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[Malta Month] The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen

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[Malta Month] The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen

I am enthralled by the Great Siege of Malta. It is one of the most engaging historical narratives I’ve ever come across, the kind of story that feels too exciting to be even remotely true. Too long to really work as a movie, it feels perfectly suited to a high drama HBO series – except probably lacking in sufficient opportunities for gratuitous female nudity. It is a story full of sudden dramatic changes in fortune, deaths, betrayals, desperation, and dramatic last stands against all odds. An underdog story of resistance against an unstoppable foe that somehow also manages to show how much that massive foe is struggling against their own difficulties. It is easy to see why it captured imaginations at the time and within months of its conclusion some commentators described it as the greatest siege that ever was.

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[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling

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[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling

Making a game about a siege is challenging. Sieges are often by their very nature filled with long stretches of time where one side has little to do but endure. A siege like the Great Siege of Malta, which lasted most of a year, can be a long, slow, tortuous, and brutal event that doesn’t lend itself immediately to being turned into a game. Capturing the scale of a siege while also giving players plenty of choices and things to do to keep them engaged is a challenge. Even when you do find an element to gamify, if the game is multiplayer, you will need something for both sides to do. It’s not very exciting if one player is taking lots of actions and the other player just has to wait until something happens. You can design the best system ever for the attacker to try and topple his opponent’s walls, but if the defender has nothing to do you haven’t made much of a game. This may be why many wargames about sieges seem to be solitaire games. When you only have to create a game for one side and can entirely abstract the other it simplifies the challenge of making a game from the history.

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 was not the first time that the Knight’s Hospitaller clashed with the Ottoman Empire, nor even the first time they had fought against the sultan Suleiman I, The Magnificent. Forty years earlier in the winter of 1522-3, at the very start of the sultan’s reign, he had driven the knights from their previous home on the island of Rhodes. The 1522 Siege of Rhodes is just one in a series of famous Ottoman sieges, starting with the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, then the less talked about 1480 Siege of Rhodes during which the Hospitallers drove off the forces of Suleiman’s father, and the later Siege of Malta in 1565. Suleiman opened his reign by driving the hated Knights Hospitaller, a military order with its roots in the eleventh century and which had participated in nearly every major crusading conflict, from the eastern Mediterranean and opened the sea for future Turkish expansion.

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First Impressions: Gettysburg by Mark Herman

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First Impressions: Gettysburg by Mark Herman

I’m not sure how many times I’ve visited Gettysburg. Enough to have the entrance to the town’s Holiday Inn burned into my memory, as well as the layout of several family friendly restaurants. I can close my eyes and picture Little Round Top as if it was in my back yard. Growing up every summer my family would drive for 15 hours from central Virginia to upstate New York to spend a couple of weeks by a lake in the Adirondacks. When I was young, we didn’t drive those 15 hours in one go, instead we would stop over at Gettysburg for a night and then usually spend a second night somewhere far less remarkable near the New York border. My father is a huge American Civil War buff and I think he really enjoyed sharing that with us at Gettysburg – we mostly enjoyed climbing on cannons and on the rocks by Devil’s Den. Still, of all the many, many battlefields he took us to (most of them in Virginia) I always enjoyed Gettysburg the most. Maybe it was because we were on vacation, but I always preferred it over Chancellorsville.

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First Impressions: Almoravid by Volko Ruhnke

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First Impressions: Almoravid by Volko Ruhnke

It took me longer to get Almoravid to the table than I expected. Partly it was the sheer size of the game – the board plus lord’s mats for the first scenario pushed the limits of my little wargaming corner. I have no idea how I’m going to play the later scenarios. The greater factor, however, was a personal mental block around learning the rules. I learned Nevsky thanks to Jean Michel Grosjeu’s excellent YouTube videos on it – I did later read the rules, but only once I knew how play worked. The prospect of learning Almoravid from scratch, especially tired as I was due to a very hectic few weeks in work, resulted in me postponing night after night.

What finally helped to sit me down at the table and play was San Diego Histcon’s online Levy and Campaign Fest event. At the event I picked up and played several in development L&C titles and my experience with Nevsky, limited as it is, was more than enough to get me playing without having read the rules to any of these games. When I finally did sit down to read Almoravid’s rules, it only took me like 15 minutes since I could just skim the sections where the rules were identical to Nevsky. The rulebook helpfully highlights areas where rules are new or have changed so you don’t need to pick through it looking for differences. Much like with Volko’s previous series, COIN, once you know how to play a Levy and Campaign game it really does making picking up another one much simpler.

