Stripped Down for Parts: Shakos two-fer, Part II – Breizh 1341

 

 

Charles S. Roberts Award nominee: Best Medieval Wargame, 2022

 

I completely missed the initial release of Laurent Gary’s Breizh 1341 (Shakos, 2022; which should be said, Breizh mille trois cent quarante-et-un, if my high-school French holds up). The first I heard about it was when the game received a Charles S. Roberts Award nomination for Best Medieval Wargame (the award went to Almoravid: Reconquista and Riposte in Spain1085-1086 (GMT Games, 2022), Intrigued, I tried to find a copy, but to no avail – I don’t know how big the initial print run was (or even if it was originally released in an English language version – I might have struggled with a French copy), but it had seemed to disappear from all shelves by the time I looked.

So, it was a happy day when I learned that the crowdfunded release of Rex Britannorum (Shakos, 2025 - you can get a peek at this one here) included Briezh as an add-on option. (Backers could also add another harder-to-find title, Saladin (Shakos, 2022), but my game budget wouldn’t stretch quite that far at the time.)

Breizh 1641 is a taut, fast and fun game. I have played it once already, which is something I try not to do before I write up an unboxing post, but there it is. I’ll try to write this objectively, leave as much of the play commentary as I can for the after-action report. Also, some of the photos I too didn’t come out well enough to include here, and I wanted to get this up to the blog quickly, so I’m just going with what I have; I’ll include more photos in the AAR.

Breizh 1341 is a small box game. The box is 18cm by 22cm (about 7” by 8 ½”) and 5cm (2”) deep, and of a quite sturdy construction. The cover illustration evokes a castle siege, very much a theme in the game. The cover also features a cocarde tricolore logo sporting a banner reading “Historie de France”. I don’t know if this is an initiative among French game companies to promote learning history through ludic pursuits, but that would correspond with a note in the rulebook to parents and teachers regarding the game’s value in presenting historical events and themes through the game. I hope this is part of a broader initiative.

The box back, with a nice representation of the game components.

The back of the box offers a short description of the historical situation; in April of 1341, Duke John III (Fr. Jean de Montfort) died without an heir. There were two contenders with arguably legitimate claims on the duchy; Jeanne de Penthièvre (translated to Joan in the English edition), the niece of John III and wife of Charles de Blois-Châtillon, and John of Monfort, half-brother to the duke. This resulted in the War of Breton Succession, which in turn became a chapter of the Hundred Years’ War. Also included is a brief explanation of game play.

The game infographic tells us the this is a two-player game (at time of writing, T and I have played just one get to know you game of Breizh, but I could tell from this that the game wouldn’t be nearly as much fun playing two-handed solo), That a game should take about forty-five minutes to play (I’d agree with this, I think – ours took closer to an hour-ten, but we backtracked through a couple of mistakes and were constantly referring back to the rules – but having got our heads around the game, I think our next run at it will be well under an hour), and it’s recommended for ages fourteen and up.

The rulebook. Glossy, but remarkably still readable under down-lights.

The rulebook is roughly A5 in size, printed on a sturdy-weight of high-gloss paper, and runs to 24 pages. Of these, there are only nine pages of actual rules, with the first three pages devoted to a cover illustration and introduction, the following six covering the components, a short glossary of terms used, and a set-up guide. There is also a five page historical background essay, and the back cover offers a Game Sequence Summary and a brief breakdown of Actions.

A sample of the rules. While the font is a tad small, it its still very readable, and
the illustrations are clear and informative, complementing the text.

The rules, of course, were originally rendered in French, and while these read like a translation, it is a good, clear translation with none of the little ambiguities that pop up sometimes; as I mentioned, we’ve played one game thus far, and there was a lot of referring back to the rulebook as we played, but points of order were easy to find and quite comprehensible.

The game board. For such a compact play area (and such large counters) the board is
remarkably comfortable to play on, with no feeling of crowding or clutter.

 
The play area is a map of mid-fourteenth century Brittany, divided up into eight regions, and marked out with various castles and fortifications. It comes mounted on a sturdy board and is both attractive and functional. It incorporates the play area (the map of Brittany), a turn track, and places marked on the top and bottom edges for the cards played in each turn to be placed. The turn track reminds the players of the number of cards to be played in each turn (five each in turns one and six, three each in turns two through five), and this is reflected in the placement presentation (with the final two positions marked in a lighter hue). The Castles are all named for their historical analogues, and given a value of one to three, representing the difficulty posed in laying siege to each, a crucial action in the game.

