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"The story of the Second Civil War is short and simple. King, Lords and Commons, landlords and merchants, the City and the countryside, bishops and presbyters, the Scottish army, the Welsh people, and the English Fleet, all now turned against the New Model Army. The Army beat the lot." Sir Winston Churchill
The New Model Army was created by Parliament in 1645 to defeat the armies of King Charles I in the 1st Civil War. As Lord-General they chose Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had little interest in politics, but his second-in-command was Oliver Cromwell, already a leading member of the Independent Party in Parliament. As a military machine the New Model did all that was desired of it. They beat the Royalists at the Battles of Naseby and Langport, besieged his capital of Oxford and in 1646 Charles surrendered. Parliament needed to reach an accommodation with the King for a Settlement of the Kingdom, but he refused to yield any of his Royal Prerogatives. Secretly, he negotiated with Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians and English Radicals, anyone who could return him to power.
Man of Blood is an area movement and impulse game for two to four players recreating the Second English Civil War of 1648. The first player controls the New Model Army; the second the Parliamentarian Northern Association, Irish Army, Scottish Whigs, some lukewarm militia and a mutinous fleet; the third has a loose alliance of Cavaliers, Presbyterians, Welsh, and any ships that desert the Parliamentarians, and the fourth the Scots Engagers and Ulster Army. Players manoeuvre their forces from area to area across the map in order to destroy enemy regiments, capture towns, build up a navy and control the King. It has a 34 by 22 inch map depicting 17th Century Britain from the English Channel to the Highlands and 280 half-inch counters representing the generals, admirals, regiments and warships that fought the war.
