Hey man, I don’t think this is comprehensive enough. Can you go and do a rewrite and cover all the bases you’ve missed 
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I love A Study in Emerald!!!
And I am Kickstarting the ass out of Auztralia when it comes up in March.
That game looks so cool.
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You laugh, but that’s totally how I feel!
Root’s got that strong asymmetry going on, but the rest of it is quite different from COIN. Looks lighter and simpler but knowing Wehrle it will be devious and brain-corkscrewing.
Ghandi I’m keen on. I didn’t bother with Pendragon, I’m really not happy with its depiction of history. See also All Bridges Burning which looks like being the first 3P COIN.
Imperial Struggle is simply a must. Just to find out what it’s like. I’m playing 1750 in the meantime.
A Way Out looks like it could be special as long as it doesn’t go Dayvid Cayje on us.
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I also got in on the P500 for Imperial Struggle.
No idea if I’m going to get to play it at all, but it will be nice to have in my collection.
Looking forward to Lord of the Rings LCG. Watched some old streams on twitch. They plan to launch into early access q1, most likely March. Early access wont last for ages. They dont want the game to live and die in EA. So ea is gonna last a month of 6 probably and they want decent version to start with so people keep playing.
At the start there will be 4 hero packs:
Rangers of Gondor: Faramir (Lore)
Faithful Servant: Sam Gamgee (Leadership)
Shieldmaiden of Rohan: Eowyn (Spirit)
Prince of Mirkwood: Legolas (Tactics)
With another 12 hero packs to be released white in early access.
They plan to add content like these hero packs and new adventures on a regular base.
They get complains about the needed internet connection but they state it is needed when the game becomes cross-platform. (One account to rule them all and in the darkness bind them )
and the connection is also needed when buying hero packs /valor cards to prevent duplicates beyond the max allowed in a deck. (Valor is an in game currency you get by playing.)
Leaderboards, co-op etc wil be implemented at a later point.
Edit: I better post this info in the dedicated LOTR topic for those interested and to keep the discussion about this game in one place.
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I P500’d it without even looking at any details based solely on COIN + Britain. Just curious, (and too lazy to go research it myself) what did they muck up?
Feel free to check out at any point.
The main textual account we have is Gildas. Bede based his work on Gildas. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle is not only based on Gildas, it’s written 400 years after the events. So we have one story, repeated.
The problem is that Gildas wasn’t writing what we think of as history. Gildas constructed a sermon out of historical events, and he remixed them at will. The weak Britons are conquered by the strong Romans. The Romans pass on Christianity. The Britons rebel against the Romans. The Romans conquer them again. Any rebellion, whether military or religious, is crushed. The Romans build a wall and leave. The Saxons come and are recruited to defend Britain. The Saxons rebel and crush Britain. The Last Roman General arrives and crushes the Saxons.
All this stuff happened, but not in the order Gildas says it did, because Gildas is sketching a lesson the equivalent of shouting “DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU REBEL AGAINST GODDDD.” directly into someone’s face.
Gildas and by extension others write of certain areas being settled by certain groups. This is where the textual and the archaeological converge. We’ve found various styles of jewellry in various places, and some of it is of x style, and some of y, but some of it is closer to contemporaneous styles in Germany, and some of it is a hybrid. Let us say you assign one particular style to the Jutes. So if you find a lot of those brooches in one particular river valley, what does it mean? Does it mean that place was only settled by Jutes and the Romano-British were either exterminated or forced to move? Gildas says so, and by extension so do those who copy him, but we know he is an unrepentant bullshitter. Perhaps it means that river valley was settled by Jutes and those brooches were traded? Perhaps it means locals who were non-Jutes were assimilated?
Being a Saxon or a Briton or a Jute didn’t mean having your ethnic group written on your forehead. It was more about language and culture, and people can change those, especially if incentivised.
Gildas says that the Roman cities were destroyed by the Saxons. Unfortunately, the archaeological record doesn’t show this. What it does show is Roman buildings slowly falling into disrepair because the necessary expertise was no longer there, and either being repurposed (sometimes even building other structures inside them) or just falling apart. Not to mention, this slump mostly occurred before the post-Roman Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.
One of the interesting things we see is the adoption of certain heritages as a kind of cultural appropriation. Kings of Wessex adopting Anglo-Saxon names in the 7th century, as a way of taking on a different, more relevant/powerful ‘origin story’. They didn’t actually have that lineage, nor were they all murdered and replaced by Saxon doubles.
