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As this period is one of my favorites, I started to design new
characters to represent historical figures like Renaud de Chatillon,
Onfroy de Toron, Saracens, camel-mounted Arabs
and more. I also hand-drew a very nice "Caravanserai"
map.
Vikings was still 5 years down the road but was really worth the
wait : the ship rules and outstanding coastal maps deserved two
thumbs up. In the following year, I wrote the
Montjoie rule booklet and
Robin Hood campaign (1993). I then published the Byzance medieval
ship rules. I hand-drew 3 large
medieval boats and created a
Fortified Harbor extension compatible with the Fortified City,
to replace Eurogames' official one that was never released (until
very recently...). I
also wrote a few additional rules for Viking ships with a scenario
that were never published and started a series of 10 ship-based
scenarios with historical background that was never completed. At
that time, we were in 1996 and after 13 years of playing almost
exclusively the Cry Havoc games, I switched to PC games with Lords
of The Realm II. Just like anybody, I played the Age of Empires/Age
of Kings series (but by-passed Age of Mythology). Over the last years, I've been a die-hard fan of Medieval: Total War
(versions I and II).
Interesting enough, I uncovered my old Cry Havoc boxes for the
first time since 1996 in November 2003 to show them to my (then) 11-year old
son: he insisted to use the maps for his Warhammer and Lord of The
Rings figures but I refused: I still love this game and doesn't want
him to destroy them...
In 2003, the works of Bob Gingell, an English scholar, was posted
on the web site of
Alex
Henderson: He had translated and adapted all the Cry Havoc
material available in French. This reignited my interest for the
game and I then found a Yahoo forum that helped me realize that
there was still an active community of English-speaking players. I
quickly created an equivalent forum for the French community as
France is the country where the game had been the most successful.
After a couple of months of active exchanges with a growing number
of fans, I decided to create the Cry Havoc Fan website to share my
various old creations with the community. To be really global in
scope, the site was made bilingual (French and English) to reach out
to the largest base of players. These original maps have been
grouped in extensions with varied themes, like the
Caravanserai,
Nefs & Galleys, the
Welsh Castle and more.
Three months later, a new version of the site was released with
the desire to become the definitive web site for anything related to
this outstanding game: Detailed presentation of each game of the
series, new extensions (from me or other community members), On Line
versions (be it CyberBoard or Vassal) and other materials created by
various people.
I met later on with Philippe Gaillard, owner of a publishing
company named
Historic’One and former author of Cry Havoc maps and scenarios
published in Claymore in the 90’s. Philippe partners with
professional printers and we decided to publish the original maps I
had created in the Shoppe.
For several years, I had been trying to contact Duccio Vitale,
the designer of the French versions of the various games who
significantly enhanced the gameplay and gave Cry Havoc its
international exposure. Contact was finally made in 2008 and a lot
of background information was made available, especially related to
the last installments that never got published due to technical and
economical reasons: Dragon Noir
3 and the Fortified
Harbor. Duccio sent me the original artwork for the four maps of
the latter as well as the various Viking and Saxon characters that
were planned to come with the boxed game. Philippe Gaillard and I
have been assembling the various elements over one year and are
now pleased to propose them in the
Shoppe.
These are real collector items for those people that have been
waiting for them for so long.
In the 90s, I had read Pierre Aubé's book on the Norman Eastern
Empires and I had been fascinated by the incredible life of Robert
Guiscard. I really wanted to design a game around this colorful
character, but I was not a character designer. I still did some
tests and took the plunge. The task was monumental, with a project
that took me 2 years of hard work, but the game was finally released
in 2013 and it was a great success. The other opuses of the Norman
Saga followed one another, with counter sheets that got thicker over
time. In 2022, we took another step forward with the release of
Sherwood, a game that aims to be very accessible to expand and renew
our circle of players. And technically, it is our first game with a
hard box. Our new project, Oppidum, takes us out of the Middle Ages
and I admit that I enjoyed immersing myself in a period of history
that I had not analyzed in detail since high school. |
