Holy Roman Empire

As I dare say I have moaned about before, The Wagamer game Holy Roman Empire, is, well, blooming complicated. However, your correspondent was not daunted. Well, he was daunted for the roughly thirty or so years the game has been sitting quietly on a shelf doing nothing, but, flushed with the success of the Machiavelli campaign, I decided to give it a go.

The game, as someone said, is beautiful.

Here it is in most of its glory. I say most because a few of the counters and one or two state cards seem to have disappeared over the decades, and they have also got muddled with the counters from the Strategy and Tactics game (which are a bit more cartoony). Actually, all the leader counters seem to have vanished. I suspect a conspiracy. But that is mid-Seventeenth Century Europe, I am afraid.

Anyway, the art on the state cards is very good, and the map is quite attractive. On the near side, left to right we have Spain and Bavaria, then, going counter-clockwise, the Austrian Hapsburgs, Sweden, the Platinate, and finally France. The other state cards, piled on the near left, are uncontrolled. Actually, there are four levels of state: controlled, influenced, conquered, and unaligned. I warned you it was complicated.

So, having set the game up I decided to try something. I simplified. Each counter representing military forces would be an army, like in Machiavelli, and each fleet would be, well, a fleet. Each army would be a 12-base army on the wargame table, and each support would be the same declining scale of 50%, 25%, and so on, of an army. Simple.

Now for the more complicated bits. The diplomacy phase of the game is represented by bidding on state cards. While there are some exceptions for hereditary states like France, you seem to be able to bid on any state. I handled this by drawing playing cards, whereupon the first heart drawn made the first bid. I only did one round of bidding (the game suggests three) as it was getting confusing. I also ignored the religious modifiers for the bidding process, as it was firstly, getting very confusing, and secondly, I am not sure really that the TYW was a religious war, but rather a dynastic war with religious overtones.

There are a few extra victory conditions for the players. The French have to try to control bordering provinces and prevent the Spanish from keeping the ‘Spanish Road’ open, a line of controlled provinces from Milan to the Spanish Netherlands. This sets up a nice conflict. The Swedes have to control Poland before they can intervene in Germany. Poland is an influenced card for the Austrians, so the latter have to judge whether to intervene or not.

A close-up shot of the map shows, additionally, the Elector states: Cologne, Mainz, Trier, Lower Palatine, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg. The control of these gives the controlling player a say in who becomes the Holy Roman Emperor. As the first picture shows the Emperor gets an extra stack of states and a great deal more problems. Various states get victory points for being the Emperor, or for the Emperor being of their religious persuasion.

I abandoned the idea of having the military units on the board as too complicated and confusing, not to mention giving seriously unbalanced forces. Map movement in the game is based on each unit having three movement points to cross unfriendly borders, mountains, rivers, or forest provinces. I sort of kept to that, although the danger is that Spanish units could, for example, zip from Milan to Brussels in a single turn. But then each game turn seems to be around 2 years in real time, so I suppose it is not unrealistic.

In the second game turn, things started to hot up a little. The Swedes invaded Poland and were met (automatically) by a Polish army. By this time the Swedes had influenced Brandenburg, so they got the support of the Brandenburg army. So, one battle was a Swedish army, assisted by half a Brandenburg army, against a Polish army.

In central Germany, a complicated situation was already arising, with Palatine armies converging on the western pass into Bohemia (I dare say it is called something; I am simply showing my ignorance of European geography). As they had failed to prevent the Austrians from entering Eastern Bohemia they needed to support their army in the western half. The Bavarians swung an army west in an attempt to outflank them and block the pass, and themselves support the Austrians into western Bohemia,

The Palatine counter to this was to overrun some states in central Germany (OK, I think they bought some, I mean, gained influence) and then support an army to attack the advancing Bavarians in Bamburg. Thus they had one and a half armies against one, and this was to be battle two.

In western Europe, the French are not allowed out of France for the first two moves, presumably because of the internal problems in France at the time (the Huguenots, I think). But they can still bid on states, and so they took influence over Lorraine, while the Spanish made a bit at building the Spanish Road.

This lot, including setting up, took me a long morning. All right, it did include another coffee and scone break, but my poor brain cell was stretching itself out of shape by this time. Even with six players, it would be complicated, and I am not even playing the full rules. I suspect that this is part and parcel of, firstly the complexity of the Thirty Years War, and secondly the complexity of the game in trying to model it. There are plenty of aspects for consideration as each player, let alone the lesser powers (who were, really, greater than represented in the game. Giving, for example, control of the Dutch to the Palatine is a little like putting the cart before the horse, especially after White Mountain). Still, I have managed to wangle my way through to a couple of wargames, which was the point, after all.