One of my professors believed that every generation needed to retell the story of Julius Caesar. In her mind, the story functioned as a sort of cultural tonic. Tyrant or hero, victim or opportunist — Caesar was a lens through which generations current and future might better witness themselves.

In playing Fred Serval’s A Gest of Robin Rood, the second installment in the Irregular Conflicts Series, itself a spinoff of the long-running COIN Series, the same could be said of everybody’s favorite forest fox. Is he a vagabond, robbing the rich for no other reason than because their wealth is there for the taking? Is he a lower-class hero, uplifting the poor? Has he been coopted by the gentlefolk, elevated to a lordling deprived of his privileges? Is he a crusader? A jokester? A kingsman? Does he venerate the Virgin Mary or has Maid Marian been invented to take her place? Eventually he’ll move into his gritty teenage years and relitigate the Battle of Normandy. Shhh. He gets embarrassed when we talk about that.

Nottingham and environs. Gorgeous.

Serval’s approach to Robin Hood resembles an archaeological cross-section, descending through modern asphalt to carriage turnpikes, medieval trackways, and Roman roads. Rather than setting sights on a single era, he draws from a wellspring of sources. Where one event card sees Robin contending with venomous traitors or attending an archery contest in a cunning disguise — a colorful hood! — the next action sees him shaking down wayward monks or transforming into a twelfth-century guerrilla. This is Robin Hood in all his forms, a superposition of bandit and liberator and trickster and everything in between.

Foremost among those identities is the game’s location in the COIN Series. It’s a mouthful that defies digestion, staying on the plate while the others go down. In a year dominated by easy access points to Volko Ruhnke’s now-storied system, with People Power and The British Way and Vijayanagara already on the line, A Gest for Robin Hood offers the gentlest entry of them all. Everything has been streamlined to a fine surface. The artwork is inviting. The operations and special activities, dubbed “plots” and “deeds,” have been trimmed. The duration is around forty-five minutes rather than two to five hours. The deck has been tightened so that every card matters. The rulebook… well, the rulebook is still written in GMT’s signature style, with all the verve of a furniture assembly manual. But there’s a learn-to-play booklet that walks players through a full ballad, the game’s epithet for a round, and the diminished complexity goes a long way toward defanging the usual bite of learning one of these things.

Still, it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, folktale provides a softer landing pad for those who’ve regarded the COIN Series curiously from the outside, wary of its political overtones or itemized rulebooks or relative complexity. On the other, the system that has defined a dozen other titles is like the abyss — peered into, it peers back.

The two-player initiative system returns from The British Way.

As in the rest of the series, this is a system that centers procedure over all else. Ruhnke’s inaugural title, Andean Abyss, reads like an insider’s gamification of serious counterinsurgency operations, probably because that’s precisely what it is. Although the series has wandered afield, producing some of its finest volumes as it edges farther from those initial overtures at war simulation, its roots have never quite withered.

Here’s what I mean. When you think of Robin Hood, what springs to mind? There’s a good chance your intuition is included somewhere in Serval’s portrayal. This is a Robin Hood who indeed robs from the rich to give to the poor. He lurks in the relative security of the Sherwood Forest, ambushes passing carriages laden with gold, and gallivants from one side of the shire to the other.

But the way those activities are expressed swings us back to series hallmarks. What does it mean to rob from the rich? It means rolling a die against the Sheriff of Nottingham’s defenses. What about giving to the poor? For that, the old support/opposition system that dominates most COIN volumes rears its stately head. The Sheriff sticks to the same basics that governed previous entries, functioning like a downscaled Colombia, Batista, Afghanistan, ARVN. To secure the submission of his subjects, he must show force. To keep his coffers healthy, he must extract taxes. His nose is buried in a hearts-and-minds textbook.

Along the way, Serval produces a thesis about state formation, about the proximity and distinctions between bandits and enforcers, about the ideological clash between rural foquismo and a more urban approach to insurgency. Along the way, he embraces a playfulness not often seen in this sort of game. The playbook includes instructions for a tarot spread using the event cards revealed in each ballad. It’s gripping stuff!

Robbing the rich. Or, in this case, the vicious.

