Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 3

Labyrinth: The War on Terror by Volko Ruhnke

I was twelve when the War on Terror began, not quite fourteen when American invaded Iraq. The political and global climate created in the aftermath of 9/11 defined some of my most formative years – the time in my life when I first became aware of politics and tried to become politically active for the first time. By the time Labyrinth was released in 2010 I was in my twenties and living in Ireland. Labyrinth isn’t unique in being about a still ongoing war whose conclusion was far from determined when it was designed and published, but it is still a rarity within the hobby. That it was on such a major conflict, and one whose casualties extended well beyond a traditional notion of battlefields, certainly drew a lot of attention to it, as did the fact that its designer Volko Ruhnke was an analyst with the CIA at the time. Playing it fifteen years after its initial release, after America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 marked what is often considered the end of the War on Terror, is an interesting experience. This is not exactly a historical game, it was not made with enough distance from the events it covers for any real historical hindsight, but it captures a certain perspective on events of the time that we can look back on now and try our best to evaluate. It’s also an incredibly well-designed card-drive wargame (CDG).

GMT Games kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of Labyrinth and both its published expansions.

I first became aware of Labyrinth years ago, probably around 2011, and I first acquired a copy in 2016 with the release of the Awakening expansion. Sometime in the next year or so I played half of a game with a friend to learn the rules, but we never managed to schedule time to play a proper game. I ultimately traded it away in an attempt to reduce the size of my collection before moving house. It, along with Falling Sky (another Volko design), were markers of a previous unsuccessful attempt to “get into” wargaming. With the recent reprints of both Labyrinth and Awakening (the first for the latter), I decided that this was my opportunity to rectify my past failure and, equipped as I am with more experience in the hobby, finally play Labyrinth.

While I’m an established fan of Volko’s Levy and Campaign series and I would classify myself as broadly fond of the COIN series, my previous experience with his other CDG, Wilderness War, was not particularly favorable. I found that game incredibly obtuse and far mor complicated than its (relatively) thin rulebook would indicate. A lot of complexity is buried in its deck and after one play I haven’t been particularly excited to revisit it. It even made me wonder if heavier CDGs were my thing. This meant I had some trepidation about revisiting Labyrinth, after all these years would I just hate it?

Where Wilderness War is rooted in the tradition of point-to-point CDGs like We the People/Washington’s War or For the People, Labyrinth seems to draw more from the most famous CDG of all: Twilight Struggle. That is a slightly misleading notion, though, since where I could happily classify Wilderness War within that broader tradition of operational/strategic point-to-point CDGs, Labyrinth stands out far more as a unique take on the genre. It takes elements from Twilight Struggle and its ilk but carves out a distinct position somewhere between the two traditions, one that I’ve not seen before or since (not that I’m the world’s expert on this specific genre). Perhaps that’s because Labyrinth has a clear successor in the COIN series, but while it is easy to see the roots of COIN in Labyrinth it is an oversimplification to view this game as just an origin point. It is very much its own thing.

That’s enough vaguery, at some point we must consider what Labyrinth is. Labyrinth is played on a point-to-point map of boxes representing countries and regions in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, with a few fringe boxes for parts of East Asia and North America. Players compete over the status of Muslim majority countries (excluding Iran), trying to shift their level of governance across four levels ranging from Islamist Rule to Good and between political positions as an Ally, Neutral, or Adversary to the United States.

While played on a point-to-point map, you won’t be moving armies between these locations. Instead they are important for determining adjacency for some die roll modifiers and moving Jihadist cells without making a roll.

Victory is primarily achieved through manipulating these states, the US wants a certain number of national resources (each nation has a value based on its wealth) to be under Good governance while the Jihadist player wants the same but under Islamist rule. Both players also have an instant win condition, either eliminating all Jihadist cells on the map or detonating a WMD in the US. The Jihadist player will move wooden pieces representing cells between these regions, using them to trigger plots or enact terrorist violence, while the US player can drop in cubes representing armed forces into friendly or hostile countries, effecting a regime change in the latter. So far, so CDG: you have actions to take, you can spend Operations Points to take them.

If only it were so easy. In Labyrinth you will be rolling dice, lots of dice, and those fickle little cubes will ruin your plans. The Jihadist player must roll for essentially every action they take, constantly playing the odds and hoping that crucial actions come out in their favor. The US player has far more luck-free actions available but their main path to victory is via the War of Ideas action, which shifts the status of Muslim nations, and that is up to fate. While in individual moments I found myself cursing these rolls, on the whole I love them. You make so many dice rolls over the course of the game that the luck will balance out, assuming you make good choices about when to push your luck to the extreme by hoping for that 1 versus opting for safer plays. You must play your odds and not put all your eggs into one roll.

It dovetails nicely that Labyrinth is a game of creeping progress. Like its Volko-designed COIN descendants, this is a game that develops slowly with players achieving incremental progress rather than big blow out plays that shift the tide decisively in one big moment. Much of what you achieve on a given turn will be undone by your opponent on theirs, but over time you can shift the global position in your favor. It is a game to be played in a broad scope – nudging your way towards victory each turn while also putting out fires as much as possible.

You will have a turns where you achieve absolutely nothing because the dice were not in your favor, but the same is true of your opponent. Global change can feel glacial. That is not to say that Labyrinth is boring. It is incredibly tense. I have never felt secure in my position during a game in Labyrinth, even when it turned out I was only a turn or two away from victory. The dice giveth and they taketh away, and you can play the odds towards victory but you can never be confident in them. I was reminded frequently of a description designer Dan Bullock gave of playing Twilight Struggle for the first time, namely that it was like having a stomach ache for several hours (in a good way). I feel that way about Labyrinth – although I’m probably not as fond of the sensation as Dan was.

The card play helps, somewhat, to mitigate the at times comic chaos of trying to take actions. Each player plays two cards on their turn, resolving the first entirely before playing the second. This is a system I’ve never seen replicated in other CDGs and introduces an interesting tempo to Labyrinth. As in Twilight Struggle and its descendants, enemy events are resolved when you play those cards for Ops, for your events you must choose events or Ops. Because you play two cards, you can sometimes play an enemy event first and then mitigate it’s outcome with a second card play. It can also allow you to set up some key combos as you play back to back cards, using the second to capitalize on the opportunity created by the first. At the same time, you must be afraid of your opponent doing the same to you, particularly as the Jihadist player can achieve automatic victory by detonating a WMD in the US, which always keeps the US player on their toes.   

The combo potential of Oil Price Spike is particularly potent. There are two copies in the deck and since they both let you dig into the discard (always a fun, but dangerous, mechanism) and adjust the value of certain countries on the map for victory determination they can give you that final push to victory at a critical moment - if you draw one!

Before you begin a game of Labyrinth you must first decide how long you want it to be – measured in the number of times you will cycle through the deck. I have yet to play a game of three cycles, but most of my games have ended before then anyway. A single deck cycle feels a bit too short given how slowly the game develops – a victory by tiebreakers seems almost inevitable unless someone gets very (un)lucky. Two decks has so far been the sweet spot for me in terms of letting the game breathe and develop. However, at two decks Labyrinth is not a short game. I played most of my games asynchronously via the Steam app – a decent but not perfect implementation in terms of usability – which helped mitigate this to a degree. A game being long is no great criticism, it is almost the norm within wargaming, and each turn of Labyrinth moves along at a good pace when you get going but at the same time I don’t know if I love how long it can take. I have similar feelings about some of the COIN games where I just wish they moved a bit faster, but at least since Labyrinth is two players I don’t have to wait so long for my turn.

I don’t love the multiple cycles of the deck as a system for determining length, though. I appreciate that Labyrinth has a timer – if it was just a “play until someone wins” situation, the games could drag on for an eternity. However, I generally prefer unpredictability in my CDG decks – games like Here I Stand or Successors where the deck is reshuffled every turn.

In Labyrinth, to play well you want to know the contents of the deck, especially if you’re going to (potentially) see every card in it two or three times in a game. At the same time, I haven’t found that many instances of events that totally negate a play (i.e. if a player doesn’t know about that event before the game begins, they’re going to have a very bad time) and the few that exist you can learn quickly.

Perhaps two of the worst offenders that you have to watch out for, since they can instantly change the governance of a country. Ethopia Strikes can undo the enormous effort required in making a country Islamist Rule in the first place, while Musharraf can punish either player but can also be blocked. Still, these are in the minority and they can be managed.

Both sides also have ways of burying events, which is generally a must in games like this but I like how in Labyrinth they’re asymmetrical. In general the events in Labyrinth feel useful but not amazing, so the game strikes a good balance where you will play most of your cards for Ops with one or two key events a turn. I spend more time thinking about the order to resolve the enemy events I have in my hand than my own, which feels pretty par for the course for this style of CDG.

I have played six games of Labyrinth at the time of writing, and in true Volko fashion I feel that I am only now really coming to grips with it. This is partly due to the depth of the design, but just as much it is due to the asymmetry. The US and the Jihadist players are playing fundamentally different games. For my first few plays I was the Jihadist and once I had come to terms with how my faction played I still had no idea what my opponent was doing – which made for a pretty weird first few games. There probably are people out there who can grasp Labyrinth during their first game, but for me it took 3-4 plays to even understand every aspect of how the game works. In this regard the app version isn’t entirely helpful, and I learned a lot by setting up the physical game and playing it solo two-handed. Even then, it took a while for the importance of some systems to sink in. For example, for my first few games I didn’t really understand why the Ally/Neutral/Enemy status mattered for countries as I was entirely focused on level of governance, then I started playing as the US player and it became immediately apparent that the status was incredibly important. There is so much to unpick in this design and the two sides are so different that it could take me dozens of plays to really understand every aspect of Labyrinth.

However, I’m not sure if I want to put in those dozens of plays. I’ve enjoyed every game of Labyrinth I’ve played, but after six games my enthusiasm to play it again is waning. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of what it has to offer and while I could pursue greater mastery of its systems, that isn’t really why I play historical games. Not that I’m finished with Labyrinth, I could still see myself pulling it off the shelf again next year to try it again It is worth revisiting, assuming I have someone to play it with, which isn’t a guarantee given the game’s subject matter. I can’t exactly blame anyone for not wanting to play a game on the War on Terror. I may want to stick my head back into this historical mess every twelve to eighteen months, but not everyone will want to even do it once.

Usually I like to spend some time analyzing how a game captures the history it purports to portray, but that’s not exactly possible with Labyrinth. Labyrinth was published approximately midway through the War on Terror, not that we knew that then, and is ostensibly about the opening chapters of that war, but I don’t think that’s what it’s really about and so I don’t believe it to be particularly valuable to dig deep into how well it captures how the Global War on Terror developed in its opening years. There are historical elements in the game that don’t feel particularly believable – chief among them are how every game I play involves an intense fight over Pakistan whose descent into Islamist Rule releases WMDs for the Jihadist player to use. Similarly, nation building seems far too easy for the US player. Sure the game makes deploying large scale forces to a nation costly and you do risk getting bogged down for a few turns, but the game doesn’t seem capable of replicating the two decades that the US spent trying to reshape Afghanistan only to ultimately, and decisively, fail.

But I don’t think that’s really what Labyrinth is about. Labyrinth is about the neo-con mindset and the worldview within US politicians, military, and intelligence services that motivated the War on Terror and informed their decisions. This is the opening years of the War on Terror as American decision makers saw it. It’s no coincidence that one player plays a coherent political entity, the US, while the other is playing a total fiction, an international network of Islamist jihadists spread across the globe. At no point was any radical Islamist faction ever as unified in its purpose or goals as the Jihadist player in Labyrinth is. This is not wholly uncharted ground – Twilight Struggle famously has systems to represent the Domino Effect, because even though the Domino Effect was nonsense the belief in it was highly influential on US decision makers and Twilight Struggle seeks to capture those decisions and that mindset. Labyrinth takes this to a new level where instead of being just a couple of systems it is the whole game.

This emphasis on a specific near-contemporary mindset is a fascinating choice, and turns the game itself into something of a time capsule when it is played decades later. However, it also makes for a pretty intense playing experience, especially if you have rather mixed to negative feelings about the Global War on Terror, as I do. I believe that all historical games should bring some complex feelings about their subject to the table, history is complicated and messy, but this is history that I lived through and that helped to shape who I am. I think Labyrinth does a pretty good job at keeping these elements on the surface rather than burying them within the game, even if its scale doesn’t leave much room for the human tragedy that accompanied this “war”. It could do more to dial in to the darker elements of US geopolitics of this era, but I also don’t think it makes a simple toy of its subject either.

As a game I enjoy Labyrinth while as a historical artifact I find it engaging and conflicting. It’s not my favorite style of CDG but it is probably my favorite example of its type – if that makes sense. I have been thoroughly engaged every time I played it, but I am also coming to an end of my desire to keep playing. That said, Labyrinth is somewhat of a rarity in the wargaming hobby in that it is blessed with multiple expansions. I have both of the currently published ones, and I am interested in seeing how designer Trevor Bender modifies Volko’s core system to cover new eras of the War on Terror. I am also very interested in how Peter Evans’ prequel expansion will take this system of contemporary political positions and apply it to a period long enough ago that we can actually apply historical hindsight to it – essentially turning the game into a true “historical” wargame.

Labyrinth isn’t a game that I would ever offer an unqualified recommendation of. Its subject matter alone makes it hard to universally recommend – most people will know instantly upon hearing what this game is about whether they would want to play it or not. What I can say is that while my initial enthusiasm for the game from first hearing about it in 2011 had faded in the intervening decade. As I played more CDGs I also began to worry that Labyrinth would not be a game for me. Having played it, I am happy to report that I am incredibly impressed with it. This is a masterful piece of game design that still manages to stand out from the field in modern wargaming. It is also so much more than just an originator that made COIN possible – in fact I probably prefer it to most COIN games I’ve played – it is an amazing and unique game in its own right. If you are a fan of CDGs, or just of interesting game design, and the subject matter isn’t a dealbreaker, then you should definitely try Labyrinth. Probably a couple times, because that first game is really confusing.