Mary Rose: King Henry VIII’s Warship 1510-45 by Brian Lavery

Mary Rose: King Henry VIII’s Warship 1510-45 by Brian Lavery

It’s impossible to study medieval archery without talking about the Mary Rose. The flagship of Henry VIII’s fleet, it sank in 1545 and took nearly its whole crew with it. It’s subsequent rediscovery, first in the nineteenth and then in the late twentieth centuries, was one of the most exciting discoveries in undersea archaeology. For historians of the longbow, it was even more important because several chests full of longbows were discovered amidst the wreck. These remain the only surviving English longbows from its period of dominance in the English armies. 1545 is late in the longbow’s life, over a century after the glory of Agincourt and only a few decades before it was officially retired by Queen Elizabeth I. Still, the hundreds of surviving bows on the Mary Rose have fuelled decades of debate and discussion in the history of archery and the longbow’s role in it.

Up until very recently that was most of what I knew about the Mary Rose. I’m a historian who has generally specialised in the history of archery so while I knew the big picture of the Mary Rose and how it sank, I was mostly interested in the bows (and arrows) that were recovered from the wreck. That made Brian Lavery’s book an interesting read, as Lavery is first and foremost a naval historian and the book emphasises the Mary Rose as a ship and its importance in the history of shipbuilding and development rather than just what was found on it.

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First Impressions: Great Heathen Army by Amabel Holland

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First Impressions: Great Heathen Army by Amabel Holland

I thought it was about time that I tried another hex and counter wargame and I had heard amazing things about Hollandspiele and the designs of Amabel Holland, so this seemed like a logical next step. Hollandspiele games tend to be quite expensive in Europe, so I owe some thanks to my older brother who bought me a copy of Great Heathen Army and its expansion, which features Viking battles in Ireland, for my birthday. My previous experience with medieval hex and counter games has pretty much entirely been the Men of Iron series (which you can read about here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/category/Men+of+Iron) so I was excited to explore another version of this style of game. I don’t know early medieval warfare to the same degree that I know the later period, and I’m not very familiar with the battles of the Great Heathen Army which rampaged through England in the 870s, so my ability to pick apart the historical aspects of the game is a little more limited here. Since I don’t have the same investment in the individual battles of this period, I just picked the first battle in the scenario book: Ashdown 871.

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Trial by Battle by Jonathan Sumption

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Trial by Battle by Jonathan Sumption

Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War is nothing short of epic. This volume is 600 pages long and only covers the first ten years of the war, ending with the Siege of Calais in 1347. For the rest of the war, you’ll need to read the next four volumes, all equally massive, the final of which is still not finished. Research projects of this scale are exceedingly rare these days, and that makes this a particularly interesting and important book, but there are also reasons people rarely tackle projects this large. It’s hard to know where to begin when tackling something as enormous in both scope and impact as Sumption’s series and there’s a lot to talk about with this book, both its context and its contents, so let’s jump into it!

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First Impressions: A Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train

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First Impressions: A Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train

Before playing my latest COIN game I didn’t have to learn how to play it because someone else had to teach it to me instead! At the end of May I had the opportunity attend Chimera Con in Dublin. Chimera Con is a one-day convention dedicated to playing games with other people who relish the opportunity of spending all day playing the one epic game. The organisers seek out volunteers in advance of the event to bring a game that they are prepared to teach to a table of potentially new players, and then players are allocated to those games for the day. I got a space playing A Distant Plain, Volko Runke and Brian Train’s COIN game about the Afghanistan War, covering the period of the war from 2001 to 2013. This would be my first time playing the game, but my third COIN game overall so I was reasonably confident I could pick it up pretty quickly. When I had played Andean Abyss at the start of May, I had been the government player, so this time I requested an insurgent faction and was given the role of the Taliban. The game organiser was the Warlords and the other players, both totally new to the system, were the Coalition and the Afghanistan Government. In the end the game took us about 7 hours, and I had an absolute blast playing it. I also have a few thoughts about it which I hope you will indulge me by reading!

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First Impressions: Saladin from Shakos Games

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First Impressions: Saladin from Shakos Games

Few medieval figures have captured peoples’ imagination quite as much as Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, more widely known in the western world as Saladin. His successful military campaigns in the mid and late twelfth century, along with his reputation for charity and mercy toward defeated foes, have inspired much discussion and debate ever since his death. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that his famous battles against the Crusader States and the Third Crusade have inspired quite a few wargames, including several battles in GMT Games’ Infidel, which I wrote about previously. The latest addition to the canon of games about the sultan and his military career is Saladin from French publisher Shakos Games.

