Kris Hall: Jerry Taylor and the Wars of the Roses

After years of not playing war games, I finally returned to the genre last year.  And what game did I pick to play?  Hammer of the Scots, Jerry Taylor’s quick-playing, low-complexity block game that many see as a modern war game classic. 

When I learned that Jerry Taylor was designing Wars of the Roses for Columbia Games, I was intrigued.  This seemed to be a perfect match between subject matter and game designer.  Jerry recently agreed to do an e-mail interview for me.  Here’s what he had to say:

Kris: We could say that Wars of the Roses is a descendant game of Hammer of the Scots.  What are the most important changes or improvements that have been made to the HotS system to make it appropriate for the Wars of the Roses subject matter?

JT: There are a number of differences between HotS and WotR, but six things stand out.

• First, I have added “hole” cards to the game.  Each player starts the year with three cards in the hole in addition to the standard five cards in his hand.  Hole cards can be played at almost any time.  For instance, during your turn, you can supplement the card you bid with by playing cards out of your hole to give you more action points to work or advantageous events.  You might also play some event cards out of the hole during your opponent’s turn to screw him over somehow.  And you can even play event cards out of the hole during battle to cause an enemy noble to defect right on the battlefield—and to turn on his old allies immediately.

  Moreover, you can do things during the year to earn additional card draws.  You can’t increase the number of cards you have in your hand in this manner, but you can add to the number of cards in the hole (three max) or replace some of your weaker cards with better cards.  This way, we maintain the ability of regulating time with five card plays a year.

  This innovation adds a lot to the game.  It allows me to reward players for doing politically important things during the year and allows for very dynamic play.  It also adds a tremendous amount of action and bluff to the game.  Finally, it provides for a system in which dramatic changes of fortune can occur, which happened frequently during these wars. 

• Second, I have added a more sophisticated regime for recruiting enemy nobles to your side.  In HotS, you flip enemy nobles by (i) beating them down in combat, (ii) occupying their home area at the end of the year, or (iii) using a “Herald” Event card.  In WotR, you use “Treachery” event cards, and there are four of them (for the time being) in the deck.

  It works roughly as follows: Each noble has a loyalty rating.  A loyalty rating of 1, 2, or 3 requires that many enemy Treachery cards to flip the noble.  Some nobles, moreover, are more loyal to one house or the other.  So for instance, the Earl of Oxford is more inclined to support the House of Lancaster, so his Lancaster block has a 2 loyalty rating.  Oxford’s Yorkist block, however, has a 1 loyalty rating, which means it’s easier for the Lancastrian player to flip Oxford than it is for the Yorkist player to do so.  Other nobles can’t be flipped at all.  They get a rose in their loyalty box (a white rose for die-hard Yorkists, a red rose for die-hard Lancastrians).  And some flip as the Earl of Warwick (the legendary “Kingmaker") flips.  Accordingly, their loyalty rating is ...Warwick’s heraldry. 

  Treachery cards can be played offensively or defensively.  So if I am the Yorkist player and I have two Treachery cards in the hole, I might try to flip Oxford in round 1 of a battle.  But if the Lancastrian player has a Treachery card in his hole, he can play it defensively right after I play my two cards and he’ll hold on to Oxford (who’s Lancastrian block, remember, has a 2 loyalty rating).  There’s also a “Kingmaker” card, which acts as the equivalent of three Treachery cards if you control Warwick or one Treachery card if you don’t.

  This system—when married with the Hole card innovation—adds a lot of uncertainty and tension to the game.  There was a lot of rather epic back-stabbing during the wars and this system reflects those events very well.

  Flipping nobles by occupying their estates, however, isn’t appropriate in this game. In HotS, it was appropriate because armies would lay waste to a noble’s estates to induce him to change allegiances as a matter of economic and political survival.  But that didn’t happen during the Wars of the Roses much because those wars were primarily undertaken to win the hearts and minds of the landed classes.  One doesn’t do that by killing lots of people and destroying estates.  So there was very little of this going on during the war—and on the few occasions it did happen, it did not have the desired effect.