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Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by Sarah Shipp

Trying to explain to someone who doesn’t play board games why this game about trading feels thematic but that other game about trading has a pasted-on theme is, in my experience at least, a ticket to a conversation that both of you lose interest in once you’re far too deep into it to easily back out. That is why I don’t envy Sarah Shipp’s task in trying to define concepts like a board game’s theme and when theme integrates well with a game’s mechanics. This is the sort of thing that is intuitive to many who have spent time in the hobby – they know thematic games when they see them – but despite what some American jurists might believe this is not particularly firm ground for a working definition. In Thematic Integration in Board Game Design Shipp sets out not only to define and explain these concepts in a manner that can serve as a foundation for future discussion, but then to also provide advice to designers on how best to effectively integrate their game’s theme with the mechanisms and rules.

Most of the book is aimed towards designers rather than people like me who ruin parties by bringing up board game themes. It is far more of a guide to designing thematic games, including literal guides to doing this at the end of the book, than it is a deep discussion of how theme and mechanism interact. Despite that, my favorite parts of the book are probably the early sections where the challenges of defining theme are most prevalent. Shipp is faced with taking terminology that has developed on internet forums and in casual discussion (e.g. “pasted-on theme”) and attempting to refine them for a more robust academic discussion. This is always a fraught process at the best of times and runs the risk of multiple authors introducing different sets of terminology for the same topic, creating endless confusion. Shipp does an excellent job at charting a course with her chosen terms (in particular, talking about themes in layers and how well the games interlock with the theme). Shipp shows an appreciation of the need for academic language without getting lost in the mazes it can create. That’s not to say that the opening chapters don’t at times get a tad labyrinthine, but they generally deposit the reader in a clearing with a working understanding of the language that will be used throughout the rest of the book.

Readers who don’t particularly care about thematic games may object to the fact that the book takes thematic games as an inherently desirable outcome, but then if you are reading a book on integrating theme into board games, maybe you shouldn’t be surprised that it unabashedly supports integrating themes into board games. The chapters on narrative and designing characters within your game were particularly rewarding reading, and I very much appreciated the reminders that a game can have too much theme in addition to having too little. However, the book’s best aspect, to me at least, is how Shipp encourages a wide engagement with art. This is most explicit in the section on research, but throughout the book she encourages readers to watch films, listen to podcasts, read books, and play other games. Familiarity with a wide variety of cultural material is essential to developing good themes and avoiding falling into boring tropes that have been used many times before.

As someone with no published game designs, and no hobby-style designs in the works, I can only provide so much commentary on how well the book works as a how-to guide for designing thematic games. I certainly found the arguments engaging and I found myself periodically spacing out and losing my place on the page because I was thinking about game design – which is usually a good sign, at least for this book’s subject matter anyway. It helps that Shipp herself is a published game designer and does an effective job at using her own designs to make several of her points, so the advice feels like it comes from a place of experience and not speculation.

I have one or two minor nit-picks. Many current hobby board games are mentioned throughout the book, but often how they work is explained only in a cursory fashion. For readers who are already familiar with modern hobby games this will pose no real barrier to understanding, but I could see those from outside the hobby finding it hard to follow in places. Some of the end notes encourage readers to look up Let’s Plays of the games, or try them for themselves, and there are certainly ways for people to get over this hurdle, but I would maintain that it is still a (small) hurdle. Detailed breakdowns of each games’ rules would likely have bloated the book to an unreadable size, but a little more detail would have helped. In particular, many games are simply described using their core mechanic, e.g. X is a deck-building game or drafting game, without defining the mechanism. Even if just a one or two sentence endnote, a little more detail would have been welcome.

I would also have preferred it if the author made more of an effort to mention games’ designers, especially in the section at the end of each chapter that lists the games mentioned in the chapter. It is simply a list of game titles, but I would have expected it to include the designers at a minimum and possibly also publishers, artists, and years first published, for a more complete ludography.

Overall, Thematic Integration in Board Game Design is a great book. There is plenty here to spur the imagination of a current or potential game designer and even as someone who probably won’t work in the space this book focuses on (it’s entirely hobby game focused, very little discussion of wargames or TTRPGs, for example) I still found a lot to benefit from here. It’s a great start to CRC’s new series on tabletop game design. Here’s hoping the trend continues with future volumes.

The Army of the Heartland by John Prados

In the niche within a niche that is operational games on the American Civil War the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (GCACW) series looms above all others. Despite arguably draining much of the oxygen from the field it does not hold a monopoly on the topic. John Prados, the designer of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich among other legendary titles, threw his hat into the ring before GCACW had even fully materialized. The Campaigns of Robert E. Lee was published in 1988 by Clash of Arms games, the same year as Joe Balkoski’s Lee vs Grant – generally considered the predecessor to GCACW – was published by Victory Games. While Stonewalll Jackson’s Way, also by Balkoski, was published in 1992 by Avalon Hill, ushering in the GCACW, it would not be until 1996 that Prados provided his own sequel: The Army of the Heartland, also published by Clash of Arms. Comparing Prados’ games to GCACW is instinctive: both are operational games on the ACW by legendary designers with established pedigrees that were released at approximately the same time. They also share certain design ideas, most notably random movement and the unpredictability of whether an attack will even happen let alone go well, but at their core they are very different designs. Rather than a cousin for GCACW, I see similarities between Prados’ series and another legendary series that first appeared in 1992: Dean Essig’s Operational Combat Series (OCS).

Before we get into it, let me throw out a few qualifiers. This is not a fully formed review – I have only played one and half games of Army of the Heartland at time of writing. Instead, this is a collection of initial thoughts and impressions on a game (and series) that has received relatively little attention. For reasons that will become clear I don’t believe that Army of the Heartland is an all-time great design, it does many interesting things, and I had more fun than I expected with it, but it also has its problems. That said, it deserves a better reputation than it has, and it is a game worthy of study. If it had received a comparable amount of attention and polish that GCACW and OCS have over the past thirty years it could be a real gem.

Army of the Heartland is an strategic-operational game on the western theater of the American Civil War covering campaigns from 1861-3. It is played on two maps by Rick Barber, which stretch from Appalachia in the east to the Mississippi River in the west. While this canvas is broad, the focus is really on western Tennessee and Kentucky. Vicksburg lies off the maps western edge, so rather than focusing on Grant’s many campaigns in the Mississippi the emphasis is on the fighting between the Army of Tennessee (after whom the game is named), mostly under Bragg, and several Union generals, notably Buell and Rosecrans, who opposed them in the eastern half of the western theater.

I’m not the most diehard Rick Barber fan but this map is very pretty, and printed on a very nice paper stock. This is the eastern map where you will be spending most of your time.

That’s what the game is about, but it doesn’t say very much about what the game is. Army of the Heartland has a dense and respectably long rulebook, so digging into every detail here would be impractical. Instead, I will focus on the elements that stood out. First and foremost among these are the army displays. Both sides have an approximately A2 sized sheet with boxes for each of their generals (although in the largest scenarios these may need to be shared between multiple generals). Each box contains the units under the general’s command as well as a track for recording the administrative points, morale, number of guns, and amount of ammo that general has. In the case of overall commanders, lower ranking generals may also be included in this box. This immediately gives the game a strong fog of war element as you can only see where the generals are, not the size of their forces or even whether they are commanding multiple lesser generals. It also makes the game an enormous table hog – the size of the displays easily adds the equivalent of one extra map to what was already a two-map game (there are no one map scenarios, but I would argue that given the game’s attention it could have fit on one map), possibly more if you place the displays on opposite sides of the map to make it harder to see your opponent’s. For these reasons, I played Army of the Heartland on Vassal.

The army displays also have some more lovely Rick Barber (I believe) art. From a play experience I see the benefits of these large sheets, but as someone without a large American basement the size of them outweighs the luxury of having that extra space.

The second intriguing mechanism in Army of the Heartland is the bid for initiative. Scenarios give each side a number of operational points and at the start of a turn players will bid points to see who goes first – the winner spending War Effort Points for the privilege. The amount bid, and in subsequent turns where play alternates the amount of the remainder spent, will determine which table you roll on when determining each general’s movement that turn. This is somewhat reminiscent of how GCACW forces you to roll for movement every activation, but instead of taking the value of the d6 you take that result and compare it to a matrix factoring in the general’s movement value and the aforementioned bid. If you roll badly enough (and your general’s movement value is poor enough) you could even render that general inactive, forcing the spend of further War Effort Points at the end of the turn to reactivate them. Sadly, I must report that the Confederacy receives 50% more movement points than the Union. The good news is that this has an interesting impact on the bidding, since it encourages the Union player to bid higher values to get more movement to equal the Confederate player (effectively, they must expend more of his resources to undertake his campaign), which may result in them going first when they don’t want to, but I still wish this was tied to specific scenarios to reflect the greater burden for an army on the offensive rather than always tied to Confederate vs. Union.

In contrast to the above two mechanisms, combat in Army of the Heartland isn’t quite so unusual but I found it blessedly simple. Players add up combat factors, calculate DRMs (the cavalry ones could be simpler if I’m nit picking), and roll a d6 to find their combat result. There is no combat ratio, instead you compare your results – step losses are inflicted on each side and then the absolute value of the difference of the two Retreat results is applied to whoever got the lower amount, so if I rolled two retreats and my opponent rolled one, then they would retreat one hex. There are also potential morale losses and wounding/killing of generals (which is tied to a roll of a six, so you are more likely to win a battle and lose a general than you are to do so while losing one).

Perhaps the best wrinkle in the combat is how it begins. Zones of Control (ZOCs), the six hexes around each general, stop movement and force the enemy army moving into them to attempt an attack. The general rolls a d6 and must roll under their battle rating – if they succeed add an Assault token on them to be resolved after all your moves are finished, if they fail, they lose a morale, suffer a step loss, and retreat. Bonus DRMs accumulate if you can attack the same hex multiple times in a single combat step. The extreme punishment for failing to trigger an attack makes the decision of whether to move adjacent to an enemy intense, particularly if you want to hit one enemy from multiple hexes. This is reminiscent of GCACW’s rules for triggering an assault where a die roll determines how many of your units will participate, but in many ways, it feels worse/more stressful which kind of makes me like it more.

The final core element to the game is the many resources you’ll be tracking as you play. As mentioned, each general has guns, ammo, morale, and administration points. Ammo is spent using guns but if you run out your units fight at half strength, morale will go up and down depending on battle results and other factors (potentially resulting in units becoming broken), while administration points you will spend on various actions. These can be combining and separating armies, overall commanders lending one of their stats to a subordinate, or even attempting to make attacks (you can do the last one without spending points, but at a significant penalty). On top of that both sides have War Effort Points (WEPs), which are set by the scenario and spent to keep generals active, to replace generals, for winning the first activation in a turn, and on various other actions. WEPs approximately represent the supreme command for both sides, the capacity of the respective war departments. I found WEPs to be harder to comprehend – the values are so large (number in the hundreds in some scenarios) and the expenditure so relatively small that I couldn’t fully appreciate their significance. Some of the elements that you spend your various points on are clear and easy to understand, while other actions seem more niche and opaquer as to how they will help you achieve victory.

I quite like the counter art as well. The markers for the generals have their names on the reverse, which indicates their inactive state, so while you can check it will serve you well to be able to recognize the commanders from their beards.

It is primarily this last element that to me evokes the comparison to OCS. While the randomized movement and the difficulty in launching attacks both feel of the same line of thinking as GCACW, the game’s scale is much closer to OCS (hexes are 5 miles, game turns approximately half a week, similar to Lee vs Grant as well) and the focus is much more in-line with OCS, I think. The tracking of resources on individual generals is different from how OCS uses supply tokens to limit your actions, but both are games that put the logistical (and in Army of the Heartland’s case administrative) burden of warfare front and center. Army of the Heartland is also a game deeply concerned with maintaining supply lines, traced back to supply sources, often via depots built out of wagons (extenders anyone?), with some potentially brutal attrition rolls waiting you should you neglect this. That is not to say that GCACW has no concern for supply, but it is often pushed to the advanced rules and some titles (e.g. Hood Strikes North) discard the rules entirely as superfluous – something that I can’t see an entry in Prados’ system doing. In the campaign for Stonewall Jackson’s Way you check supply status twice, in Army of the Heartland you check supply twice each turn.

What Army of the Heartland lacks that OCS and GCACW share is a clear conception of what it is – a point of focus. OCS is a game of supply management and logistics to support its maneuver and exploitation systems while GCACW is first and foremost a game of movement (particularly with its fatigue system, which Army of the Heartland has no parallel to). Both systems have more to them than that, but if you were to pitch the games to someone those are the core elements you would lead with. While I would compare Army of the Heartland to OCS before GCACW, I don’t believe it has the focus of either. It has a jumble of systems and a mountain of chrome that dilutes its attention, resulting in an overall messier game. Of course, it also has not had the same rounds of revisions as the others – it received a second edition in 2004 (which I own), but OCS is on version 4.1 and GCACW is on 1.6 following a significant overhaul in the new versions published by MMP (to say nothing of the changes from Lee vs Grant to GCACW). I can’t help but wonder had Prados’ games received comparable attention and refinement they might have found their voice more clearly, but instead the desire to “simulate” the warfare of the period clouds the games intentions and reduces the quality of the experience.

I also find its victory conditions to be completely lacking. There is an automatic victory for whoever can control both Louisville and Chattanooga, but in many scenarios that is functionally impossible. It is also an odd duck when you consider the scenarios that focus on the western half of the map, such as the one for Shiloh and the Corinth campaign or the one covering the 1861 campaigns. Beyond that most scenarios come down to whoever inflicts the most losses on the enemy, with carve outs for attrition from lack of supply and several other factors – so cutting your opponent’s supply and causing them huge casualties nets you zero victory points (not that I’m bitter about that). This always parses weird to me for ACW games at a higher scale – the attacker nearly always suffered higher casualties historically, and most games replicate that, but ultimately Grant still won in Virginia, so pure attrition doesn’t strike me as a reasonable victory condition, especially with little in the way of alternatives. Given all the (at times nit-picky) detail throughout the rest of the design victory almost feels like an afterthought. While I kind of prefer its simplicity to the dozens of victory factors included in some GCACW scenarios, the latter overwhelms me while and the former leaves me unsatisfied, neither has me fully convinced. Show me the happy middle.

