Stripped Down for Parts: The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 (Legion Wargames catch-up order, Part 1)

 

Long-time readers will know I’m a fan of Legion Wargames. I made a point of grabbing All Are Brothers: Solferino, 1859 (Legion Wargames, 2025) when it came out because I was worried about the title selling out quickly. I don’t think I’d ordered anything directly from the publisher since Aces of Valor (Legion Wargames, 2022). Legion produces interesting games with thoughtful design elements, often covering more obscure aspects of history.  

I try to support publishers directly where I can, and Legion has a CPO (Customer Pre-Order) section on their website that lists their proposed and in-development games. Customers can indicate their intention to buy a copy of a game on publication, which gives the publisher an indication of a title’s popularity and a guide for its print run. The CPO is based on the honour system; no payment details are collected, but Legion will send you an email when the game is available for order.

I’ve been feeling guilty for some time about not following through on my own CPO order of A Glorious Chance: The Naval Struggle for Lake Ontario in the War of 1812 (Legion Wargames, 2023) when it became available about two years ago, due to financial constraints. So, when I managed to sell some old RPG books, I suddenly had some “found money” to put toward A Glorious Chance and two other titles I’ve been interested in a while. So, here is the first of a three-part unboxing of my Legion Wargames catch-up order. I’ll cover them in release order, so we’re starting with The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 (Legion Wargames, 2018). Next, we’ll take a look at Fire on the Mountain: Battle of South Mountain September 14, 1862 (Legion Wargames, 2022), and we’ll close it out with A Glorious Chance. I may not get to these until the new year, so you’ll just have to be patient.

Box cover.

The cover image on the Battle of Blenheim, 1704 is an extract from a classic Baroque battle portrait of “The Duke of Marlborough and the Earl of Cadogan at the Battle of Blenheim,” by Pieter van Bloemen. Well, this painting was by van Bloemen, but it is actually a copy rendered by the artist of a collaborative work that he was invited to assist with (van Bloemen was, in his day, a renowned painter of horses). The painting, primarily by Balthasar van den Bossche, was presented to Marlborough on a visit to Antwerp after his success at the Battle of Ramillies, two years after Blenheim. The original work is no longer extant, but we still have this credible, acknowledged copy by one of the original participating artists. This work now resides in at Marlborough House in London, as part of the national collection administered by the Commonwealth Secretariat.

The cover also mentions that Battle of Blenheim is the first volume of a series called the Seven Hex System. It’s this system that intrigued me about the game. Justin Fassino, on his Justegarde YouTube channel, did a great two-part play-through of the game and the intricacies of the system that together make for a better introduction to the game than I could offer here.

There are two more volumes in development using the Seven Hex System. The second volume will offer two battles from Napoleon’s Russian campaign, The Battles of Borodino & Polotsk 1812 (Legion Wargames, ~2026), and third, two battles of the Great Northern War, The Battles of Kliszow 1702 and Fraustadt 1706 (Legion Wargames, ~2026). Mr Fassino mentioned in his video that he’d heard the series was unlikely to continue, so I contacted Randy Lein, publisher at Legion Wargames. Mr Lein said that the current plan was to release the next two volumes in zip-loc bags, and that we should see them in some time in 2026.

Box-back.

For readers unfamiliar with the Battle of Blenheim, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article for some context. Blenheim (pronounced Blen’m by the English and referred to by the French as la Bataille de Höchstädt), has been described as “the battle that saved Europe.” It was one of the most important battles of the War of Spanish Succession and built Marlborough’s reputation as the greatest soldier of his era (this was further secured by his victory at Battle of Ramillies twenty-one months later). The box back offers a paragraph of context for the battle, followed by a brief explanation of the Seven Hex System (which we’ll spend a little time on when we get to the map). Also displayed is a picture of the game-map in its entirety, as well as a sampling of unit and administrative counters (at actual size).

