About game:

Kingdom of Heaven: The Crusader States 1097-1291 – designed by Scott de Brestian and published by Multi-Man Publishing roughly fifteen years ago – is a two-player, card driven, strategic level treatment of the whole Crusading era. Not a single battle, not a single campaign, but two hundred years of it, on one point-to-point map stretching from Antioch to Cairo and from Cyprus to Mosul.


The heart of the game is a deck of 110 cards. Sixty of them are generic and appear in every scenario; the rest are tied to specific scenarios and get shuffled into the basic deck before you start. That single idea does an enormous amount of work. The system stays identical from play to play, so you learn it once, but the historical texture changes completely – Kerbogha marches in the First Crusade, the death of a sultan in another, a mediation attempt in a third. You always know the machine and you are always surprised by the events.


A card can be spent in several ways: activate a leader (each leader has a strategy rating from one to three, and the card value must match or beat it), play the printed event, resolve a siege, attempt a diplomatic roll, or make a vassal move that shifts individual units without any leader at all. Movement is point-to-point, infantry gets four points and cavalry six, and mountain passes cost extra. Leaders carry a command rating that determines how many units they can drag along, and a chain of subordination lets a senior commander bring another leader with his own retinue – which is how you end up with a stack of nine counters marching under one activation.


Two mechanics really define the game. Attrition is everywhere: crossing Asia Minor, moving through harsh terrain, sitting in front of an enemy stronghold, or being shadowed by an enemy cavalry force all trigger a foraging roll, and a large army can evaporate four steps before it ever meets an enemy. And sieges – five pages of rules, resistance factors, calls for surrender, blockades, starvation, siege events played from your hand against a manpower limit, and finally the bloody assault with column shifts against you for every point of resistance. It is the best siege system I have seen in any wargame.


On top of that sits diplomacy. Every faction on the map is pro-Christian, neutral or pro-Muslim, and orientation has nothing to do with religion – Catholic Antioch can sit neutral while the Seljuk Turks are aligned with the Christians. You can shift them with cards, with the diplomatic advantage marker, or simply by marching into their territory and forcing their hand.


So, will you hold Jerusalem longer than the Franks managed – or will you be the one to tear the Kingdom down?

Number of players:

Strictly two, and the box is honest in marking it as not solitaire suitable. That said, Scenario A – the three-turn First Crusade learning scenario – works perfectly well solo as a way to internalize the sequence of play before you invite an opponent. Treat it as a training exercise, not a solo mode. For the real thing you want a regular partner, because this is a game that rewards a series of sessions rather than a single evening.

Playing time:

Each turn represents one year, and scenarios run from three turns to seven. The designer promised that every scenario should fit into a 3-4 hour evening, and in my experience that holds – the shortest ones come in well under that, the long Baibars scenario will fill a full session. Setup is the slow part: units, leaders and strongholds are placed differently every time, and the scenario book gives you text rather than a picture. Downloading the Vassal module and using it as a visual reference makes this dramatically faster.

Complexity:

The rulebook is 27 pages, which does not sound like much, but it is dense and it is not for a first wargamers. MMP itself compares the complexity to Wilderness War or Shifting Sands, and that feels right. The map looks simple – points and lines – and then the rules pile on attrition, foraging, interception, avoiding battle, shadowing, retreat, pursuit, leader casualties and those five pages of siege procedure. Read it once, then learn it by playing; a lot of it only clicks when a stack of yours is starving in front of a castle.

What I like:
  • Nine scenarios covering the whole arc – from the improbable success of the First Crusade through Saladin, the Fifth and Seventh Crusades, the Mongol invasion and the Mamluk rise, plus a hypothetical one asking what a Crusader-Mongol alliance would have looked like. Inception to downfall, in one box.
  • The best strategic level Crusades game there is – if you want the battles you go tactical, but if you want the two centuries of politics, marching, starving and besieging that actually decided the Crusader States, nothing else comes close.
  • A deck that reshapes itself for every scenario – the same sixty generic cards plus a handful of scenario-specific historical events. The system stays familiar, the history never repeats.
  • The best siege resolution ever designed – one procedure handles a two-week collapse and an eighteen-month grind equally well. Calls for surrender, blockade, starvation, siege events, assault – all of it, and all of it thematic.
What I do not like or would like to see in the game:
  • The paper map and unclipped counters – the map is thin cardstock, it folds badly and never lies flat, and the counters really need clipping before they look as good as they should. The art is excellent; the production is not. A mounted map would transform this game.

  • No reprint for far too long – a title this good should not be this hard to find. There are rumors that it may return, and I hope they are true, because right now the main obstacle to recommending it is simply getting a copy.
For whom?

For anyone who wants the Crusades at the strategic level rather than the tactical one. If you enjoyed Commands & Colors: Medieval and now want to know why those battles were fought at all, this is the answer. It is also a natural fit for card driven veterans coming from Wilderness War or Paths of Glory, and for anyone who appreciates a game where logistics and sieges matter as much as the field battle. Find a regular opponent, commit to playing several scenarios in order, and you will get a history lesson you will not forget.

More about the game:




And now let us have a look at the components and materials – all pictures and videos taken during my own plays:

Components overview – the cards, the counters, the player aids and the scenario book, with a first look at the map.
Rules explained – sequence of play, movement, battles, attrition and the whole siege procedure.
The leaders of the First Crusade – Toulouse, Bouillon, Bohemond, Tancred and Baldwin – with their Crusader units and a Byzantine contingent alongside. Note the three ratings on every leader counter: strategy, battle and command.
The Principality of Antioch at the start of Scenario C. Crusader red, Seljuk green, Byzantine blue and the grey Assassins all sharing the same few spaces – and diplomatic orientation, not religion, decides who fights whom.
The whole theatre at the end of Scenario C – Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa in the north, the Crusader army massed at Acre, and Nur ad-Din with Shirkuh gathering their host below Damascus.
My storage solution based on great Cube4Me Trays!

VERDICT:

I have now played six scenarios of this game with Janek, and every single one of them was a pleasure. That is not a sentence I write often. Most systems start to show their seams after the third or fourth session, and this one keeps opening up instead.

What makes it work is the combination of a stable system with a deck that is rebuilt for every scenario. You are never relearning the rules, but you are never playing the same game either. Add the fact that the political map changes dramatically between scenarios – who holds Antioch, who is neutral, who can even be influenced – and setting up a new scenario becomes a history lesson in itself.

And then there are the sieges. I keep coming back to them because I do not know another design that solves this problem so elegantly. Medieval warfare in this region was overwhelmingly about walls, and sieges lasted anything from two weeks to a year and a half. Here one procedure handles both, and the whole thing feels like a negotiation between hunger, morale, luck and the cards still left in your hand. Attrition deserves the same praise: very few games make you feel that an army marching across Asia Minor is losing men every single week, and this one does.

The production is the one place where I would ask for more. The paper map is a genuine shame on a design of this quality, and the counters need clipping before they do justice to their own artwork. Neither of those things is a rules problem, and neither of them stopped me playing six scenarios – but a mounted map would turn a great game into a beautiful one. What worries me more is availability, because this has not been reprinted in a long time. There are rumors of a return. I would very much like them to be true.

If you want to understand how the Crusader States were built, held and finally lost, this is the game. For me it is still the best strategic level treatment of the Crusades ever published, and Janek and I are already looking at the scenarios we have not played yet.

Strongly recommended!