Because it’s what I do, I need to take a moment to talk about how Army of the Heartland portrays its subject. I initially picked up this game for the podcast We Intend to Move on Your Works, and my decision was made solely based on the cover. The front of Army of the Heartland shows the Army of Tennessee marching towards battle proudly waving the Stars and Bars and the “Orphan Brigade” flags against a backdrop of the battle flag. It’s a lot of Confederate flags for one image. I also immediately noticed the choice to name the game after the Confederate army operating in the theater. This is explicitly a game about the Confederacy. That it follows The Campaigns of Robert E. Lee and is in turn followed by Look Away (a reference to the song Dixie) reinforced that impression.

Seriously, look at that cover. Wow.

The game has a few elements that make me wince a little. The fact that Confederates pretty much always move 50% further (the only exception being the result where both sides only get one movement point) rubs me the wrong way much like the faster Confederate movement did in GCACW. I think the movement asymmetry has the potential to be more interesting here thanks to the bidding system, but I still don’t like that it is always the Confederacy who moves further. The ratings for Nathan Bedford Forrest which make him the best combat commander in the game also indicate a familiarity with the work of Shelby Foote, who heaped endless praise on the Klan supporting war criminal. Not that everyone who reads Foote is a monster, but his work is very Lost Cause-adjacent and has never been particularly scholarly.

On the whole, though, I found very little within the design beyond its initial framing that struck me as particularly influenced by The Lost Cause. The historical background at the end of the rulebook is remarkably even-handed. I could nit pick it, but for something that was written nearly thirty years ago by a non-specialist it didn’t throw up any red flags for me. I would like to know why John Prados chose the title and framing he did for the games in this system, but aside from that odd choice I found remarkably little to distress me in the game’s rules. Perhaps a deeper dive will turn up something, there is a lot in this game, but only time (and more plays) will tell.

I’m on the fence about Army of the Heartland. I enjoyed it far more than I expected, and there is an excellent game in there somewhere, but at the same time I don’t know if I want to keep it on my shelf. Its vast size makes it all but impossible that I will ever play the physical game, and the fog of war doesn’t make it particularly good for solo play anyway. I first played the start of the scenario for Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky in 1862, but a string of illnesses interrupted that game and when I found time to resume, I had forgotten most of how the system worked, which required a substantial relearning process. I settled on the shorter Stone’s River scenario for my second attempt (the right choice I think), and once we got going the game played much more smoothly than I anticipated, but the relearning process was brutal. The rulebook is adequate, laid out in the traditional (and not great in my opinion) sequence of play order, but there’s just so much chrome and other little things that I never felt confident that I fully understood it. It also lacks an index, which makes finding specific rules (where in the sequence of play is the rule for unit morale?) a pain. I’ve learned to play more complicated games, but they were also generally more intuitive, and I just see the inertia of not playing Army of the Heartland outweighing my genuine desire to revisit this title.

I think I will try and acquire a copy of Look Away, the third and final entry in this series. Look Away was published in an issue of Against the Odds magazine and so has a smaller footprint – one map with army displays that have been reduced to a single page each. It also covers the Atlanta campaign, which is one I have an enduring interest in. If Look Away convinces me that this system is worthy of return visits then I will open my copy of Army of the Heartland again – who knows, maybe it will even encourage me to punch and clip it in hopes of finding a table large enough to play on.

I can’t universally recommend Army of the Heartland – taken as a whole, I think the design is not quite there. However, it is chock full of interesting ideas and the moment-to-moment gameplay of the turns really is very fun. If you are a fan of operational Civil War games or if you’re a designer looking for a system that with a little refinement could sing, then you should check out Army of the Heartland or one of its siblings. I don’t know if it’s currently up to snuff as a challenger to GCACW, but with the right coach and a few drills it might be a contender.

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Most Anticipated Games: 2025 Edition

It’s almost Lunar New Year (shout out to fellow Year of the Snake people), so what better time to take a moment and look to the year ahead? Last year I did a most anticipated games list, and since it was pretty good fun, I decided to do it again! First, though, I want to reflect for a moment on last year’s list and see how I did both in terms of predicting what came out and what I managed to play.

Overall, I picked eleven games for my most anticipated list, of which only six were actually released in 2024, which gives me a hit rate of just above 50%. I expect three of them (Seljuk, Halls of Montezuma, and Cuius Regio) will probably come out this year while the two others (Libertadores del Sur and 1066: Year of Destiny) probably won’t. Of the remaining six games, I managed to play four of them. Pax Penning and Sedgwick Attacks both sit on my shelf of shame, but I am confident I can play at least Sedgwick Attacks this year. Of those final four, Tanto Monta was ultimately disappointing but the other three were a lot of fun. Two of them made my best of list for 2024. 1812: Napoleon’s Fateful March is the one released title from the list that I don’t own, and had I played more than one intro game it may also have made the best of list – it’s a fascinating design but I just haven’t played it enough.

So last year I got about half of my guesses right, slightly worse if you factor in that I ultimately didn’t like one of the games, so I have a target to try an exceed for this year’s predictions. In honor of my forgetting Pax Penning last year and adding it on to the end of the list after I published my post, I am once again choosing eleven games. The list is ordered based on approximately how confident I am in whether the game will come out this year rather than how excited I am for them. Without further ado, then, let’s get to the list:

Most Anticipated Games 2025By Sword and Bayonets by Allen Dickerson (GMT Games)

I didn’t get along with Great Battles of the American Civil War when I tried Into the Woods and Dead of Winter, but I’m generally willing to give the series another shot and By Sword and Bayonets is promising to be a good entry point into GBACW. I’m not super excited about the chosen battles, but single map GBACW with a manageable number of units promises to avoid some of the problems I had when learning it before. Who knows, maybe I’ll fall in love and P500 the upcoming entry on The Wilderness.

Korea: the Fight Across the 38th by Trevor Bender (RBM Studios)

I’m currently living in South Korea and last year I started what I intended to be a small project looking at operational games on the Korean War – it just so happens that at the same time there has been a surge in games on the topic. There was a solitaire game in a recent issue of Strategy & Tactics magazine, Vuca Simulations is supposed to be publishing an edition of Jun Tajima’s game from Game Journal, and there’s this upcoming game to be included in C3i Magazine. While I’m probably a little more excited for the Vuca game, there’s no real information on when it will come out while this should be out in the spring so it takes a spot on the list. I haven’t played any of the other games in the same system from previous issues, but they have been well received and I’m interested in seeing what this take on Korea looks like.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add that Rodger MacGowan, the man behind C3i Magazine and many other games, and his family lost their house and home office in the Palisades Fire. You can donate to their GoFundMe to help them recover and to get C3i back up and running as soon as possible.

Shakespeare’s First Folio by Kate Bertram and Kevin Bertram (Fort Circle Games)

I’ll confess that this wasn’t high on my anticipated list when I first heard about it – I wasn’t sure if this was the kind of game I’d enjoy. However, the buzz I’ve heard from conventions has been great and I’m hoping this year to try some more historical board games of a less wargame-y form, because it’s nice to have something lighter to break up the complex hex and counter games. Also, Fort Circle always does amazing productions on their games and I trust Kevin Bertram to know what he’s doing both as a designer and developer. Ask me in a month and I could probably substitute another Fort Circle game in here instead. The slate of releases they have set for 2025 looks really promising.

Gettysburg the First Day by Steve Carey (Revolution Games)

There is very little public information on this game yet, but it was being playtested at SD Hist Con last year and will supposedly be out this year. This is the next volume in the Blind Swords series from Revolution Games. Blind Swords is one of my favorite hex and counter systems and the first day of Gettysburg is an excellent subject to wargame – I love games with a large approach to battle element and the first day has that in spades. This topic was technically covered already by series originator Hermann Luttmann in a game from Tiny Battles Publishing, but I’m excited to see what designer Steve Carey and the development team at Revolution bring to this new take on the battle.

Oblique by Amabel Holland (Hollandspiele)

I have a low-key obsession with Frederick the Great, especially since I read Tim Blanning’s excellent biography of him before visiting Berlin a few years ago. I also love games that introduce the challenge of managing supply and even if I don’t always love them I am continually fascinated by Amabel Holland’s designs. I love blocks. All of those elements together mean that I’m very excited to see what Amabel does with Prussia’s gayest king. I must also give an honorable mention to A Battle, Furious, Bloody, Repulsive, Crimson, Gory, Boisterous, Manly, Rough, Fierce, Unmerciful, and Hostile also by Amabel, I’m excited for the return of Shields and Swords as a system but skeptical of the dry erase map, so it only gets honorable mention status while Oblique secures a full spot on the list.

No Turning Back by Dean Essig (Multi-Man Publishing)

There is a copy of To Take Washington sitting unplayed on my shelf, so perhaps I shouldn’t be getting too excited about more games in the Line of Battle series, but I’m a sucker for games about The Wilderness and as a newfound fan of OCS I can’t help but be excited by the release of one of the late Dean Essig’s last designs. Do I have room for four maps? Absolutely not. Do I have time to play it? Probably not. Will I pre-order it anyway? Almost certainly.

Thunderbolt Deluxe by Richard Berg, Mark Herman, and Alan Ray (GMT Games)

I’m nothing if not a disciple of Berg. I don’t always love his designs (see previously mentioned problems with GBACW) but I think there’s always something interesting to his games and I love his approach to crafting a hypothesis for each of his designs. Thunderbolt is his opus that was left unfinished on his death – a massive operational scale ancients’ game and the final part of his trilogy on the subject. Mark Herman and Alan Ray are finishing the design and GMT are packaging all three games into one box, and I can’t help but be excited to try it even if it ends up being too big and too much.

The Pure Land: Onin War in Muromachi Japan 1465-1477 by Joe Dewhurst (GMT Games)

I’m not the biggest fan of the COIN series – I enjoy it but I’m not a super fan, usually I’m content to move on after one to two plays of each entry. However, COIN’s take on pre-Sengoku Jidai Japan is the kind of thing that I can get behind – especially since it seems to tackle the role of the peasantry within the conflict rather than abstracting the populace away. I also generally trust Joe Dewhurst to know what he’s doing based on his previous development work for the series, so I’m tentatively excited. I want to give an honorable mention to Brian Train’s China’s War as well, which is another really interesting topic to tackle in COIN from a designer I have a lot of respect for.

Castelnuovo 1539 by Francisco Ronco (Draco Ideas)

I’m a sucker for siege games and I’m a sucker for block games, put them together and you’ve got my attention. This is a game on a somewhat obscure (to English speaking audiences at least) siege of a Spanish garrison in Albania by the Ottoman Empire. Draco Ideas have made some excellent games, the production looks beautiful, and the subject sounds fascinating, fingers crossed the game is good!

Baltic Empires: The Northern Wars of 1558-1721 by Brian Asklev (GMT Games)

Big multiplayer game about early modern competition in Europe with art by Nils Johansson? You better bet I’m interested! Brian Asklev designed 1812: Napoleon’s Fateful March which was on my list last year and is a fascinating game, and the buzz I’ve heard about Baltic Empires is that it’s amazing, so I’m incredibly excited. Because it’s a big multiplayer game I don’t know if I’ll get to play it this year (assuming it comes out), but I’m hopeful!

Crown & Courage by Petter Schanke Olsen (Tompet Games)

This is only coming to Kickstarter this year, so chances are it won’t deliver within 2025 given how these things go, which is what earns it the bottom slot on the list. While Halls of Hegra, the previous game by this designer and publisher, won’t be making my top 10 favorite games list I was impressed with how it brought Eurogame mechanisms to historical games wrapped in a stunning production covering a subject I knew nothing about. I don’t know a lot about Crown & Courage but it promises to do similar things and so it has my attention.

Top 5 Most Anticipated Games I Own

Last year I also picked five games from my shelves that I was most excited to get to the table in 2024. I managed to play three of the five. Glory we covered on an episode of We Intend to Move on Your Works, I wrote a brief piece about learning Musket and Pike but ultimately I think Banish All Their Fears is more to my taste, and I am currently playing a game of Korea: The Forgotten War. Sadly, neither Give Us Victories nor Granada: Last Stand of the Moors made it to the table, and for that I will have eternal shame. Hopefully this year I can do better than 3/5, but I am reasonably happy with that result all things considered. Continuing the precedent, here are the five games I already own that I am most excited to play in 2025.

Give Us Victories by Sergio Schiavi (Dissimula Edizioni)

Look, it’s simple, it was on last year’s list, and I brought it with me to Korea because I failed to play it then. I’ve clipped it and sorted everything into trays and bags. I swear this year I will play this game if it kills me.

The Korean War: June 1950-May 1951 by Joe Balkoski (Victory Games)

Next on my list of Korean War games once I’ve finished playing Korea: The Forgotten War. This is often held up as the gold standard for games on the Korean War and my copy of the Victory Games edition is clipped and sorted. Balkoski has certainly proven his operational game design chops to me via the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, so I’m very excited to see what he did with “The Forgotten War”.

A Greater Victory: South Mountain, September 14, 1862 by Steve Carey (Revolution Games)

I have three Blind Swords games on my shelf right now, and if you’d asked me last year, I probably would have picked one of the others as my most anticipated since they’re on Chancellorsville and Vicksburg, two battles I have a longstanding interest in. However, playing Fire on the Mountain last year left me both unsatisfied with that game and looking for a better take on the Battle of South Mountain, which this promises to be. Who doesn’t love grueling uphill attacks in the woods?

Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno by Walter Vejdovsky (Fellowship of Simulations)

A very recent addition to my collection courtesy of the Homo Ludens Secret Santa, this is a beautiful CDG about the Battle of Verdun that looks like it makes lots of interesting decisions. It’s a big ol’ game in terms of table space and CDGs are not my favorite games to play solitaire so I’ll need to persuade someone to be my opponent, but I’m really hoping I can get this to the table. Between this and Labyrinth (which I’m currently playing) 2025 might be the year I get back into CDGs.

Bulge 20 by Joseph Miranda (Bonsai Games)

An upside of being in Korea is that it’s suddenly much easier for me to get my hands on otherwise difficult to track down Japanese games. This new edition of a classic game from Victory Point Games got my attention because of Nils Johansson’s amazing art, and while Bulge games don’t usually get my blood going this looks like an interesting design and I love the small package it comes in. This one will require some work as I need to print out English references for the cards, since they’re obviously in Japanese, but the game is supposed to be relatively simple so hopefully I can convince someone to play it with me.

That’s my list, what games are you looking forward to this year and what games that are on your shelf are you hoping to finally dust off and play?

