Wars of the Roses Designers' Notes

Wars of the Roses Design Notes

Installment #1

15th century English politics

For many gamers, Avalon Hill's 1976 classic game Kingmaker (now, unfortunately, out of print) is their primary source of information about the Wars of the Roses. While one could write a rather long essay about the historical shortcomings of that game, doing so would be churlish. Games, first and foremost, are just that - games. And from our perspective, Kingmaker is, by-and-large, a great game.

In fact, we so liked Kingmaker that our initial idea was to combine the best elements of that game and Hammer of the Scots (an earlier, award-winning Columbia Games publication about the Scottish Wars of Independence between 1297-1314). We wanted a game that was quite a bit more fast-moving than Kingmaker , so we anticipated the need to streamline that game's heavy dose of chrome, clean-up the system, correct some of the historical faux pas , and reengineer the mechanics to allow for an interesting two-player game. "Give me Kingmaker with blocks!" the president of Columbia Games said.

It didn't turn out that way. Wars of the Roses is a very different from Kingmaker. The most obvious difference is the most important. Wars of the Roses is primarily a military show-down between the two chief contestants for the throne of England - the dynastic houses of Lancaster and York. Kingmaker, on the other hand, is multi-player game of political maneuver wherein players represent not Lancaster or York, but distinct coalitions of the greater and lesser English nobility. As Avalon Hill noted in its introduction to Kingmaker;

The game is based on the premise that the powerful Noble families used the Lancastrian and Yorkist princes as pawns in a great game of gaining control of England. Players control pieces representing the Noble families as they seek power by a combination of military, political and diplomatic skills.

This interpretation of the wars reflected the thinking of academic historians who were quite influential when Kingmaker was published 30+ years ago. But the belief that the Yorkist and Lancastrian claimants were mere puppets dancing on strings pulled by "powerful and over-mighty subjects" is now a minority perspective within academia. The emerging view today (best articulated in Christine Carpenter's The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution of England, c. 1437-1509 , 1997) is that the sharp internecine struggles within the nobility were a consequence of - not a cause of - the weakness of Henry VI's government. Local grievances were exploited by Yorkist and Lancastrian claimants, not the other way around. Nobles had a vested interest in maintaining a stable, powerful royal authority in London, and they were reluctant actors - not enthusiastic participants - in the wars that followed.

Consequently, we felt that having players take the role of Lancaster and York made more sense than having them represent noble families or some collection of important affinities. We also concluded that an option for three or more players was unnecessary.

A less obvious difference between the two games is the role that patronage plays in maintaining support for the crown. While Kingmaker encourages the idea ( pace K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England , 1973, and, more recently, C. Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages , 1987) that nobles were inclined to support those claimants who were most generous with estates, offices, titles, and endowments of various kinds - and that a successful King is one who gained the maximum amount of political capital from royal hand-outs - there is surprisingly little evidence to suggest that feudal affections were subject to the highest bidder.

The first difficulty with the "patronage uber alles " perspective is that it assumes that the nobles were not the King's natural allies and that they had to be bought to be tied to the crown's interest. But in truth, the peerage needed a strong and effective King to protect their estates from domestic predation and to secure tranquility within the Commons. With few exceptions, preexisting noble endowments were far more valuable than the largesse that might be doled out by the King. Landowners thus gained far more from the security provided by good royal governance than from the wealth associated with royal patronage at the margin.

Second, it assumes a bounty of royal patronage that simply didn't exist. Once the patronage necessary to reward the King's unsalaried professional servants was subtracted from the mix, there simply wasn't enough of the crown's largesse to go around.

While one might argue that the competition within the landowning classes for scarce royal favors made violent conflict inevitable, how do we explain the relative stability that characterized England during most of the Middle Ages, even during periods of bad Kingship? Or the fact that a number of very strong Kings - such as Edward I, Henry V, and Henry VII - employed patronage quite sparingly but nonetheless maintained solid noble support?

And what of the fact that there was little correlation during Edward IV's reign between patronage bestowed and loyalty secured? Lord Grey of Ruthyn's critical betrayal of the Lancastrian cause on the battlefield at Northampton, which helped put Edward IV on the throne, was apparently prompted by something other than promise of Yorkist largesse. On the contrary, Lord Grey subsequently received no lands from the King and, although briefly enjoying the lucrative office of Treasurer of England for 17 months, had to wait until 1466 before he was given the relatively empty title of Earl of Kent. Lord Dacre, (Richard Fiennes) likewise received little reward for his valuable military service to the crown, and the Earl of Arundel and Duke of Suffolk received virtually nothing from their royal kinsman. Yet in all of those cases, those men provided valuable support for the crown and remained loyal to Edward IV.

Contrast the unpurchased loyalty of Grey, Dacre, Arundel, and Suffolk with the unprecedented bounty of patronage heaped upon the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence. Lands, titles, and privileges galore were bestowed on those two, yet even that vast bounty of patronage and the closest of family ties proved incapable of securing their long-term support for Edward's reign. The same pattern of patronage bestowed and treachery reaped can be seen in the rebellions of the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Stanley against Richard III.

Simply put, there was no correlation between patronage and loyalty. In fact, it tended to work the other way; the more patronage, the greater threat of rebellion! Prof. Christine Carpenter explains why:

Only kings who had forfeited the instinctive support of the nobility, and usurpers who did not yet have it, had to buy the nobles. Usurpers had to go on buying them until they themselves became accepted as "real" kings. And for both it could be only a temporary expedient because, as we shall see, most notably under Richard III, there was no end to the price of loyalty if it had to be bought.

Accordingly, we decided early-on to forgo any sort of political mechanism by which players might "buy" the affections of key nobles or the loyalty of particular regions with specific grants and titles (ala Kingmaker ) or by allocating abstracted "Influence" or "Patronage" points to bid for noble or regional control. That sort of thing is great fun in Kingmaker , but we think it is fundamentally a-historical.

