren’t very interested in joining the Crusade and couldn’t think up a better excuse than repeatedly claiming they had to attend a monarch’s funeral.
Those wacky Valdemars, always dying off and forcing all their lords to come home for a big funeral.
That kind of incident is silly but doesn’t greatly hurt my experience of the game much. What was more frustrating was the campaign game where I was Rus and my opponent drew one of the Events that shifted Alexandr’s cylinder further down the turn calendar three times over the game’s second half. This was extremely frustrating not because it was hurt me tactically, I honestly didn’t need Aleksandr that badly, but rather because it felt like it was removing part of the game experience. One of Nevsky’s most interesting decisions as the Rus is deciding when to bring Aleksandr and/or his brother onto the map to fight for you. If you refuse to bring them you receive Victory Points but on the other hand they are your most powerful lords. Finding the perfect balance point between pushing them back for VPs or bringing one (or both) of them on to deal with the Teutonic threat is a core part of the game, especially in the big Campaign game. The event that pushed them away on its own wasn’t terrible, but the fact that it triggered so many times meant that for basically the entire second half of the game I didn’t have that decision and except for adding one Coin to my Veche box I basically didn’t get to do the Call to Arms phase at all. Further, it was almost entirely due to blind luck of the draw on my opponent’s part and not the result of some grand strategy he had concocted which made it all the more annoying. A system where events like that are removed from play to limit their potential impact in one game could potentially be better, but that isn’t really possible with the dual purpose Arts of War cards.
Honestly, that’s basically my only significant criticism and it’s a pretty halfhearted one - I like the idea of the dual use Arts of War cards but I don’t think it’s quite there in either Nevsky or Almoravid. I am certainly open to a future entry in the series proving me wrong, and it is entirely possible that they will. Part of the problem I see in these dual purpose cards is that it is hard to tweak them to get them exactly right in a game where there is so much else that needs to be managed as part of the design and development. As Levy and Campaign advances as a series, the core mechanisms will need less tweaking and that could leave more room for refining the Arts of War decks into potentially being one of the series’ greatest strengths. We shall see.
An even milder critique would be that in the full campaign game, and even in the longer scenarios, it can be clear that the game is over for one side well before it actually reaches its conclusion. There is an auto-victory trigger if one side ever has no Lords on the map but that’s pretty rare as it is fairly easy to keep at least one Lord on map if you play conservatively. This can mean that there could be hours of game left well after the results are written on the wall. This is a very mild critique because you can just concede when it becomes clear that you can’t win anymore but I do enjoy it when games include a victory mechanism that prevents them from lasting past the point where they become largely unwinnable for one player. I don’t know what that would look like in Nevsky and I don’t think it’s a substantial flaw in the game, but it is something I would potentially be interested in seeing in future entries in the series.
In Conclusion
I adore Nevsky and the implementation on Rally the Troops makes it so easy to just keep playing more and more of it. I’m finally playing the full Campaign and while that feels like the game’s main meal, and I would recommend people tackle it as soon as they can - right after playing the Quickstart scenario if you can. Rally the Troops removes the barrier of it taking too long to easily be done in one session, since you can now just play it as you are available with no set up, and I think experiencing Nevsky as a slow burn is phenomenal. I’ve begun dabbling in some of the other scenarios and I really enjoy the ones I have played but I think they are in many ways best suited to players who have a better idea of what they are doing. It’s not that you can’t play them, but I think you will get more out of fumbling your way through the full campaign and you will have a better appreciation for the tactical situations of the shorter scenarios once you’ve messed up a few games of your own.
That all having been said, I do feel like I should put in a disclaimer here that Nevsky is absolutely not a game for everyone. I’m a medieval military historian, obsessing over medieval logistics is one of my primary pastimes, but it might not be yours! It is also a game with its fair share of luck and dice rolling and it can be punishing in the extreme if you make a critical error. That all said, it’s free to try on Rally the Troops and if you’ve read this far and you think this sounds like an interesting game you should just try it. Levy and Campaign is an experience unlike anything else currently on offer in the wargaming scene!