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The Korean War by Bruce Cummings

The greatest gift a work of history can give is to take a subject that you thought you knew something about and to show you that either your knowledge was far from extensive or it was fundamentally flawed. Years ago, Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston’s book on Crécy complicated the narrative of that battle to such a degree that I’m still reeling from the discovery. Bruce Cummings’ history of the Korean War has achieved a similar feat. This slim 250-page volume radically reframes the war in a way that challenged all my base assumptions about what I thought I knew and has made me think about the Korean War in a completely different way. I’m not sure that I will ever be the same. In complicating the war, Cummings’ digs up hard truths that many would prefer to forget, and which are largely absent from a bittersweet if essentially triumphalist narrative of the war that prevails in many other accounts. This book is essential reading, but at the same time I’m not sure if its impact can be felt as keenly if you haven’t already read at least one other book on the subject which makes me hesitate to recommend it as the best introductory history of the topic.

One of my favorite books I read last year was David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a brilliantly written and utterly engaging history of the Korean War by a man who showed significant mastery of the art of popular military history. While Halberstam often eviscerates American decision making and particularly MacArthur and his staff, at the end of the day The Coldest Winter does not particularly question whether the American intervention in Korea was overall a good thing. The North Koreans and the Chinese are portrayed sympathetically but we are told that the Americans, while misguided and often flawed, were on the right side of history. In that way it is broadly a positive history, while Korea was no World War II it also assures its readers that it was no Vietnam. Cummings’ gives his readers no such assurances.

It often goes unspoken, but since the Korean War is still technically ongoing it complicates how we think about what happened in 1950-3. There is a tendency to look at the current state of the peninsula and use that as justification for what happened in the 1950s. South Korea is now a thriving democracy and one of the largest economies in the world, while North Korea is a paranoid totalitarian state that let large swathes of its population starve in the 1990s. This is used to justify the American intervention in 1950 – we saved a democracy and its people even if we were ultimately unable to liberate the entire peninsula from autocratic rule. This is basically Whig historiography, though, where we use the modern end point as justification for the trajectory of history. The Korean War does much to challenge this conception and argues for a very different meaning for the war.

Cummings devotes relatively little time to the narrative of the war. The back and forth along the peninsula occupies just thirty pages. Instead, what he does is force the reader to fundamentally rethink what the war was, what it meant, and what we are refusing to acknowledge. At its core the Korean War was a post-colonial civil war, and in that way, it shares far more with Vietnam than we are usually prepared to admit. Cummings shows how the government of South Korea was assembled haphazardly by the United States after 1945 and was full of Koreans who had collaborated with the brutal Imperial Japanese colonial regime in the preceding decades. Far from a free and democratic society, South Korea was in many ways an extension of the practices of colonial rule – a deeply conservative government that perpetuated violence on anyone accused of dissent or leftist thinking.

In contrast, Kim Il-Sung was a famous freedom fighter against the Japanese and North Korea represented a genuine home-grown anti-colonial movement. The Korean War was a civil war between these freedom fighters and the US-created imperialist regime in the South. In this way Korea is very much like Vietnam, where the USA intervened in support of a failing colonial regime against a movement trying to liberate their country from foreign influenced rule.

Cummings does not attach any particular moral value to this assessment, his work is meant to correct our perspective rather than to judge it. That said, later in the book it becomes very hard to feel that the USA was particularly righteous in this war. Chapter six documents the atrocities of the “air war” in the later stages of the conflict. While many people familiar with the Korean War may know of MiG Alley and the early days of jet fighter aerial combat, those accounts focus on technology porn over the actual costs of the war. The reason those plane to plane dogfights were happening is because the USA was carpet bombing North Korea into oblivion – destroying virtually every village and caring not one bit for civilian casualties. That North Korea hates America is known, but if you consider what America did to them maybe one could consider that there is some justification. America destroyed their nation and forced them to completely rebuild it. In many cases these bombing runs likely constituted war crimes – violating agreements put it in place after World War II with regard to carpet bombing civilian targets.

Chapters five and seven, structurally framing the horrors of the bombing campaign in the book, are equally unrelenting in their discussion of violence against civilians. Chapter five documents the establishment of the South Korean state in 1945 and dives deep into the mass violence committed by the new state, with tacit US approval and support, against its own people. The massacres conducted in the southwest and on Jeju Island are documented in great detail. Chapter seven continues this theme into massacres committed during the war. While North Korean violence against civilians is often brought up in histories of the war, Cummings digs deep into the crimes committed by the South Korean and UN forces and shows that of the two it was the latter that was more violent. Some of the massacres committed by the South were even blamed on North Korean forces to push a narrative of the evil communist invasion. While that does not excuse North Korean atrocities, and Cummings does not suggest it should, it is a key part of the story that is almost always overlooked in narratives of the war.

All this evidence is supported by conclusions from truth and reconciliation committees undertaken by the South Korean government around the turn of the millennium, committees that the United States did not support and in fact largely seems to have hindered (even when the forced declassification of our own reports in 1999 showed that the South Korean evidence was correct). A South Korea that is prepared to stare its own dark past in the face is laid in stark contrast with an America that refuses to acknowledge its own crimes and prefers to believe a lie of a “limited war” to prevent the spread of communism. The Korean War is often known as the “Forgotten War”, but Cummings notes that in many ways it is a war that America has refused to reckon with even when it was happening. Forgotten implies that we ever once knew what it was we did in Korea, and Cummings suggests that we never even reached that basic level of understanding of what Korea meant.

There is more to The Korean War than documenting war crimes, including a fascinating chapter that shows how it was the Korean War rather than WWII or Vietnam that led to the current status quo of the USA acting as policeman to the world with military bases flung across the globe, but I should leave at least some aspects of the book for readers to discover for themselves.

Cummings is an excellent writer, although given its content I would not call this an easy read. He does much to explain the context of Japan, China, and Korea in the lead up to and aftermath of the Korean War so no familiarity with east Asian politics is particularly necessary to read The Korean War, but he doesn’t particularly hold readers’ hands when it comes to US politics. If you don’t have some knowledge of the Truman administration and McCarthyism you might find the names thrown at you to be overwhelming. While a determined reader who is prepared to look up individuals they don’t recognize can tackle The Korean War as their first history of the subject, I think it may be best appreciated as a companion to another work on the subject – a counterpoint of sorts. Given that Cummings offers his own critiques of The Coldest Winter in the book (while at the same time praising Halberstam and having his own positive opinions of the work), I think that presents the ideal companion.

Overall, I can’t recommend The Korean War enough. It has fundamentally changed my perspective of the war but beyond that it has made me rethink how I feel about America’s place in the world. At the end of the book Cummings argues that in time the Korean War will be seen as one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century, far from forgotten it will be fundamental to our understanding of how the Cold War and post Cold War world order came to be. After reading his book, I think he may be right.

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2024 in Review – Top 8 Books

I like to set myself a goal for the number of books I will read in a given year. In previous years this was fifty books, but I found that this constrained my choices as I often passed over big doorstopper volumes because they take too long to read which could imperil my chance of reaching my target. In 2023 I dropped my goal to forty books and barely hit that target, and 2024 proved to be an exact repeat – sliding in to the finish in the last weeks of December. For 2025 I may drop down to thirty-five to allow even more room for the kind of dense books I enjoy. However, I am also hoping to read more fiction, which generally goes much faster than the kinds of history I usually read. I’ve recently been getting more review copies of academic books which has been great (academic books are expensive!) but it also means I’m reading more dense history books and I need to put some more lighter fair in there as well.

On the whole, I wouldn’t classify 2024 as a particularly great year in terms of what I read. I read some excellent books, eight* of which I’ve chosen to highlight below, but I also read a lot of books that were just fine. I don’t think I read anything that I absolutely hated, though, so that’s a win.  

Non-Fiction

I read a real mix of books in 2024. I continue to dabble in American Civil War history for the We Intend to Move on Your Works project, but fewer than in previous years. If any theme was dominant this year it was the range of new books on the history and culture of tabletop games, particularly historical wargames and roleplaying games, that I read last year. I also read quite a few books on the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses as I wrapped up my own book on the Battle of Castillon.

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

Probably my single favorite book I read this year, and almost certainly my favorite review I wrote, this is a fascinating trip through the history of tabletop RPGs delivered by a passionate author. I could heap more praise on it, but please just read the review because I’d just be repeating myself in a worse format. I also have to give honorable mentions to the second edition of Playing at the World and the edited volume Fifty Years of D&D, both of which I adored but of the books on tabletop games I read this year it was Monsters that I enjoyed the most.

Chancellorsville by Stephen Sears

As a central Virginia of a Union-sympathetic persuasion I have a long and complex relationship with the Battle of Chancellorsville. For years I maintained an obstinate ignorance of it in rejection of the often-masturbatory glee that Neo-Confederates dump on “Lee’s greatest victory”. However, when visiting my parents over the summer I decided to grab my dad’s copy of Stephen Sears’ book down from the shelf (having previously enjoyed his book on Gettysburg) and I’m so glad I did, it gave me a newfound respect for the history of the battle and did much to complicate its status as an example of Lee’s genius overshadowing an incompetent Hooker.

A Short History of the Wars of the Roses by David Grummitt

I’m on the record as not being the biggest fan of the Wars of the Roses. A large part of this has been that histories written by posh English historians of years past assume a baseline familiarity with the personalities and details of the conflict and as a result the narratives are hard to follow and tedious to read. I previously enjoyed David Grummitt’s biography of Henry VI and so I decided to try his history of the Wars of the Roses and was delighted to find an approachable and engaging history that assumes no previous knowledge of who Earl such and such or Duke so and so was – just a delight to read.

The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge by Joe Starita

This is a book that was recommended to me many times on a subject I know nothing about and this year I finally got around to reading it. A history of the Lakota people from the mid-19th century through the 1980s told through one single family across three generations, this shows the complexities of American expansion westward and the challenges of being a native under an American imperialist state in an intimate and utterly engaging way. Highly recommended.

Fiction

I didn’t read as much fiction as I would have liked (which is becoming something of a theme, sadly). This year I revisited some favorite authors and took advantage of a trip back to Charlottesville to browse its excellent secondhand bookshops and pick up some classic paperbacks. As a fan of classic sci fi and fantasy, secondhand bookshops are treasure troves of books to tempt me.

Neutron Star by Larry Niven

The first of my classic paperback haul, I’d never read any Niven before and I was delighted with the experience. Set in his Known Universe, the stories were that flavor of hard sci fi that I find engaging without being tedious. While his protagonists tend to be stiff and largely indistinguishable from each other (a common problem for authors of the era) the setting and plots were enjoyable and different from what I’ve read before. I don’t know how much deeper into Niven’s canon I will go, but I expect to pick up at least one more in the future.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Not a lot to say here – I’m a huge fan of Raymond Chandler and I’m slowly reading through his catalogue, taking my time because I know there won’t be any new ones. This year I actually read quite a few modern hardboiled detective stories and while I enjoyed most of them none were as good as Chandler.

A Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality by John le Carre

I like le Carre, but I have also found his books to be so bleak that I struggle to read them – too much of a downer for me. I decided to try and tackle the Smiley series, hoping that since Smiley continues to live throughout that they can at least only be so depressing. The first two are honestly more like detective fiction than the later espionage novels that le Carre became famous for. A Call for the Dead is probably the better mystery (and has elements of espionage in it) but I adored how much A Murder of Quality is a hate letter to Eton and posh English boarding schools – you love to see it.

The Face of Chaos ed. Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey

This is an odd one, because at times I didn’t really enjoy this book and I’m not sure I would recommend it but I also cannot stop thinking about it. This is the fifth volume in the Thieves World series, a collective fantasy universe that multiple authors contributed to the development of which I learned about from Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. I snagged a few of these in a secondhand shop, but sadly this was the earliest volume I could find. Jumping in mid-series wasn’t the best experience, and some of the stories are a bit gross in a way that fantasy of this era was, but I remain fascinated by this idea of a shared world that multiple authors helped to advance the shared narrative of. I will absolutely return to Thieves World and I can’t help but wonder what a modern take on this style of publication would look like.

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Wargames According to Mark by Mark Herman

It looks like we are entering something of a golden age when it comes to serious discussions of tabletop games – at least in book form. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a respectable pile of new books on the subject over the past year, including several on historical wargaming. Last year saw the publication of Maurice Suckling’s textbook Paper Time Machines and Riccardo Masini’s philosophical treatise Historical Simulation and Wargames, and, last but not least, renowned designer Mark Herman’s personal memoir/philosophy/reflections on his own design process for historical games.

Published by GMT Games, better known for publishing Herman’s games than for publishing books, this is a hefty volume full of color pictures that draws inspiration from Herman’s frequent contributions to C3i Magazine. In addition to the two hundred odd pages written for the book, Wargames According to Mark includes sixty pages of design notes originally printed in many of Herman’s card driven games (CDGs). The book is subtitled An Historian’s View of Wargame Design (more on that later), highlighting up front that this is explicitly one person’s view of game design. This is not like Paper Time Machines, which hopes to provide a general view for individuals interested in analyzing and possibly designing games, but rather Herman’s own thoughts on how he has designed his own games. While some readers may find insight for their own design work, this is not a how-to guide. Rather, it is more closely aligned to the design notes that are usually included in Herman’s games.

I am of the firm opinion that the kindest thing one can do with someone’s creative output is to take it seriously – and to treat it with respect requires unfiltered honesty. This means giving praise, of course, but also offering commentary and critique where necessary. I enjoyed reading Wargames According to Mark and I would recommend it to anyone who is already interested based on the title and author alone – you won’t be disappointed. It covers a lot of ground and in it I found sections that made me consider viewpoints I never had before while also finding others that made me scratch my head and consider my own conflicting beliefs. I love books that encourage me to engage with them and offer my own critiques, and Wargames According to Mark achieves this with aplomb, kudos to the author.

Mark on Herman

Wargames According to Mark sits at a crossroads of different book potentialities, a position that I find easier to define by what the book isn’t rather than what it is. It is not a guide to design, that much Herman makes clear from the start. It is also not a history of Herman’s own design career; it dips into aspects of his designs but readers looking for a comprehensive account of the past forty or so years of Herman’s design work may be disappointed. The book is primarily a snapshot of Herman in the here and now with an emphasis on certain threads of his design career.

