Jim Dunnigan is one of a handful of designers to have published in excess of a hundred games (it helps to run your own game company for a decade), and in my opinion, Empires of the Middle Ages is one of his best designs -- possibly the best of them all.
It's a multiplayer game in which you control a medieval kingdom (different scenarios for different periods in the era), earning victory points for ruling as many provinces, with as high a social state as possible, at game end. (You only get VP for provinces you have "claims" to, though.) It's the grandest of grand strategy games, with each turn representing five years, and with your monarch likely to die (often several times) in the course of a game -- and being replaced by a successor whose characteristics may be far inferior (or in rare cases, considerably better).
Each province in the game has a language group (e.g., Celtic, or Langue d'Oc) and a religion; it's easiest to deal with provinces that match your leader's language and faith. There's a concept of "language groups," as well, so that, say, an Italian leader will find Italian-speaking provinces easier than, say, Langue d'Oc provinces -- but all Romance language provinces are better than Germanic ones. Similarly, if you are Catholic, you'll still do better with Orthodox provinces than Moslem ones.
A province's social state ranges for "-3" (what happens after large armies rape it for ten years or so) to "+3" (Venice in its golden age, say). One of the things you do most in the game is rule a province to try to improve its social state; basically, you get five "year cards" per turn, and turn one over (unseen) each time you take an action. Your ruler's characteristics, plus what the card says, plus some opposing value (social statue when ruling, opposing military when attacking) determines whether you succeed in the action or not.
Monarchs are rated by their capacity for administration (improving social state), warfare, and diplomacy (which can be used to gain claims to areas, or in rare cases to 'conquer' them diplomatically). In each scenario, players begin with historical monarchs -- often excellent ones -- but when a leader dies, dice are rolled on a table to determine the new leader's characteristics.
One of the interesting facets of Empires is that it is, in a sense, a world-conquest game; but conquest is hard. Mostly, players spend their time struggling against the system -- trying to get social status at a reasonable level to give themselves an adequate tax base, dealing with attacks from non-player "magnates," or the Mongols, or the Black Plague -- and only rarely being in a position to really gear up for war against each other. Even then, you need "claims" to make conquering a province worthwhile, and they are hard to establish (though often a scenario begins with players having claims against each other -- e.g., in 1200, England has claims to most of France). And even then, it's very hard to expand out of your core linguistic/religious group of provinces.
Empires is a game I once played obsessively (often with JFD and Al Nofi), and it was reprinted a few years ago by Decision Games. I'm not a big fan of the Decision edition; it's larger, and with more components, and adds some interesting additional rules, but it has a number of flaws. For one thing, in the original edition, social status was recorded on a track printed within each province, and changing it (which happens constantly) was just a matter of moving a marker; in the Decision Games version, social status is printed on a marker, so each time it changes, you have to go hunting for a replacement marker. Tracks have the problem that when the cat leaps on the board, you might forget where things were -- but the extra time spent finding and replacing markers, in a game that already takes quite a long time to play, is a pain in the ass. Also, the DG rules, as originally printed, contained any number of errors -- luckily, a revised version is available on Boardgame Geek.
Finally, for whatever reason, the DG edition does not make one change to Empires that Jim Dunnigan himself made when we played together: In the original game as printed, and in the DG edition, you subtract the absolute value of the social state when Ruling a province, meaning that both prosperous and incredibly poor provinces are harder to rule, that is, hard to improve the social state of. Dunnigan always maintained that this was not what he had intended, and that not the absolute value but the value should be subtracted -- thus making it much easier to pull poor social-state provinces out of the dumps (and making for a somewhat less frustrating game.)
I'm therefore going to put up the following things here:
Jim Dunnigan's Additional Rules
Robert Sacks's Errata and Tournament Rules, from 1983, explicitly endorsed by Dunnigan in the above.
Empires of the Middle Ages Revisions, written by Eric Goldberg and myself in 1983, and also endorsed by JFD as improving the game's balance
Venetian Variant, which I wrote years ago, and adds Venice as a playable power in two scenarios
I read Dunnigan's book, "How
I read Dunnigan's book, "How To Make War," back in high school. I had read Sun Tzu, some military manuals (my favourite was a US infantryman's field guide), and a few other bits and pieces of history. But Dunnigan's book was probably one of the more interesting ones to me. It included a lot of the nitty-gritty that I hadn't read before, either in theoretical treatises, histories, or combat manuals. By this I mean estimates of attrition, comparative evaluations of aircraft and tanks, and of course a whole lot of price tags.
I reckon that's what inspired me to write a bill for a model congress I went to proposing a massive cut-back in military spending, mostly in nuclear capabilities and heavy support (carriers and submarines). I suppose, at the time, I was a liberal looking for the much-talked-of "peace dividend," but I also was beginning to recognise that as America entered a period of "little wars," a much different military would be needed than one to fight toe to toe with the USSR. My bill also proposed channelling more funds to special ops, intelligence, and infantry.
In the long run, his thinking influenced my politics even more profoundly. I was pretty equipped to predict most of the disaster that Iraq has turned out to be. I slowly became aware of the military-industrial complex and the politics behind militarism.
From a gamer's perspective, his Complete Wargames Handbook was the first book I ever read on game design. I still haven't gotten around to fully designing a wargame, with the exception of some leagues and campaigns for other games (Warhammer and Starcraft in particular) that had their own diplomatic-strategic elements. Still, it's worth a read.
He's a useful person to have in existence. I would love to play this game... if I could afford it.
The Sword and the Stars
I've never played (and sadly don't have an SPI copy of) "Empire of the Middle Ages", though as a mid-70s to mid-80s wargamer was certainly aware of it. I do own a copy of "The Sword and the Stars"[1], which SPI also published and which was based on some of the same fundamental game design elements as EotMA. It remains one of my all-time favorite board games. ..bruce..
[1] Not to be confused with "The Sword of the Stars", a rather popular 4x computer game, which I frankly didn't like all that much, even though it actually used a 3-D starmap (2-D starmaps have been a pet peeve of mine for, oh 20+ years; I did a computer game [SunDog] in 1984 that had a 3-D starmap, for cryin' out loud).