State of Play: Men or Iron Tri-Pack – Agincourt (The War Room Ten Wargame Challenge #2)

 

 

I’m pleased to announce that slow progress is being made on my Ten Game Challenge list. Some of the games on my list I have played before, while some are relatively new – or new to me – titles I’ve been keen to try out. Then there’s the other games, the ones that I’ve had sitting in the closet for years, untouched.

I ordered the Men of Iron Tri-Pack (GMT Games, 2020) on P500 and rejoiced in its arrival. I read through the rules, punched out the Men of Iron and Infidel counters, and made plans to get it to the table sometime soon.

Opening set-up.

Fast-track to 2025. I think Men of Iron was the third game I settled on for my Ten Wargame Challenge list (it’s the first on the list because I set it out in chronological order). I’ve thought about pulling it out before now, but there was always something more pressing to play instead. The value of a commitment like the Ten Game Challenge is it can bring the impetus you need to get over whatever is holding you back from a game. For me, I think what stopped me from getting MoI to the table before now was that I wanted to play it against another human player, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to make the game understandable to another player through play. For the folks who haven’t played the Men of Iron rules, the game doesn’t play out in turns. Rather, each side’s forces are divvied up into formations called “battles,” the moniker used in Europe at the time for a group of fighters under a single command, such as the men-at-arms, yeomen and peasantry fulfilling their oath of fealty to a lord, and the etymological antecedent of the modern term “battalion” (also an early example of the English-speakers’ predilection to make every available noun into a verb, i.e., “to do battle”).

I chose the Agincourt scenario for a couple of reasons. It’s familiar to anybody who has read or (more likely) seen a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Never underestimate the value of assumed foreknowledge in convincing a prospective player to try something new. It also has a small footprint, with little room for manoeuvre. The two sides have quite limited resources, and the play time, under normal circumstances, would run to about an hour.

Technically this was our second bite of the Men of Iron cherry. The week before I’d set up the scenario, but rather than play a full game, I thought it would be best to go through the sequence of play, step by step a few times just to get a feel for the flow of the game, for my own benefit as much as for T’s. This experience proved useful. T picked up the concepts of and continuous battle activation far more quickly than I’d expected – I’d struggled with it on my first read-through of the rules – and we got to see how movement, Fire and Shock attacks, and Disordered, Recovering, and Retiring unit rules all worked before having to worry about actual play. Mistakes were made, but as it was a test run, it didn’t matter. We learned by doing.

Ferocious fighting at the pickets.

This week was our first proper game, which we approached a little tardily – T had a work hold-up, and arrived late, truncating our available game time. Still, armed with our experience of the previous week, we approached the game in an appropriately competitive spirit.

As may have been predicted, T chose to play the French. The English begin the game, and I chose to lead with Edward, Duke of York’s battle, engaging his Longbow against Charles, Duc d’Orleans’ unmounted Men-at-Arms. This should have resulted in two units being Disordered (two hits, one miss by York’s longbowmen). After the initial Free Activation you have to roll for further activations. I rolled a 3 for Henry and got another volley of arrows off for another disordered unit, in this case the Dauphin’s personal guard (when a unit with an attached leader becomes disordered, the owning player must roll to see if the leader is lost; in this instance Charles survived). Pressing my luck paid off with a roll of 1 for Thomas de Comoys’ battle (de Comoys’ Activation rating is 3 and the roll had a +1 modifier for the previous successful continuation roll, so I needed a 2 or lower). Baron de Comoys’ longbowmen were less successful, with just one French unit disordered. A second activation for York failed, and so the initiative moved to the French.

T ‘s free activation was naturally spent on his beleaguered Orleans battle, which he brought forward, pairing two of his dismounted Men-at-Arms with each of mine. His Mounted Men-at-Arms he committed to the flanking forests. Observing this, I reminded myself of Napoleon’s axiom, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”

The first round of Shock combat was an indifferent affair. T could not roll a high enough number to dislodge or disorder my battle-hardened Britons and suffered two self-inflicted disorders and a retirement. He succeeded in his first activation roll, bringing forward his archers and crossbowmen under Rambures who, alas, were still out of range and with the poor movement in the mud (two points per hex for clear terrain) unable to clear a path for Jean I, Duc d’Alençon’s battle to reinforce the Dauphin’s depleted forces. A second successful activation roll saw Jean bring his battle up behind the line of French archers. The subsequent roll for Valéran de Raineval, Count Fauquembergue’s battle – the rear-most French battle – was a 9 and convincingly unsuccessful.

"Take it, brave York. Now, soldiers, march away:
And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day!"

Initiative returned to the English, and I chose to activate de Comoys’ battle. Duc d’Alençon fell to de Comoys’ longbowmen and two of his units were disordered, while one of the Dauphin’s units was eliminated in melee. A successful roll activated Henry’s battle. Henry managed to eliminate a second of the Dauphin’s Men-at-Arms units, fatally wounding Charles in the process. The English were finally beginning to see some Flight Points accruing against the French. In Men of Iron, each side has a quotient of Flight Points, which accrue with each unit or leader eliminated. At each change of initiative (this is usually skippable for the first couple in the game) each side rolls a d10, and if the combined result of the die roll and the current number of accrued Flight Points exceeds the Flight Point quotient for that side, they immediately loose the game (their men collectively losing the will to press the fight). If both aides fail their check, the game is declared a draw.

York’s activation was successful, but his bowmen’s fire was not, amounting to nought. Still, in melee managed to disorder his antagonists. The course of battle had disordered Henry’s and de Comoys’ attached units, but the York’s men stood firm.

In the interests of keeping the game moving, I tried to activate de Comoys’ battle and failed, passing the initiative over to the French once more. Neither side failed their Flight check, so the game continued. In retrospect, this is the point at which the English lost the battle.

Final game-state. The English may have been able to come back from this,
but not with my die-rolls.

To my surprise, T used his free activation to manoeuvre his bow battle to bring some into range, while shifting others to allow egress of the Duc d’Alençon’s battle to support the Dauphin’s brittle line. It was the archers, though, that proved to be the fulcrum on which the battle pivoted. Two volleys were loosed against Henry’s men, the second disordering them and killing the King of England and Wales. Two more successful activations for the French saw some further melees, but ultimately nothing proved decisive, with no further eliminations of leaders or troops.

With Henry dead and his host in disorder, and the hour getting closer to around 11:00pm, we decided to call the game as a minor French victory. We reasoned that, with the loss of their king, the English army could feasibly make a fighting withdrawal in good order and let the disordered and disheartened French morn the loss of their Dauphin.

Casualties of war. For all the fighting, only two units, a duke a prince and a king lost.