Politics, of course, influenced the allegiances of the peerage - and patronage was not irrelevant to politics - but medieval English Kings best cultivated support by practicing good royal governance and adroitly exploiting matrimonial alliances. Hence, a game that more fully challenged players with political considerations might include mechanisms for the King to "invest" in good Sheriffs and other agents of the crown; adjudicate disputes between nobles in a manner that reduced political tension; and dole access to politically attractive brides and grooms to nobles and their families on the marriage market. While we can imagine (if we try really hard) an interesting game along those lines (although one obvious problem is that the player representing the House out of power would have very little to do save to exploit opportunities that might be left by the King, suggesting that a solitaire game rather than a two-player game might be in order), game mechanisms to do all of the above would quickly take over the design and threaten to relegate the military struggle to the margins - unless, of course, we were willing to accept a much longer and more complicated game than the one we hoped to produce.

The above understanding of political life in England leaves little room for Parliament in this game. Historically speaking, English Parliaments during the wars were made up of individuals largely hand-picked by the King to rubber-stamp crown decisions ex post and legitimize regime change. They exercised little independent power and had no institutional impact on the political or military course of the wars. There is simply no reason to include Parliament in this game.

The church played a rather complicated role in the wars. Ecclesiastic office holders were frequently tied by blood and family alliance to claimants on both sides of the conflict, and they accordingly contributed some - but not relatively many - men-at-arms to the armies that campaigned across England during this period. But the church played primarily a financial and political role in the conflict, so we decided to abstract their involvement through the Operations Deck. Good cards might in part represent support from the church with bad cards representing the opposite.

The aforementioned considerations explain our decision to keep the military campaigning front-and-center and to abstract the political side of the struggle in the Operations Deck. If you've got good Action or Event cards, your political situation is good. If you don't, you invest in your political standing by doing things to gain additional draws from the deck. Players are denied the opportunity to practice good politics (or bad), but are provided the opportunity to improve their political standing and to manage their political assets to their best effect.

In Hammer of the Scots, players turned enemy nobles by use of a Herald event card. This proved too crude a tool for the same in Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, for instance, swore vengeance against York after his father’s death at the 1st battle of St. Albans, and nothing could have induced him to abandon the red rose after 1455. Hence, we had to differentiate between those nobles who would never betray their allegiances and those who might.

We also had to allow for betrayal in the heat of battle, a necessity that inspired the idea of Crib cards. For instance, five major battles were largely determined by a timely betrayal:

- Hours before the Battle of Ludlow Bridge (1459), the Calais garrison under Sir Andrew Trollope - the best troops in the Yorkist army - defected to Henry VI, an event that compelled Richard of York to abandon the field and go into exile.

- At the Battle of Northampton (1460), commander of the Lancastrian right - Lord Grey - directed his men to stand aside from the Yorkist attack in what historians believe was a prearranged agreement between Grey and Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, who’s men were told prior to battle to spare the lives of those wearing Grey’s livery. The disappearance of the Lancastrian right led to complete disaster, with the Earls of Buckingham, Shrewsbury, and Lord Egremont dying in defense of King Henry VI, who quickly fell into Yorkist hands.

- At the Battle of Wakefield (1460), the Duke of York commissioned Lord Neville to raise an army from his northern estates and to rendezvous with him at Sandal castle. When Neville finally showed up at the scene, he turned his men against York and ensured his bloody demise.

- During the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross (1461), French and Irish mercenaries under the Earl of Wiltshire, who made up the bulk of the Lancastrian army sent after the teenage Earl of March, sat down on the field shortly after battle commenced and refused to fight, an act which doomed the army and allowed Edward the throne.

- At Bosworth (1485), Lord Stanley and his brother, Sir William Stanley, sat on the sidelines as the battle commenced despite marching to the field under the Yorkist banner. Meanwhile Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, refused to engage Henry Tudor’s army, a development which seemed to confirm King Richard III's fears that Northumberland was there to betray him at the proper moment. Only after Richard’s desperate charge at Henry Tudor did Stanley intervene - on the right flank of the King’s army at full charge - but it’s unclear whether Northumberland inactivity was a result of conscious betrayal, incompetence, cowardice, or poor field generalship by King Richard III.

Moreover, several well-timed betrayals outside of battle decisively swung events in the war. In 1470, for instance, Shrewsbury’s defection from Warwick’s army at Rotherham ruined the Earl’s plan to ambush King Edward IV there in conjunction with a Warwick-inspired rebellion in Yorkshire. Neville’s army quickly dissolved and the Kingmaker was forced to fly to Calais. Later in that same year, Montagu’s betrayal of the Edward IV at Nottingham forced Edward into a similar panicky flight to Holland.

We had to be careful, however to not make betrayal so common that chaos governed the battlefield and luck of the draw determined the course of whole campaigns and thus the game. This is one of those instances where too strong a dose of history could threaten to ruin the gaming experience for many. It would have been nice to introduce a mechanism by which players could manage the likelihood of treachery, but it was unclear how we might do that. The main difficulty is that it’s unclear why nobles betrayed their feudal lords. As noted earlier, they did not necessarily reap great rewards for doing so.

Some undoubtedly made the decision to ally with this or that house - or to betray the same - out of fear of being caught on the losing side. Others may have had personal motives that were opaque to most contemporaries, much less to modern historians. And we can’t discount the possibility that concern for the wellbeing of the realm induced some nobles to choose the allegiances they did.

In short, it’s unclear to what extent a leading heir could affect the allegiances of the high peerage. The best way to draw supporters was probably to demonstrate political and military power. If so, then randomizing changes of allegiances via the cards makes perfect sense. Political power, for reasons discussed above, is randomized by the draw. Hence, political power equals good cards, and Treachery cards are very good cards. Military success will produce additional draws from the deck, so military success will increase the chance of a shift in the balance of power within the noble class.

Some players will undoubtedly be unsettled by the possibility that a major battle could easily swing with the well-timed play of enemy Treachery cards. The best remedy for those fears is to only declare those blocks whose loyalty is beyond question. The catch, of course, is that those blocks are scarce and once eliminated, they are gone forever. Accordingly, one must be very careful when committing rose-blocks to battle.

