State building and Rob(b)in(g)
A classroom-focused review of A Gest of Robin Hood designed by Fred Serval and released by GMT Games.
Bringing ballads to the class?
One of the key challenges when looking for games to use in a classroom setting is students’ familiarity with the topic. For the wargaming course, it is a bit easier, as we can spend time focusing on a variety of topics from counterinsurgency to piracy along the Barbary Coast and look at them through the lens of selected games.
Yet, in cases, where a wargame would serve a primary purpose of illustrating and explaining a topic that the class covers, finding a suitable game is more challenging. Such a game must be relatively quick and accessible, while also telling something important about the topic of the day. If the students are at least somewhat familiar with the story of the game, it’s even better. A Gest of Robin Hood seemed to meet all these prerequisites and tell a story known to students at least in some rough form. But is it a good fit for the university environment? Can the legend of Robin and his Merry Men can then help teach political science?
The gist of the Gest
A Gest of Robin Hood is an entry in GMT Games’ Irregular Conflict Series adjacent to the COIN games. I would like to highlight its sharing specific elements with The British Way, and the playbook reveals the interactions that designers of these games had. The Gest is a two-player game, where one player takes the role of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and the other plays the part of the Sheriff of Nottingham. At the start of each turn, a card is drawn from the deck, and players choose from an asymmetric selection of actions split into Plots (think Operations in COIN terms) and Deeds (think Special Activities in COIN terms) or playing an event. The player with the initiative decides on the their action and acts first, and the second player reacts with an option from the two still available. Players’ choices then affect the initiative for the next turn, a new card is drawn and the cycle repeats until a Fortune Event or a Royal Inspection card (with the role of Propaganda in COIN) is drawn.
The goals of the players are to either enforce Order or bring Justice. These are directly opposite to one another. This is contrary to many of the COIN games, where despite interactions among factions, victory conditions are tracked separately. Yet, as we will see later in the review, the focus on one specific tension, the one between Order and Justice, makes perfect sense.
At any time, when playing a game as a part of the series (or being adjacent to a well-established series), the questions of fitness to topic and uniqueness come up. Based on my plays of A Gest, this game has several key elements that address these two issues:
Taxation (or confiscation) and robbing mechanics – the way that the Sheriff of Nottingham generates wealth (and strengthens order) works through taxing the population and then transferring wealth from the rural areas to Nottingham. This must be done physically, modelled through carriage token movement, and gives an opening for the Merry Men to attempt a robbery. There is also a whole economic network functioning behind the game, and the Robin Hood player can engage them, again, by trying to rob travellers.
The way revolt works – the cost of confiscation of population’s wealth leads to an automatic revolt in a taxed Parish. However, confiscation itself requires the presence of Sheriff’s Henchmen. Revolting Parishes, naturally, lower the level of Order by brining Justice, which also facilitates further Robin’s actions.
Geography – the space plays an important role both in terms of troop movement and engagements between the Merry Men and the Sheriff (e.g. the latter’s advantages in fighting or finding the enemy, putting the Merry Men in tight spots) and movement of resources. As noted, the carriages must travel from one point to another, requiring good timing from both players to make the best use of them.
The role of Robin and prison – a more powerful, but no less merry, Robin Hood brings advantage to his own side, but his use can also put him in prison, when he is revealed, with Sheriff scoring points. The hidden movement and decision of reveal adds further intrigue.
The visual side of the game is also very evocative with beautiful illustrations and physical components. It certainly helps to communicate the theme, whether you are familiar with similar games or not.
A gest is not a jest
What has become of the story of Robin Hood can be interpreted as a story of the days of old or a legend close to a fairy tale. Undoubtedly, many have their own version of it. Here, in Lithuania, there was a 19th century outlaw Tadas Blinda who was caught and killed by the crowd at a St. George Day’s market. Yet, possibly inspired by Robin Hood, Blinda was soon romanticized by local writers, turning his story into one about social justice.
The story of Robin Hood is different, as the game’s playbook discusses extensively, and the game is focused on what the story tells about state power consolidation, which links back to the origins of the legend. In this sense, the tale of Robin and his Merry Men as shown in A Gest of Robin Hood is more than just a story. Rather, it tells a story and builds a model of state power consolidation, predation, and rivalry for political power.
There is a topic on the concept of state and state formation in the Comparative Politics course I teach bachelor students. Our core focus there is the distinction between the contractarian and the predatory views of state formation. In the first case, the story goes that a social contract leads people from a (hypothetical) state of nature to building a state. To ensure that there is no deviation, there must be punishments for breaking the contract, while taxation is kept sufficiently low. The predatory view (based on Charles Tilly’s work) argues that four key components of state formation were: war making, state making (i.e. dealing with internal rivals), protection of clients from their enemies, extraction of resources to fund the other activities.
A Gest of Robin Hood models processes that are relevant to these models. From the contractarian perspective, the social contract is broken when the Sheriff engages in confiscation, leading to revolting Parishes. If the Sheriff does not spend resources on punishing the Parishes and the Merry Men there, then the ‘state condition’ is not restored. From the predatory perspective, the topic of the game itself engages with state making and internal rivalry between the Sheriff and Robin. How they manage the protection and resource extraction can shift the scales to either the Order or the Justice side.
The game also comes with a very interesting essay on stationary vs. roving banditry by Stephen Rangazas and what A Gest tells about it. That’s another dimension that touched less during the class, but the game serves as a good way to extend the discussion. This view of state formation can then be further contextualised by looking at the organised crime as the rival to the state. My colleague sometimes asks business students if their parents warned them that having your own business is a dangerous career. The students reply to him that no. For the professor the experience in the 90s was different and until the state capacity to police got stronger, running a business, even a small shop, could be dangerous.
These discussions on the state and its rivals work well to discuss the concept of the state and its emergence from different perspectives. When planning the class, I would first give these different theoretical views, and then ask students to find how A Gest relates to them on their own, and then provide arguments for one or the other position in a joint discussion.
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
One final thing that A Gest of Robin Hood brought to mind was the peasant world it shows. Set in Medieval England, it engages the social structures that have mostly vanished in Europe, a topic recently explored in Patrick Joyce’s book Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. Reading about the worldview of peasant societies connects with some specific aspects of the game – whether it is through Marian devotion (not actually in the game, but discussed in the playbook, through the role of the market or the nature (the Sherwood Oak). This peasant world is not the core of the game’s story, but just enough of the details of the game bring it forward.
However, coming back to the tension between Order and Justice it is also a key aspect of the historical peasant experience. On the one hand, order is expected, including in relation to the cyclical experience of time. On the other hand, justice is also needed, to keep the societal contract. In cases, where the order is changed and leads to exploitation of the population, peasant revolts break out. Similarly, as in A Gest, where Robin Hood and his Merry Men can help to instigate it. Perhaps, it is not surprising that the first reference to the Sherwood’s outlaw is found just before the time of the peasant uprisings of the 1381.
So, can the ballads of Robin Hood be brought to the class? I would argue that yes, absolutely. The game is not too complex but complex enough to inform about rivalry during state power consolidation. It tells a story that at least in a rough form is known to students. Yet, it’s also an activity that would likely have to be organized outside of the class. While the game is not too long, with a rule explanation and a post-game discussion, you may run out of time. I’ll next be giving a class on state formation in Spring of the coming academic year. I hope I can find time for A Gest or two.
Tadas Blinda sounds so much like Taras Bulba...