I was in a bit of a Scottish wars mood after playing the Braveheart: Solitaire book game so I decided to try out how Richard Berg modelled Falkirk in Men of Iron as an interesting counterpoint. As I somewhat hinted at in that review – I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to William Wallace. I feel he’s a bit overrated as a historical figure, basically entirely because of Braveheart – a movie I strongly dislike. Lest you think I’m a boring historian who hates fun, my favourite medieval movie is A Knight’s Tale, my hatred of Braveheart stretches beyond mere historical inaccuracy. I’ve born a slight grudge about living in a post-Braveheart world where William Wallace has overshadowed the far more interesting Robert Bruce. My opinions on this have mellowed with time – and I think it helps that Bruce seems to be getting more popular culture recognition as well (including his own movies, which I have not seen, making me part of the problem).

I was immediately interested to see that the Falkirk scenario comes with a sort of solo mode as default. With the basic rules the Scottish player basically sits in schiltron and the English player has to crack their defences. I was intrigued by only having to really think about one side and abandoned my plans to try playing this scenario with modified chit pull rules for activations. I have to confess I was a little disappointed by my experience. The scenario is timed, and while my understanding is that the timer only advances if the non-timed side passes, I moved it forward after every English turn because that felt like the only challenge to the scenario – could I defeat the Scots within 15 turns? The answer was a pretty definitive yes.

Having gotten a handle on the rules of Richard Berg’s Men of Iron with my fabulous French upset last week I decided to try a scenario that was on a slightly larger scale but still didn’t up complexity too much. I chose Courtrai, also known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs because of the loot that the victorious Flemings took from the dead French nobles, in part because I’ve always found it fascinating and because it once again sees a French army trying to attack a strong defensive position – historically with disastrous results. I won’t totally spoil what happened, but I will say that things did not go as well for the French this time.

I should probably talk a bit about how Men of Iron plays, because it is interesting and unlike anything I’ve played before. Instead of being divided into strict turns, the starting player as designated in the scenario chooses one Battle – a group of units with a single commander – to activate. As an aside, I love that the game uses the medieval term Battle instead of a more modern designation like company or squad. The selected Battle can then move and shoot or engage in melee combat – usually “shock” combat but mounted units can charge instead for an extra bonus. After activating that Battle the active player can pass or instead they can choose to try to activate another Battle. To successfully do so they must roll under that Battle’s commander’s Activation Rating on a d10 - most commanders have a rating of 2 or 3 so this isn’t particularly common but it happens often enough to keep things interesting. As an aside, in Men of Iron the 0 on a d10 is actually a zero and not a ten like I’m used to from D&D, something that frequently causes me to go from elation to disappointment whenever one is rolled. Each activation after the first imposes a -1 penalty to the roll, so it’s harder and harder to activate subsequent Battles.