The game components are listed (but we’ll be getting to all of them in the course of this post), and the credits are prominently featured. Steve Pole is the game’s designer and developer of the Seven Hex System, and he was assisted in the development by two Legion alumni, Andy Loakes (Toulon, 1793: Napoleon’s First Great Victory (Legion Games, 2014), and the late Godfrey Bailey (Hill of Doves: The First Anglo-Boer War (Legion Wargames, 2013), with map and counter art by Knut Grünitz (with an assist on the map-art by Mr Lein); a veritable team of champions.

The units are battalions or cavalry squadrons, and scale of the game is 500 yards to a three-hex wide manoeuvre hex, with turns representing about twenty minutes, with the whole game playable in inside of three hours. Another thing I like about Legion games is the standardised Game Meter, which for Blenheim tell us the game is suitable for one or two players, of Medium-Low complexity (two out of five), and the Solitaire Suitability is Medium-High (four out of five).

The Battle of Blenheim Rules of Play. Greater than the sum of its parts.

The rulebook is a 24-page booklet printed on a heavier weight, high-gloss paper-stock. Some might experience issues with glare (such as the slight flaring in my photos) but depending on your lighting situation, this should be negligible. Legion rulebooks have a particular layout style that I find makes the rules a breeze to read and to refer back to at the table. I’m sure some people won’t like them, but the style is consistent over all the games I own, and it works for me personally.

Rulebook sample page. I really appreciate the clean and simple layout of Legion
rulebooks in general. The Blenheim rules are a good example of the house style.

Of those 24 pages, the rules take up barely ten pages of the overall count. The front page offers an Introduction and Table of Contents, and the rules are followed by three pages of design notes on the Seven Hex System (and a column-length bibliography covering the battle and the War of Spanish Succession more broadly), four pages of illustrated combat examples, and a five-page military history of the battle covering the two sides’ battle plans, a timeline of the battle, and its broader outcomes. Basically, there’s nothing here you’ll want to skip over – it’s all gravy.

The game-map. Once again, apologies for the poor lighting and photographic work
that fail to do justice to the fine work here.

The maps a standard 22” by 34” sheet printed on a nice weight (I’d guess about 110 gsm paper-stock) and flattens out reasonably well with some encouragement. I’ll be honest; the map is a little jarring at first blush – not so much the enlarged and subdivided large hexes called Areas (creating a twelve by sixteen area hex-grid), but the smaller hexes they’re made up of all tilting about fifteen degrees off-kilter. Initially, this for me was the visual equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. When you get past that, though, the battle area is nicely presented, with clearly readable terrain and the centre (manoeuvre) hexes of each greater hex numbered. When the phasing player conducts movement, units move from one numbered hex to another, adjacent numbered hex. This is called Strategic movement and is conducted in the first phase of the turn. Each unit has an Occupancy Factor number in a black box in the top-right corner, usually a 3 (artillery batteries have a weight of 0), and units adding up to no higher than six can occupy a greater hex at a time, so as an average two units can remain in the same hex after movement, plus a battery.

Map detail. Normally I resent the use of caltrop corner markings for indicating hex
boundaries, but in context hexes within the larger Strategic hexes, I think
it makes perfect sense.

Getting back to the map, the representation of the terrain and features is clear and not at all distracting from the activity of the game. I particularly like the representation of the marshy lowland areas lining the Nobèlbach River, which meanders diagonally through the map, west to east, before joining the Danube. The map-sheet also features a Terrain legend, Turn Track, and an Order Modifier track. I’ll expand on the use of the Order Modifier track in our first game AAR.

The game's single counter-sheet. The colours chosen for the two factions contrast 
well against the battle map, highlighting the action.

Blenheim comes with a single sheet of 5/8” counters, half of which is comprised of units. The other half is a set of administrative order-markers for units, Ranged Fire markers, and Turn and modifier markers. The counters are printed on decent-weight white-core cardstock and look like they should punch out and clip up cleanly.

The game has a low counter density, with just forty-seven French/Bavarian and forty Allied unit counters, plus three and two leader counters respectively. The units are nicely presented, illustrated a with single soldiers, mounted cavalrymen, or a cannon representing Infantry or Cavalry units or batteries respectively. Each unit is named for their regimental commander, which helps with the setting up of the game, as we’ll see. The background colours for the two sides – royal blue for the French and a dark mustard for the Allies – offer clear differentiation between the factions, and both will stans out well against the muted greens of the battle map, and the digits on the counters are large enough for me to make out without resorting to reading glasses.