• Third, combat occurs within class.  By that I mean when A blocks fire, they are inflicting casualties on enemy A blocks.  If no enemy A blocks are around, then the next highest rated blocks (probably B blocks) will take the hits.  Moreover, combat is simultaneous within class.

  This results in more battlefield uncertainty than in HotS.  In the latter game, you can rest assured that your less important blocks can soak up damage and protect your more important blocks.  But that’s hard to accomplish in this game, so whenever you go into battle, you run a big risk that the king or some important noble might well get waxed.  This is one of the big things that Avalon Hill’s Kingmaker got right—random noble death.  Well, we don’t go quite that far in WotR, but it’s pretty close.  Consequently, battles are very bloody and less predictable than what gamers might be used to.  Big armies will still probably beat smaller armies, but what do you gain if you win a battle but lose, say, Warwick and/or an heir or two in the process?  Or even the King himself?

• Fourth, exile is a key part of the game.  Players will find that campaigns are usually quite bloody and decisive.  Accordingly, it’s often better to flee with your heirs and key supporters to Europe (or perhaps Scotland if you control the Scottish King) rather than fight it out to the bitter end.  Coming out of exile to take on the King even with only a few blocks can well succeed if you’ve got a good hand.  During the wars, the King often found that if he didn’t dispatch a rival claimant rather quickly, the insurgent would quickly gain political support and overwhelm the incumbent monarch.  That happens in this game a lot because I reward the insurgent player for ending a turn in England with his insurgent heir (a 50% chance of a draw from the deck, but we might make the draw automatic—we’ll see).  Accordingly, it’s easy to build up momentum and turn a small band of insurgents into a pretty formidable army in very short time if things break your way.

  The catch, however, is that an heir can only come out of European exile once per game, so when you do land in England and challenge for the throne, it’s an all or nothing proposition.  That’s why you might want to pass a few years and try to maximize your cards before you give it a shot.  When you pass, you see, you have the option of drawing a card from the deck.  This allows me to give players an incentive to do what their historical counterparts sometimes did.  To wit, sit around in France for a while before charging back into England.  It also allows me to quickly dispatch years of down-time which did indeed happen over the 30 or so years of this conflict.  Of course, if you draw a strong hand right off the bat, you will probably want to charge out of exile immediately and jump the King before he gets to build up his hand likewise via draws.  The whole thing can get very tense because there’s so much at stake.

• Fifth, I’ve increased the size of the deck to 40 cards to provide some more event cards to the game and allow me to operate comfortably with 8-cards per side per year (and maybe more given the ability to draw during the year).  There were a lot of rich politics to this era and we need to reflect that with more robust event possibilities.  At the moment, there are 12 event cards and 28 action cards (mostly 1-3 cards, but there’s a 4 and 5 card in there as well).  Events can always be played for 2 action points, however, so the chance of being screwed by an event-heavy hand of only marginal utility vanishes.

• Sixth, each side has a number of heir cards, representing the order of succession for his house.  As heirs are killed, their cards are removed from the deck, which allows one to easily keep track of succession.  Each heir has a special ability—listed right there on the card—that applies when that heir is the leading heir of the house.  This allows me to add some nice historical flavor to the game and address issues that might otherwise require cumbersome rules.  It also personalizes these individuals, which provides for a richer gaming experience.

JT: There are two big reasons why siege warfare was not a factor during the wars.  First, there were very few major castles of military consequence in England during the 15th century.  During the middle ages, England was for the most part a rather peaceful peace, so nobles had no reason to spend heavily on military defenses.  The same goes for city expenditures for city walls.  Castles were primarily built with an eye toward comfort, luxury, and display.  This contrasts directly with practices on the continent, where warfare was far more common, such as in France as a consequence of the 100 Years’ War.  There were some militarily significant towers and fortifications in England, but they were not common or particularly large and, for game purposes, are “below the radar screen” so to speak.

