A Gest of Robin Hood Board Game Review

Year Published: 2024

Players: 2

Playing Time: 45-120 minutes

COIN games, short for counter-insurgency, have become more numerous in recent years. What was once a dusty, obscure wing of hobby board gaming has become at least a touch more mainstream.

Since most of the genre’s early successes were lengthy, rules-dense, and featuring historical settings that appealed only to small subsets of interested gamers, several games have attempted to distill the gameplay of COIN into something that’s more accessible.

A Gest of Robin Hood is one of the more recent attempts, and due to the popularity of the Robin Hood folklore, quickly became perhaps COIN’s most well-known “introductory” title.

COIN games feature, as you might expect, two or more factions that have asymmetric goals, and some aspect of gameplay simulates the “insurgency” aspects of the name, wherein a marginalized, oppressed, or upstart force is trying to undermine or overthrow the existing power structures. In Gest, Robin Hood and his Merry Men are the insurgents. The Sheriff of Nottingham and his forces are the established presence. The game avoids a clear Good/Evil distinction here, but we’ll talk more about that later.

I do not have extensive experience with the COIN genre, so I will not be placing Gest in this context. Rather, I am approaching it as I think many are: as gamers potentially interested in the genre, but wanting something that isn’t so intimidating that we struggle to bring it to the table.

The short version of this review is that Gest is a fascinating game with a lot to enjoy, but that its various historical ambitions and its mechanical legacy in COIN games stifle what I believe is its full potential.

The Gameplay of Gest of Robin Hood

Players have three options for action types, and the selection of these also determines initiative for the next round.

The lowliest option, which also assures you top initiative next round, permits you a single action from a menu that is unique to your player action.

The middle option corresponds to an event card that is drawn each round, which will have two events, generally one each that benefits either faction. These can be worthless or immensely powerful depending on the game state at the time a card is drawn. These cards aren’t endless, but are randomized sufficiently that you can’t count on a specific event arriving at any moment.

The last option is a more powerful version of the first. You can perform your chosen primary menu action (Plot) more times, and also optionally a secondary action (Deed). But you are guaranteed to have the second choice of action next round, and the plots and deeds also generally cost enough money that you can’t simply perform them endlessly.

On two occasions at specific points, there will be an inspection by the King, which follows a specific procedure that awards progress in some areas and resets other portions of the board for the next era of play. These inspections break the game up to where it feels a bit like a three act play. Not a bad thing, given the inherent theatricality of the source material.

Robin Hood uses guerilla-style tactics to spread dissent, rob caravans or travelers on the road, and set up camps that act as minor strongholds for future operations.

The Sheriff’s forces apply their brute force in more direct ways, revealing and capturing Merry Men, quelling dissent, and looting towns for goods to be shipped to the capital. The arrival of these goods represents significant boons for the Sheriff, but they must be guarded against Mr. Hood’s robbery attempts.

The whole plays out as a tug of war between Order and Justice, and it’s this track that determines the winner. Many actions you take won’t directly affect this track, but they’ll set up circumstances that will allow you to do so. These pivotal actions – and the prevention of them for your opponent – drive much of the game’s tension.

Procedure and Freedom in Conflict Games

There’s an emergent freedom in Gest that typifies its best features, where you have the board before you, ripe with possibility, and many avenues to explore to achieve your ends.

At least, to a point.

As I’ve gleaned from other writings on COIN games, and have now experienced firsthand, there’s a fair amount of procedure involved in these titles.

Gest is not exempt from this, even as it attempts to streamline the format into something that can be played in under two hours.

But aren’t all games procedural to a large extent? Yes, but there are structures that highlight this fact more than others. I’ll give you an example:

The event deck takes an amusing, almost baffling number of steps to properly construct, and there are several rigid rules necessary to prepare it properly. Yes, there’s some randomness in events that appear, but the overall cadence of the game is never altered and there are multiple hyper-specific walkthroughs of deck preparation in the rulebooks (plural) to ensure you get it right.

This is procedural in the micro, but in the macro it creates a predictable flow to gameplay instead of allowing for more narrative freedom as a result of full variability in the deck.

This is undoubtedly for play-balancing reasons, and some of the equally procedural steps in the inspection rounds are – to my eye – clearly there to balance the imbalances that can (and will) occur during each of the game’s three Acts. This is probably necessary to maintain the strategic integrity of the design, but at times I can’t help but feel like I’m being presented a path to follow instead of being asked to blaze my own trail. It’s a constriction of that freedom, whereas I’d want to see the freedom expanded upon. A game without these minor “reset buttons” would likely appeal to me more, with more varied and disparate late-game states that better tell the story of the entirety of the game’s tug of war.

Again, simply removing these rounds would break too much in the design to work as-is, so it would need other alterations to work. But their presence is noticeable in its effect on player progress and emergent, holistic narrative.

Some might accuse me of wishing that the game be something that it’s not intended to be, which is an occasional crutch for some in critique. But I’d argue that the more organic, and more exciting, push and pull of the “normal” rounds is what it’s trying to be in its heart of hearts, and these inspection rounds and rigid structural elements are limiting factors preventing it from achieving its full potential.

Asymmetry and Balance

Commenting on game balance in these things is a fool’s errand. I’m not that much of an expert, and I trust the designer and publisher to put out a game that’s broadly balanced between the two factions, disparate as they are.

What I – and anyone – can comment on with more authority, though, is the subjective feel and flow of gameplay.

The asymmetry is handled well. Robin Hood’s forces will never be the more intimidating of the two factions. They’re the underdogs that have to spread out and be a nuisance to the more overbearing forces of the Sheriff. Meanwhile, the Sheriff needs to corral and pummel groups of Merry Men, snuffing out camps and restricting them to the forests that represent their greatest systemic advantage.

