Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Grunewald Swords

The original monument to the Battle of Grunwald was erected in Kraków for the battle's 500th anniversary. It was destroyed during WWII by the Germans and rebuilt in 1976. Broadly speaking, the Teutonic Player must absolutely protect the camp hexes in his rear at all costs. The Allied Player can win the game immediately if he takes possession of those hexes. The Allied Player's two Polish Wings have the best chance of grabbing it, mostly because they're the ones that are going to stay on the map during the entire game. Naturally, if the Teutonic Player is able to box...

"Battle of Grunwald", Jan Matejko, 1878, 426×987cm So, last time I touched on the history of the original Shields & Swords games, how they sold, why the folio series was cancelled, and why it made sense for Mary and I to resurrect it for Hollandspiele as Shields & Swords II. Today, I'm going to explain the mechanics of the system, how it was tweaked by each of the four S&S games, and how S&S II differs from that iteration. The core of the system is that each player has one or more color-coded Wings, with each Wing made up of...