The book opens with an account of how Herman got into wargame design, including his early career with SPI and how he learned design at the feet of Jim Dunnigan. Fans of SPI and anyone with an interest in how they did design, including some detailed descriptions of pre-computer wargame design, will really enjoy this section. It explains Herman’s design origins and he even walks through the design of one of his games from that era to show the basics of his process. While the theme of him learning his craft at SPI reverberates throughout the book, beyond this section there isn’t a lot of detailed discussion of the actual games he made at this time – fans of Stonewall will not find a detailed breakdown of how that game came to be, for example.

Much of the book focuses on Herman’s favorite designs, which lean towards his more recent work and games on the strategic scale. We the People/Washington’s War, For the People, and especially Empire of the Sun loom large throughout the book, as do Churchill, Pericles, and the relatively recent new edition of Pacific War (technically the oldest game to receive substantial attention in the book). That’s not to say that these are the only games that Herman writes about, many other designs get a look in here or there, but in general if you’re a diehard fan of Great Battles of History or any of Herman’s tactical games (excepting Rebel Fury and its ancestors) you may be disappointed. On the other hand, if you’re an Empire of the Sun mega fan you will be delighted with Wargames According to Mark.

I don’t share Herman’s enthusiasm for strategic games (more of an operational man, myself) and I haven’t played many of the games he discusses in depth in the book, so I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t getting the most out of these sections. Discussions of the underpinnings of aspects of Empire of the Sun’s design are harder to appreciate if I’ve never played it and I don’t know much about the Pacific War (although, to be fair, Herman does usually provide some historical context before going on a lengthy piece about design) so it was hard for me to relate the history to the design choices. This is not a criticism, the book is what its author wants it to be, nor did it prevent me from enjoying reading it, but it is to describe how I may not have been the target audience.

For this reason, I enjoyed the general arguments in Wargames According to Mark more than the game specific stuff. One point he makes that has stuck in my mind is the notion that strategic games are the least abstract form of wargame while tactical games are the most. I suspect that many wargamers are like me and think of abstraction as increasing as you zoom further away from the specific and into the more general. However, Herman’s argument is that actual historical generals (at least in the modern era, we must caveat) were often interacting with the war they were commanding on a scale very similar to the strategic – maps in front of them, considering troop deployments, supply, etc. In this sense a strategic game can bring you much closer to the decision space of a general or national leader than a tactical game can bring you to the perspective of a soldier in the trenches. I think this is an interesting point, although I would controversially suggest that this is a view from the perspective of a game designer and military contractor who has spent substantial time interacting with real world militaries rather than that of a historian trying to look past the great men to discover the smaller factors that determined historical outcomes – but I’m getting ahead of myself. The strategic viewpoint also seems to me to run the risk of falling into traps of Great Man history and I would have loved to see Herman discuss how to avoid that pitfall. Still, I think his overall argument has a lot of merit and dovetails nicely into discussions about who the player is when playing a wargame and how these games are much better at putting you in the shoes of a real person at the strategic scale than at the tactical.

There are also chapters where Herman breaks down his thoughts on different systems for managing movement, how to construct a Combat Results Table, game balance, how to design a multiplayer game, designing solo bots, and the implications of your sequence of play. While I would not say I found these all equally effective, they generally hit a good balance of providing general philosophies or opinions on a subject supported by specific examples. However, there are times when the book gets so lost in the specifics of one choice on one game that I think it loses its perspectives. Fans of the chosen game will enjoy learning more about how it was made but I came for general arguments, not the a director’s cut of designer’s notes.

Of these chapters I found the one on movement systems to be the most successful. The general discussion on different movement systems and why you might choose them is interesting and avoids getting too lost in the weeds. The chapter then ends with a detailed discussion of how Herman applied these principles to designing his game Waterloo, and this section is for my money the best case of marrying design decisions to a specific design. I haven’t played Waterloo, but I have played Gettysburg and Rebel Fury which share the same core movement system. The way Herman highlights why he made changes to Waterloo and how those reflect his interpretation of history represents a high point in the book.

The Card Driven Game system that Herman invented in We the People receives pride of place throughout the book. The final sixty or so pages are just a reprint of the design notes for Herman’s various CDG games published by GMT games (controversially for some this includes Fire in the Lake, a COIN game which some would not classify as a genre of CDG). I happen to really enjoy CDGs in general, even if I’ve only played one of Herman’s, and reading his thoughts on things like separate player decks and whether to include different decks for different eras was another high point. He lays out the case for his own preferences well and there is a lot of insight on display in terms of how to construct a deck for the effect you want in your CDG. He does a great job at showing his own thought processes but still leaves plenty of room for the reader to disagree with his preferences from the position of understanding where Herman is coming from. The CDG discussion is also the aspect of the book that is probably the most useful to designers looking for actionable advice from Wargames According to Mark – anyone thinking about designing their own CDG could probably benefit from reading this book even if they ultimately reject Mark’s advice and make different choices for their design.

What Makes a Historian a Historian

I enjoyed Wargames According to Mark, it may not be the book I wanted it to be, but it’s certainly an enjoyable read with plenty of insight into many of Herman’s most popular and influential designs. What follows is largely tangential to the contents of the book itself, but a trait shared by historians and most cats is that if we see a thread we can’t help but pull on it and see what unravels. The book is subtitled An Historian’s View of Wargame Design and throughout its author argues that it is written from the perspective of a historian. That Herman is a top tier game designer cannot be disputed, even by people who may not care for his designs, but is he a(n) historian?

I’m not a snob, or at least not a huge one. I don’t think you need paper in Latin hanging from your wall to make you a historian. I have some fancy degrees that mean I get to add letters to my name, and certainly that was beneficial in my pursuit of being a historian, but I know plenty of historians who don’t even have university degrees. I am also happy to acknowledge that some people who do have fancy pieces of paper, like, for example, Dr. Naomi Wolf, are complete hacks unable to conduct even basic historical research competently.

At the same time, I’m not prepared to throw the gates wide open and say that anyone who has ever made a historical argument, written an essay, published a paper, or designed a game is a historian because they have engaged with the practice of history. It’s better to think of history as a field which has its own guidelines for best practice. A historian is someone who routinely practices history by using the methodology of historical inquisition, discussion, and writing in their work.

It is also possible to cease to be a historian. As an extreme example consider David Irving. His 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden while not beyond critique was considered a reasonable historical work when it was first published (but has long since been superseded by other books on the topic), however starting with his 1977 book Hitler’s War and continuing through his later publications Irving revealed himself to be a holocaust denier and racist. Nobody now would consider Irving a historian, he’s a conspiracy theorist.

Irving and Wolf are extreme cases, useful because they are so clear cut in terms of how they fell from the field into quackery and worse. They are a reminder, though, that the role of historian is not something bestowed once based on a single piece of work. Instead it must be maintained, and each new work evaluated fresh. If you want to argue that you are a historian you cannot just point to past work, the work you are presenting now that says you are a historian must also meet the necessary standards to be history.

I could spend the rest of my life debating exactly what best practices are in terms of historical methodology, so this is by no means a comprehensive breakdown, but to my mind there are at least a few baseline qualities a work needs to be considered historical, and its author a historian. These are: proper referencing, honest engagement with fellow scholars, and showing your work.

Let’s do those in reverse order. History is not delivering proclamations of your own brilliance from on high. It is not making a priori judgements based on what you’ve read or what you think makes sense. A work of history is an argument with which you attempt to persuade others to agree with your own interpretation of the past. For that reason, it is essential that you show your work, outlining what evidence you’re using, what you think it says, and why that supports your conclusions. This is a better way to persuade others, but it is also so that other historians can examine your reasoning and potentially identify faults with it or point towards alternate interpretations. History is a dialogue not a diatribe.

Naturally extending from that, it is essential to engage with the work of other scholars. I don’t mean just read it, which you should do, but also to honestly and seriously consider what they have to say. You should approach a new work on a subject, especially one you know well, with the assumption that this author may have found something new to you or may know something that you do not. The wealth of historical evidence is far greater than any one person could possibly know, so historians must constantly rely on each other and uplift each other through our work. It also means you can’t just rely on the same old sources that you’ve used for decades because you like them, you need to constantly be keeping up to date with new work – the work of new historians is not something to be torn down to show your own intelligence but rather a chance for you to reevaluate your sincerely held beliefs.

A common undergraduate mistake is to assume the inherent superiority of primary sources to the detriment of engaging with scholarly works that are essential to contextualizing those primary sources. We all have biases, no source, reader, or author is fully objective. Some students will hear this and use it as a basis to reject modern works, relying instead solely on the words written by historical actors. Rather than reducing bias, though, this merely enhances it as now the only bias on display is your own, with no counterpoints being introduced by alternate interpretations or evidence. For that reason one should not just read Thucydides or Froissart and assume one knows all that is necessary about the subjects they discussed, one must participate in the wider historical dialogue about those sources. You should, of course, read primary sources – they are the essential foundation of historical inquiry – but you need a balanced diet which includes modern research.

Referencing is the structure that underpins all of this. It both shows your work by directly pointing readers to where you got your evidence and simultaneously crediting the work of your fellow scholars whose work has made your own possible. While some works of history are very light on references that is almost always at the insistence of the publisher and is detrimental to the work’s overall value as history. Proper referencing is the lifeblood of historical discourse.

I don’t see the value in going through Wargames According to Mark line by line to evaluate it against my criteria. That’s not a good use of anybody’s time. Instead, I want to make a few general observations and consider a case study that I think gets to the heart of the matter.

There are essentially no references in Wargames According to Mark. There are no footnotes or endnotes in the book at all, despite it containing numerous sections of historical background. The few in-text citations that are present are often haphazard (e.g. a reference on pp. 148-9 to an article from the 1960s that apparently forms the foundation for the data for the CRT in For the People and Rebel Fury disagrees about whether it was published in 1964 or 1966).

Perhaps more frustrating, to me at least, is that there is also no substantive discussion of historiography or the work of historians on the subject’s Herman discusses, even those areas where he considers himself an expert. While Herman frequently refers to where in the design process he does his research, there is no detailed breakdown of what his research process looks like. For a historian’s view on design, I would have hoped for a lengthy discussion of what makes good vs. bad historical research, particularly on subjects that might have a challenging historiography (like, say, the American Civil War).

In the book Herman discusses the Pacific War through his designs Pacific War and Empire of the Sun. Pacific War was originally published in 1985, Empire of the Sun in 2005, and Pacific War was redone for a new edition in 2022. That’s nearly forty years between the three publications, an amazing opportunity to discuss how the historiography of the Pacific War has changed over the decades and how Herman engaged with scholarly works - and how they possibly changed his own perspective on the conflict. It would be too much to say that there is none of this in the book, but it is very limited and for a book that’s meant to be a historian’s view I expected more depth to it.

Let’s consider another example. On p. 231 when discussing the design of the 2014 game Hoplite, a co-design with Richard Berg and vol. 15 in the Great Battles of History series, Herman cites three books as influences: The Art of War in the Western World by Archer Jones and Victor Davis Hanson’s (VDH) The Western Way of War and A War Like No Other. I have no strong opinion on Jones’ book besides to note that it is a sweeping general history covering thousands of years of history that was published in 1973 – forty years before Hoplite was designed – which makes me question whether it was the best possible source for a historian who professes specialty in the field of ancient warfare to use. Rather, it is VDH I want to consider.

If you haven’t heard of VDH, well, I’m sorry for introducing you to him. The best primer on his work and how it has been received by academics is probably this summary written by Dr. Roel Konijnendijk from nine years ago, if you prefer an audio version Dr. Konijnendijk also recorded a discussion on VDH’s work five years ago. For the tl;dr crowd, to quote Dr. Konijnendijk:

I should say first of all that Hanson is (or rather, was once) a very capable Classicist. He knows the sources very well, and he knows how to write about them in an accessible and engaging way. His PhD thesis, which was published as Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983, 2nd ed. 1998), is an excellent piece of scholarship with a number of very insightful contributions to the field. His article on the battle of Leuktra (1988) is the best article on that topic ever to have appeared, and I believe it should have ended the Leuktra controversy then and there.

However, everything he was written since 1988 is drivel. It is increasingly ideological drivel, with very little academic merit, as u/Zinegata points out. He simply rehashes the same thesis over and over again, with ever less justification and ever wider supposed implications.

This is also not a particularly new opinion, you can read scathing reviews of VDH’s work going back at least as far as 2002, and probably much further (I am not a specialist in this field so I haven’t read every review). Even then, while several of the items I’ve shared post-date Hoplite’s publication, they are still years before the publication of Wargames According to Mark and reflecting on new research vs. an old design would have been a fascinating subject to include in the book.

Now, VDH isn’t a full-blown conspiracy theorist like Irving, but he’s an inflammatory figure who is increasingly a right-wing talking head and whose work – including the two volumes mentioned by Herman – has been evaluated by scholars and found to be completely lacking. I’m not the thought police, I won’t say that Herman isn’t allowed to use VDH as a basis for his work just because numerous scholars have pointed out the flaws in it – and to be fair to Herman, his discussion of hoplite tactics in the book does deviate from VDH orthodoxy. However, if Herman wants to be taken seriously as a historian, he needs to justify the use of VDH as a source that he recommends as the best the field has to offer – he needs to offer some rebuttal to the criticism to explain why VDH’s research provides valuable evidence for the work he is doing. That’s what the practice of history looks like, that’s showing your work.

Nit Picks

None of the elements covered in this section stopped me from enjoying Wargames According to Mark, but they were minor annoyances or things that slightly baffled me, included here both for completeness and because if these really annoy you, then the book may not be for you.

While I mostly don’t have a strong opinion on Herman’s writing style, I do find that he has a frustrating tendency to erect theoretical naysayers when making a point about why he made a certain decision or how his design choices have withstood the test of time and multiple plays. I don’t really care if there was some controversy around the balance of one of his games back in 2007, and I also don’t care if people were wrong on an internet forum or at a convention I’ve never been to. This rhetorical device makes me feel like I am reading someone settling grudges that have lingered for decades, and that makes me uncomfortable. I just want to know what decisions were made without hearing about how some random guy I’ll never meet was wrong.

