History, Medieval, Retrospective
Stuart Gorman
The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Stephen Rangazas

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The Guerrilla Generation by Stephen Rangazas

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The Guerrilla Generation by Stephen Rangazas

I would not consider myself someone who is likely to join the GMT Games’ COIN system fan club. I have never had a bad time playing a COIN game, and I have enjoyed most of my time with the system, but there are just so many of them and I struggle to be excited to try another one. As I explored the system more, I very quickly found COIN fatigue setting in. There was one notable deviation from that, though, in the form of Stephen Rangazas’ The British Way, a game that had to overcome my initial reluctance to play as the British Empire and convince me it was an interesting take on COIN and the history it covered. Sadly, I only managed to play the Malaya game a couple of times before packing the box into storage for my move to South Korea in 2024, and so it remains shamefully un-reviewed at present.

While I plan on eventually revisiting that box and giving it its due, in the meantime a new Rangazas’ package has arrived on my doorstop. The Guerilla Generation is another multi-pack volume with four separate small COIN games in it. While each game is generally more complex than those in The British Way, these are still smaller COIN experiences than you’ll find in basically any main-series entry. Instead of focusing on a single counter-insurgent power like The British Way, The Guerilla Generation dwells on four different kinds of insurgency, specifically in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century.