When the Past Becomes a Mechanic

When history has your name on it

History changes when you discover that your family is somewhere inside it.

I am a McDougal. Clan MacDougall is part of my heritage. That does not make the accomplishments of people who lived centuries ago mine, and it certainly does not make every choice they made right because I happen to carry the name. But it changes the way I look at certain places and objects.

Gylen Castle is not simply a dramatic Scottish ruin standing above the sea. Dunollie is not simply another old castle near Oban. The Brooch of Lorn is not merely an unusual piece of silverwork behind museum glass.

Those places and objects are attached to a name my family still carries.

There is something grounding about looking backward hundreds of years and realizing that people bearing that name lived in those places, chose sides, defended land, won some struggles, lost others, and left consequences behind them. That is where Gylen: The Brooch of Lorn began.

A castle on Kerrera

Gylen Castle stands near the southern end of the island of Kerrera off the coast of Argyll. Historic Environment Scotland dates the surviving tower house to about 1582 and describes a four-storey structure set on a high rocky promontory. Its defenses included an outer court and a forework protecting the approach to the tower.

The castle did not survive the seventeenth century intact. Covenanting forces captured and burned Gylen in 1647. The physical record is unusually tangible: archaeological work has found evidence of the fire in the masonry and destruction deposits, and the site appears never to have been reoccupied afterward. Canmore's record for Gylen is an excellent place to dig into the surviving structure and archaeology.

Even the geography matters. The MacDougalls had once been Lords of Lorn, part of a maritime world whose power was measured not only in acreage but in islands, sea routes, strongholds, landing places, and the ability to move through western Scotland. Dunollie's Clan MacDougall history traces that older lordship and the network of castles associated with the family.

By the 1640s the clan no longer held the medieval power it once had, but land, local standing, maritime access, family identity, and political allegiance were still intertwined. When national conflict reached Argyll, it was not arriving in a vacuum.

Crown, Covenant, church, and clan

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms are difficult to turn into a tidy paragraph because they were not a tidy conflict. Religion mattered. Royal authority mattered. Church government mattered. Patronage, land, clan relationships, local rivalries, and survival mattered too.

The Scottish crisis of the 1630s centered in part on Charles I's attempts to impose changes on the Church of Scotland. The National Covenant of 1638 organized resistance to those changes, and the confrontation between the Crown and the Scottish Kirk helped set in motion years of civil war. National Records of Scotland preserves a useful window into that pivotal 1638 General Assembly.

It is too simple, however, to say the Covenanters rejected monarchy. They did not. The deeper disagreement concerned what monarchy was allowed to mean. The Covenanters could affirm a hereditary king while also insisting that the king ruled under God, was bound by law and covenant, and could not claim Christ's place as Head of the Church. The Church of Scotland's historical overview gives a concise account of that struggle over royal supremacy and church government.

Clan MacDougall remained Royalist. That loyalty was not merely an abstract argument about political theory. The family had land, castles, inherited standing in Argyll, and centuries of identity tied to the existing order. Theology, loyalty, family position, commerce, and survival did not live in separate boxes for the people making decisions at the time.

I cannot look backward four centuries and claim to know every private motive of every MacDougall who chose the Royalist side. I do not need to. The documented fact that the clan stood with the Royalist cause is enough to make the consequence personal: in 1647 the wider war arrived at Gylen.

The Brooch was more than treasure

The Brooch of Lorn gives the story its human-scale objective.

National Museums Scotland describes the surviving brooch as an elaborate silver status object dominated by a central rock crystal and surrounded by turret-like projections. Study of its style points to a setting around 1600, while the central stone may have an older history.

Then there is the inherited story.

Clan tradition connects the Brooch to Robert the Bruce and the Battle of Dalrigh in 1306. According to that tradition, a MacDougall warrior caught Bruce during his escape, tore away his cloak, and captured the brooch fastening it. The surviving silver setting is later than that battle, which means the tradition and the artifact cannot simply be treated as one perfectly documented chain.

I do not see that as a reason to throw the story away.