Another alternative is to only go into battle with dubious allies when you have at least one Treachery card in your possession. As long as Warwick is not on the other side, you will have nothing to fear. If you know the Kingmaker card is out of play, then even if Warwick is arrayed against you, you will be fine. If you have no choice but to put a group of dodgy noble allies into the field, then you may want to bring as many along for the campaign as possible. That way, a single defection won’t necessarily doom your army. The biggest danger is to have a suspicious noble along in an evenly matched battle without a Treachery card in hand. You never want to be in a position in which a key defection will cripple your army in a close fight. Of course, sometimes you have no choice save to either run that risk or exit post-haste for the Continent. Decisions, decisions.

A final note - a battlefield defection may not literally mean that the noble in question defected. It may also mean that an important subject or minor ally became a turncoat at the worst possible moment. Hence, if we were refighting the battle of Northampton in this game, a Treachery card turning Buckingham to the Yorkists would simulate Lord Grey’s betrayal on the battlefield. Of course, unlike in history, Buckingham in this case may well survive the battle and now be arrayed with the Yorkists. But if Buckingham had survived Northampton, that would probably have occurred anyway.

Stipulating that one block equals one noble levy made immediate sense. Doing so kept the block count down (which, in turn, kept the game price down) and minimized the administrative burden on players who would otherwise be forced to keep track of which infantry, knight, and archer blocks belonged to which noble. But there are some drawbacks.

First, because a noble would typically muster various numbers of archers, knights, and infantry, we could not easily differentiate blocks by troop type. This didn't prove to be too troubling because Yorkist and Lancastrian armies pretty much looked alike. Both had about the same proportion of archers, knights, infantry, and artillery in battle, and both armies fought in a similar manner. Hence, it was rare for an army to have a militarily significant advantage in one combat arm or the other, which meant that little would be gained by providing more granularity regarding the exact composition of the contending armies (something that could not be said if we were designing a game about the 100 Years War).

Second, because the strongest levies would be represented by a single block, lesser nobles could not be included in the game unless they were able to marshal a substantial fraction of the fighting power fielded by the great nobles. In essence, we were forced to ask the question, "Could Lord X field an army that was at least half as large as that which might be fielded by, say, the Earl of Northumberland?" Otherwise, a couple or three minor nobles (each with their own block) would be able to collectively field a more powerful army than that fielded by the major magnates. Accordingly, nobles such as Henry Bourchier, the Earl of Essex, and Lords Audley, Beaumont, Bonville, Dacre, Dinham, Egremont, Ferrers, Grey, Hungerford, Powys, Rivers, Roos, and Scales - all active participants in the wars - were forced to the sidelines. Consider those lesser peers to be part and parcel of the blocks representing the greater magnates on the battlefield.

We also decided to leave out those nobles who might theoretically have been capable of fielding larger armies but for whatever reason kept to the (military) sideline. Otherwise, given the nature of the game, they would have been in the thick of things more often than not - something that we were uncomfortable with for historical reasons. That's why you will not find the Earls of Arundel, Westmorland, or Worcester in the game.

Noble power often waxed and waned, which presented a final set of problems. To wit, what to do with Viscount Lovell, the Earl of Lincoln, and the powerful Woodville affinity, which revolved around the Queen herself, her son, the Marquis of Dorset, and her father, the Earl of Rivers?

We concluded that those blocks would be more trouble than they were worth. We were tempted to include John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, because he was indeed a member of the high peerage, a nephew of King Edward IV, Richard III's likely heir, and a militarily significant magnate in his own right. But Lincoln only came of age during what would be the last couple of turns. That and the fact that there is no indication that he brought significant military assets to the Yorkist army at Bosworth suggested that he was not that important to the game.

Viscount Lovell could probably field a significant army as well, but, like Lincoln, he would not appear until late in the game, and then only if the Duke of Gloucester were to gain the throne. It is hard to imagine Lovell coming into power in any way other than via Gloucester's usurpation, something that we didn't want to hard-wire into the game. Hence, including Lovell in a historically realistic manner would mean that Lovell would not come to glory - that is, enter the game - in a majority of the games. Hence, we decided to leave him out too. Consider King Richard III's block to made-up in part with Lovell's men.

The Woodvilles pose the trickiest problem of all. There is no denying the fact that, by the time of Edward IV's death, the relatively unpopular Woodville affinity had as much wealth and manpower at its command as did the Duke of Gloucester. Yet the family's gradual but steady accumulation of power proved unsustainable without the patronage of Edward IV and collapsed rapidly upon challenge.

The Woodvilles thus pose a challenging series of "what ifs" for the designer. If the Earl of March never ascends the throne, there will be no Woodville power. If the Earl of March ascends the throne and subsequently receives good cards from the Operations Deck, it might well suggest that Edward IV never makes Elizabeth Woodville his queen and thus never makes one of the most serious political miscalculations of this reign. If Edward IV were killed by a Lancastrian uprising, the Woodvilles would likely have lost much of the ground they had gained under the late King. If there were no coup upon Edward IV's natural death, it is unclear how much political and military support the crown would lose under a Woodville regency, but there would almost certainly have been severe repercussions.

Hence, only a series of special circumstances would put the Woodvilles front-and-center in this game, and allowing them to come front-and-center would probably require a mechanism of some kind to reflect the inevitable erosion of Yorkist support - perhaps best reflected, at least in part, by a deterioration of Woodville power.

Given that the Woodvilles never fielded significant military strength during the wars (at least as measured by the military force implied by an independent noble block), we decided that including the Woodvilles would pose historical and gameplay headaches best avoided. Accordingly, we posit that Woodville power - should it arise within the game's narrative - is a passing political event with no long-term military implications. When Edward IV is on the throne, consider some of his King block's power as coming from the Woodville affinity if you like. If Richard Plantagenet inherits the throne peacefully, you may assume that Edward IV never married Elizabeth Woodville; that he did and the two never had offspring; or that Richard is ruling England as a Regent for Edward V, not as a King in their own right. If either Clarence or Gloucester seizes the throne after Edward IV is deposed by a Lancastrian rising, you may assume that the Woodville affinity, if it was ever created in the first place, perished in the fighting and that the young Edward V did likewise. If either inherits the throne via a Usurpation card, assume that historical events are being played out.