There was definitely a migration of people (not just from the east, but also the west, according to studies done on oxygen isotopes in dental enamel) which is oddly missing. There was definitely violence, but it was on nowhere near the scale depicted in Pendragon, and doesn’t deserve the term ‘invasion’ or ‘conquest’. In reality you had a slow flow of migration for hundreds of years, with small communities and farms run by close kin groups, mostly consisting of whole families rather than all of them being warriors, and that migration making inroads from the coast.
The scholarship behind Pendragon is at least a decade out of date for the newest stuff, IIRC. The designer talks about the ‘Dark Age’ but that’s a term from Petrarch, a 14th century scholar who loved giving the Romans the old historical oily handjob whenever he could. There were absolutely some devastating changes, most of them actually wrought by the Romans themselves (the shifting of Roman administration east, to provinces already on the edge of empire was not good). There were many religious, cultural, social, economic, and technological changes. Not a fall. Not a Dark Age. Not an incredible wave of violence brought by ‘barbarians’.
Please see
Britain After Rome, Robin Fleming. (2010)
The Ruin of Roman Britain, James Gerrard. (2013)
Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages, Guy Halsall. (2013)
The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, Sam Lucy. (2000)
Ithangyew.
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I played the Imperial Struggle prototype in October. It might not reach the same level at Twilight Struggle, but I think most of you will love it.
Also, Apocalypse Road!!!
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@OhBollox, you’re a treasure. I suppose one can still enjoy the game by imagining it to model Gildas’ propaganda rather than actual events, much as Twilight Struggle deliberately models the Cold War as it’s participants largely saw it (without disputing those who claim that the domino theory of the participants was mistaken). But it’s good to know where the history ends and the sermon begins.
Along similar lines, I was mortified to learn that Rising Sun seems to do rather a poor job of capturing its subject. CMON seem like they might benefit from a bit of corporate culture evolution.
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I think I’m spoiled because looking at the previous COIN games, I was quite happy with their rather level treatment of the conflicts and they were fairly well-informed when it came to the history. Pendragon…it’s as if the designer looked at the most recent work on the subject and just decided to not read it. I can understand why, because that then doesn’t really give you a COIN game (or perhaps a very different one), it just doesn’t sit well with me in a series I respect for its approach to history.
You can of course enjoy the game, by all accounts it’s very good and I doubt they’d let the series slip in that regard. I’m confident COIN can do other eras than just 20th C. Falling Sky is excellent and fairly depicts the swathe the Romans cut through the Gaulish population. Liberty or Death is superb.
Regarding TS, I think integrating the world view of those contesting is a chunk of genius, and it’s also why I like Labyrinth so much (the War on Terror one, not the codpiece one).
Rising Sun I don’t know much about but CMON may have set it in a fantasy world as an escape clause.
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That’s fine and all, but when does Merlin battle Madam Mim while Arthur is shapechanged into a squirrel?
'#LearnedHistoryViaDisney
(Seriously, though, holy shit! And thank you!)
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Well, there are monsters and gods walking around, so I think they have the whole “fantasy world” thing to cover them up when one of their gods is actually a Kiwi and Kyoto appears as a province in the center of Japan.
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Wow guys, I could really have done without seeing that p500 page. Can someone do me a favour and get the men in black mind wiper out. Ive just paid the car off and I was planning on doing something a bit more productive with the extra cash. Maybe one little treat won’t hurt. I have earnt it after all
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I know…I just went and logged in on my account to see if I had P500’d Imperial Struggle and nearly choked when I saw how many games from GMT I have coming in the next year. My wife is going to kill me.
Of course, I could cancel some of them…but I’ll just pretend I didn’t see the list.
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My favourite thing about P500 is it’s like a disease spread by the internet.
I say chaps, have you seen At Any Cost: Metz 1870?
https://www.gmtgames.com/p-493-at-any-cost-metz-1870.aspx
It’s Hermann Luttmann doing chit-pull warfare (fun, quick, easy, exciting) on a lovely map!
What’s that? You’re not interested in the Franco-Prussian War?! Neither am I.
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Unfortunately, I will never be able to buy a wargame because there’s no way I will get it played.
I’m in the same boat. If I were to get one, Root definitely looks like the one that would earn it’s place on my shelf.
Aside from Twilight Struggle, anything that’s themed around military history bounces off me like jello on a trampoline.
I don’t doubt the mechanics are interesting, it’s just not my particular cup of tea (I don’t even like tea, why am I in the UK?)
I’m the exact opposite.
I would love one, but the only person I play 2-player games with (except for perhaps 30-45 minute games with a co-worker at lunch) is my wife.
Who would not like a wargame at all.
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Solo! Solo! Solo!
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