Crusaders - The Siege of Acre

 Another week, another team effort at a solo game. This time one of the many sieges of Acre, this particular one in 1291.

"Crusaders". This is by a company I've not heard of before.

The map is exquisite though, and printed on canvas! Tim had mounted it temporarily in a clip frame. Acre is on the left with SP (coloured blocks) allocated to the various Crusader contingents. Hospitallers in white, Teutonic Knights in Black and the Templars in red. There are also blocks to show the state of of the inner and outer walls and 'the accursed tower' (an amalgam of various towers and defensive works).

The Mameluks track their catapults, miners (bottom right) and infantry (the huge block top right on the track).

The rules are a few pages long, but all the important stuff is summarised on this one page QRS. It is a pretty simple dice driven narrative game, the main player decisions are about making raids and how to play their (one off' 'Deus Vault') cards which do various things.

Vast hordes of Crusaders turned up for this.

After six turns you can see how things stand. The Knights Templar are undamaged, but the poor old Hospitallers and Teutons are seriously battered. The defences are mainly intact but the miners have made some progress. After a very successful raid on turn four, we've also hammered the Mameluk infantry who are over halfway through their first block of hits.

We have played a lot of our cards though, on things like fixing the walls, counter mining and sallying to disable the catapults.

Turn 9 and Acre is hanging on. The Accursed Tower is down and the miners are approaching the walls. Both the inner and outer walls only have a couple of hits left after being battered. The Mameluk infantry is close to its first demoralisation level.

To win we have to suffer less than eighteen Crusader casualties by the end of the game AND have one contingent of knights with 4 SP or more. No-one told us that at the time...

The Mameluk infantry are finally demoralised, reducing their attacks. All the walls are down now but our Knights hang on....

At game end we've pushed the Mameluk infantry to breaking point and we have 'only' suffered seventeen casualties. Sadly we don't have any contingent with four SP, so it is a draw!

That took 37 minutes, so we ran it again.

Here we are on turn 12. Hilariously the mines have not advanced at all, but all the defences are down and we've not made significant inroads into the enemy strength, while our own Knights are badly battered.

As we go into the last turn, it is game over. We've only got 2SP left and the Mameluks morale is still holding up. Their miners haven't moved an inch though.

That was really good fun. There isn't a lot of decision making tbh, but there is some and the vagaries of fortune produce lots of 'ooooh, aaaah' moments, rather like the Dominion games do. Glad we played that, and another one for a week when we are short of things to do.

I have been to.... Sheffield Castle

 The Friends of Sheffield Castle recently organised some tours of the castle as part of the Castlegate Festival in Sheffield. I managed to get one of the tickets, which get snapped up in seconds. The castle is notable for being one of the largest in England (as the curtain wall was vast, bigger than the adjacent town) and it was the prison of Mary Queen of Scots for 14 years. It was slighted after the Civil War and then the site was built over as Sheffield became an industrial city.

A digital model of the castle keep produced by the University of Sheffield and based on the features described in the 1637 castle survey. Sadly no contemporary pictures of it survive, but the complete dogs dinner of different tower styles etc is apparently correct. The Keep is built on Castle Hill, which is the remains of the original Norman Motte. 

It doesn't look like the image now! It is just a huge building site. The walls in the foreground are early Victorian buildings which date from when there was a steel works here. The Medieval moat and bottom structures of the gatehouse are in the middle distance, and the far boundary of the moat is where the row of buildings with tower are in the far distance. 

 

A brief timeline of the castle from the blurb outside the site. The first known castle on the site was Norman, and it was built at the confluence of the Rivers Don and Sheaf, supposedly the southern border of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, but an important communications node in any case.

This hill is the original Norman Motte. The lighter tone is the original sandstone, the dark layer is shale and earth laid down to raise the height of the Motte. The structure on the top right is a concrete shell built  around remains of the northeast tower in the 1920s. There is a (locked) door giving access to the original tower wall.ls inside. The white wall is the foundations of the Castle Market building built in the 1920s right over the site and demolished some years ago.

The site of the original gate house and moat. The concrete square was also built in the 1920s and is protecting the base of one of the gatehouse towers, and the masonry on the foreground is the site of the drawbridge. The moat is quite deep, around 6m, but only 2m or so has been excavated. Sections of the original Norman ditch run behind it, but have been filled in.

Another view of the site of the gatehouse and drawbridge, you can see more clearly the layer of extra shale and earth used to build up the Motte.

There are still some quite nice bits of dressed stone left, but most of the wall facing was sold off for building in the rest of the city after the castle was slighted in the seventeeth century. Most of the walls which remain are just the rubble cores, and the rest of the castle stone has been incorporated in various buildings around the city. 

This is up on Castle Hill. The white wall is part of the 1920s market building, but the stones of the old castle walls can be seen behind. Some of these are interior walls for towers. The old castle well is at the far end of the ridge, and one of the walls of the old steel works went right over it. 

The wall interiors from the other side. The walls on the near right are early eighteenth century. The hill was squared off then, houses built around the perimeter and a large bowling green constructed in the middle of what had been the courtyard.

The River Sheaf joins the Don here (the Don is off to the left) , both used to be floating cesspits choked with human and industrial waste. This section of the Sheaf was covered over in 1917, but is now being exposed again down to the Don. Those arches are the original 1917 ones. I've done the underground river tour almost as far as here, it stops at the 'Megatron' culvert underground on the right off picture, which is huge and hosts nesting bats.

