There’s been a lot of positive buzz out there in the boardgaming community for Multiman Publishing’s just-released game WARRIORS OF GOD, a low-complexity wargame about The Hundred Years War. Jeanne D’Arc, Henry V, the English longbow, and even Robin Hood make guest appearances in the dramatic and often extremely fluid struggle for control of France between 1135 and 1435. The result is nothing short of a masterpiece of accessible wargame design—highly thematic, spirited, and fun gameplay coupled with some of the finest graphic design and production values we’ve seen to date in the genre and easy-to-manage rules should make this one a must-buy for anyone interested in the period or in light wargaming in general.

But I’m going to let others sing WARRIORS OF GOD’s praises at length and instead focus on another game that didn’t garner nearly the attention or praise that it has in the few short works since its release. JOAN OF ARC is a game that I bought some ten years ago—at the time I knew almost nothing about it other than that it was about The Hundred Years War.

Pascal Bernard’s 1998 game (published by Tilsit in France as MONTJOIE) was a light Euro-wargame for two to six players featuring fairly simple but somewhat confusing rules, beautiful Tarot-style cards with period artwork, and stone-finished resin castle towers to represent towns and fortresses. It was a pretty great looking game for its time, and it was also pretty good in a “not really all that great of a design, but fun to play” way. Unfortunately, it seemed like I was the only person who felt that way about it and it hasn’t enjoyed a particularly great reputation. None of my friends really cared for it, so it sat on the shelf. Some years later, I introduced another group to it and it was met with indifference and an almost complete disinterest in playing the game again.

I still have JOAN OF ARC mainly because of my interest in the history of the period but I know I’ll likely never get to play it again. All of these very cool advanced rules, historical variants, and optional scenarios will never be played and all those really neat stone castles will languish forevermore in their plastic baggie. I’m notorious for jettisoning games that I may like but have a poor replay prognosis but somehow I just can’t let this one go. It has weathered flurries of trading activity and many eBay purges of my game collection over the past decade and in another ten years I totally expect to see it still sitting there gathering dust.

A couple of weeks ago, I was scouting around for a new PC wargame to kill some time with and I was poking around French design house AGEOD’s website to see about grabbing a demo for their latest game, NAPOELON’S CAMPAIGNS. For those unfamiliar with AGEOD’s games, they do some very nice board-style wargames for PC that are unfortunately hampered by HUGE learning curves and strange (at best) translations of oddly incomplete manuals. I noticed something peculiar on their website- a link to a newly released game called MONTJOIE. “Certainly,” I thought, “that doesn’t have anything to do with the board game. No one likes it enough for there to be a PC game.”

Well, I was wrong. MONTJOIE, developed by Tchounga Games in association with designer Pascal Bernard, is in fact a PC version of the board game. The thought of finally getting to play the game—and more than once every five years—was more than enough to convince me to part with thirty five bucks for a 230mb direct download. I didn’t even bother with the demo and just went straight for the full version. I also completely forget about getting that NAPOLEON’S CAMPAIGNS demo that I had gone to the site for in the first place.

What a surprise the game turned out to be. MONTJOIE is not only a 1:1 translation of the board game to an electronic format, it’s actually- somehow- a better and more playable game. It helps a lot that all those optional and advanced rules are integrated seamlessly into the game and that there are a huge variety of ways to play; the original board game edition, an “Xtreme” version that is totally gets biz-zay in your face, and several alternate historical scenarios that offer slightly altered rules and narrate the factual elements of the game through elaborately detailed (and hypertexted) scripted events.