The only thing we are ruling out from the game's narrative is something that in fact did not happen - the survival of the Woodville affinity as a significant, independent military force absent King Edward IV.

Deciding exactly who we wanted as heirs to the crown was no easy matter. Games like this are exercises in "what-if?" and there were plenty of individuals who, under different circumstances, might have ascended to the throne.

Plausible Lancastrian heirs at the beginning of the game (1460) include, in rough order of the strength of their blood lines:

- The 7 year-old son of King Henry VI, Edward of Lancaster, the Prince of Wales;

- Margaret Beaufort, the grand-daughter of John Beaufort, half-brother of King Henry IV. Margaret's problem was that King Henry IV issued an edict in 1407 barring John Beaufort and his line from royal succession. Margaret's first husband was Edmund Tudor, the Earl of Richmond. After Richmond's death in 1456, she married Henry Stafford (son of Duke Humphrey Stafford of Buckingham and father of the similarly named Henry Stafford, who subsequently became Duke of Buckingham in 1460) and then Thomas Stanley in 1472, otherwise known as Lord Stanley;

- The 3 year-old Henry Tudor, Margaret's son from her first marriage and subsequently Earl of Richmond and King Henry VII.

- Edmund Beaufort, Henry Beaufort's younger brother and the 4 th Duke of Somerset after Henry's death in 1464; and

- Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, a distant cousin of King Henry VI who was quite aggressive about asserting his hereditary claim to the throne.

Our first problem here is simple: What to do about King Henry VI? He led the Lancastrian army at Northampton in July, 1460 (although to what degree he truly "led" that army is unclear), but that was almost certainly his last nominal field command. After his capture at Northampton, he served as the titular head of the Yorkist government until his subsequent recapture by Lancastrian forces at the 2 nd Battle of St. Albans seven months later. When Edward IV declared himself king, however, Henry went into exile in Scotland, leaving command of his armies to his wife or other prominent loyalists. By late 1463, he was wondering the northern English countryside, often alone, while his wife and son plotted in France against the Yorkist government. After King Henry was captured in July, 1465, he was confined to the Tower of London, where he stayed until Warwick's rebellion put him back on the throne in October, 1470. There Henry sat - once again, a political pawn shuffled about the board by others - until he was captured by Edward IV when he entered London unopposed in April, 1471. Two days later, he was forced to accompany the Yorkist army to Barnet, and after Queen Margaret's defeat at Tewkesbury a month later, he was executed in the Tower.

In short, Henry VI was a unique figure in the war - little more than "a political vegetable" in the words of historian Charles Ross. Accordingly, there were several options available to us. First, we could craft a host of special rules regarding Henry and divorce his person from the military forces operating under his nominal command. Second, we could ignore him altogether and allow Margaret of Anjou - the true leader of the Lancastrian cause until her exile after Tewkesbury - to represent Henry's cause in the game. Third, we could give Henry VI a block but stipulate that the Henry VI block represents the core of Henry's partisans; sometimes Henry himself, but usually Margaret of Anjou or, after 1471, perhaps Edward of Lancaster.

We quickly ruled-out the first option because it would add a tremendous amount of headache without providing a corresponding enhancement to the gaming experience. While it is certainly true that control of Henry's person provided advantages - and that, in the early years at least, it was difficult to rule without Henry's symbolic occupation of the throne - that period did not last long (in game terms, maybe a Campaign Turn or two) and was a political sideshow regardless. We playtested for quite a while with the second option, but it never seemed quite right to have Margaret listed as the leading Lancastrian "heir" given that she could never hold the throne in her own right.

Hence, the lesser of evils was to provide Henry VI with his own block but assume that the block represents not necessarily Henry VI per se but his core partisans under Margaret's command. Only when this block is in control of London will Henry truly reign as King, and when this block is out of commission, Henry's political (if not personal) fate is sealed - as is that of the young Prince of Wales, who we assume parishes with the block (as he did historically).

Our second problem involves the Beauforts. Henry IV's edict blocking Beaufort succession seemed to have political strength throughout most of the conflict. There is no evidence that Margaret or her two cousins were seriously thought to be candidates for the throne and no evidence that the Beauforts offered themselves up as such. But the deaths of the King Henry VI and the Prince of Wales in 1471, Exeter in 1475, and Buckingham in 1483 left Lancastrians and disaffected Yorkists with only one remaining alternative to Richard III - Henry Tudor, the last male member of the Beaufort line. Accordingly, the edict of 1407 was conveniently ignored by Richard's opponents who were, by that time, desperate and legion.

In Wars of the Roses , we assume that history again plays out accordingly. The edict of 1407 will hold until Henry VI and Henry Holland are dead. We then open up the Beaufort line to the throne, but we assume that the male line (the Dukes of Somerset) will be deferred to before we repair back to Margaret's claim and the corresponding claim of her son, Henry Tudor. Somerset's ability to die and come back from the grave, so to speak, reflects our assumption that elimination the first time around kills Henry Beaufort and, the second time around, Edmund Beaufort.

Of course, this is all speculation. While the male line to inheritance often had more political weight in English politics than a rival female line, that wasn't always the case. We suspect, however, that the pressure of the war would have given even greater weight to the claims of - and the case for - the militarily powerful and politically adroit male Dukes of Somerset. Unfortunately, both Henry and Edmund Beaufort were dead and buried before Henry Holland left the scene in 1475, so we'll never know how it might have played out. In any event, this interpretation of events makes for a better game, so we have two decent reasons to stick with it.