A very fanciful illustration of the 'Norman Castle'. Of course it looked nothing like that, and Sheffield is apparently a flat rolling plain.

This painting was made in the 1950s, and bears a slightly greater resemblance to the original, at least the layout of some of the walls and towers and rivers, although the structure is far too big. In this image, Sheffield has apparently been transported to the Scottish Highlands, and the city itself has ben replaced with some woodland and fields.

Anyway, that was loads of fun and very interesting. The site has been worked on for years now, but hopefully the exposed (and conserved) sections will be open for general public access as the key features of a new park in Spring 2026. 

I have been to.... Japan

 We've recently returned from a 3 week trip to Japan, which I have to say was absolutely amazing. We arrived in mid March, and travelled to the very tip of Honshu and (briefly) to Kyushu, although most of the places we visited were in the centre of the country. Everything from blizzards, through howling gales, rain and blazing sunshine.

Anyway, as ever I'll put up a few pictures of historical/military interest. First up though, a few touristy pictures.

Tokyo Tower. Mt Fuji dimly visible in the distance in the morning sun (this was actually the view from our hotel in Tokyo, Park Hotel in Shiodome, highly recommended).

The frozen north! This is near Akita iirc.

Cherry blossoms in the centre/South and the traditional picnics underneath them.

Mt Fuji looking pretty good across the bay.

OK, enough of that, lets have some Samurai stuff.

We visited a few Samurai houses, this was the largest, but they all had a similar layout essentially being a walled building complex. This one was big enough to host a number of farm buildings and various crops and animal enclosures.

Inside was much as you'd expect  - lots of wood and paper sliding doors etc and tatami mats on the floor.

This was a much smaller house, albeit still with a decent walled garden. This one featured its own moat!

Nice set of armour.

And a couple of Katana blades. They looked absolutely razor sharp.

One of the internal gardens. I gather there are six desirable characteristics of Japanese gardens which include water, plants, a vista and some other things I can't recall.

Tokugawa Armour (reproduction!). This was at the Tokagawa Shrine and tomb beneath Mount Fuji. 

This fine chap is outside the Imperial Palace and was one of the 13th Century Emperors most loyal retainers. Now he is on permanent guard outside the remains of Edo Castle. 

Speaking of castles, we also visited several of these, although they were all built towards the end of the Sengoku period and saw very little (or no) actual use in warfare. They all had a similar construction, but some were (much) bigger than others.

This is the main keep of Matsue Castle, one of only 12 surviving original castles, the rest having been destroyed accidentally or deliberately, although many have been rebuilt in modern times. Unlike Medieval European castles, they aren't designed to be permanently occupied.

The interior construction is very similar to an eighteenth century Man of War! The whole wooden structure rests on a massive stone base.

Outside the main keep is a system of moats, walls and smaller towers. This is a watchtower at Kanazawa Castle, the construction is similar to the main keep but much smaller.

And there are usually secondary moats inside the defensive works too.

This bridge leads to the island with the main keep on it. You can also see how sturdy the walls are, and how imposing the moats are.

The final castle we visited was Edo Castle in Tokyo, now the Imperial Palace. Compared to the others, it is absolutely vast. This is one of the huge secondary moats and a watch tower.

One of the inner fortifications. The amount of stonework in general was very impressive.

And this is the remaining base of the keep at Edo which was four times the size of any others we saw.

Along with castles there were various nautical encounters.

A Coastguard ship, we saw quite a few of these in various sizes but no proper Japanese Navy ships.

I rather liked this tugboat with its dayglo mast. This was in Aomori at the very tip of Honshu. The snow covered mountains of Hokkaido were just visible on the horizon.

Also in Aomori was this excellent museum ship covering the old rail ferries which ran from Aomori to Hokkaido. The rails are mounted on a sort of retractable crane thing so they move up and down with the tide. 

Now there is an undersea tunnel(!) going to Hokkaido, one of the longest in the world, which has reduced the demand for ferry services.

The preserved ferry from the side. Aomori was attacked in August 1945 by B29s and all six of the original wartime ferries were sunk or damaged by US carrier planes in various attacks.

Another Coastguard ship moored near the ferry.

Even more coastguard ships. These were on the Sea of Japan, I can't recall exactly where.

Shipping on the the strait between Honshu and Kyushu. It was incredibly busy, as the strait links the Pacific with the Sea of Japan and all those busy factories on Korea and China. At the narrowest section (just visible) there is a road bridge and tunnel. 

There was at least one traditional Japanese ship doing pleasure cruises.

This tug boat, named "Yamato" apparently has ideas above its station! I later discovered that Yamato is actually quite a common name for things in Japan.

It wouldn't be a trip to Japan without a trip to Hiroshima.

The famous nuclear dome building. Ground zero was 150m east of here, so I'm astonished it is still standing.

The cenotaph, memorial park and eternal flame were all very well done.

We did visit the museum, but it was very busy. The 'human shadow' steps have bene moved inside here now. I didn't take any photos inside apart form this one as it seemed rather distasteful. 

Under this dome are the ashes of 70,000 people, which is rather sobering.

This shrine is to the memorialise the school students who were in the city at the time.

Three of the original tramcars survived the atomic attack and are still running. We were fortunate enough to see one. The rest of the trams are much more modern.

That was a great trip, very enjoyable, with everything from BladeRunner to Japanese social realist cinema and taking in a big dollop of Shogun and The Last Samurai on the way. Great stuff and highly recommended for a visit. Even if you don't speak Japanese, Google Translate is very helpful!