Chapter 14 starts with an extensive section on how Pericles is apparently based on Herman’s reading of the debate around the US Constitution during the ratification process, including the views of ancient Greek democracy put forward in the Federalist Papers. This opens a huge can of worms of questions about the design and what exactly it is representing (is it meant to be actual Greek politics or how rich eighteenth-century Americans viewed those politics?) that is largely left unanswered by the rest of the book and goes completely unmentioned in the Pericles design notes included in the appendix. How America’s Founding Father’s viewed ancient democracy, and how those views were inherently the result of their own time, is the kind of subject that could fill a library, and I feel like I had a bombshell dropped at my feet that left me with far more questions than answers.

Every so often Herman grinds his axe about the three-to-one ratio in combat results. Take for example this line from p.59: “…and given that every wargame incorrectly perpetrates the unsupported myth that you need three-to-one odds to attack it should have failed, yet it did not.” It is, of course, objectively untrue that “every wargame” requires you to have three-to-one odds to achieve success. Herman even points this out later in the book. On pp. 137-9 he shows how even by 1965 Avalon Hill wasn’t using it’s same three-to-one is always best ratio. Herman includes an extensive discussion of how three-to-one doctrine was linked to post-WWII Cold War thinking and includes his own opinion on why it was never true (in the process revealing that it was widely debated at the time as well), which is interesting but just further muddies the waters. I think this kind of sweeping generalized statement hurts the book’s argument and makes Herman look dismissive of the work of others even though I know he plays and enjoys many other designers’ games.

Conclusions

I don’t want to end on a bitter note – I really enjoyed Wargames According to Mark and it is a good sign that it produced so many little threads for me to paw at. I much prefer a book that makes me want to argue with it, even just a little, to something that is completely milquetoast and bland. Many books I read could be summarized as “fascinating history, kind of dull writing” and so I’m always pleased when a book gets my blood going.

I probably would have preferred Wargames According to Mark if it had been more of a comprehensive retrospective of Herman’s entire career with coverage spread across a wider selection of his body of work rather than emphasizing his more recent designs, but I can’t fault him for focusing on many of his more popular and influential games – especially as they seem to be both his personal favorites and reflective of his own taste at time of writing. It does make me wonder what this book would have looked like if he’d written it back when Victory Games first closed its doors and when most of his games were of a more traditional hex and counter bent. That’s not to say that it would have been a better book, it almost certainly would not, but it would present an interesting contrast. There’s no point wishing the book was something different, though, and I can’t critique it for that.

Fans of Herman’s designs, especially Empire of the Sun, Churchill, and For the People, will learn plenty about these games and how they were made and more general wargames enthusiasts should still leave the experience of reading Wargames According to Mark with plenty to ponder and discuss next time they’re at the table. At the end of the day you can’t really ask for much more than that!

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2024 in Review and My Top 7 Games of the Year*

Last year was one of meandering and trying new things to the detriment of repeat plays – my BGStats end of year report indicates that I played 48 different games, 42 for the first time. For all the new games that I played, I don’t feel like all that many really stuck with me a year later. I faced a few disappointments in terms of games I was initially excited about failing to deliver, and I played some old masterpieces which I enjoyed but maybe won’t make my favorite of all time lists. Trying so many new games also meant that I rarely spent as much time with each individual title as I would have liked. For 2025 I am hoping to spend more time with most of the games I play, digging a bit deeper into the designs rather than playing just enough for a review and then sticking it back on the shelf.

We Intend to Move on Your Works continued apace, with seven new episodes released in 2024. Releasing an episode approximately every two months is a pace I can be reasonably happy with. Unfortunately, things have slowed down recently thanks to my move (more on that below), but with the turning of the new year I’m hoping to get it back up and running. We’ve already started our next game before we stalled out over Christmas, and I’m keen to get back to it.

I also started a second, hopefully smaller, project where I’m playing operational games on the Korean War. I have no intention of playing every title on the subject – of which there are a surprising number – but I have a shortlist of 4 or 5 games that I’m hoping to play at a minimum. First I tackled Jim Dunnigan’s early design on the subject, which was interesting if not great. At the very end of the year I learned how to play Dean Essig’s Operational Combat Series and I’ve started a game of Korea: The Forgotten War which promises to be more engaging.

Relatedly, I moved to South Korea in September. My partner is on sabbatical at a university here and so for the next year or two this is where I live! The change in continents (and my tiny Korean apartment) limited the number of games I can have at any one time, which I’m hoping will encourage repeat plays of the few games I can fit. The change in time zone has also forced me to come up with new schedules for my online games. I have made some initial connections with local gamers here as well, so hopefully 2025 brings more in person games.

My Top 6 Games of 2024*

Per the rules established in previous years, this list is not my favorite games that were released in 2024 but rather my favorite games that I played for the first time in 2024. The number of games included is entirely arbitrary based on the number of games I felt stood out. The ranking of these is also very much a gut decision and were I to make the list again (possibly after playing these games more) it is very likely that the order would be different. With caveats and explanations done, let’s get to the games:

#7 Norman Conquests by ralph Shelton and richard berg

I’m always excited in a new entry in possibly my favorite hex and counter system and I enjoyed my time with Norman Conquests, but I found that the scenarios lacked some of that Bergian ambition that I love which ultimately relegated the game to the bottom of this list. Still, the simplicity makes Norman Conquests a great entry point into the series, I just hope that future volumes bring a bit more spice.

The two scenarios designed by Berg, originally published in Simon Says, do stand out as having more of that spice that I like.

#6 Kings and Castles by Gary Dicken, Steve Kendall, and Phil Kendall

I believe David Thompson is to blame for this one – he posted something about playing this game at a convention in 2023 I believe, and when I was in England for a We Intend to Move on Your Works team meet up (where we played no ACW games, but one ill-fated game of Tanto Monta), Fred brought along a copy of Kings and Castles. While inarguably a highly abstract game of dynastic conflict between France and England, I couldn’t help but be enamored with its unorthodox design choices. We only played one short game, but I would love to revisit it in the future – this has the potential to be an underappreciated gem.

The cloth map is also a really nice touch, there’s something nice about playing on cloth.

#5 Successors by Mark Simonitch and Richard Berg

Successors is a venerable classic of the card drive game (CDG) genre, one of if not the first big multiplayer games to use the system. As a devoted Bergian and general fan of multiplayer CDGs I couldn’t help but want to play it. I got a copy of the lavish fourth edition from Phalanx Games some time ago and courtesy of some members of the Homo Ludens Discord learned the game via TTS before teaching it at two conventions in Ireland. In the end I prefer Here I Stand in the big multiplayer CDG space, but I can’t help but admire Successors design – it’s a masterpiece of the form, but perhaps a little too vicious for me.

The Phalanx edition is very pretty, but I always played without the miniatures since they are very hard to parse at a glance.

#4 Banish All Their Fears by Ben Hull and David Fox

Banish All Their Fears had a bit of a troubled release – the rulebook has problems and there was a respectable pile of errata counters which should be shipping soon as part of the 2024 replacement sheet from GMT Games. That all having been said, when I was willing to vibe with it I had a lot of fun playing the Blenheim scenario and this is one of the games I have thought about the most this year. The side map governing the lines of your troops is really interesting and it strikes a great balance in terms of movement and combat complexity. I hope they manage to fix up the rulebook and I’m really looking forward to future entries in the series.

There are a lot of counters and set up takes quite a while, but the stacking is manageable and I didn’t find it particularly overwhelming.

#3 Washington’s War by Mark Herman

My first historical wargame was We the People, which was also the first card driven wargame, but despite that it took until this year for me to try the revised version, Washington’s War. In some ways the game feels old, you can tell it was the originator of the genre, but at the same time it manages to feel fresh and engaging – you can enjoy this without nostalgia glasses. This, along with Successors, has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for card driven games and I’m hoping to play more of them in 2025. It’s also on Rally the Troops now, so if you’ve never played it you should give it a try!

One of the ways you can tell this is the original is that events and ops were on separate cards - later games would combine the two and that is generally considered the standard form for CDGs.

#2 Plantagenet: Cousins' War for England, 1459 - 1485 by Francisco Gradaille

I love me some Levy and Campaign but when a game I love (Nevsky in this case) becomes a big multi-game series there is always the worry that newer games will conform too closely to the original template to the detriment of the new game(s). Plantagenet makes the strongest case yet for how the core of Levy and Campaign can be adapted to a new conflict. In the process it throws out several core systems and adds a whole new system that completely transforms the play experience. While probably not my favorite in the system, there’s no denying that it is a brilliant design and powerful argument for the strength of Levy and Campaign as a base for future designs.

There are a lot of counters to place on the map now, which makes things a little tight in the middle, but if you play on Rally the Troops it handles all that for you! While I like in person L&C there’s no denying the convenience of RtT.

Honorable Mentions:

Stonewall Jackson’s Way II by Joseph M. Balkoski, Ed Beach, Mike Belles, and Chris Withers – I’m still deciding how I feel about Great Campaigns of the American Civil War, there’s a lot to like about the system but I have some reservations as well. SJWII was a great way to learn the system, but it’s not a campaign that particularly excites me so I’m hoping a future entry will be the one to finally win me over.

Lanzerath Ridge by David Thompson and Nils Johansson – I remain somewhat on the fence with regard to dedicated solitaire games, for some reason they have not fully clicked for me. That said, I enjoyed Lanzerath Ridge and exploring it alongside Halls of Hegra has helped me to better understand myself and my own taste in games. I’m looking forward to pulling it off the shelf again this year and seeing how I feel about it upon repeat plays.

Shiloh: April Glory by Tom Dalgliesh and Grant Dalgliesh – While I think I prefer Shenandoah when it comes to ACW Columbia block games, I am pretty confident that after playing three games on the topic this is my favorite Shiloh game. It does a lot with a little in terms of rules complexity and really captures that grinding attrition, even if it’s maybe a little too long.

Rafter Five by Mashiu and Jun Sasaki – Another game I played at the We Intend to Move on Your Works meet up. I love dexterity games, and this is an adorable and engaging little dexterity game from Oink Games. Sometimes my favorite games aren’t wargames.

Tikal by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer – I’ve joined a local board game group that plays standard hobby board games and there I had the opportunity to finally play Tikal, a classic German style board game. While not perfect, it reminded me of how much I enjoy games from this era, there’s just something wonderfully simple and board game-y about them.

Labyrinth: The War on Terror by Volko Ruhnke – This is down here because technically I played a learning game of Labyrinth years ago so this wasn’t my first time playing it but I never played a full game. This year I finally started addressing that error. I’ve only completed one full game so opinions are still in the early stages, but so far I think it’s a really interesting design and I’m keen to explore it some more.

#1 Operational Combat Series – Luzon: Race for Bataan by Matsuura Yutaka / Korea: The Forgotten War by Dean Essig and Rod Miller

Nobody is more surprised about this turn of events than I am. I had long placed Dean Essig’s Operational Combat Series (OCS) in the category of overly complex wargames I was never going to learn how to play. However, for my planned dive into Korean War games I wanted to focus on logistics and OCS is the series that does logistics in modern warfare. I had planned to start learnign OCS with Korea: The Forgotten War but pivoted at the last minute to Luzon. I really enjoyed Luzon but now that I’m starting my first big scenario of Korea, I am having even more fun with all the system’s elements in play. I still don’t intend to play any of the huge 4+ map East Front titles, but I may be developing a bit of an OCS addiction…

In addition to my ongoing game on Vassal where we’re playing the first half of the 1950, up to the Chinese intervention, I also set up this little scenario on the breakout at Chosin on my side table to brush up on some of the rules in Korea that weren’t included in Luzon.

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Halls of Hegra by Petter Schanke Olsen and Lanzerath Ridge by David Thompson and Nils Johansson

I play a lot of games solo, but I don’t play very many solitaire games. I’m not exactly sure why that is. I’ve had some of my best gaming experiences multi-handing a hex and counter game, but I’ve yet to find a dedicated solitaire game that has gripped me in the same way. As a result, I don’t play that many dedicated solitaire games, but I am also not beyond hope that I have simply not played the right one(s). With that in mind, I couldn’t help but notice the praise that has been heaped on both Petter Schanke Olsen’s Halls of Hegra (published by Tompet Games) and David Thompson’s Valiant Defense series (published by Dan Verssen Games) - in particular Lanzerath Ridge, a collaboration between Thompson and Nils Johansson. Both focus on lesser known actions in World War II where beleaguered defenders withstood ferocious Nazi onslaughts before eventually succumbing. While World War II is far from my favorite topic, I do enjoy killing the odd Nazi and I have something of a penchant for both niche topics and siege games. Since both games have a shared theme, I figured it might be interesting to review them together.

I want to put a caveat up front that I have not played either game to the point of expertise. Previously I have made sure to log a minimum of 3-5 plays for every solitaire game I review, but playing them that many times back to back has often had a deleterious effect on my enjoyment of the games in the long term. Since I’m hardly raking in the big dollars reviewing wargames online, I have decided to prioritize my own long term joy in this case and so I have only played these games a cursory number of times with the hope that this will encourage me to return to them again in the future and avoid any solitaire game burnout. If you wish you can consider this more of a “first impressions” than a full review.

I am also going to be covering these games from a more thematic and experiential perspective. I won’t completely neglect the game’s mechanisms, but if what you want is a detailed breakdown of how these games play I would recommend another review, or maybe just reading the manual.

Tompet Games and Dan Verssen Games kindly provided me with review copies of Halls of Hegra and Lanzerath Ridge

A Siege by Any Other Name

Halls of Hegra is about the Siege of Hegra during World War II. This 26-day siege saw Norwegian defenders in a (partially) repaired fortress that dated to before World War I holding off attacks from Nazi forces during the German invasion of Norway. While ultimately a Norwegian defeat, with the defenders forced to surrender when a lack of an Allied counteroffensive became apparent, their steadfast resistance to the Nazi invaders was widely praised and when Norway was ultimately liberated many of them were praised as heroes.

Players are tasked with managing the Norwegian defense. The game is split across three distinct phases. In the first you have to try and restore Hegra to a defensible status - the fortress was over thirty years old at the time and not in great repair. This requires digging out positions, sending out runners for supplies, recruiting more defenders, and unlocking technology upgrades. You will also shovel snow, possibly a lot of snow depending on the weather results you get. In the second phase you will undergo sustained assault by Nazi soldiers while also still needing to send runners through Nazi lines to find more supplies and continue repairing the fortress. In the final phase the Nazi’s settle into a more sustained siege with constant bombardments accompanying the attacks, likely devastating your morale and causing significant casualties to your exhausted defenders.

