Guest post: bringing research to the table

In today's guest post, Matthew Harris takes us behind the scenes to look at the origin of his upcoming article on Genoese forces in the Crusades. My name is Matthew Harris, and I recently completed my undergraduate dissertation at the University of Edinburg, on Genoese Crusading Warfare, from the First to the Third Crusades. I...

Preparing the castle display board

With Salute just over a week away, the castle team have been working on presentation. At a wargames convention, drawing the eyes of passing gamers is the first priority. This means spreading out the castle model to cover as much of our table as possible. Any game played on a small board runs the risk...

The other crusaders

One of the most important points of Steve Tibble's recent book The Crusader Armies was that the contribution of non-western Christians to the politics and warfare of the crusading period is typically overlooked. Contemporary writers tended to either minimise their importance or take them for granted, but that shouldn't be the case for modern historians --...

Visit us at Salute 2019

Salute 2019 is right around the corner, and we're getting ready to host a game there. The show is on April 6th at ExCel London; doors open at 10 AM. We'll be running a Lion Rampant skirmish game set in the Byblos castle model at game table GG10 throughout the day; we'll also be showing off the...

Interior design in a crusader castle

As we mentioned in our earlier post, if we're going to be focusing on a game inside the castle, we'll need to think about how to decorate it. So far, the castle has had a fairly plain interior. Now we need to start making it more eye-catching for our games at Salute. This poses some interesting...

Happy new year and new plans!

Updates have been slow over the holidays, but we're back at work on the Gaming a Crusader Castle project. We've got a show appearance coming up this April as we bring the keep to Salute 2019. It seems like April's a long way away, but two months is no time at all in wargaming years....

Further Outremer playtesting

Over time, we've been refining the proposed scenario for an Outremer skirmish game using the Byblos castle prototype. In our last post, we talked about an early playtest in Cambridge. This revealed that the system was working well for us, but suggested that we might want to vary the force composition and deployment in the...

Giving Outremer a try

Our search for the perfect system to use for fighting inside the keep led us to Outremer, a medieval skirmish wargame from Osprey Games. In order to learn the rules, we gave the game a try at our local bookstore's game night. We didn't have the keep model itself, but we threw together a board using...

How big is too big?

In the last post, we mentioned in passing one of the limitations of making accurate models of historical buildings: space. Most 28mm scale wargames buildings are much smaller than the notional scale would suggest; this is simply because if a game's ground scale and figure scale were the same, battlefields would be so large that...

It’s what’s inside that counts

In a previous post, we talked about the reconstruction of the mezzanine on the ground floor of Byblos castle. In this one, we're going to look at a similar feature on the upper floor and the very different interpretation we think it supports -- and in the process, raise some points about designing interiors for...