Inside the box; two decks of cards, two sets of wooden tokens and a nice three-sided
 die. Of course, being a Shakos game, time and thought has gone into
how to best present and store all the components.

The game comes with two cellophane-wrapped decks of cards. It might be my imagination, but these feel like the nicest cards I’ve ever seen, even in a Shakos game. The decks are divided into Event cards and Personality cards, with some extra cards added, which I’ll come back to.

The Event cards are divided into four groups; the First, Second and Third Epoch decks (defined by the presence of one, two or three ermines in the top left corner of the card), and the Special Events deck. Most of the Event cards exhibit either a red or blue background; these cards may only be used for their event by the appropriate faction, red for the English, blue for the French. Some cards show a white background. These hold no game-function event and can only be used and for the performance of an action.

Each player also has their own deck of Personality deck to draw from. One Personality card is drawn each turn, and can be carried over from turn to turn. Each offers some kind of benefit for the player in a given circumstance; they can be used in the appropriate situation to, say, add a point advantage in a Fight, or allow the recruitment of extra Partisans.

None of the photos I took of the cards came out clearly enough for this presentation, so
here's a shot from our first game. On the left is a Special Event card (black background),
which had to be played in the turn it was drawn. On the right, and English Event card
(clearly, from the vermillion background) from the Second Epoch deck that I used for
the event, much to the chagrin of my opponent.

Finally, there is an eight-card Special Events deck. These cards present event happening in the broader European context. In the hand-building phase of turns two through five, each player draws one of these cards into their hands. Each Special Event card must be played in the turn it is drawn.

All of the cards in the game are quite remarkable to look at; each features an extract from a contemporary painting and a reference to an actual individual or event from the conflict or the broader Hundred Years’ War, while the Personality cards feature a stone memorial or funerary statue of the individual in question, The backgrounds to the cards are rendered like draped satin in the colours of the belligerent forces. The whole effect is quite stunning; it comes as no surprise that Nicolas Treil was the headline artist involved in the preparation of Breizh 1341 (the game credits list Treil and Lisa Fix as being responsible for the graphic design, but does not distinguish duties).

This covers the cards used in the historical game. But thew folks at Shakos don’t believe in giving you just a standard setup. A short note at the end of the rules explains the other cards not otherwise represented. These ten cards allow the players to randomly pick a starting location (by selecting one each of eight cards representing the eight regions of Brittany) as an alternative to the historical starting positions, as well as a pair of cards which offer asymmetric – but balanced – starting strengths on the ground in their respective starting locations. It’s a small thing, but it’s a nice touch, and an elegant way to increase the game replayability with very little overhead.

There are two types of wooden tokens will be familiar to anyone who has played Shakos game from their Conquerors series; the pieces come in a red and blue matching the card themes quite well, and there are two types, with twenty of each in each colour. The little cylinders represent Partisans – these are indicative of one or the other side’s supporters within a region – and the cubes represent Troops, the levied soldiers and mercenaries that the sides engage for campaigning. Any Troops on the board at the end of a round leave (presumably to go back to their farms and workshops, or the professional troops’ winter quarters), while the Partisans persist from turn to turn; these, along with controlled Castles, help establish and maintain dominance in a given region through the course of a game.

The counter sheet, showing the French side of the Castle and Region markers.

The game comes with a single punchboard of counters. These are a nice size (about 22mm) and are quite thick, very easy to deal with on the board. The counters are pre-rounded and punch out neatly (no centre-nubs). The majority of the counters are control markers. These are used to indicate control of the Castles on the map as each is taken or exchanged in besieging actions. There are enough counters to cover all of the varying strength Castles on the board. Other counters indicate which side has control of a region at the end of each turn (both the Region and Castle control markers are double sided, indicating French control on one side and English on the other). Other markers include Highwaymen counters, an hourglass turn marker, and a +2 counter used in a single card event function that may only rarely get played, but which struck me as a nice little detail and indicative of the thoughtfulness that has gone into the creation and development of Breizh 1341.

Randomness has its place in this game, but it is restricted in its scope by the choice of a three-side die (actually a d6 with two faces each of 1, 2, and 3). Tempering the hand of fate in the way limits how much the players can rely on their own good fortune. It still provides room for cruel disappointments and happy accidents, but the game rewards careful planning and strategic consideration.

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A post on how Breizh 1341 plays will be forthcoming. Not to give too much away, I can tell you that game play is very smooth and quite logical once you get your head around Breizh’s idiosyncrasies; it’s a CDG, but it doesn’t do things in a way typical to CDGs. It is definitely its own game, and is a better experience for it.