Player Aid Card 1, which deals with the Movement, positioning and Cannon fire.

The charts for the game appear on two single sided Player Aid Cards (PACs), and there are two each of these in the game. Like their rulebooks. Legion has a particular style of formatting for their games’ PACs that is clear and functional and immediately recognisable. The title boxes for each table is colour-coded, with related tables sharing the same banner colour, and more loosely related ones exhibiting similar colours in different shades. This approach isn’t exclusive to Legion games, but with the otherwise austere presentation of the charts and tables, it is for my money one of its best implementations.

Player Aid Card 2, dealing with Combat (Attack and Defence). The cards aren't actually
numbered, but this PAC references rules that appear later in the rulebook.

The first PAC presents a Unit Occupancy Table, Command Association Table for the five leaders represented in the game, Strategic Movement (articulating three types of movement permitted within this phase), a Ranged Fire Hit Table all ranged fire is executed before the Orders, Tactical Movement and Combat phase) and short tables dealing with asymmetric Order Values, Morale Adjustment and Attrition value Modifiers. The second PAC brings the necessary tables for Defending and Attacking in combat.

Blenheim's Set-up Guide, colour-coded and leader-referenced.

The game also comes with a 11” by 17” set-up chart, printed on the same cardstock as the PACs. This sets out the starting locations of each unit. This is why the leaders of each regiment appear on the unit counters – Their names correspond to the various units’ starting positions on the set-up guide.

Personally, I really appreciate this kind of visual guide. I can cope with a typed list of unit names and numbered hex positions, but a set-up map like this just speeds up the pre-game prep significantly.  

Dice and baggies.

To wrap up, the game comes with some zip-loc baggies for sorting and storing the counters, and two dice, one white and one red, for reasons that I’ll get into in the AAR. I should have mentioned that, like most Legion games, the box ix on the lighter side compared to those used many larger publishers. That’s not to say it isn’t up to the task; so long as you don’t go sitting on them or leaving them in the rain, they’re certainly solid enough, and lighter for shipping.

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So, that’s The Battle of Blenheim, 1704. I’m looking forward to getting this to the table, which is something I say a lot, but in this case the subject is right in my wheelhouse – my Honours thesis dealt with early Eighteenth-Century history and literature. With Christmas and the end of the year bearing down, I’m planning on playing through a handful of games, nearly all playing against myself, and Blenheim might just get pushed up to first off the rank for its clear ease of two-handed play. An After-Action Report will follow.

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492

 

 

Charles S. Roberts Award 2021 nominee: Best Early Gunpowder Board Wargame 1453-1793 AD 

I’ve had this nagging feeling for a while that I haven’t shown Compass Games as much love as I should, given the number of their title I own. I don’t know where this comes from; I’ve posted two reviews and seven unboxings of Compass titles – expect maybe that I have probably four or five more games that I haven’t got around to punching yet because I told myself, I really should post an unboxing of that one. One or two of these have been languishing for a year or more (sorry, Barbarians at the Gates (Compass Games, 2022), I’ll get to you soon). Today I’m starting to redress that situation.

Granada: Last Stand of the Moors, 1482-1492 (Compass Games, 2021), a game by noted designer, Jose Rivero, is a game about the Reconquista, the final push by rulers of Catholic Spain to retake the Moorish holdouts along the Iberian peninsula’s south-eastern coast. The game takes some mechanical cues from Sekigahara: the Unification of Japan (GMT Games, 2011), but in spite of the broadly shared theme of cultural homogenisation through conquest, it is definitely its own game.

If this was a movie, Omar Sheriff would be co-starring.

The box art, the work of Iván Cáceres, is reminiscent of nothing do much as an early 1960s epic movie poster. It’s very effective, I’d go so far as to say stirring, and lends a sense of the scale of the game. Basically, the cover on its own was enough to make me curious about the game.

Box back. Love the colour palette.