There is documented history. There is material evidence. There is clan tradition. They are not always the same thing, and a responsible historical game should say which is which. But inherited tradition is itself part of history because it tells us what a family or community remembered and chose to carry forward.

For generations of MacDougalls, the Brooch meant more than its material value. It represented status, family continuity, Lorn, and an older story about Bruce. By the seventeenth century it was associated with Gylen. When the castle fell in 1647, the Brooch left MacDougall possession. It was returned to the family in 1824, 177 years later.

That gave me the ending of the game before I had designed the beginning.

The attackers are not simply trying to knock down a castle.

They are trying to reach the Brooch.

Turning Gylen into a mechanic

Gylen: The Brooch of Lorn is a three-player asymmetric siege. Two players attack. One player becomes the MacDougall defender.

The historical siege did not unfold as nine neat game phases called Morning Mist, High Sun, and Gloaming. There were no Resolve cubes at Kerrera in 1647. A Spade did not literally rally a broken defensive line.

Those things are game design, and I think a historical game is stronger when it admits that plainly.

The game fights over four Fronts at once: Shore Landing, Kerrera Outlands, Outer Court, and Forework. The Shore Landing and Kerrera Outlands are thematic abstractions representing the attackers' movement across Kerrera. The Outer Court and Forework are based on documented features of the castle complex.

Each phase, both attackers secretly commit a card to every Front. The defender must answer every Front and receives one additional card to reinforce a single position. Nobody gets to see the complete enemy plan and then calculate a perfect reply. Everyone commits under uncertainty. Then the cards are revealed.

That uncertainty is the heart of the siege.

The suits tell the battle

The suits deliberately speak a simple language.

I do not want the player consulting a military-effects table every time cards are revealed. Red hurts. Spades hold. Clubs accomplish nothing.

There is one rule I particularly like: the effect belongs to the card, not to the person who played it. An attacker whose Spade becomes the highest card can accidentally rally the MacDougalls. A defender whose Heart or Diamond dominates a Front can damage his own position. Players choose where to commit resources, but they do not control every consequence.

That creates mistakes, misreads, and reversals. It also makes the system feel less like two players performing arithmetic against a health track.

Gylen does not fall one wall at a time

A Front with no Resolve is Broken, but one Broken Front is not enough. All four must be Broken simultaneously before the outer defense collapses.

That one condition creates most of the defender's tension.

The attackers can have three positions in ruins and still not be through. The defender may not need to rebuild everything. One successful Rally can be enough to keep the whole outer defense alive for another phase.

So the decisions become uncomfortable. Where can I afford to lose? Which Front has to survive? Do I reinforce the obvious weak point, or is that exactly where the attackers expect me to commit my best card?

Then, eventually, the battlefield can collapse all at once.

When every Front is Broken simultaneously, the transition is permanent. Shore, Outlands, Court, and Forework disappear from play. There is nowhere farther to retreat. Every remaining phase becomes an assault on the Inner House.

And sitting beyond the Forework from the beginning of the game is the Ace of Clubs: the Brooch of Lorn.

If a Heart or Diamond controls an Inner House assault, the Brooch is seized and the attackers win. A Spade holds it. A Club means the assault has exhausted itself.

The game has narrowed from an island and four defensive positions to one object.

History records that Gylen fell and the Brooch was taken. The game asks a different question: what if the MacDougalls had held just a little longer?

That is not an attempt to rewrite history. It is one of the things games can do that a history book should not. The book tells me what happened. The game can make me understand what is at stake and then let me push against the outcome.

Dalrymple: history already hiding in the deck

Dalrymple: Cursed Diamonds began somewhere completely different.

It began with the Nine of Diamonds.

That card has carried the nickname the Curse of Scotland for centuries. The difficulty is that nobody can prove exactly why.

The International Playing-Card Society surveys several competing explanations, and the phrase appears too early for some of the popular stories later attached to it. An Oxford University Press discussion of the nickname likewise shows why the etymology remains unsettled.

One traditional explanation connects the card to John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, and the Massacre of Glencoe. The visual connection is striking because the Dalrymple/Stair arms feature nine lozenges, diamond-shaped heraldic figures, arranged on a saltire. The British Armorial Bindings database preserves examples of the nine-lozenge arms.