But it’s also more textual than ludic. The best portions of A Gest of Robin Hood deal with questions of logistics and theft. When the Sheriff hopes to raise funds, he squeezes his parishes to produce carriages, economic hot-spots that trundle from the corners of the shire to Nottingham. There they will be converted into shillings and order, the Sheriff’s side of his tug-of-war with Robin Hood. If Robin happens to have Merry Men positioned along the way, especially in the crucial wooded periphery of Nottingham, he can interrupt their passage for some good old-fashioned highway robbery.

This isn’t the only object of Robin Hood’s antics. When there are no carriages about, he can also rob from a deck of victims. There’s a minor degree of customization afoot. Certain events add high-value targets to the deck — or, in the Sheriff’s case, add patrolling knights to disrupt the Merry Men. Meanwhile, Robin can choose whether to merely fleece his quarry or steal every farthing and even murder the poor sods. There are potential long-term ramifications for such brutality, blurring the lines between fanciful folktale and outright banditry.

Whatever his target, Robin’s success hinges on the roll of a die. Often, a flubbed roll presents a serious setback. The Sheriff can also play a shell-game, employing carriages loaded with extra guards. At every point, Robin must exhibit supreme caution, keeping the titular hero concealed among his Merry Men. Both sides thus get a chance to play at deception.

Curiously, the Sheriff never rolls a die. His operations — pardon me, plots — proceed with all the assuredness of a twentieth-century nation-state. As in previous COIN volumes, which portray insurgent activities as inherently testy but state activities as guaranteed in their outcome (provided they operate with sufficient resources and support), this delineation between Sheriff and Robin Hood is a peculiar one. The same goes for their relative mobility. The Sheriff’s men can gallop across the map in a heartbeat, but Robin slinks hither and yon. Certain events allude to his band’s ability to travel freely, using boats to move along rivers or the like, but on the whole his movements are restricted compared to those of the Sheriff.

COIN events have never looked so good.

These details feel like remnant assumptions, hangnails that were never trimmed from previous volumes. In, say, Cuba Libre or Andean Abyss, the government traveled freely because it had access to boats and helicopters. Here, contained within such a limited geography, Robin’s pokiness strikes the ear amiss.

These are small but instructive concerns. Put bluntly, Robin Hood is the more thrilling of the game’s factions — but he’s also trickier to play well. Perhaps that’s suitable, given their contrasting roles. Perhaps. But it’s also a source of some frustration. An aggressive Sheriff can corner Robin a little too easily, can make missteps, can suffer a string of poor events, and recover. Robin Hood must walk a tightrope at all times. Taking losses, especially those that imprison the Merry Men or Robin himself, can prove disastrous. Being eliminated from a particular theater, especially those isolated by the shire’s rivers, also strikes a significant blow.

I’m always wary of putting too much stock in balance. I have no doubt that some players will have inverse experiences to those that marked my sessions. Rather, my concerns have more to do with mouthfeel. A Gest of Robin Hood is chock-full of exciting morsels. Robbing a carriage. Turning a region against the Sheriff. Creeping into Nottingham to crack the treasury. One event lets a parish weaponize work stoppages and “peasant ignorance” to effectively opt them out of the game. Wonderful! What a perfect expression of the ways oppressed groups have historically warred with their overlords!

But while I’ve had a terrific time with certain aspects of A Gest of Robin Hood, I’ve also balked at its gristle. Invariably, these are the spots where it applies the COIN formula most stringently. The finicky procedures. Tallying patrols. Parishes teeter-tottering between submission and revolt. The royal checklist at the conclusion of each ballad. The best parts of this game are tethered to the earth by COIN procedures, not lifted skyward by them.

Robbing carriages.

In a way, its dual identity only deepens Serval’s thesis. Because A Gest of Robin Hood is as much a reflection of its author’s perspective as any other retelling of the bandit’s legend. Some Robin Hoods are dashing. Some are daring. Some are silly, irreverent, iconoclastic, holy. Some are gritty. Brrr. Let’s not talk about those ones.

This Robin Hood is procedural. He selects his activities from a dual-layer menu, melting into Sherwood Forest, but only after taking his principal action and never before. This Robin Hood is actuarial. He counts shillings to determine if he has enough funding to bribe a henchman into joining his band. This Robin Hood is Che Guevara. He is a folktale grasping at the roots of his own legend.

And that makes A Gest for Robin Hood a jest indeed. As an entry point to the COIN Series, it’s considerable. I find myself wishing it had been an entry point to something else instead.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.