Turning to the box back, we get a (computer generated) idea of what the action on the board will look like. Personally, I think I’s rather just see a pic of the board and some cards and pieces (we get to see both here as well – the slight wrongness of the perspective with the pieces in relation to the board does my head in a little. But it’s not a deal-breaker.

The box-back information tells us that Granada is a two-player game of Medium complexity (somebody explained to me that it’s usually left to the designer to say how complex and how solitaire-friendly their game is), and Low solitaire suitability, which is fair, given we’re talking about a card-driven game with hidden information.

As is typical for Compass games, the Rulebook sports a facsimile of the cover art. The paper is a nice weight of low-gloss stock, a little shinier than a low-sheen, but not so you’ll be wrangling with serious glare trying to read the pages.

I’m still working through the rulebook, but so far it seems fairly straight forward and understandable. If you haven’t played a game like this before, it may present a slightly steeper learning curve, but the rulebook is full of illustrated examples of play, and while I haven’t looked yet, somebody must have done a play-though on YouTube by now.

Fully loaded: the contents of the box. I neglected to mention in this write-up;
the Christians and Muslims get their own drawstring bags  in which to
keep their blocks (and to randomly draw from for the arrival of reinforcements).

My only gripe with the rules is the size of the font. This isn’t really a valid complaint – I can read the Granada rules just fine if I’m wearing my prescription reading glasses (thanks again, old age), but even though I’ve been wearing the damn things for maybe ten years now, it’s still not yet an automatic thing to reach for my specs when I pick up a book or a magazine. Or, apparently, anything game-related. The font is a little small (about 6 point at an estimate, a similar sizer to the original Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1977) rulebooks), but given the rulebook comes to 28 pages as is, I can understand why the project director didn’t want to push it out to 32 pages to accommodate a larger print. But that just feels like looking for something to complain about.

The game board, incorporating the Turn Track and various holding boxes.

The game board is a map of the southern Iberian Peninsula, stretching from Gibraltar in the West to Cartagena in the east, and up to Ubeda in the North. Across the Mediterranean, Oran on the Barbary Coast makes an appearance. Point to point movement links towns and cities across the land, and the reconquered lands of the Catholic kings is differentiated in pale green from the diminishing extents of the remaining Muslim holdings, the subject of contention in this game.

I really like the map, but I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste – people get pernickety about maps. I think it manages to garner an impression of the maps of the period without slavishly aping the tropes. It’s clear and readable, and the muted colour palette really helps the stark black and white pieces pop on the board – there’s no chance of missing a unit here – and the locations aren’t so bunched up as to be impractical.

I haven’t checked this, but I suspect the game board is the work of Knut Grünitz, an artist with a long relationship with Compass Games, having contributed amazing work to tiles like Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games, 2015), The Conquistadors (2020), and the upcoming Manassas –Designer Signature Edition (Compass Games, ~2025), to name but a few.

Granada set-up card (in reality, in inner fold of the PAC)- quarter size of the game board..

The game comes not one, but two 11” X 17” set-up maps (inside the bi-fold PACs), which I for one really appreciate. It would be an easy thing to make this a two-page spread at the beginning of the rulebook, but Compass will often go the extra mile which this kind of thing. Thanks, Bill. Having two means if you have a buddy whose already familiar with the Granada set-up, you can each set up your own sides, giving you more time to actually play the game.

Players' Aid - Front and verso pages of the game layout.

Battle Reference Card - like it says on the label, this is a short precis of all the rules
affecting possible combat situations in the game. 

The back and front panels of the set-up charts are the designated Player’s Aids (again, duplicated, so you don’t need to be handing it over between turns). These offer A Yearly Cycle (each year consists of two turns, then a Reinforcement steep), table of Movement costs, Mustering and Land Movement on the front, and rules reminders for Overruns, Naval Movement and Victory conditions, as well as the Boabdil Mixed Army, which I am unfamiliar with but I’m sure we’ll learn all about it in play.

Victory Point Track. for the tracking of VPs, among other things.