Can I prove that Glencoe is the true reason the Nine of Diamonds became the Curse of Scotland? No.

Do I need to pretend I can in order to use that centuries-old association as the seed for a game? Also no.

Games tell stories. My job is to distinguish the tradition from certainty, then decide what story the mechanism can tell.

Glencoe and the horror of hospitality betrayed

The Massacre of Glencoe took place on 13 February 1692 after the overthrow of James VII and II and during the Williamite government's effort to pacify Jacobite resistance in the Highlands.

Highland chiefs were ordered to swear allegiance to William by the end of 1691. Alasdair MacIain of Glencoe attempted to comply, but delays and the requirement to reach an official authorized to receive the oath caused him to miss the deadline. He eventually swore the oath at Inveraray in early January.

It did not save Glencoe.

Government troops from the Earl of Argyll's Regiment were quartered among the MacDonalds. They lived with them, ate with them, and accepted their hospitality. Then the military orders came to attack the people who had been hosting them.

The National Library of Scotland preserves the order sent through the military chain to Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. The National Trust for Scotland explains the political setting and the later parliamentary inquiry, which condemned what happened as murder under trust.

That phrase gets to the center of the story for me.

Seventeenth-century Scotland was not short of violence. What made Glencoe especially infamous was betrayal under hospitality. The victims had reason to believe the men living among them were guests. The soldiers had accepted that trust. Then the relationship reversed.

That reversal, not a casualty table, became the heart of Dalrymple.

First I teach you to love Diamonds

For most of Dalrymple, Diamonds are good.

Every Diamond you capture in a normal round is worth +1 point. Winning a trick without a Diamond earns nothing.

So the game trains you.

Win Diamonds. Watch Diamonds. Fight over Diamonds. Feel good when several land in a trick you capture.

Meanwhile, nine cards sit face down in the center Tableau. One of them is the Nine of Diamonds. The first four positions are guaranteed safe; the Curse is hidden somewhere in the bottom five.

Everyone therefore knows what is coming.

Nobody knows exactly when.

That was an important design choice. Glencoe is not represented by a random event that may or may not happen. The final reversal is inevitable. Only its timing is uncertain.

Each safe Tableau card establishes trump for another normal round. The used Flip Card later returns to the deal pool, so the available deal grows as the game progresses. Hands naturally get larger. More cards circulate. More Diamonds can be fought over. The Tableau gets smaller.

The game grows while the threat becomes more obvious.

Then the rules betray you

Eventually someone turns over the Nine of Diamonds.

There is no trump.

There are no positive Diamond points.

Every Diamond you capture is now worth -3 points.

The game does not merely make the scoring suit bad. It makes it three times as powerful in the opposite direction.

The instinct the game spent all those rounds teaching you has become dangerous.

If you are void in the led suit, you can sluff a Diamond into somebody else's trick. Suddenly the table's vocabulary changes.

For most of the game: Give me the Diamonds.

In the Curse Round: Take them.

That is Dalrymple.

The game does not ask players to reenact the murders at Glencoe. There are no MacDonald pawns to eliminate. Nobody receives victory points for casualties. The massacre is not converted into a spectacle.

Instead I took one reason Glencoe remained so infamous and translated it into the language of a trick-taking game:

Something you welcomed becomes the source of your suffering.

That is not a complete history of Glencoe. It is a mechanic telling one true part of the story.

History as backdrop, not a cage

This is the balance I want to keep exploring in historical design.

A game does not need to simulate every documented detail of an event in order to have something truthful to say about it. In fact, trying to reproduce everything can bury the very idea that made the history interesting in the first place.

If I want to catalogue Gylen Castle, I should write about Gylen Castle.

If I want to explain every faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, I should write history.

If I want to provide a comprehensive account of Glencoe, a thirty-minute trick-taking game is a terrible medium.

But games are exceptionally good at systems, and systems create experiences.

Gylen creates pressure. There are too many places to defend and not enough certainty. Positions fail. Some can be rallied. Eventually everything can collapse, and then the entire game becomes about saving one thing that matters.

