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

Wargame Review

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Columbia Games’ Card-Driven Block Wargames – An Almost Comprehensive Review

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Columbia Games’ Card-Driven Block Wargames – An Almost Comprehensive Review

Columbia has been famous for their block wargames since the 1970s, but in recent memory none of have loomed quite as large as the series of four games card driven games starting with Hammer of the Scots in 2002, and including Crusader Rex, Julius Caesar, and Richard III. I played my first game from this line a little while ago, and you can read my first impressions here (https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/first-impressions-richard-iii-by-columbia-games). In the intervening period, and with many thanks to the amazing digital implementations of these games on the website Rally the troops (https://rally-the-troops.com/), I have been able to play all four of these games and I have put my thoughts down on each of them below. Hopefully this will be interesting or enlightening, but at the very least you can tell me why I’m wrong and how your favourite is really the best one.

Before we get on to the games themselves, an overview of the features shared across these games is in order. They are all block wargames – meaning that the player’s pieces are wooden blocks with unit information only on the side which faces their controller. This creates a simple but effective fog of war where my opponent can tell how many units I have and where they are on the map but doesn’t know which specific units those are – and crucially doesn’t know their strength. Play is determined by playing action cards – there are generally two kinds of cards, those with action points and those with special events. Action points allow the movement of armies across the board while events usually allow for a limited action that breaks the game rules, such as moving units further than normally allowed or allowing units to recover strength.

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Review: The Shores of Tripoli by Fort Circle Games   

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Review: The Shores of Tripoli by Fort Circle Games   

I first became aware of the Barbary War when I was around fourteen years old. I was in my hometown’s Barnes and Noble and saw a book that covered the career of William Eaton, focusing on his role in the Barbary War and eventual conflicts with Thomas Jefferson. It had been granted a prominent place in the bookshop since it involved TJ – our local hometown hero, of sorts, and yes, we do call him TJ – and while I didn’t buy it at the time it stuck with me. Later I convinced my parents to buy a copy of the audiobook on CD and after one failed attempt, eventually listened to it with my father on a road trip somewhere. It is perhaps not the most ringing of endorsements that I remember almost nothing from that book, not even its title. I tried looking it up, but it turns out that several books on the Barbary War were published in the mid-00’s. Still, while my first encounter with the Barbary War was not the most engaging it has sat in the back of my head all these years as one of the more interesting, and forgotten, American wars.