Description

"The story of the Second Civil War is short and simple. King, Lords and Commons, landlords and merchants, the City and the countryside, bishops and presbyters, the Scottish army, the Welsh people, and the English Fleet, all now turned against the New Model Army. The Army beat the lot."

Sir Winston Churchill

The New Model Army was created by Parliament in 1645 to defeat the armies of King Charles I in the 1st Civil War. As Lord-General they chose Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had little interest in politics, but his second-in-command was Oliver Cromwell, already a leading member of the Independent Party in Parliament. As a military machine the New Model did all that was desired of it. They beat the Royalists at the Battles of Naseby and Langport, besieged his capital of Oxford and in 1646 Charles surrendered. Parliament needed to reach an accommodation with the King for a Settlement of the Kingdom, but he refused to yield any of his Royal Prerogatives. Secretly, he negotiated with Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians and English Radicals, anyone who could return him to power.

By 1647 agitators elected by the Army rank and file were expressing increasingly radical politics and under Cromwell it had become a haven for religious independents. Parliament proposed to ship troublesome regiments to Ireland, disband others without payment of arrears and establish a Presbyterian Church to suppress religious dissent. In response the Army kidnapped the king and marched on London. Their opponents fled and the Army began its own fruitless negotiations with Charles, but he had other plans; he made an Engagement with the Scottish Duke of Hamilton, promising a Presbyterian Church in England if they restored him to power. In the spring of 1648 Hamilton began to recruit a 36,000 army to invade England, the Parliamentarian armies in Munster and Wales declared for the King, the Cavalier Sir Marmaduke Langdale seized the border fortresses of Berwick-upon-Tweed and Carlisle, the Navy mutinied, there were pro-Royalist riots across England and major rebellions broke out in Kent and Essex.

On 30th April 1648 the Army Council met at Windsor Castle for a three day prayer meeting where they decided "that it was the duty of our day, with the forces we had, to go out and fight against those potent enemies". Despite being outnumbered two, three or even four to one the New Model Army beat the Welsh at St Fagans, the Royalists at Maidstone and Colchester and the Scots at Preston. The victorious regiments occupied Edinburgh and London, purged Parliament and brought "Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed". They tried him waging war on his people, cut off his head and proclaimed a republic.

Man of Blood is an area movement and impulse game for two to four players recreating the Second Civil War of 1648, the direct cause of the English Revolution and the execution of Charles I. The first player controls the New Model Army; the second the Parliamentarian Northern Association, Irish Army, Scottish Whigs, some lukewarm militia and a mutinous fleet; the third has a loose alliance of Cavaliers, Presbyterians, Welsh, and any ships that desert the Parliamentarians, and the fourth the Scots Engagers and Ulster Army. The Royalists and Scots have more men, but worse generals and variable reinforcements. Players manoeuvre their forces from area to area across the map in order to destroy enemy regiments, capture towns, build up a navy and control the King. It has a 34 by 22 inch map depicting 17th Century Britain from the English Channel to the Highlands and 280 half-inch counters representing the generals, admirals, regiments and warships that fought the war.