Below you will find Part 1 in an Inferno Replay and Tutorial series from Cristophe Correia originally published on The Boardgames Chronicle blog. Enjoy! -Rachel
Volko Ruhnke’s Levy & Campaign series from GMT Games presents medieval warfare at the operational level in various settings. Volume I, Nevsky, is set on the 13th-Century Baltic frontier with Novgorodan Russia. Volume II, Almoravid, took us to 11th-Century Spain and the Reconquista conflict among Christians and Muslims—you can read Michal’s first impressions and session reports of that volume on The Boardgames Chronicle here. Soon to be released, Volume III, Inferno, will travel to 13th-Century Italy.
Levy & Campaign volumes share core systems simulating medieval Levy of armies by individual great Lords and lesser Vassals, equipping of those armies with transport such as Carts and special Capabilities such as crossbowmen, trebuchets, or stonecutters, to name a few. For each Campaign, players then form stacks of Command cards to preset the order that Lords will March, Forage, Siege, and so on. Logistics loom large, as Provender must be gathered and moved to Feed Troops in the field or suffer curtailed Lords’ Service and Disband.
But each volume in the series features widely different geographic, cultural, and political settings, each with twists on the core rules to help bring out these differences. Inferno concerns fighting between the Guelph and Ghibelline political factions in the well-to-do and densely populated Tuscany of the mid-1200s. You can here all about this setting from Volko directly in this video.
