I didn’t quite click with Mark Herman’s SPQR, the second volume in the Great Battles of History (GBoH) series that he co-designed with Richard Berg, but I’m nothing if not willing to give a series a second shot. With the recent reprint of Hoplite, volume 15 and the most recent entry in the series, I decided to give it another shot. I was drawn to a few things about Hoplite that I hoped might fix elements that hadn’t quite worked with me in SPQR. Firstly, this is a Richard Berg design and I’m nothing if not a Berg fan. I have had bad experiences with Berg games, but even when I don’t like them, I am generally fascinated by Berg’s takes on history and game design. While I have enjoyed several of Mark Herman’s games in the past, my taste and his are not exactly aligned. The second thing that drew me to Hoplite was that it promised to be a little simpler than earlier entries in the series – stripping out some of the complexity that Berg felt didn’t apply to ancient Greek warfare – and that it was now a chit-pull game. Something I admire about GBoH is how it seems to change significantly between volumes – taking the core but adapting it to each new topic. For that reason, I felt it warranted a second shot. I’m happy to report that I have enjoyed Hoplite quite a bit more than my first dalliance with SPQR, but I’m also still not entirely sure I’m a fan of the series yet.
Hoplite simplifies and changes several elements from previous GBoH games, something that Berg is up front about in the rulebook. As an aside, I love how these games all have their own rulebook rather than a series rules and a game-specific rules. I hate series rulebooks. I would love to give you, the reader, a comprehensive list of differences in Hoplite, but I don’t have nearly the level of mastery of GBoH I would need to be able to spot all the differences. There are, however, a few changes that I did notice and really appreciate. Berg is quick to note that for the most part these changes are to adapt the rules to the ancient Greek world, often discarding rules that might have made sense in Rome but not Greece, rather than a complete redesign of the system, but there are a few rules that can be applied backwards to earlier entries should you so desire. There were two changes that stood out to me as the most impactful: the change to TQ checks before combat and the choice to use chit pull activation.
GBoH is also chock full of markers, so expect to spend a fair bit of time updating them on each unit.
One of the things I found most tedious in SPQR was resolving the endless TQ checks when two lines of infantry clashed. TQ, short for Troop Quality, represents how good your units are and also how many cohesion hits they can take before they rout. In SPQR, and I believe other entries as well, before resolving combat you had to resolve a TQ check for each unit that was involved in the fight. This meant rolling a d10 and if the die roll was higher than the unit’s TQ, printed on the counter, you added a cohesion hit for every point of difference. This took forever, especially at the huge scale of some of those battles, and while I could appreciate that to some degree it was trying to represent the impact of differing troop quality on combat at the time, it was tedious to resolve and not very interesting in its result.
In Hoplite things work a little differently. In a clash of lines, when one side has advanced a section of their army adjacent to their opponent, the attacker doesn’t have to make these TQ checks, only the defender does. This really incentivizes you to be the aggressor, at least for the final stretch between the two armies, which creates some interesting decisions about how to position your armies. It also ties in really well with the movement rules for hoplite units (more on that later). The only time the attacker has to make a TQ check is if they already start adjacent to an enemy unit and not already Engaged (a marker that indicates that these two units fought last turn but neither side routed), then they need to make a TQ check to see if they can actually attack or not. Most of the time only one side in a combat will be making TQ checks before resolving Shock Combat, which already halves the amount of TQ checks you need to make. It also creates more interesting choices since it introduces a little asymmetry. If you are behind a good defensive position, you may want to stay there, but if you advance out at the last minute you could force TQ checks on your opponent and avoid them yourself, but lose that position in the process. I like this change a lot.
As someone who mostly plays these heavy hex and counter games solo, I appreciate the change to chit pull. It also adds that little extra dose of randomness that I love to see in my historical games. In SPQR you could mostly know the order that commanders would activate in, with some potential for unpredictability and the all-important Trump rules being crucial (although I never really mastered how to optimally use them). Trumping is still here in Hoplite, but to my mind it is a bit simpler in how it works. The chit pull itself is pretty basic, each wing of your army has a chit and activates when it is pulled from the cup. The most interesting element is the addition of the Momentum chit. When you pull your Momentum chit you pick one of your commanders and roll a d10, if the roll is less than that commander’s Initiative stat then the wing under their command gets to activate. This is in addition to their activation from their standard chit, so you could potentially get two activations in one turn. This reminds me a bit of the Continuation mechanism from Berg’s Men of Iron, and it has a similar tension to that. I think the Momentum chit is a brilliant addition, bringing that little more unpredictability and worry into the game. It also ties into the Trump mechanic, because if you fail your one Trump attempt this turn your opponent gets to put their Momentum counter back into the cup, potentially giving them even more activations (but not guaranteeing it). All of this feels like peak Berg in terms of including just the right amount of unpredictability in the system.