The last card is labelled the Victory Point Track. It looks complicated at first glance, but it's actually quite elegant. Each player earns points for various successes (such as taking castles or vanquishing enemy units), but they do so at different rates. The lower part of the track helps to decode this inequity, making it a simpler job to track overall VP, and keep a tally of individual achievements.

Lots of blocks and bit, but don't despair - many don't need labelling.

When you get a copy of Granada, you’re going to be faced with the prospect of stickering up lots of wooden blocks. Don’t panic. It’s not all the blocks, and it’s just a single side. And there are only two sheets of stickers (with some duplicates for spares). I think I stickered mine up in less than ninety minutes, about a quarter of the time it took to sticker up the whole of Commands and Colors Tricorne: Jacobite Rising (Compass Games, 2020).

 

Stickers: Christian forces (top) and Muslim forces (above). I could not get a photo
of the stickers with my inadequate equipment to come out without too much glare
to make it worthwhile, so here are some copies Jose Rivero
posted on BoardgameGeek, just to give you the idea. 

The “blocks” themselves are an unusual mix. In most block games you’ll find just one size, or maybe a couple of sizes like in Commands and Colors games. In Granada you have a standard size of block for the units, then you have shallow discs labelled for tracking victory points, the current turn and such, and marking the presence of two Muslim leaders on the board. Then there are the Pioneer force (for use in sieges) and out-of-supply markers, labelled but in their natural pine colour, small cubes in black and white (haven’t got to these in the rules yet, so apologies), and really neat castle (square based) and watchtower (garrison markers, round base) blocks that stan upright on the board, complete with crenulations for that more authentic castle look. It’s a nice detail to add, and I can’t wait to see them on the board.

The block labels look great. They clear and easy to read. They’re a little on the glossy side for my taste but that’s no kind of legitimate criticism, merely an opinion. I can confirm that they adhere well, and so long as you don’t live in a super-dry environment (or, at the other extreme, a sauna), you shouldn’t have to take any special precautions looking after your stickered blocks.

The card decks, still in their cellophane wrappers; Car backs (top), and fronts (above);
Christian to the left, Muslim to the right.

The two sides come with their own sets of cards. None of the things that will make Granada an interesting game to play is the way combat works. The cards dictate which available forces you can bring to a fight; the others will, for whatever reason, sit it out. When an altercation is proposed, presumably the two sides will have certain forces available to them, but you can only bring to the battle the forces you can activate using the cards in your hand. Sometimes discretion will be the better part of valour. Or, to put it another way, Granada will likely be a game that rewards and punishes bold and reckless plays in equal measure.

The cards are transcendently attractive, illustrated in the style of the time, again by Mr Cáceres, who excels at this kind of work. There are four separate decks of cards in Granada; the Muslim and Christian decks for regular game operations, a naval deck for conflagrations at sea, and a Castle Surrender deck to deal with the results of successful sieges. The cards are printed on good stock, but you’ll probably want to sleeve a least the operational decks as I imagine you’ll probably cycle through these a time or two in a game.

Just one more thing... (Clarifications sheet).

A Compass game wouldn’t be a Compass game without errata, so the old saw goes. Well, that's a cheap shot, and not really fair; nearly every wargame, on release, has some hiccups with the rules. Poking the Bill the bear has become something of a sport with Compass and “errata” – I’ve been guilty of doing it myself – and but in all fairness, Compass has some of the best credentials of any game company in regard to this. If there are counter errors, the firm will mail out replacement counters to everyone who bought the game directly from the publisher, at the company's expense. And if typos slip past the catcher, or there is deemed to be some ambiguity in the rules that are found between the game getting printed and being sent out from the warehouse, Compass will incorporate a sheet of fixes, or in the case of Granada, Clarifications. People complain about this, but I’ve edited my share of public-facing documents in the past, so I know how easy it is for a mistake or two to make it into the release version, no matter how many times it’s proofed and checked. Compass does at lease as good a job at rectifying these as anyone else in the business, and to my mind a much better job than many.

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So, there you have it. My gaming program seems to be filling up for the foreseeable, but I’m very keen to get this to the table sometime sooner rather than later. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a review (or at least some AARs) before the end of the year. As always, thanks for reading this far.