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River Kings by Cat Jarman

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River Kings by Cat Jarman

I have often felt like a fake archaeologist. I did my PhD on the development of the bow and the crossbow in the later Middle Ages and for much of my evidence I used surviving medieval weapons. I took measurements of five-hundred-year-old crossbows in a Swiss castle and examined an early 15th century crossbow in the basement of the Met in New York. This was, by any reasonable measure, an archaeological study. However, I’ve never been to a dig site or participated in any of the usual archaeologist activities most people picture when they hear the word. I kind of regret that I’ve never been hanging around when someone pulled something old and cool out of the ground and I am a little jealous of those who have. I really enjoy archaeology and I’m fascinated to learn what interesting nuggets of information have been dug out of the earth. That is roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed how deep into the archaeological woods Cat Jarman’s River Kings goes in places and reading it reminded me a lot of my time as a PhD student – where I was surrounded by people doing Viking age archaeology in Ireland.

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First Impressions: Andean Abyss

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First Impressions: Andean Abyss

I managed to get Andean Abyss to the table less than a week after learning it, which must be a record for me – it definitely beats the years I owned Here I Stand before I finally played it. I bought it largely because while Pendragon has been fascinating to learn, there’s no way I can teach that game to four people who have never played a COIN game before. It took me days to learn it – and I’m still not even sure I totally get it! The internet wisdom around learning COIN is to start with Cuba Libre, but for whatever reason the Cuban revolution doesn’t really grab me, so I went with the original COIN instead – Andean Abyss and the Colombian drug war. After all, if it wasn’t possible for people to learn from the original game then there wouldn’t be a series, would there? I’ve already documented my learning process on this blog (www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/learning-coin-andean-abyss) but what that didn’t cover was teaching and playing the game, which is what we’re here for!

A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

I first became acquainted with Anthony Bourdain while flying Jet Blue between New York and Washington, DC. I was in college at the time and the recession had meant that the direct flight from Dublin to Washington had been cancelled, so now I had to travel via JFK. Jet Blue had (and presumably still has, not that I’ve checked) screens for every seat that played network TV broadcasts in flight. Usually there wasn’t much on, but while flicking through channels I would usually settle on the Travel Channel to watch this rude New Yorker get wildly inebriated in a series of gorgeous locales. The scene from this era that sticks with me the most is Bourdain getting tipsy in the early morning at a stall that sold a fortified beverage in Lisbon, Portugal. It was not the sort of travel programme I was used to seeing from my childhood.

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

The Norwegian Civil Wars were a period of near continuous unrest that lasted for over a century, from1130 until 1240, and saw over twenty kings, pretenders, and claimants battling for control of the kingdom. Amidst this turmoil the reign of Sverre Sigurdson, who claimed the Norwegian throne in 1177 but only ruled as Sverre I from 1184 until his death in 1202, contains an interesting anecdote in the history of the crossbow.

Sverre’s rule was one marked by near constant conflict. He had originated as a pretender to the throne before eventually achieving legitimacy through warfare. An account of his reign was provided by the Sverris Saga, a poetic account of his life probably written by Karl Jónsson, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in Northern Iceland. Jónsson died in 1213, meaning that the saga must have been written nearly contemporary to Sverre’s life. The saga says that Sverre’s initial group of followers consisted mainly of “vagrants, outcasts, and robbers who are primarily interested in plundering farmers.”

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Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside by Nicholas Wright (Boydell Press, 1998)

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Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside by Nicholas Wright (Boydell Press, 1998)

Military history often has the bad habit of overemphasising the generals and commanders that lead armies to glorious victory or disastrous defeat in climactic battles or sieges. While these stories are interesting and often significant, telling them can come at the cost of neglecting the impact that these campaigns had on the people who happened to have the misfortune of living between the army and its goals. That’s not to say that the existence of the common people is entirely ignored in the study of military history, few modern histories would go that far, but they rarely receive an equal level of attention and what they do receive can often be overly simplistic. Nicholas Wright’s book on the effects of the Hundred Years War on the peasantry and communities in rural France does an excellent job of balancing this narrative, leaving aside the battles and putting the people front and centre.