There are some other elements to Hoplite that have endeared it to me. One of these is that the battles are, generally, quite a bit smaller. There is Plataea, which is a two map beast of a thing, if you want your ancients battles to be huge – and I will admit that the terrain and scale of that does tempt me a little. However, for a system with this much going on I prefer it to be a bit smaller. I don’t really want to be playing a GBoH scenario for 4+ hours, if I’m honest, and I appreciate that with Hoplite I could set up and play a scenario in an evening. It’s a much more manageable scale and as the parent of a small child I appreciate that.
The initial set up for Marathon. All that pretty terrain, none of it going to be relevant as we fight in the one big open space available.
I also really like the rules for moving hoplites. Naturally in a game titled Hoplite the hoplites take center stage. The most fun of these are the phalanxes which (excepting the comically large Theban one that is used in one scenario) are two hexes wide. I love counters that are wider than one hex, and the irritating movement challenges they inevitably cause. There’s something wonderful about the constraints that they introduce that just fills me with joy. Turning these unwieldy formations causes cohesion hits, so you have to debate whether you really want to risk wheeling this unit to try and flank the enemy because there are times when doing so could cause the phalanx to break and rout. If I have one minor criticism here, it’s that there are two different types of turning movement for phalanxes, one is more punishing than the other, and it feels a little too fiddly and at times confusing. It’s not the most complicated thing, and I can see the logic behind it (it’s generally harder to turn the formation when near an enemy) but it is an example of GBoH pushing a little beyond the level of complexity that I’d like.
The hoplites quickly fall out of formation, while the Persians await their approach.
What I really love, though, is determining the hoplite movement rate. When you first move your hoplites towards the enemy, usually on the first turn, you have to roll to see how fast they move. Normally they will advance at a trot, moving four hexes forward each turn. But maybe they’re slower, and they walk at a rate of three hexes, or maybe they are running at five hexes a turn and earning a DRM bonus to combat when they reach the enemy but potentially suffering cohesion hits along the way. Once they start moving these units must move their maximum movement allowance each turn, so you can’t choose to slow the faster units down. Across a wide open plain between armies your hoplites will quickly fall out of order and no longer be the neat line you had hoped for. It also makes it hard to control when they will reach the enemy lines, which is important when you remember that being the side that advances into that initial combat will spare you having to make TQ checks and instead force them on your opponent. But your opponent can’t exactly calculate the right distance to stay away from your hoplites because they don’t know what order units will activate in. This is a case where the actual rules aren’t too complicated, but the implications of these rules are really interesting.
With all that having been said, I’m still not entirely sold on Hoplite. The combat still feels just a bit too tedious for me to ever love it. Combat in Hoplite isn’t incredibly complicated, but it sure isn’t simple. My main complaint is that it has too many steps. In ranged combat, the simpler of the two types, each weapon type has a value based on the range, e.g. composite bows at one hex are six and at two are four. At its simplest, roll a d10 and if the number is equal to or lower than the value you deal one cohesion hit. However, make sure you also check the table that compares weapon system to unit type to get the die roll modifier (DRM) to the ranged weapon roll.
This is basically the core experience of combat in GBoH: checking multiple tables. In Shock Combat you first must check if one side has superiority, first positional superiority (e.g. is someone flanking or being flanked) and if that’s not relevant then you check the table that determines weapon superiority. Having superiority will double or triple the number of cohesion hits inflicted in the combat, so it’s important. After that, you compare the attacking and defending unit types on another table to determine which column on the combat results table (CRT) you will be using. Having more attackers or defenders in the combat can cause shifts in which column you use. You roll the d10, find that row (including any DRMs, of which there are only a few) and find the crossover point between that row and the column and that will tell you how many cohesion hits the attacker and the defender receive. These hits are distributed among all participating units, so if you have more units in a given combat, you can spread the hits around more widely. This allows many weaker units to hold their own against one strong unit better than you would expect, unless someone achieves superiority because those doubled or tripled hits will add up quickly.