The first phase of Halls of Hegra, the board section in the bottom left shows your preparation while cardboard markers cover up several sections on the fortress that you will want to unlock. Top right is the supply minigame, and top left you can see the Nazi artillery and planes but they won’t come into play yet.

Halls of Hegra’s board is carved up into different sections for each aspect of the game, from the paths to supply sources to the changeable board that is swapped out for each phase of the Nazi attack. The main way you interact with this system is via worker placement - you draw workers blindly from a bag in a simple push your luck system and then place them on sections of the board to take specific actions. Different workers have benefits to taking certain actions and some actions are restricted to specific kinds of workers. Taking actions exhausts workers, who need to rest or be supplied to continue taking actions in the future. Managing your supply of workers so that you always have some for the next turn despite having so much you want to do right now is the core tension in Halls of Hegra.

The Valiant Defense series started back in 2018 with the widely loved Pavlov’s House, which looks like a very cool game, but I must confess to some shallowness and say that the early Valiant Defense games are too ugly for me to play. I’ve mentioned before that when playing a solitaire game I really need it to look nice, because it is taking all of my attention. I’m not distracted by chatting to my friend or any wider social elements beyond the game, I am instead locked in and staring at the board for hours on end so I want it to look nice. That means that the release of Lanzerath Ridge, with gorgeous art by the ever unique Nils Johansson, was the moment for me to jump in and try the series.

States of Siege never looked this good. You can see the tracks along the bottom of the board - the map is arranged so that you are looking from the Nazi perspective which creates this very odd experience of being simultaneously the attacker and the defender. It’s a bold choice, and one that creates an interesting sensation during play.

Lanzerath Ridge isn’t exactly on an obscure topic - the Battle of the Bulge is practically a meme for most covered wargaming topics - but it does choose a less widely covered action within that battle and with a distinct perspective. You control 18 members of the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon who delayed the advance of 1st SS Panzer Division for over 20 hours before being captured. Like with Halls of Hegra your odds of survival are very low and there is an inevitability to your defeat. It is rather a matter of how long can you hold out and keep your position against an overwhelming assault of over 500 German infantry.

Where Halls of Hegra adapted worker placement to the role of managing a siege, Lanzerath Ridge traces its roots back to the States of Siege system with tracks for enemies to attack along and decks of cards that determine where the attacks come from and what form they take. You will take actions with your soldiers, rolling dice to resolve attacks, managing ammunition for your precious machine guns, and exhausting your pieces in the process. Like with Halls of Hegra there is a balance to maintaining your morale and supply of ready workers, but there is also more of a geographical distribution to your soldiers and fewer options to refresh during a round - instead of managing a team it can feel more like you’re just trying to cling on for another few turns before the lull in attacks where you can fully recover. Halls of Hegra has a long, slow build to its pressure where Lanzerath Ridge is about accelerating tension with moments of release before another acceleration.

Best Men for the Job

Worker placement is not my favorite board game mechanic. While I don’t hate it, it also doesn’t get my blood going. Weirdly, the small extra layer of randomization added by dice placement (where you roll a die and the result is placed like a worker but the result either restricts or modifies the action) is one of my favorite mechanisms, go figure. With that caveat noted, the worker placement in Halls of Hegra is very well done. There are multiple different kinds of workers to consider and workers can become exhausted or even wounded which makes them feel more like workers and less like abstract pieces in a board game. You do feel like you are managing a team of humans in an impossible situation, even if you also feel a bit like God rather than one of the participants yourself - but that may be unavoidable unless you commit to having a friend lob ordnance at you while you play.

The one critique I would have of the worker placement aspect is that the generic types lose some of the intimacy compared to if each worker represented an actual person. I know the designer has said that he was not comfortable using representing real people in the game, and that’s perfectly understandable, but at the same time when playing Lanzerath Ridge, where each Allied defender is named after a real life participant, I found myself far more invested in the fate of my pieces than I did in Halls of Hegra. I related much more to those portraits and was much more anxious about them every time a mortar exploded overhead or a machine gun lit up the section of woods they were in.

The three squads that make up your team in Lanzerath Ridge. It’s a little shallow but I did relate more to the ones who had portraits, but I suspect the difference is primarily the result of limited sources - if there was an available contemporary photo for each of them they would all have portraits. Still, the inclusion of names makes me care about them quite a lot.

Both games abstract away the Nazis, in a good way. In Halls of Hegra all the Nazis are identical and faceless pieces that march inexorably towards your position unless you can gun them down first, while in Lanzerath Ridge there are different kinds of Nazi but they are represented by abstract symbols of helmets and weapons. There is no effort to humanize the inhumane genocidal attackers, and that is absolutely the right decision. These are games about the defenders and their resistance to overwhelming inhumanity, and through art and mechanisms both games focus on that resistance.

Playing a losing defense

Rather than any shared mechanism, the element that links Lanzerath Ridge and Halls of Hegra is that both games are about desperate defenses that withstood attacks against the odds before ultimately being defeated. There is an inevitability to the end - you will not win this battle, but you must hold out for as long as possible, either to allow for your friends to prepare themselves for the next attack or just to show your defiance against conquering fascists.

Both games effectively evoke the desperation of your situation, but in slightly different ways. Halls of Hegra does a better job at conjuring a sense of desperation and claustrophobia. The different phases of the game make you feel the tightening noose of the Nazi attack, and when the artillery bombardments begin during the final phase the game becomes actively stressful. You can feel the worsening situation as the game progresses and it does it with remarkably little rules overhead which is quite the achievement.

The final phase of Halls of Hegra, note the swarm of Nazis on the bottom left (this did not go well for me), but also see the artillery pieces and Nazi insignia on the top right - where once I was sending out runners for supplies, now there are just Nazi guns and encroaching positions. The difference between phase three and phase one is palpable.

In contrast, while Lanzerath Ridge’s individual phase decks do convey the different tactics employed by the SS - frontal assaults, mortar bombardments, or finally an attack on the flanks - the shared mechanisms between each phase make them feel pretty similar. It doesn’t have Halls of Hegra’s modular board where aspects of the game are discarded as you play. It tells an interesting story, but it is a slightly more static one - but then to be fair Lanzerath Ridge is the story of a single day while Halls of Hegra covers nearly a month.

What Lanzerath Ridge has is the touch of the personal. I already mentioned the individual portraits on each counter, but on top of that the game really emphasizes the importance of casualties. You only have five morale points and if you run out you lose the game. Every time one of your men is injured at the end of the turn, that costs you a morale, and if they die (which happens after only two hits), you lose a morale. You get an immediate sense of how bad a single death will affect the situation with the soldiers. They are in a desperate situation and things could spiral very quickly. Where Halls of Hegra tells a story of a desperate situation, Lanzerath Ridge is the story of desperate people. In that way the two games manage to tell similar stories without feeling redundant.

I want to stake out a (potentially) controversial stance here, though. Both games are about desperate defenses where everyone involved was ultimately either killed or captured, but it is possible for you to “win” both games. Halls of Hegra has a static victory condition - you win if you can survive to the end - while Lanzerath Ridge has a score if you make it to the end, and even a mechanism (radioing intelligence reports) that serves to boost your score should you win. These are games, so it’s not surprising that they have a way to win, but I also have to wonder if I wouldn’t like these games more if they just didn’t have victory conditions. I can’t take much credit for this notion, Amabel Holland’s recent solitaire game Endurance discards the notion of victory conditions entirely and she has written a video essay discussing whether victory conditions are necessary.

Amabel Holland’s video Do Board Games Need Victory Conditions?

While certainly not for everyone, as someone who is playing these games for the narrative first I wonder if I wouldn’t be more invested in them if they were purely stories without any specified victory (or even necessarily loss) conditions. I’m honestly not sure, I haven’t played Endurance so maybe I should refrain from suggesting that other games about desperate situations follow its lead, but it is a notion that I can’t quite shake.

Playing on My Own

Ultimately, while I am incredibly impressed with the design of Halls of Hegra and I enjoyed my game of it, I didn’t rush to set it up again. I slightly preferred my time with Lanzerath Ridge, but I also did not immediately set it up for a second attempt. I think this speaks to some degree to my relationship with solitaire games, especially solitaire historical games.

The element of these games that I most enjoy is the story they tell. In exploring their story and experiencing this historical event from a new lens (potentially even the first time for me) I find myself fully engaged. The games are designed with randomization to ensure that no two games play exactly the same, but they are still restricted to a specific story. The necessity of a game that can be efficiently played by one person places restrictions on how broad the game can go. I will always be attacked by the Nazis with increasing furiosity, and after that first play I will begin to learn the patterns of those attacks - they won’t surprise me the same way.

There is the risk that the more I play these games the more the mechanism overrides the story. I learn the patterns of the card decks and push myself more towards system mastery, resulting in the slow erasure of the story and the people from my mind. Rather than thinking about what a card or action means in the story, I proceed through the steps of play as if it were the latest Stefan Feld game (no disrespect intended, I do love me a mid-weight Eurogame).

None of this is meant as a criticism exactly, I’m happy for people who engage with these games as what they are - games - but rather to describe my own difficult relationship with solitaire only games. I think for me playing a solitaire game is more akin to reading a book. I rarely re-read books. When I do re-read a book it is often years after I last read it, when my memory of the story has faded. I don’t mind this, there are so many books to read and I’m happy for old favorites to sit on my shelf and only be revisited every 3-5 years. I think dedicated solitaire games may be in a similar situation.

As to why I prefer multi-handed solo play, I think that is because those games are usually not trying to tell so narrow a story (or at least the ones I love aren’t). Most historical wargames are counterfactual machines, paper tools for generating alternative history. Solitaire games are also generating counterfactuals, but within a narrower band because one side must be completely automated, and so I think repetition is less interesting to me. It is also worth noting that I don’t often play my 2+ player wargames solitaire that many times unless they have multiple very distinct scenarios - instead I play them by myself once or twice and then either stick them back on the shelf for a while or seek out an opponent to play with. So maybe I just only play games solitaire once every few years, and the variable scenarios and option for multiplayer is the only thing that keeps me coming back to those other games.

Conclusion

Both of these games are incredible designs, and ones that fans of solitaire games especially should seek out and try. Just because I personally have struggled to find enthusiasm to play them on repeat for weeks on end does not diminish the fact that I enjoyed them both immensely and I have found myself thinking about them often since.

I should also say that both games are gorgeous - beautiful art and excellent use of graphic design to make a wonderful collection of cardboard to spend an evening with. The rulebooks for both games are great (although Lanzerath Ridge’s play aids are a bit lackluster) and I didn’t struggle to learn and play either game. As examples of the modern wargaming hobby these are both excellent ambassadors and the wide praise they have received is certainly warranted.

That all having been said, I don’t know that either game will make my favorite games I played this year list, nor can I swear that they will have spaces on my shelves forever. I can say that I am glad I played them and I am doubly glad they exist as both games serve to enrich the hobby. I think Halls of Hegra, by integrating worker placement into wargaming and in its representation of siege warfare, feels like the more innovative game but Lanzerath Ridge brings bold aesthetics and a new perspective to a widely tread subject and was overall the game I enjoyed more. Halls of Hegra is a more involved game, both in terms of set up and systems, and I preferred the way that I was able to jump into Lanzerath Ridge with relative ease - possibly reflective of how what I want out of these games is the narrative first and less so the mechanisms. As the reviewer I should probably know, but if I’m honest I’m still working it out for myself.

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Luzon: Race for Bataan by Matsuura Yutaka (OCS Review)

A system like Dean Essig’s Operational Combat Series (OCS) has a rightfully intimidating reputation. I’ll confess that if you’d asked me a year ago if I was ever going to play OCS, I would have told you absolutely not. It has some legendarily large games, with huge stacks of counters (a personal bugbear of mine), and playtimes that are measured in days not hours. The rulebook clocks in at over forty pages with three columns of text on each page – while it may not be the longest rulebook, I’ve ever read it is certainly in competition for that dubious title. As the name suggests, this is a system for operational warfare, one that focuses primarily on World War II but has strayed into at least one other mid-twentieth century war. You must manage individual supply points to take actions and balance stacks of counters to cover your air power, artillery, combat units, leaders, etc. There’s a lot going on is what I’m saying, and as someone who has only minimal interest in playing games about World War II it just did not strike me as something I’d want to try. I put all this up front at the start to hopefully provide some context for the news I must bring you: I am afraid that I think OCS might be great.

Any long running, complicated but beloved series of games will at some point attempt to answer the question of how to help people learn the system. Given enough time they will make several attempts at answering the ubiquitous question “what’s the best game to start with?” This is especially true with a series published by MMP who have a reputation for rarely reprinting older games, so what was a good entry point may end up being $200+ on the secondary market. Luzon: Race for Bataan is the latest attempt to provide an easy entry point into OCS for interested players. Published in the second issue of the Operational Matters magazine along with an assortment of supplementary play aids and articles targeted at new players, Luzon is a very small OCS game and probably about as simple an experience as something like OCS is ever going to be.

Luzon is still capable of some very impressive counter stacks on occasion but I don’t mind isolated stacks like this quite so much as clusters of stacks all next to each other, where an unfortunate collapse could domino across the game.

There is probably some expectation that I should declare whether Luzon is the best entry point for OCS or not, but realistically this is not a question I can answer. I will try to provide some context for Luzon’s strengths as a way to learn OCS, but I can’t really compare it to any other entry point. I’ve only played Luzon at time of writing, but even after I’ve played more OCS games I will be doing so as someone who has already learned the basics of the system. All I can really say is that I found Luzon to be a great entry point. It’s smaller footprint and lower counter density just hits a great spot for learning in my opinion. But I also don’t want to obsess about this topic too much – Luzon is a game, and I think a fun one and I don’t want to lose that point.

It’s OCS but it fits on the tiny side table in my apartment. It’s some kind of miracle!