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

In the immediate aftermath of his famous victory at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, King Edward III laid siege to the city of Calais in Northern France. The siege was long and lasted through the winter, but in the end the city could not hold out and there was no sign of a relief army coming from the French king. In the subsequent decades Calais would provide a valuable foothold for the English on the European continent as well as granting them greater control over the English Channel. By the late fifteenth century the Pale of Calais, which consisted of the city of Calais and several nearby fortresses, was the last area in France still held by the English monarchy after King Charles VII’s reconquests of Normandy and Gascony. Defending Calais was a high priority, even during the upheaval of the War of the Roses. The soldiers defending Calais represented as close to a standing army as England had in the Middle Ages, and the information contained in the detailed records left by the garrison and its treasurers provide insight into the extent of crossbow use by the English during the era of the longbow.

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First Impressions: Warriors of God

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First Impressions: Warriors of God

This game is amazing, I think I’m in love. It’s also total chaos, wildly messy, and definitely not for everyone. It’s a fascinating representation of the Hundred Years War that manages to capture certain aspects of the conflict while throwing vast portions of its history into the wind. It’s a game that feels like it has been built around one specific mechanic which I’ve never encountered anywhere else, and the rest of the design has spiralled out from that decision. It’s got area control, dice chucking, unit recruitment, and, most importantly, lots and lots of leader death. I am super enamoured with this design, and I think every wargamer should play it at least once – it’s an experience you cannot get anywhere else. Let’s talk about it.

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The Agincourt War by A.H. Burne

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The Agincourt War by A.H. Burne

Lt. Col. Alfred H. Burne served in the Royal Artillery of Great Britain from 1906 through 1945, serving active duty in France during World War I and as a training officer in Britain during World War II. In his retirement in the late 1940s and 1950s he wrote several very influential works on military history, particularly medieval military history. The Agincourt War, first published in 1956, is the second book in his history of the Hundred Years War. The first The Crecy War, covers the conflict from its origins until the 1390s, where The Agincourt War picks up and continues the war to its conclusion. It is always useful to understand the background and potential biases of any historian, but for a historian like Burne it is particularly vital because his background bleeds through into his work on almost every page. This is not to say that reading Burne’s work is without merit, nor to undersell his influence on the field of medieval military history, but more to note that tackling an author like Burne and his work is a complex matter and not one to be taken lightly.

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Learning COIN: Andean Abyss

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Learning COIN: Andean Abyss

Holy God this game is a lot easier to learn than Pendragon was. Part of that is certainly the familiarity with the system I developed over my two solo plays of Pendragon, but also there’s just a lot less going on and a lot less to keep track of! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like Andean Abyss is a simple game, it’s more that I now see just how deep the water was where I first jumped in, and I understand why most people pick somewhere else. I know a lot of people learn with Cuba Libre, but for some reason the Cuban Revolution just doesn’t really appeal to me, so I decided that I should take a trip to South America instead. My knowledge of Colombian history is pretty limited, probably on par with a lot of Americans who are vaguely aware of the War on Drugs and its effects in Colombia but not much beyond that. I do know they have way too many hippos thanks to Pablo Escobar, but I’m not sure that will help me learn this game.

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography

Hokusai: A Graphic Biography

More years ago than I care to reflect upon, I was recommended a graphic novel called Logicomix which examined the developments and debates in mathematics and logic that dominated the early twentieth century through the lens of the life of famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. Logicomix narrative was multi-layered, intermixing the story of the writing of the book itself with the life of Russell and his contemporaries, and even tying in ancient Greek tragedy in a rather unexpected way. It really convinced me that graphic novels could not only be entertaining but also highly informative and great pieces of scholarship in their own right. Logicomix does a better job explaining Gödel’s contribution to logic than many books I’ve read.

My past experience with Logicomix meant that I was intrigued when I was given a copy of Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Latanza and Francesco Matteuzzi for my birthday. I’m a big fan of Hokusai’s work – seeing some of his original prints on my trip to Japan in 2019 was a highlight even if we were unable to make time to visit the Hokusai Museum in Tokyo. I also had an idea that his life was a bit…eccentric to put it mildly, so this promised to be an interesting read. It also brought to mind the anime film Miss Hokusai which adapted vignettes from a manga about the life and artistic career of Hokusai’s most famous daughter, Katsushika Ōi. Unlike Miss Hokusai, Hokusai: A Graphic Biography is a western production intended for a European and North American audience rather than a Japanese one. This is made very clear by the choice to intersperse the story of Hokusai and his life with pages of text explaining Edo era Japan for the uninitiated.