If you’re prepared to just go through it step by step every time it isn’t very complicated to resolve. No individual step is that complex, it’s just that there’s a lot of them. I imagine this will be a point of disagreement among players based on their taste, but where I am generally happy to factor in a lot of DRMs in a combat (say, for example, in Berg’s Men of Iron system) I find this jumping from table to table to be incredibly tedious. Because Hoplite doesn’t have a huge variation in unit types I slowly learned the table in a way I struggled with in SPQR, but I still never loved this combat. I just feel like I’m spending too much time resolving a process and not enough playing a game.
It doesn’t help that the combat results themselves contain no real decisions. All the combat results are just numbers of cohesion hits, and the only decision is how to distribute those hits – something that is usually trivial and isn’t even a free choice as the rules restrict you (not without reason, though). My favorite combat systems are like those in the Operational Combat Series (OCS), which are quick to resolve and generate multiple interesting decisions as a result. I spend so much time resolving combats in GBoH and I never feel like I’m doing something fun or interesting in the process.
A little bit of terrain honestly goes a long way to making these battles more exciting. Yes it adds a bit more to the rules, but sometimes it’s the spice that I feel like the combat is otherwise missing.
I appreciate, to a degree, what the game is trying to model with this combat. It captures a grinding and slow style of warfare. I really love that units suffer damage to their cohesion, not to their health or strength. These units usually aren’t suffering casualties; they are instead getting tired, losing morale, and falling out of their tight formation that is necessary to their function. The deciding moment is when they ultimately flee the battle, and it is when one side breaks and runs that the battle is decided. This is a great representation of how pre-modern battles often went, with most of the casualties happening after one side fled rather than in the fighting proper (I speak more for medieval rather than ancient, as that’s my area of expertise, but I believe they shared this to a degree). However, that doesn’t make this fun to play as a game, and it can’t help but make me wish that it tried something more interesting.
The combat system feels like it’s core to the argument that GBoH in general makes about historical warfare. It highlights two threads as the most important to warfare: troop quality and weapons systems. I have to confess that I am somewhat skeptical of this analysis. Before digging in deeper, I want to note that one of the reasons why I enjoy Berg so much as a designer is that he generally lays out an argument in his games and he makes this very explicit. These are the Berg interpretations of what he has read and what he thinks about it. I rarely feel like Berg is trying to give me some kind of “objective history” take. Even when I think his version of history is weird, I can appreciate that he is making an argument and it is an argument that is interesting to engage with. Now, I’m no certified expert in ancient warfare, but I do specialize in pre-modern warfare and the history of military technology so I feel at least qualified enough to ramble about the topic in a blog post like this.
Troop quality is a tricky thing. I think in terms of making an interesting game it helps to have a way to differentiate different units from each other. Some games manage to make functionally identical armies interesting, but it’s challenging. It is generally more interesting if there is some asymmetry between units and armies. However, evaluating the quality of soldiers from thousands of years ago is basically impossible. None of these people were professionals – no, not even the Spartans. The Spartan elite didn’t do a job other than fighting, but they didn’t actually train for combat (no formation drills every morning, for example). Sometimes troop quality can be connected to something we can kind of measure, like how in the Battle of Marathon scenario the center line of Greek hoplites have a slightly lower Troop Quality because Herodotus says that the line was thinner there – so the lower quality reflects fewer troops. Things get more difficult when you try to assign one type of unit as more elite than another. Sometimes ancient sources will tell us that X unit were veterans, or were more elite, but what do they really mean by that? We bring with us a lot of baggage around what an elite unit looks like in a modern army, and that’s not necessarily the same as what it meant in the ancient world.
Now, I don’t think Hoplite makes a bunch of egregious errors in this regard. However, as a core argument for a series this does still make me a little wary because it’s very easy to take things too far and start making value judgements on the different qualities of troops across regions. In particular to ancient Greek warfare, in popular media there is a lot of borderline (and sometimes not borderline) orientalism in the portrayal of Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars. You can see notions of Strong Manly Western Greeks vs. Effeminate and Sneaky Eastern Orientals in many depictions of this period. I think Hoplite flirts with this idea, and the inclusion of Victor Davis Hanson in the bibliography nudges things in this direction I believe, but I also don’t think Berg completely buys in, which helps keep the game interesting.
Berg’s frequent insertions of little design and play notes, often tongue-in-cheek, also does a lot to endear me to his arguments. He is clearly having fun and knows the limitations of his medium and our own ability to understand history.