- Richard of York, Duke of York and great grandson of Edward III through his father's side of the family;

- Edward Plantagenet, the 18 year-old Earl of March and eldest son of Richard of York;

- Edmund Plantagenet, the 17 year-old Earl of Rutland second son of Richard of York;

- The 11 year-old George Plantagenet, York's third son and subsequently named Duke of Clarence in 1461; and

- The 8 year-old Richard Plantagenet, York's fourth son and subsequently named Duke of Gloucester in 1461.

Our main problem here is Rutland. The young Edmund Plantagenet died with his father at Wakefield, but had he not, he would undoubtedly have been an active player in the Yorkist drama. We have no idea how many men he might have been able to independently marshal from his estates at the outset of this game (1460), but whatever their number (and it was not likely very large), they were probably men answerable to his father, not to him.

While the same could probably be said of March's retinue, allowing March to mobilize men allows the Duke of York to field about the right number of men in relation to other English magnates. Putting a Rutland block into the game, however, would allow the Duke to field an army from his estates that was probably outside of his reach.

Hence, the problem: Three capable Yorkist blocks at the outset of the game is probably one military block too many in relation to York's actual strength. We could, of course, treat Rutland the way we treat Clarence and Gloucester - that is, Rutland must be bestowed lands by a Yorkist King before he can enter the game - but how then do we account for Rutland's death at Wakefield, which would occur before his block had a chance to enter the game? The most historically defensible rule would stipulate that if the leading Yorkist heir dies in battle, roll one die for each of the Yorkist heirs yet to receive bestowed lands (representing the fact that landless brothers generally accompanied their politically powerful kinsmen), and on some roll, that heir dies and never gets to enter the game. But how would the Yorkist player like it if, early in the game, the Duke of York were to go down in battle and all three young heirs were to fall with him? It would be Earl of March and then "game-over" - not a very happy prospect. We could of course apply the rule only to Rutland in relation to the Duke of York, but that seems a little gamey. Why should Rutland face an early death but not Clarence or Gloucester, who might easily have found themselves in similar situations?

The easiest answer is to hardwire history. If the Duke of York dies at some point, we assume that the Duke's eldest son lacking significant estates of his own - the Earl of Rutland - will be by his side and will likewise die. On the other hand, if the Duke of York never dies, the issue will remain moot. It's not the best answer in that it forecloses an interesting "what-if" regarding Rutland's ascent to the throne and denies King Richard of York the opportunity to bestow three Yorkist heirs with lands in addition to the Plantagenet estates that would presumably be held by March (something that would probably have triggered a political backlash - another argument against going this route), but it's the cleanest answer from the game's perspective.

Five other historical problems associated with the Plantagenets invited specialized treatment in the rules.

First, the Duke of Clarence was a constant schemer for the throne. He was a co-conspirator with Warwick during his rebellion of 1470, reconciled with Edward IV a year later once it became clear that it would be Henry, not he, who would sit on the throne, and then caused constant trouble for the King until his execution for treason in 1478 (Clarence's son, Edward Plantagenet - Earl of Warwick - was also subsequently barred from succession by his father's attainder for treason). Rather than provide rules or special cards for such internecine feuds, we allowed Clarence to defect with Treachery cards and hard-wired his execution at a certain point if a Yorkist King other than himself sits on the throne at a certain point in the game. We felt that the Usurpation card was an adequate "what-if" mechanism to allow heirs other than Clarence and Gloucester to "go villain."

Second, what do we do with heirs who might die of natural causes? Although this is only an historical issue for Edward IV (who died on the throne in 1483), any heir who sits on the throne for an extended period of time risked the same fate. While we could have required a die roll at the beginning of the Campaign Turn to determine whether the monarch lives or dies (say, a 1 = death of natural causes), we would ideally want some mechanism to track whether the King in question has reached an age that made such a possibility likely. That would be administratively messy and also invite the question of whether aging heirs not on the throne should be subject to the same die roll as well. Accordingly, we dodged this complicated and annoying issue by hard-wiring Edward's death at a certain point if he is indeed the King. It's not wholly satisfactory from an historical perspective (Duke Richard of York and Henry VI, for instance, were probably even more likely to die of natural causes than Edward IV), but a game where heirs could die through no fault of the player - and thus, cost him the game - argued against such a mechanism.

Third, we had to decide what to do about new lines of succession that might open-up as a consequence of one heir or another gaining the throne. In 1477, for instance, the Yorkist line of succession looked a lot different than it did in 1460. Those with the strongest claims were Edward IV to die at Christmas that year included:

- The seven year-old Edward Plantagenet, Edward IV's eldest son and later Edward V;

- The four year-old Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and Edward IV's second son;

- The two year-old Edward Plantagenet, Clarence's son and inheritor of the Earldom of Warwick through his mother, Isabel Neville (Warwick's daughter);

- Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, Edward's youngest brother and later King Richard III;

- The four year-old Edward Plantagenet, Gloucester's son and later Prince of Wales; and

- The 13 year-old John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln and nephew of Edward IV through his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet (Edward's sister).

The problem posed by Edward IV's reign is not unique to the historical narrative. Any King that sits on the throne for a couple of this game's Campaign Turns would likely start sprouting an entirely new line of succession in directions we can't even begin to imagine.

Entertaining the emergence of new lines of succession, however, poses serious problems. First, there's no way to accommodate such eventualities without burdening the game with extremely clumsy rules that would, by-force, require rather vanilla treatment of these potential new heirs to come. We might, for instance, require a King on the throne for two Campaign Turns to roll a die (perhaps divided by two, rounded down) to ascertain just how many of these young royals will come along. That would add six new blocks to the game (three for each side) and require us to track their arrival somehow on the Campaign Turn Track. We would also probably require sons number two and three to receive bestowed lands before entering the game and make some arbitrary decisions about what kind of military strength to bestow on these hypothetical claimants (see below). Question - how would you like to win a game with King on the throne named "Son #2" or, perhaps, some a-historical marker-name like "Bob"? (OK, we could probably come up with something better than "Bob," but you get the point).

