Possible Future Games of History Past?

One of the things I like doing other than designing and playing board games is reading about history -- albeit slowly; I am not a quick reader and I don't have the attention span to keep going for long periods. Over the last couple of years or so I've been mostly reading books about earlyish medieval England, mostly around the years roughly 900 to 1200 CE, but looking into some other periods as well.  Many of the stories and personalities I read about suggest subject matter for games, and I have a couple of ongoing projects based on these (see The Castle War and Ætheling Business), but I am slowly building up a list of historical things I would like to make games about and I thought I would mention a few of them here.

These are mostly thematic hooks that I would like to work with, and don't yet have more than the vaguest idea of how to implement them, but as I generally have more difficulty attaching a theme or setting to a mechanism than vice versa, so this seems a reasonable starting place, and a list I can go back to if I feel the need to work on something new.

So, some of these ideas, in no particular order... 

The coronation of Henry the Young King
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, where they 
assert that it is public domain.

Henry, the Young King, son of Henry II of England, crowned as co-king during his father's lifetime, died before he was able to take over the kingdom in his own right. He was part of a failed rebellion against his father, and then ended up touring Europe, racking up eyewatering debt but being a superstar of the tournament scene. This tournament tour thing -- which were more about ritualised, "play" wars rather than the arena-based jousts of movies -- sounds like it could be something interesting to explore as a game, particularly centred around a glamorous young man and his exploits. Maybe players are in Henry's traveling retinue and trying to excel on the tournament field and stay in favour by not outshining their leader.

The town where I live, Wantage, is probably best known as the birthplace of the Saxon king Alfred the Great, but there was a period leading up to the mid-19th century when it was a notorious and wretched hive of scum and villainy. This period came to an end when the town was cleaned up by a priest, the Reverend W J Butler, who encouraged and oversaw a period of building and regeneration, and many of the finer buildings in the town are directly linked to him. I would love to make a game about this period of Wantage's history, but make it so that it is reasonably accessible to non-gamers -- it would be great if it could be sold at the local museum. I kind of feel that I want this to be a tile laying game of some sort.

Much further back in time, the Second Punic War was the one with Hannibal and his elephants rampaging around what is now Italy and causing problems for Rome. There were three major pitched battles fought on Italian soil, all historically won by Hannibal's forces, but he never quite managed to finish Rome off. In each of these battles, Rome fielded a fresh, full-strength army, while Hannibal had a dwindling portion of his original army, bolstered by whatever allies he had been able to rally to his cause. My plan is to make a game (probably a card game) where players compete over these three battles; the Rome player always starts at full strength, but the Hannibal player loses resources each time. If Rome wins any of the three battles, that player wins the game, so the aim is largely to make each of the earlier battles more costly for Hannibal than necessary.

Back to Saxon times, Æthelflæd was a daughter of Alfred the Great, who was married to the lord of Mercia, after whose death she continued to fight to reclaim her kingdom's lands from the occupying Danes, and alongside her brother, King Edward the Elder, made great progress in returning chunks of England to Anglo-Saxon control. One of the sources I have read tells of how Æthelflæd launched raids into the Danelaw to liberate relics of saints from the occupied areas in order to return them to safety, and that aspect of her story is one which appeals to me for making into a game. This could actually work as a solo challenge game, or maybe an asymmetric 2-player thing.

A few decades later, in the reign of Edgar the Peaceable, there was a period of monastic reform in England, where the various abbeys and monasteries were... strongly encouraged, shall we say?... to adopt the Rule of Benedict for their practices. One book I read on this period paints this as a case of the king promoting this in order to ensure that all the monks were praying in the "correct" way as part of a national defence policy. After all, what is the point of having swords and armour if you don't also have the favour of The Almighty? There has to be a game in that reform process, which sounds again like it might be a solo game, but I don't have any clear ideas yet here.

Finally, back to the mother of the aforementioned Young King, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This was a woman who was a Duchess in her own right for most of her life, married to the King of France, and then the King of England, went to the Holy Land on Crusade, had three of her sons crowned as kings (two reigned in their own right), spent 16 years imprisoned by her husband, who she survived, living on into her eighties, influencing European politics through her own actions and her offspring pretty much to the end. I don't have a clear idea of what part of her story to build a game around yet, but I'm thinking about it...

I have no idea what, if anything, I will do with these thoughts, but I am sure the list will grow longer. I am up for collaborating on some of them, if anyone I gel with fancies a try; and if someone beats me to making some of them, that is cool too. Ideas are just ideas, and useless until they are acted upon -- and these are only half ideas.