London, of course, is the primary exception.  But it was not a given that an army could avail itself of London’s defenses.  That was primarily up to the civilian population, and their affections could prove fickle.  Hence, I include an event card giving a defender double defense in that city.

Second, English nobles could not generally afford to keep large groups of fighting men together for very long.  This made it nearly impossible to conduct sieges, which would require resources generally beyond the means of even the King.  In fact, the expense and difficulty associated with holding a large army together encouraged nobles to seek quick and decisive results from campaigns, which provided a further disincentive to hole up behind fortifications.

Kris: From your description of the rules and the development process, it seems that the most difficult thing about creating the game was distilling the incredibly complicated and dynamic political system of the period into a game that could mirror the shifting alliances with relatively few rules.  Is this correct?

JT: Actually, the Treachery cards were an innovation that occurred relatively early in development and have worked well from the get-go, so I’m not sure that the political issues have proven all that difficult for me to handle.  I thought it would be a tough thing to work into the game, but it hasn’t proven that difficult.

The biggest design challenges thus far have been associated with ensuring that the final product will play relatively closely to events that actually occurred.  For instance, will players ever have an incentive to stay in exile for long periods of time?  Will major swings in fortune prove common enough without detracting from the better player winning more often than not?  Will treachery occur at about the “right” rate?  And will the campaigns that evolve look a lot like those that evolved during the war?  I’m pretty happy with the game on those fronts at the moment, but there is still some room for improvement, which is why I’m still playtesting various ideas.

Kris: In Hammer of the Scots, both sides have areas that they consider home base.  The English always start from the south and the Scots are often strongest in the north.  Do the opposing factions in Wars of the Roses have their own home bases in England, or is the situation on the board too unpredictable for any area to favor one faction?

JT: It’s not quite as cut-and-dried as it is in HotS, but the Lancastrians definitely have a power base in the north and southwest.  The Yorkists have a smaller power base, but it’s nicely situated in the center of the board.  And there’s also some nice asymmetry elsewhere in the game.  The Lancastrians are stronger politically (blocks are typically more loyal to their cause than the Yorkist case) and have more widespread support, but the Yorkists have better military blocks and stronger heirs.  Playing the two sides definitely feels different.

Kris: In reading your description of the rules, I was impressed by how you used the simple mechanism of laying a piece on its side or standing it up to indicate clandestine or open support for a faction.  Am I correct in thinking that a player cannot improve the combat strength of a noble until he openly supports his faction?

JT: You are correct, but that’s not the key difference.  All blocks save for the King block “resets” to 1 strength point at the end of the year (and an optional rule allows Northumberland to reset at a 2, representing his role as Warden of the Eastern March).  After which, you have an option to have that block declare for your side.  If so, you stand him right up and it operates as per normal—that is, it can be built up with action points or moved with action points.

But there are rather compelling reasons to leave many of your blocks undeclared—that is, face down.  First, undeclared blocks can’t be attacked.  That not only saves them from getting jumped at the beginning of the year, it keeps the other guy from earning a quick card draw from an easy victory. (In this game, winning a battle with a King or leading heir earns you a bonus draw from the deck.) It also allows your political support to go into “hibernation” while your heir wiles away his years in France.  On the other hand, it costs 1 action point to “declare” an undeclared noble (a prerequisite for moving or building a block), and action points are scarce commodities.  Moreover, an undeclared block can’t declare during the year if an enemy blocks are occupying that area.  Accordingly, you run the risk of having rather nice blocks pinned down by the enemy and thus unavailable to you in the campaign.

Kris: Another aspect of the game that impressed me was the way that all the nobles have to go home during the winter.  It seems that the realities of medieval warfare have given you an easy solution to a difficult problem: how to keep a losing player in the game with a decent chance to win.  In Wars of the Roses both sides have to start fresh at the beginning of every year.  Comments?