Equally distressing is the fact that this would introduce a significantly important random element to the game that threatens to dictate the winner by die roll. If a player manages to hold the throne for a couple of Campaign Turns and rolls a 6, for instance, he's probably at least doubled the number of heirs arrayed against his opponent. Because the name of the game is "kill the heirs," this makes it awfully difficult for the Insurgent to win once these kids arrive in the game - through little fault of his own. One could always argue, "Well, that's what you get if you let the bad guys hold the throne for too long," but why stop at only allowing Kings to make this roll? Aren't claimants-in-waiting equally liable to spawn offspring? Why deny them the right to breed new dynastic champions if we're going to entertain such "what-ifs?"

We suspect players would quickly grow sour over such "heir pollution." If you are one of those players who would not - and who wants to dial-up the simulation aspect of the game - then by all means, feel free to experiment with those sorts of rules. But we guess that, for most players, plugging unforeseen new heirs into the game would prove historically clunky, administratively burdensome, somewhat unbalancing, and contribute little to the game's fun in return.

Hence, we dispense with the whole thing. If you can't bear the violence to history, you may assume that - unless a Usurpation card has been successfully played - claimants that come along late in the game after one of your Kings have been on the throne for a while are arriving on the scene as Regents to some young heir. Or you may assume that, in your alternative historical narrative, no further male claimants emerged from marriage.

If that's not enough, a fourth quandary surrounding heirs arises; what about independent claimants to the throne? Richard of York, for instance, was not the only great-grandson of Edward III's with royal blood. Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, had a similar (albeit weaker) claim through his mother's side of the family, a claim that he passed on to his grandson, Henry Stafford, who inherited the Dukedom upon his grandfather's death in 1460. Even Warwick had distant claims available to him had circumstances allowed their exercise.

While some historians suspect that Henry Stafford supported (or perhaps even engineered) Richard's coup in 1483 as a means of opening up his own path to the throne, there is reason to believe that Buckingham's subsequent rebellion against King Richard III was launched in concert with Lancastrian exiles as part of a larger campaign to make Henry Tudor king. If so, it's hard to square this Tudor alliance with the proposition that Buckingham had a politically plausible independent path to royal power. Accordingly, since we have no real evidence that Buckingham was interested in exercising his own claims - and given that his presence as an heir would represent a wild card to the game that would require some special rules and gameplay treatment - we decided to leave him out of the royal picture.

Fifth and finally, there's the issue of pretenders to the throne. The most famous examples were Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, both of whom masqueraded as the sons of Edward IV who disappeared into the Tower of London during Richard III's brief reign. The resulting Yorkist uprisings in 1487 (which ended on the battlefield of Stoke) and 1497 (which ended in ignominy in Cornwall) were, however, serious affairs which could conceivably have gone the other way. Moreover, there were several legitimate (albeit distant) Yorkist heirs who posed a threat to Henry VII's reign, most notably Edmund de la Pole (Lincoln's younger brother and inheritor of the Earldom of Suffolk), Richard and William de la Pole (Edmund's younger brothers), Henry Courtenay (son of Edward IV's daughter Katherine and subsequently the Marquis of Exeter), Margaret Pole (Warwick's sister, the Countess of Salisbury), and Henry Pole (Margaret's son and subsequently Lord Montagu). Most of the above either perished in the Tower or were murdered by Tudor executioners. Had they survived, who knows?

Accordingly, it would not be difficult to incorporate a longer list of heirs, but it would correspondingly mean a much longer game. It wasn't until 1541, for instance, that the last of the most dangerous Yorkist claimants was finally dead. We simply had to draw the line somewhere, and four heirs a piece gave us the 3-4 hour gaming window we were looking for.

Many of the nobles represented in the game had significant estates all across England. Richard of York, for instance, held 20 significant revenue producing lands across more than 20 shires.

One would think that a magnate could generally rely on his estates for men and material when needed, but that simply wasn’t the case. Neither Richard, Duke of York, nor his son Edward Plantagenet proved capable of mobilizing a significant number of men at arms from their northern holdings, even when they found themselves in desperate straits in that very countryside. Likewise, both Buckingham and Warwick held large estates in Wales and the Marcher lands to the east, but neither proved capable of drawing troops from those regions during their military campaigns. Even the king himself found that a lack of energetic local partisans and longtime custodial relationships prevented him from mobilizing military support for the throne from certain regions of the country.

The historical record suggests that unless a magnate was directly and intimately engaged in the governance of his lands over an extended period of time, it was unlikely that those estates would produce fighting men for him upon command. That shouldn’t surprise; few men relished dying on the battlefield for some greater lord’s glory or paying the heavy expenses associated with even brief military campaigns. Letters unearthed by modern historians repeatedly find distant feudal subjects or civil authorities begging-off desperate entreaties for manpower, and the magnates on the receiving end of those letters by-and-large exhibited surprising grace and equanimity in the face of such refusals. Clearly, both parties understood the practical limitations of military service during the wars.

The conclusion we came to is that nobles had only so much time, energy, and attention to go around, and this put a natural constraint on the power that the great magnates could bring to bear against poorer rivals in war.
In this game, home areas are tied to the ability to recruit troops for battle. That is, they have nothing to do with whether an area produced income for this or that magnate. Accordingly, a noble’s home area was selected based on the best (albeit in all cases, spotty) information available regarding where that magnate’s fighting men actually came from during the wars.

Some allowances were made, however, for complicating political factors. For instance, we gave Warwick a home area in Kent even though he held no significant estates there. His brother, however - William Neville, Lord Fauconberg - did have estates there, as did his cousin, Thomas Neville (the colorfully named "Bastard of Fauconberg"). Moreover, Warwick’s hold on the Captaincy of Calais gave him a great deal of support from the Kentish commons (which was unencumbered by subservience to great lords), so we decided to give Warwick a second home area there.

