A year of living dangerously - Montrose’s Scottish Campaign of 1644-1645

I picked this up recently following an always dangerous recommendation from a friend (thanks Matthew!). It’s a campaign I’ve long been interested in, not least because a fair bit of the action is ‘local’ to where I grew up. 

It costs about £15 and the first (solo) play took just over an hour.

Lovely map and counters. 

Montrose nearly did it!

The game set up to play. 

Detail of the map. My part of the world!

I’ll no doubt have more to say when I’ve played it more.  In this first outing, Montrose came close to victory but basically ran out of troops. He did, however, manage the all-important sack of Dundee!  

Bannockburn, 1314

While driving to a meeting yesterday I chanced to hear most of an interesting radio programme about the Battle of Bannockburn http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y2srx 

For those of you even less familiar then me with this period, Bannockburn (1314) saw the English army under Edward II get a good kicking.  Not that I am in any way biased.

Joining Melvyn Bragg to discuss the battle, what caused it and it's effects were:
Matthew Strickland - Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow
Fiona Watson - Honorary Research Fellow in History at the University of Dundee
Michael Brown - Reader in History at the University of St Andrews

The link above will take you to the BBC's 'listen again' facility and a useful reading list - I expect it'll be available for about a week.