Dalrymple creates expectation. It establishes value, reinforces that value repeatedly, lets players become comfortable with it, and then changes the meaning of the thing they have learned to desire.

Those are not historical simulations.

They are historical stories told through mechanisms.

Truth, tradition, and abstraction

I have found it useful to keep three ideas separate.

Documented history is what the surviving sources, records, objects, and archaeology support. Gylen was burned in 1647. The Brooch was a MacDougall heirloom. Glencoe happened in February 1692. John Dalrymple was centrally involved in the government policy that led to it.

Tradition is inherited memory whose details may be harder to prove. The Brooch's connection to Robert the Bruce belongs here. So does the theory connecting the Nine of Diamonds' nickname directly to Dalrymple and Glencoe.

Abstraction is where I enter as a designer. The four Fronts and Resolve track in Gylen are abstractions. The three-day structure is an abstraction. Turning Diamonds from +1 to -3 in Dalrymple is an abstraction.

The goal is not to blur those categories until folklore becomes fact.

The goal is to let all three contribute honestly to the story.

Heritage without mythology

Personal heritage creates one more temptation: making your own ancestors the heroes.

I do not want to do that.

The MacDougalls were not automatically right because I carry the name. The Covenanters were not automatically villains because Covenanting forces destroyed a MacDougall castle. Their insistence on Christ's headship over the Church and limits on royal authority came from serious theological convictions that mattered profoundly to Scotland.

At the same time, serious convictions do not make every action taken by a political or military faction righteous.

The same care matters at Glencoe. It is easy to flatten the massacre into England versus Scotland or Campbell versus MacDonald. Scotland was still a separate kingdom in 1692. The troops involved were Scottish government forces acting within a Williamite program aimed at Highland Jacobite resistance. Clan identities mattered, but the event cannot be explained honestly as nothing more than an ancient clan feud.

None of that makes the suffering smaller.

It makes the history more useful because the people in it remain human rather than becoming symbols drafted into a modern argument.

Fun still matters

There is another mistake historical games can make: becoming so afraid of mishandling history that they stop being games.

I do not want that either.

I want Gylen to produce bluffing, misreads, coordinated attacks, desperate rallies, accidental mistakes, and that moment when the defender survives a phase that looked impossible.

I want Dalrymple to produce clever trick play, painful sluffs, laughter, groans, and the sudden shift around the table when the Nine appears and everyone realizes the rules they had become comfortable with no longer reward the same instincts.

Fun is not the enemy of learning.

Very often, fun is what opens the door.

A player might finish Gylen, look at the Ace of Clubs, and ask, “Wait. The Brooch is real?”

Someone might finish Dalrymple and ask, “Why is the Nine of Diamonds called the Curse of Scotland?”

Now the game has done something valuable.

It did not deliver a lecture. It created curiosity.

The table can be a doorway

I do not need Gylen to teach a complete course on the Covenanters. I need the Brooch to matter enough that someone wonders why it mattered to the MacDougalls.

I do not need Dalrymple to explain every consequence of the Revolution of 1688. I need that face-down Nine to feel ominous enough that someone wants to know why Scotland has been cursing that card for centuries.

The rules can establish the story. A Designer Diary can go deeper. Then museums, archives, historical sites, primary sources, and historians can take the curious player as far as they want to go.

That relationship between games and history makes more sense to me than trying to cram an encyclopedia into the box.

Why I keep coming back to these stories

There is a personal element to Gylen that I cannot remove, and I would not want to.

Hundreds of years separate me from the people who defended MacDougall lands in the seventeenth century. Their lives were not mine. Their victories are not accomplishments I earned. Their failures are not mine to hide.

But I carry the name.

The ruins are still there.

The Brooch is still there.

The records are still there.

The fire left marks in stone.

Somebody stood in that castle before it burned. Somebody carried that Brooch. Somebody watched a political and religious struggle that had consumed kingdoms arrive at a small island off the Scottish coast.

And centuries later, someone carrying that family name can sit in Virginia with a deck of cards and ask how to keep a fragment of that story alive.

I find that remarkable.