This feels right, which is great. It’s extremely thematic gameplay at the best moments.

If there’s a potential downside, it’s that the random chance in various robberies, and the possibility of an enormously useful event swinging things to one side or another, means that I’ve seen lopsided, inevitable final thirds of the game in both directions. In such a zero-sum, 2P environment, it seems eminently possible for one player to turn a couple good breaks into an insurmountable lead. We’ve had close sessions and those that weren’t in doubt for the last 30-40% of the game, and I don’t think the quality of strategic play was markedly different in either.

I want the drama of those swings. These are arguably the game’s best moments. But I would be lying if I said I haven’t had some anticlimactic sessions for lengthy stretches of gameplay. The truth of my experience with Gest must include both of those things to be accurate.

Games as Historical Interpretation

Designer Fred Serval seems like a thoughtful guy, and the game’s extensive historical notes are a testament to this.

Dan Thurot’s review of Gest focuses on the variable portrayals of Robin Hood in the game, which draw on several sources and sort of amalgamate them into the game’s Robin Hood. Which is somewhat expected since Dan routinely finds the most interest for himself at the cross-section of history and ludology. His review is worth a read.

My approach is a bit less high-minded. It’s not that I don’t find the historical side fascinating. It’s that I am viewing the game as a plaything first and foremost. Games can be more than mere playthings in ways that elevate the medium to historical critique and artistry that warrants nuanced interpretation. But in this case, the marginalia of the designer’s assumptions about the source material are secondary to me, and engaging with these copious notes in the game’s rulebooks is not what I found myself gravitating toward.

It’s a somewhat modern trend to want or expect a designer’s thoughts on the subject matter to accompany a game. Not entirely modern, because there are long traditions of such think pieces in wargaming, and COIN games are only short steps away from wargaming’s mechanical waters. The game’s publisher, GMT, is also traditionally a publisher of wargames, and so there is an expectation for this among their regular customers.

Modern, though, because I don’t think we would have expected such treatment even 5-10 years ago for what’s largely seen as a highly fictionalized folk tale. More people imagine Disney’s Robin Hood than the realities of medieval life, though perhaps shaking us out of this assumption is part of Serval’s intent.

On the one hand, this is good. It’s creators thinking deeply and passionately about their creations, in ways perhaps they haven’t always. On the other hand, the game still lives and dies on its gameplay for me, and I latch on to a game’s emergent narrative during play much more than any underlying assumptions that informed the design. It’s nice if some want to dive more deeply into the historical context, but that’s not why I purchase and play most games. If the story is strong enough, it stands on its own during play without the text-based context in the extended rulebooks.

Board games can be interesting historical simulations and philosophical arguments, but are also occasionally limited by their format. Handling the depths of historical interpretation isn’t easy in any medium. Games themselves are exercises in varying levels of abstraction; good for the broad narrative, and for asking the player to consider new perspectives. But this can be at the expense of presenting the most immediately playable game.

This is me waffling, since I see both positives and negatives in this case from such an approach. But if I have a takeaway from this section, it’s something like this: I appreciate the thought that seems to be going into such subjects by game designers, and would like to see more of this. Conversely, I don’t want adherence to an historical precedent to mold games into lesser versions of themselves in terms of streamlining, possibility for drama and broad accessibility. Serval’s trying to do a lot here in terms of bringing a nuanced period piece to life, and succeeds in a lot of that goal, though it may overburden the design at times.

Ideally, these two are not at odds. In practice, though, I think they sometimes are. The simulationist cruft of many wargames is the entire point to some, and is a primary draw of many games. But this creates barriers to entry for those to whom this additional rules, procedural and upkeep overhead feels like work, not play. I think we see the fringes of this tension in Gest of Robin Hood.

A Gest of Robin Hood: Conclusions

In reading everything above, this review sounds more harsh to me than I originally intended.

I enjoy A Gest of Robin Hood, truly. It’s been fascinating to explore and fun to play. And despite being notorious among my friends for culling games from my collection that are merely “good,” Gest remains in my collection as I write and publish this, and will see more table time in the coming months and years.

The slight negativity I’m perceiving in the review above – and which I’m suspecting you inferred as well – is in large part because I think this game hints at greatness but doesn’t fully deliver on it. It’s a little too bounded, a little too safe, a little too competitively fragile. It’s trying to be an immediately-playable intro to a genre of games with a well-known and often light-hearted IP, while also trying to bring to life complex political relationships and conceptual ideas that tread in thematic gray-space that defies easy moral compartmentalization.

Which is extremely difficult.

Where I suspect previous COIN titles excel where this one struggles is in adding more players, thus creating a more emergent, organic system of play. It’s less zero-sum and thus less prone to anticlimactic periods, with more oblique methods to climb back to relevance and manipulate the game’s systems in ways that won’t immediately be overturned.

Even without being able to say that for certain about other COINs, there’s a slight disconnect I feel here when I compare it to the experiences of my favorite adventure games and asymmetric games, games that have those qualities I mentioned.

Conversely, my partner and I enjoyed the premise and execution of Gest enough to continuing exploring past the point where I penned this review, so am I unfairly nitpicking a really good experience or confirming that it never quite achieved greatness for me? Or some of both? Probably some of both.

It’s a step in the right direction for Serval relative to my tastes as well. A previous effort of his, Red Flag Over Paris, was equally interesting in historical and thematic premise but even more restrictive in gameplay in my experience with it. By comparison, Gest seems a welcome loosening of the belt into more interesting ludological territory.

For fans of the Robin Hood tale, COIN fans, or those curious about either, there’s a lot to enjoy here, and I also hope it represents a direction for the designer that he attempts to push even further in future efforts.