Players may wonder about the fact that a noble has a near-zero interest in defending his home area(s) in the course of the game. That is, if the Lancastrian player decides to punish, say, Norfolk for his involvement with the Yorkist cause, the good Duke will shrug his shoulders and carry on regardless: A Lancastrian army investing East Anglia will have no impact on Norfolk’s allegiances or Norfolk’s fighting power (assuming, of course, that he is a declared Yorkist and about his business somewhere else on the board).

This is quite unlike Hammer of the Scots, a game in which nobles will switch sides if they find enemy blocks in their area when they return home for the winter. The reason for the difference between the two games boils down to this: the Wars of the Roses were essentially a struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York for the "hearts and minds" of the landed gentry, and one could not win those hearts and minds by pillaging estates or slaughtering innocents. While the leading figures in this drama often found themselves on the receiving end of an executioner’s axe, pardons were liberally granted to their feudal vassals in the hope that such charity would breed gratitude, reconciliation, and support. Hence, political considerations mitigated against the scorched-earth tactics that were so much a part of the Scottish Wars of Independence and the 100 Years War in France. Once you take away the threat that estates will be pillaged, you take away a magnate’s need to keep the enemy away from his estates when he’s on campaign.

Pillaging was also discouraged by the lust for money and power. Nobles that found themselves on the losing side of a campaign would often find that their estates were confiscated by the King; estates that were in turn distributed to allies and supporters of the crown. The prospect that an enemy’s lands today might well be your lands tomorrow tempered the vengeance delivered upon the wealthy estates.

The one instance in which an army engaged in widespread pillaging to punish political opposition - the Lancastrian march south towards London after the battle of Wakefield - is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. The bloody Lancastrian campaign through the Yorkist countryside failed to "turn" any Yorkist lords at all. On the contrary, the panic triggered by the Lancastrian application of fire and sword rallied so many men to the defense of London that it prevented Queen Margaret of Anjou from taking the city after her decisive victory over Warwick’s army at the 2nd Battle of St. Albans. Margaret’s subsequent retreat to Coventry allowed the young Earl of March - fresh off his stunning victory over Pembroke and the Welsh Lancastrians at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross - to enter London unopposed and proclaim himself King Edward IV. Hence, in a very real sense, the attempt to punish Yorkist lords for their defense of the white rose probably ended the best chance the Lancastrians had to win the civil war before Richard’s usurpation in 1483.

Only very circumstantial and fragmentary evidence exists to inform our estimates about the size of the armies engaged in the wars. Although chroniclers of the period often report hundreds of thousands of men in the field during these struggles, that’s extremely unlikely. The few detailed inventories of men that we can find in the records suggest that even the largest armies probably never exceeded about 25,000 men.

The largest number of quality fighting men brought into the field by any magnate – including the king from his own estates – probably never exceeded about 4,000 in number. The highest number we found from chroniclers of the period is about 3,000, although some evidence exists to suggest that the Nevilles could raise about 10,000 men if both Salisbury and Warwick were fully mobilized.

One might think that the wealthiest magnates could field much larger armies than their relatively poorer counterparts, but there is little evidence that wealth scaled linearly with military power. We find no historical evidence to suggest, for instance, that the Dukes of Buckingham put all that much more military power into the field than did the Dukes of Somerset despite the fact that the former were far wealthier than the latter.

Larger levies than those reported by the best chroniclers were theoretically possible. After all, about 600,000 men of fighting age lived in England during the 15th century, and Northumberland alone was believed capable of marshalling over 11,000 men to defend northern England against the Scots when necessary. Magnates, however, needed both time and a compelling cause to bring their subjects into the field. Both were lacking during the wars depicted in this game. Even highly motivated magnates found it difficult to persuade or compel their subjects to put their lives on the line in pursuit of quarrels that generally didn’t concern them. Money, of course, could buy troops, but the pool of available mercenaries was limited. Armies were primarily made up of household men, contracted retainers, commissions of array (levies called-up by the king), and the Commons. Only the former two sources of manpower were routinely paid for their services, and most of them served because of long-standing relationships to their feudal lords.

As noted earlier, when we assembled the block manifest for this game, we wanted no more than one block per noble. That suggested an upper-bound strength of about 4,000 men per block. From there, we posited that each strength point equals roughly 500 – 1,500 men at arms, the exact number varying depending upon our suspicions about troop quality. The upshot is that a noble did not get into the game unless we suspected that he could – and, at some point, did – bring at least 1,000 men into the field given our disinclination to include 1-strength blocks in the mix.

Some outright guesses about troop strength had to be made, however, given how little is known about the orders of battle, so it’s probably best to look at the strength points as matters of relative power. That is, a 4-strength block represents a lot of quality fighting men; a 3-strength block represents a good-sized contingent of same; a 2-strength block represents a modest amount of quality fighting men, while a 1-strength block represents a small force. Those values can be scaled to represent whatever one might think about the size of the armies in play.

Given that we make no distinctions with regard to troop composition – that is, we assume a relatively uniform ratio of archers-to-knights-to-foot – what, you may ask, justifies the rule allowing some blocks to fire before others via the A-B-C mechanism? Those ratings represent our subjective judgments about the tactical ability of the nobles in command of those levies. Our default rating was a C. If a noble had a good military reputation – or if we had reason to believe that he performed well on the battlefield – we raised the rating to a B. The very best battlefield commanders earned an A rating.
“Tactics?” you may ask – “What tactics!?” A mountain of well-regarded historical works – including such mainstays as Charles Oman’s A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, Hans Delbruck’s Medieval Warfare, and Philippe Contamine’s War in the Middle Ages – scoff at the very idea of order on the medieval battlefield. A passage from Richard Preston, Alex Roland and Sydney Wise’s popular textbook Men in Arms is typical of this school of thought:

A feudal army in the field was an indescribably undisciplined force. Many tenants-in-chief would take orders only from their immediate overlord, the king; therefore an effective chain of command was impossible. There was a superabundance of courage, which tended to aggravate rather than to relieve the normal disorder. Long centuries of control of the art of war by one class, the exaggerated concentration upon cavalry warfare alone, and the absence of any provision for group training except in a restricted fashion in the reformed tournament meant that the study and practice of organized tactics all but vanished … once the battle was joined, all semblance of order disappeared, and the struggle became nothing more than a confused melee of hundreds of individual encounters.

