That's it then. Ground to a 3-way deadlock after 8 years.

Very enjoyable game despite the disappointing result. The map needs some attention, but the idea (5-player expansion of Hundred) is a good one. Thanks Matthew for the opportunity and for the GMing - faultless (apart from your attempt to resurrect a Castilian fleet to hold me up even further!)

France is the obvious target with the map as it is - surrounded by the other four and an easy victim. And so it went. Once France was weakened Castile and Aragon decided to split off and fight Burgundy and me (England) but they had little chance of making progress. A fairly attritional war until Aragon stabbed Castile in 1306 (I think it was.) I may have missed a trick there; I wasn't fast enough of the mark to offer friendship to Castile, which might have changed the game, and he quickly dropped out. Aragon proposed that he and I take on Burgundy, but it seemed clear to me that he would gain a lot more than I would out of that one.

The final problem was the map - the sea spaces are totally divided into three sections - those to the north of France, the Med, and the two/three spaces in the West. England is always going to control the northern waters with no challenge let alone difficulty; Only Aragon gets a look in with the Med; and there is little room for movement in the West. Fairly early Castile tried to persuade me that there was no way into that area for me; I'm still not convinced that was true, but it was always going to take a long time (in the event Aragon's stab undermined Castile's defence.)

Those are the problems which need to be fixed before this becomes the excellent small variant it could become (alongside such as Baltic.)

1. Find a way to give France a decent game - at the very least it needs a fleet on the Channel coast. A France-Burgundy alliance might be interesting, but I doubt whether Burgundy would see enough mileage in it to make it a realistic starter.

2. Free up the western waters - I'd suggest that a new space is needed west of the current Mid-Atlantic and possibly touching Gibraltar and the Atlantic space in the north-west.

3. Open up the Med to somebody other than Aragon. At present there is almost no hope of anybody coming from the north managing to build even a single fleet there even if they do manage to take Piedmont or Languedoc.

But don't get me wrong - I think this map has huge potential.