As someone who spent way too long studying medieval weaponry, I have so many opinions on how we understand the history of military technology. I believe that we are far too obsessed with the idea of new weapons replacing old ones, and the notion of one weapon “system” being superior to another in an elaborate rock, paper, scissors relationship. It can be tempting to try and seek out an “objective” way of measuring historical strategy. A core problem with trying to understand pre-modern warfare is that we often just don’t have that much material that describes the battles, and what we have is often frustratingly vague. For a modern battle we can often study exact troop movements and the fighting at specific positions, for ancient and medieval battles we do not have the luxury of this specificity.
This is something that historians, both popular and academic, have tried to find ways around, and an obsession with technology offers a potential solution. If we can create a hierarchy, or a complex relationship, between different “weapons systems” we can make arguments about what probably happened when people using these systems fought against each other even if we don’t have a description of that engagement. I am sympathetic to this goal, but I am also suspicious of it. It is far too easy to link together a chain of suppositions and “this probably happened” to create what feels like a logical conclusion, but which has no foundation in the historical record. History is also incredibly messy, and for every example that supports a position there is generally at least one that confounds it as well. On some level the past cannot be understood. None of us have ever fought as part of an ancient Greek phalanx, and we never will, and that experience will be forever alien and unknowable to us.
A problem I often see coming out of this process is the question “well why didn’t X just use Y weapon system, since it was obviously better? Were they just dumb?” This is an extreme case, but I also think it is a pretty natural question when you are being presented with a situation where a system seems to be objectively better than the others available at that time. It loses the nuance of history. People in the past were as rational as we are now, and they had more expertise in the warfare of their time than we ever will. If they were using a type of weapon, then there was a reason behind it. That’s not to say it was a good reason, even now we know that our society doesn’t always make good decisions. These factors can be lost when we distill a complex political and military culture down to just what weapon they happen to be using.
However, one of the challenges that game designers face that historians don’t is that they do kind of need to achieve a level of specificity that a historian can hand wave away. These hex and counter games demand a certain granularity to be playable as games, so the designer must make decisions about what happened, or was likely to have happened, without the ambiguity allowed to a book or article. They are also not the best system for examining wider cultural and political systems that might have a major impact on why a given army looked the way it did. But that doesn’t mean we should just hand wave away the arguments it might be making just because it is a game. These are worth taking seriously, and no work of art is exempt from analysis and criticism just because it is also meant to be fun.
I don’t really have a neat conclusion where I can say “GBoH good” or “GBoH bad”. It has its take on history and what was important in ancient battles. It is a position I am certainly skeptical of, and it doesn’t necessarily convince me that it is correct. It is not a fringe perspective, though, and I’m not prepared to say that it is invalid nor do I feel like I should criticize a ten year old game because it doesn’t incorporate the latest scholarship into the most nuanced picture imaginable of the ancient world. At the same time, I do want to flag that it is but one take and there are reasons to doubt that it is the best way to represent this period. I sometimes encounter the viewpoint that the more complex games are better representations of history, and GBoH, as one of the most complex ancient warfare games, must to some seem to be the most accurate. I think this is a fallacy and that we should hold the same skepticism that this is the best example of history as we would if this was a simple dudes-on-a-map dice chucker. I think even Berg would agree, maybe not that his interpretation could be wrong but that we must be prepared to see the flaws in the works of all designers no matter their prestige.
I am still not convinced that GBoH is a system where the juice is worth the squeeze. There are a lot of rules in this box and there is a lot to keep track of. When I play a wargame I’m looking for a good balance between playing the game and resolving the systems, and for me GBoH has too much resolving the system and not enough playing the game. Hoplite is a step in the right direction in terms of this balance, at least compared to SPQR (I can’t speak to the other thirteen volumes), but I’m not sure it’s a big enough step. I still spent lots of time in the rulebook, and even if I got faster and better at playing Hoplite it was never that fast. It has made me interested in giving Simple GBoH a shot, though. I have heard that this is an even more Berg take on the core system and pushes it closer to something like Men of Iron, my personal favorite Berg system. It is possible that Simple GBoH is the game that better strikes that balance for me, and I’m planning to try it next.
So, for the moment I don’t know how eagerly I will revisit GBoH, original flavor. I enjoyed my time with Hoplite, and I think if you are GBoH curious this is a great place to start. The slightly simpler rules and the smaller scale of the battles makes this about as approachable a game as a system this heavy will have. At the same time, when I look at the games on my shelf this is not going to be one that I am eager to pull out again – at least in its original form. There are just so many other games that I enjoy more and that are closer to my ideal ratio of systems to game. It is possible that Simple-GBoH will change my mind, stay tuned to find out, but for the moment I think I might be done with this set of rules at least.
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