Carolingian Conundrum

 

Charlemagne: Master of Europe

This solitaire game is a clever mechanical puzzle. The three-cup system is very interesting. I have the canvas map, and the chunky laser cut counters and artwork are really cool. The overall aesthetic is fantastic. The box is flimsier than I’d like, though. 

 

The game might be fun, but also might be tedious, punishing, a bit ahistorical, too random, and senseless in places. For instance, why would traveling around allied and historically friendly regions have to be conducted only as a forced march and why would that provoke a hostile reaction? It's also pretty difficult. Only played four games. No wins. Yet feels more or less solvable, like once you get it down you could optimize and game it but for me there are three major issues with Charlemagne, Master of Europe:

1.) Randomness can completely defeat you. From my experience with this, you can lose the game even while seeming to play well. That initial setup can significantly disadvantage the player right off the rip and it has nothing to do with performance or player decisions. One of my games, I pulled both End Turn chits with only one hostile cup draw between them and because of the random setup and the draws there was no way I could have avoided the almost immediate loss. Turn one. Game over. I did a forced march and lost the game. That's a pretty big bug in my book. One expects extra randomness in solo games, but to lose a game solely as a result of game randomness without reference to player's decisions, agency or performance is just bad design. Probably a bug that could've been solved mechanically. Makes you wonder if there are other less obvious issues with the machine.

2.) There’s no concrete reference to time here. Time is completely amorphous and that bothers me in a historical game. The player also always seems to be reacting rather than steering things which I feel doesn’t properly represent Charlemagne’s modus operandi. But maybe I’m not fully appreciating the designer’s intent. You, the player, aren’t competing with unruly German tribes or Arabs so much as competing against the historical Charles and I don’t know if I like that. Right or wrong, the emphasis is almost entirely on cash flow and combat and I think that’s sort of reductionist in terms of the net impact of the reign of Charles the Great. I assume the church and road building functions are proxies for his administrative reforms, but it seems to give the cultural impact short shrift. Court intrigue can crop up in the latter stages of a game but are dealt with statically, meaning, if you previously made enough money or beat up enough Saxons, your political rivals will fail. I don’t know if that’s a good representation of Frankish power politics. And it isn't particularly intriguing either.

 

3.) The tactical display. I know I'm in the minority on this and many games make use of this sort of thing, but I don't like these little abstract tactical display combat resolution things. It's tedious, boring, and fiddly. It’s just chucking dice on and on with minimal influence on the outcome from a player's "tactics." It interrupts the game and is distracting. Takes me out of the more important, to me, macro strategic part of the game and yet it seems to be the primary focus of the game, i.e. where the player invests the most time during actual play. It all takes place in one small corner of the board (Cruel Necessity does this too and I dreaded battles in that game for these reasons as well) and I think that’s an odd and off-putting design choice. Why make this big beautiful game map if the majority of the game is actually played in a small space in one corner of the board? I find myself wanting to avoid battles because they’re annoying and since it’s a core function of the game, this is obviously problematic.

I REALLY wanted to like this game. I wanted to love it, actually. Such high hopes.

In the end, the whole thing feels a bit forced. Like a retheming of a design that was intended to model a completely different set of circumstances, which I believe it is or was. Just a couple too many bits of sort of tacked on chrome here. The system doesn’t really suit the situation or theme, in my opinion. It was originally developed for Agricola, Master of Britain which I think would be a much better fit for these mechanics. And I think the original system was a tad simpler, which I'd find preferable. I also had a sense that I was being pushed in a certain direction and that might mean that with this game there is only one way to skin the cat. That would be wholly in keeping with this type of game; once solved, it' done, like a puzzle should be. One of the only tools to mitigate this effect is the introduction of randomness, but as pointed out before here, too much or the wrong kind of randomness can ruin the game experience and cause frustration.

 

 

Confusion In and About Warlord Games Publications 

~ a lighthearted critique from a newb ~

Warlord Games works with or is part of Osprey Press, a known publisher of history texts. I am entirely new to Warlord Games product line and yet my initial brief perusal of the materials has been somewhat confounding. In barely cracking the covers of a couple of these books I've found some alarming and, to me, entirely new information.

To begin, in the Thirty Years War section of the Pike & Shotte rulebook, page 128 says that events in 1643 led to "...Sweden once more becoming the dominant force in Scandinavia and the Balkans."

Did the Turks know about this? Did anyone consult the Sultan?!

Then in the introduction to the Battle of the Bulge Bolt Action supplement, pg. 9 says that as a result of the Allied invasion of Normandy "...Hitler’s forces in northern France were comprehensively defeated and forced to retreat westward."  

Was there a failed German withdrawal maneuver that somehow escaped the attention of the Allies and everyone else in the world including a couple subsequent generations of academics and historians? (Thinking: this'll confuse the yanks and brits, everybody run away from Berlin!)

Or perhaps an aborted large-scale amphibious frog-man operation for the seizure and occupation of the Atlantic Ocean?

I realize, after being reminded every few paragraphs, that these rules in no way attempt to simulate "real" conflicts, but then the books proceed to offer chapter after chapter of seeming technical and historical information. If the games are in no way intended to reflect the reality of anything, why the copious amounts of (questionable?) background information? It's sort of a confusing stance in my opinion. Why partner with Osprey Press who clearly do intend their publications to be regarded as serious efforts at history?

If these publications were small press with limited budgets some of the confusion might be understandable, if only regrettable, but these are fairly large corporate entities with large market footprints and with presumably capable and qualified editorial departments. Is this just contempt for consumers, actual ignorance or something else? 

Still, the pictures are really nice in some of these books and those alone make them interesting to me. Nice pictures. Lovely toys. The "fun" side of warfare, I guess, to be taken lightly, as they spare no effort to remind the reader. VERY lightly.

Finally, and I do apologize for invoking the following but it's too apropos here to forgo, perhaps the lady doth protest too much. Or maybe she could just do a better job.