Accordingly, we will grant the reader that, if he or she is inclined to argue against the proposition that nobles should be rated for their tactical abilities on the battlefield, they will have an abundance of material to cite in the course of making that argument.
We are of the opinion, however, that Oman et al are fundamentally wrong about the nature of the medieval battlefield. We are more persuaded J.F. Verbruggen’s The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages: From the Eighth Century to 1340, which argues that medieval battles were far from the mindless slugging matches of popular imagination. Commanders seemed to fully appreciate the need for combined-arms tactics. Reports frequently tell of flanking maneuvers and a rather sophisticated use of terrain. Reconnaissance, holding actions, ambushes, feigned retreats, and other modern stratagems appear often in the contemporaneous narratives passed down to modern historians. For an overview of those tactics in the battles depicted in this game, you can do no better than Anthony Goodman’s The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452-97 or Philip Haigh’s The Military Campaigns of the Wars of the Roses.

Some English commanders during the 15th Century clearly excelled at the art of war and made a significant difference on the battlefield. Edward IV, for instance, was perhaps the greatest – yet underappreciated – military commander ever produced by the English people. His tactical judgment was nearly flawless and, as a consequence, never once did Edward lose a battle. His campaigns demonstrated a remarkably modern appreciation for speed, initiative, concentration of force, and logistical planning. There is ample reason for us to make distinctions between Edward IV and, say, the Earl of Wiltshire beyond the number of men the two could put in the field.
Of course, another distinction we make is associated with relative firepower; that is, whether a block hits on a die roll of 2 or 3. Firepower distinctions are based less on our judgment about the tactical abilities of a commander than on our subjective judgment about the quality of the troops and the personal fighting prowess of the noble in question – a consideration that had a major impact on the troop morale and, thus, overall military capability.

It may seem odd to think that the fighting ability of one man – the noble leading his men in battle – could have such an impact on an army’s fighting ability, but that was in fact the case. Medieval warfare was an intensely personal affair. In order to keep their men steady, nobles often engaged in the thick of the fighting, but the banners they waived to rally their men were magnets for the enemy. Hence, the incredibly high mortality rate among the high peerage during the wars.

Most important for our purposes, however, is the fact that once a noble fell in battle, the men under his command would typically give up the ghost then-and-there (a commentary, by the way, on how reluctant most men in the field were to fight in these wars absent direct coercion applied by their feudal lords). A magnate who happened to be good with a sword thus had a great advantage over one who was not for the simple reason that if “Earl Bad-Sword” were to go down, his entire army (or at least those troops under his command in his wing in the battle) tended to stop fighting and seek terms. Given the need for most nobles to be in the thick of the fight, a lack of marshal prowess was thus a crippling problem for his forces in battle.

These two distinctions – a noble’s tactical ability and a noble’s fighting ability – leavened with a judgment about the martial fiber of the troops in the field, allow us to make some fine-grained decisions about the military capabilities of the blocks. Gloucester, for instance, appears to have been a reasonably decent tactician and was well regarded as such by his contemporaries, but his dubious performance in Scotland in 1482 and at Bosworth thereafter kept him from achieving an “A” rating. In fact, a “C” rating would be historically defensible (albeit a little harsh), but we couldn’t bear to bestow the kiss of military mediocrity on the swashbuckling Richard III. His martial prowess, however, earns him a no-apologies firepower rating of “3.”

We expect that some will quibble over certain ratings. For instance, Henry Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, is rated quite highly in this game based on contemporaneous reports concerning his military prowess and operational judgment. Yet his record in important battles was mixed; two wins (Wakefield and 2nd St. Albans) and three losses (Towton, Hedgeley Moor, and Hexham). While we think those losses had less to do with Somerset’s abilities than factors outside of his control, there is room to argue for a less impressive rating than the one granted here.

Likewise, depending upon who you believe, Warwick was either a visionary genius or a bumbling duffer. One can’t lightly dismiss the fact that Edward IV had a remarkably low opinion of Warwick’s military abilities. Yet a survey of the historical record suggests that Warwick had rather good strategic and tactical sense that was often overshadowed by extraordinarily bad luck. What can’t be denied is that the tremendous loyalty Warwick inspired in his men was a great asset on the battlefield, and it was an asset that Warwick exploited to the fullest.

Henry VI’s block, we should note here, is a special case. That block is rated based on our judgment about the military capabilities of his foremost commanders – those who actually planned and fought those campaigns on his behalf.

A more serious set of criticisms, however, might stem from the fact that the blocks often represent a rotating cast of characters, all of whom have different capabilities and thus (potentially) different military ratings. For instance, the Buckingham block is pressed into double duty in that it represents both the crusty veteran Humphrey Stafford, the level-headed and capable commander of King Henry VI’s army, and the callow young Henry Stafford, Humphrey’s grandson and Richard’s co-conspirator in 1483. While we don’t know for certain that Humphrey was a better battlefield commander than Henry since the latter never really had a chance to put his abilities to the test, it’s quite possible that a single rating will do someone an injustice.

Given that providing players with multiple blocks to represent the many heirs who might step-forward to inherit aristocratic titles would prove an administrative nightmare, we had to make some tough choices regarding some of these blocks. When confronted with this problem, we’ve rated the block based on the individual who had the most impact on the war. Hence, we felt that Humphrey Stafford played a bigger role on the English stage than Henry Stafford, so we rated the block based on the former. Likewise, we felt that Henry Beaufort, the 3rd Duke of Somerset, played a more important role than his less capable younger brother, Edmund, who assumed the Dukedom after his brother’s execution in 1464, so the Somerset block represents our take on Henry, not Edmund. Whatever violence one might suspect we have done to the historical record in this regard is at least counterbalanced by the fact that we know remarkably little about the truth of such matters. There is no clear “right and wrong” regarding these ratings.