JT: Yes, that’s a nice aspect of medieval warfare from the game’s perspective.  But it’s the randomness of the annual card draw that contributes the most towards allowing a player on the ropes to get back into the game.  A great hand = a great set of possibilities, and vice versa, and you can accomplish a lot in a year given the hole cards.  The trick is allowing this dynamic without setting up a game where the luck of the draw will dictate the winner.

Kris: I see that Wars of the Roses will have multiple scenarios.  How long will the shortest scenario take to play?  How long to play the campaign game?

JT: Unclear.  Right now, all my playtesting has been with the campaign game, which seems to take 2-4 hours to play.  Scenarios will allow games to play out in 1-3 hours depending upon the scenario.  A nice aspect of the game is that players can start in 1459 (the start of the campaign game) and agree to play only through year whatever.  If all the heirs aren’t dead by that year, he who controls the King at the end of the designated year wins.  This does no violence at all to the underlying game play and allows “slow” players to bite off only as much time as they wish to chew.

Kris: Do you think that Wars of the Roses will be published this year?

JT: Yes.  Earliest is probably September, but it will likely be out before Christmas.  It’s hard to say for sure because, well, I’ll only know when I’m done when I’m done.  Ninety percent of the game is fine.  It’s getting the final ten percent the way that I like it that’s taking up all the time. But that’s the way it usually goes and there’s no knowing right now when I’ll find the right mix of tweaks to put that final ten percent to bed.  And that’s before it goes to Columbia.  I don’t think it will take long to run through that gauntlet—all of the artwork save for the event and action cards is done already and there are certainly enough preorders to justify going forward.  But you never know—Tom Dalgliesh (CG’s president) may have some ideas for improvements and if they are major, then a whole new round of playtesting will go forward.  That’s probably the main threat to a pre-Christmas release.  But if it happens, you’ll certainly be getting an even better game because of it.  Tom is an excellent developer and always has good ideas for my games no matter how perfect I think they are when they are submitted.

Kris: Would you care to give us any hints of future projects?  Any other historical subjects that are of interest?

JT: I’m not sure what—if anything—I’ll do after WotR.  Game design is a hard and time-consuming business.  I’ve been doing it now pretty much non-stop since the mid-1990s (when I started work on HotS) and I might be ready for a breather, or even to hang it up.

If I do tackle another game, I have my eye set on a few of possibilities.  In no particular order of preference, I’d like to do a game on Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobin rebellion.  A series of operational games depicting campaigns during the 100 Years’ War (think CG’s “Napoleon”) would be interesting.  Games depicting Edward I’s conquest of Wales and Edward the Bruce’s attempt to win Ireland from Edward II would also be easy ports for this system.  Finally, I have half a mind to do a third-edition HotS to incorporate innovations in the system I’ve come up with since then and to remedy some of the historical problems with the game that have never stopped bugging me.  Still, you don’t want to mess with something that’s popular and inadvertently screw it up, so I’ll probably get talked out of that particular project.

But I might well move on to WWII game design—albeit in under-published areas.  I would like to do a South Pacific WWII game covering the invasion of Guadalcanal up through the encirclement of Rabaul, which means covering the allied offensive from the Solomons to New Guinea.  That project, by the way, was almost the project at present, but I decided at the last minute to switch gears and cover the Wars of the Roses before someone else did.  And I’ve always wanted to do a company level WWII game which would simplify but still reflect the system employed by Victory Games’ Panzer Command, which was an excellent, albeit rather complicated game.

Finally, a block game of Caesar’s campaign in Gaul has always tempted me. We’ll see.

Kris: Thanks for talking the time to respond.  I’ll be looking forward to Wars of the Roses.

You can read Jerry Taylor’s Wars of the Roses designer diaries at the Columbia Games website: Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3, and Issue 4, the most recent as of this column’s appearance.

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