I have yet to find an easy solution to the problem that faces attempts to review a venerable series like OCS: any initial review of a game in the series also de facto functions as a review of the series in its totality. This is on the surface an absurd situation – I have only played one OCS game, and a particularly light one at that, how could I review the whole of the series? At the same time, since my thoughts on Luzon will in many ways be my thoughts on the core mechanisms shared by all OCS games, it is still the case that I am to some degree reviewing all of OCS. While I have played three full games of Luzon and feel reasonably qualified to express my general thoughts on it, I must caveat my feelings on OCS as still under development. That’s probably the best I can do until I ascend to the wargame reviewer equivalent of nirvana and can find an enlightened solution to this challenge.

There are far too many elements to OCS for me to dig into them all while maintaining a reasonable word count so I’m going to focus on just the supply systems, movement, and combat for this review, since as a neophyte those are the elements that stood out to me the most. It also helps that they are some of my favorite aspects of the system. I’m going to address supply last, since it underpins pretty much every system in OCS, and some basic grounding in those systems should make supply’s importance apparent.

For a hex and counter system to grab me it really needs an interesting movement system. While having a good movement system is not enough to ensure I will love a game, I’m not sure there are any hex and counter games with boring movement systems that I like. To me the strength of hexes is the freedom of movement they allow - or in cases with restricted movement, how they can still create interesting situations. While I’ve played area movement and point to point games with interesting movement, hex and counter, to me, is the space where movement should be king. I am please to say that OCS has interesting movement, and that it stands out among the other systems I’ve played. A key aspect of this is how OCS handles Zones of Control (ZOCs).

The map is quite small - it is one sheet but also has larger hexes than most OCS titles and focuses players into the middle of the map - but also offers multiple paths for players to explore, both guiding your movement and presenting you with important choices.

OCS has relatively soft ZOCs. What I mean is that in most games a ZOC is used to stop movement of a piece, locking it down for at least that turn. In OCS there are three different types of movement (foot, truck, and track) and only truck movement is stopped by ZOCs. At the same time, ZOCs are only projected by units in Combat Mode (not in the more mobile Movement Mode) and ZOCs can be negated by friendly units (for movement at least). This gives you plenty of tools for just walking past enemy units, you can’t rely on your lines to be impermeable. However, after you move your units, you will have to establish trace supply or risk attrition (which is brutal in OCS), and trace supply generally does not ignore those ZOCs so while you could march your units past an enemy you might be killing them in the process.

This creates this interesting puzzle of placing units and sustaining lines back to your own bases, and I must confess I’m not very good at it. I am aware when playing Luzon as the Japanese that I should probably be finding ways to cut off US supply to eliminate units without having to risk combat but executing that idea without losing my own units has so far largely eluded me. I can see what I need to be doing with my movement, but figuring out how to do it is challenging in a way that is incredibly satisfying if you figure out how to do it. It’s interesting and unlike anything else I’ve played before.

But why wouldn’t you just kill the enemy units? Why encircle them? The simple reason is that OCS combat is far from a guarantee. One thing I look for when I’m first experiencing a complex game is where that design has spent its complexity budget. Some super complex systems just spend it everywhere – every system is complicated for maximum “realism” or whatever. I hate this. What I want is a game to know where to be complex and where to keep things simple stupid. OCS absolutely nails it with its combat. There is so much going on in OCS and the combat is blessedly simple. You each pick a unit to lead the combat and use their Action Rating, usually a number between zero and five. The difference between these ratings will be the sole DRM in combat. Then you compare the strength ratios of the two forces and check the hex terrain to determine the column on the combat results table (CRT), roll for surprise (more on that later), then roll 2d6 (adding the DRM from the action ratings) and find that row and where it intersects your column. This may not sound like the simplest combat ever, but in the world of wargaming this is bare bones simple. I love that it is this simple, so you never get bogged down in tedious combat calculations, but it also offers a range of interesting results.

There are only four kinds of combat result in OCS. You have losses for either the attacker or defender, the attacker can gain Exploitation which will potentially let them activate again later this turn (this is great), the defender can become disorganized (this is bad), and then you have Options. Options are amazing. A combat result will give attackers and defenders a number of Options and you must spend those Options on one of two things: taking a loss or retreating the whole stack of units that participated in the combat – one hex for each Option spent. Pretty simple. The spice is that the attacker must spend their Options first and if they take any retreats then the defender doesn’t have to spend any of their Options. So, you can get situations where the attacker could choose to not suffer any losses, but in those cases, they probably aren’t inflicting any harm on the enemy. To truly make progress you must be prepared to take some losses, and losses must come first from the unit you used the Action Rating of (maybe your best unit) which makes it extra painful. This is such a tense little decision space that doesn’t require tedious rules and endless math. While I’m usually no fan of strength ratios, here at least they are not further burdened by more math, and I can tolerate that.

And then there’s Surprise. Before each combat you roll 2d6 and add the relevant DRM. A high roll might give the attacker Surprise, a low roll could give it to the defender – the exact number differs between Overrun and standard combat. If there is Surprise, you shift the combat d6 columns in the direction of the side that got surprise. This means that your 4:1 combat could become a 13:1 combat, or it could be a 1:4 combat. It’s not so random that you can’t account for it in your strategy, and you should be accounting for it, but it lingers in the background of nearly every combat as something that could save or ruin your plans. I’m a huge fan of games that inject just the right amount of chaos and unpredictability into their systems, and Surprise is exactly the kind of spice I love in a combat system.

The other reason you might not want to be making attacks, and especially why you might not want to be making artillery bombardments, is that every attack costs you supply. In OCS supply points are tracked on the map and you need to be able to spend from a nearby supply depot – either within 5 movement points or via a headquarters throwing it to your units. This requires open supply lines, of course, as well as ample enough resources. On the other hand, though, you may find it beneficial to force your opponent to spend supply defending from attacks if their resources are low. It really makes you think on whether you can afford to fight these battles. You may even need to spend supply to move your units – units with truck or track movement need fuel to even move and there are several options for how to fuel them. Like with combat, the core systems at play aren’t that difficult to understand but how to make the most of them has some tricky implications. It makes you think about combat in a different way and especially forces you to consider whether you can sustain an attack. OCS frequently asks you if you can capitalize on a breakthrough should you achieve one – it’s not enough to punch a hole in the enemy’s position, you need to be able to take advantage of that which means having units and resources available. It does all this without getting bogged down in spreadsheets and bookkeeping, which is some small miracle.

There are many more systems I am neglecting in this overview. The one aspect I do want to give a brief mention to is how OCS splits itself into phases. Each player’s turn has a Movement, Supply, Reaction, Combat, and Exploitation phases (ignoring a few other admin phases for the moment). What stands out to me about these phases is that combat can in theory happen in any of Movement, Reaction, Combat, or Exploitation phases and units can move in all of those except Combat (ignoring taking ground after a successful attack). With the ability to put units in Reserve Mode to take advantage of certain phases, either to plug a hole in your lines in your opponent’s turn via Reaction Phase movement or to exploit an attack you made via the Exploitation Phase, the pacing of an OCS turn is truly remarkable. I have deliberately chosen to not go into very much detail on this, however, because I don’t think I’ve fully come to grips with it. I can see how it is important and that I need to make myself think not just in terms of movement and attack but also in pacing and timing my moves to certain phases, but I don’t yet grasp how to do that. This is something I believe will come with time – as more of the system becomes second nature it will be easier for me to think strategically. For the moment I’m trying to just keep my units in supply and not embarrass myself too much.

A refrain I’ve heard from a few sources is that OCS “isn’t that complicated”. I would like to say now that this is an insane take – OCS is incredibly complicated. It took me a solid month to learn how to play. However, I can see how they reached this opinion. OCS is immensely complicated, but it follows a coherent logic. Like with many system-based series, once you internalize the flow of OCS it can become second nature. The individual rules governing things like supply and combat are quite complex and have many little specific quirks that you must learn, but they all make sense within the narrative of the game (or at least the vast majority do). At the same time, it is incredibly easy to make a mistake in OCS because there is just so much happening. But, as with many wargames, a rules mistake is not cataclysmic – they are generally easily corrected and so long as that core logic is sustained the flow can usually continue. Once you’ve started playing OCS it becomes fairly easy to continue, but climbing that mountain is still challenging if you’re starting at the bottom!

For the sake of simplicity, and in some cases because it does not make sense for the campaign in question, Luzon jettisons many core OCS rules. Whether this is advantageous to learning OCS or not depends on your philosophy of learning systems. I’ve seen the opinion expressed in a few places, about a few series, that some people prefer to learn the whole of the system, with all its features from the start. For them Luzon’s stripping out of core elements will be unsatisfying. I, however, prefer to learn the system in chunks. Luzon does not introduce any significant deviations from OCS, so you don’t have to unlearn anything when moving from Luzon to a new entry. I prefer to use a game like Luzon as a steppingstone – teaching me the vast majority of OCS and then I can learn the final 20% or so as part of learning the next volume on my shelf. For me this is a preferable way to engage with OCS.

If I were to cite a minor gripe as a new player dabbling in OCS, I wish the two sides of the counter had some visual label for which one was Movement Mode and which was Combat Mode. While I can tell the modes on an individual counter by flipping it and seeing which side has the higher movement value, the more counters you add to the game (and there can be a lot of counters) the harder tracking this becomes. This is especially true of units where I’m only learning their stats. On the physical game I can kind of tell which side is which because I can tell the difference between the top and reverse of the counter, but on Vassal (where I played my opposed game) I had no such helpful indicator. I expect there may be some secret that I’m missing which expert OCS players will already know, but as a way to get into the system I just found it that little bit more fiddly than I would like. This is an incredibly minor nit pick, but at such an early stage in my OCS career it’s all I’ve got.

The full list of rules that Luzon ejects to simplify the experience.

But enough about OCS the system, what about Luzon the game? As you might have guessed, Luzon covers the Japanese landing on that island the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor which resulted in US-Philippine forces under General MacArthur retreating to the Bataan Peninsula and ultimately abandoning the island. As you would expect from that description, in Luzon the Japanese are tasked with attacking as hard and as fast as they can. They have superior units, especially in terms of Action Ratings, but they have fewer units and far less access to replacements when their units are eliminated in combat. This means that while you can be certain of eliminating defending US and Philippine units when you attack as the Japanese you may end up worse off should you also lose your attacking unit. An even exchange of units will see you falling quickly behind.

A confession: I am a terrible Japanese commander in Luzon. I have yet to win as the Japanese, and in fact in most games I come nowhere close. I can successfully drive the US forces back – eventually – but on nowhere near the timescale I need to be on to win within the five turns the game lasts. While you can feel the greater resources and organization of the Japanese military against the disorganized US-Philippine defenses, it is still a tall order to drive hard and fast enough to rout the enemy who will continually bring reorganized units back into the front. More experienced OCS players may not find this quite so challenging, but as a new player it was a puzzle that wracked my brain, in a good way.

This was the best I did as Japan across three games, and I’m nowhere near the victory line on the Bataan Peninsula.

As the impetus lies with the Japanese player to sustain their offensive, to some degree they are also more interesting to play. Luzon is pretty solitaire friendly since the defender’s strategy is generally easier to parse on a turn-to-turn basis so you can almost automate it and focus on playing the Japanese. That’s not to say that it isn’t fun as a two-player game, but it feels like the Japanese player has more to do and does more to shape the game. This is not a criticism, Luzon is hardly unique in having this dynamic, but it is something to be aware of. I will say that I’m not always the biggest fan of this dynamic as a player – I can admire games that use it well, but they don’t always click with me – but I still found a lot to enjoy in Luzon as the US player.

Overall, at just five turns and with quite low counter density (half a counter sheet total), Luzon does not overstay its welcome. Some experienced OCS heads may find it too small to be satisfying, but I love games at this scale. You could play this in an evening once you know what you’re doing, but as a new player you may want to allow yourself 4-5 hours for that first game. With its fairly settled opening state I could see some people finding Luzon to become repetitive with time and for clear “solved” opening strategies to be established, but it does allow quite a few options as it opens up in the mid-game. I don’t know that you would get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of Luzon, but any wargame that I’m still happy to play after three games is a winner. For its intended purpose, offering a good entry point into OCS, I think Luzon is an unqualified success.

Luzon doesn’t come as a boxed game, it is rather a magazine game, and the accompanying issue is focused on helping new players learn and enjoy OCS. Operational Matters volume 2 is not a particularly dense magazine, the whole package is fewer than 40 pages including the Luzon specific rules, but I enjoyed every article I read. There are articles on tips for new players and mistakes to avoid, along with some denser fair on things like how fog of war works in OCS (something that as a neophyte I have largely elected to ignore). I particularly enjoyed the design notes for Luzon by Matsuura Yutaka - his search for a beginner friendly OCS topic to encourage more players in Japan was really interesting and highly relatable. Not the bit about Japan specifically, but rather finding a series you love and desperately wanting more local opponents to play with. It also comes with several play aids to help explain/remember key rules and systems of OCS, all of which are quite nice. The total package is good, but I would also say that it is not essential. I wasn’t constantly referencing the play aids or the individual articles. They were nice to have as a tool to help me in my journey but you don’t need them if you are looking to learn OCS yourself. For me the total package was a great introduction to the system, but it was the smaller scale of the Luzon game that helped me click with it the best, not the supplementary material.

The table of contents for Operational Matters Volume 2. The example of play was particularly helpful for learning Luzon. The other articles were all interesting and helped me understand the system better without being strictly essential reading.

For an introduction to be fully successful, it should direct the player (i.e. me) towards the rest of the series. I am certainly interested in exploring OCS more, and I have spent more time than I care to admit browsing entries in the series. However, I must qualify that to some degree. There are aspects of the system that I still find quite off-putting. For one thing I’m not the biggest fan of East Front WWII and I have a certified phobia of enormous counter stacks. For that reason, don’t expect me to be taking out a mortgage to buy a copy of Case Blue any time soon. However, there are ample smaller OCS titles – one or maybe two map sheets tops – the allure of which is beginning to call to me. Next on my list, though, does have more maps than a man in a small Korean apartment can fit, but with a counter density that should be manageable for my deepest fears: Korea: The Forgotten War. While East Front isn’t my cup of tea, Korea is another story entirely.  I had originally intended to start with Korea since it is meant to be a good first OCS game, but I was distracted by the temptation of Luzon. Now with that under my belt, it’s time for a bigger meal and I’m very excited for my second helping.

Current OCS Honcho Chip Saltsman kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of Operational Matters Volume 2

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