Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 5

Plantagenet by Francisco Gradaille

Any long running game series faces the risk of stagnation. While Levy and Campaign is only on its fourth volume, there are near countless future volumes in the works and it could easily expand to equal it’s predecessor COIN in terms of size, and so naturally we begin to wonder do we really need all these games? Can each new addition sufficiently differentiate itself from what came before? Plantagenet answers this question by being far more than a simple rejigging of the core system, this is practically a ground up rebuild. It takes mechanisms designed for the thirteenth-century Baltic and reshapes them to suit fifteenth-century England, casting off several core systems in the process and adding whole new ones. The final product is, surprisingly, probably the most approachable Levy and Campaign game yet and a stunning marriage of mechanism and theme. While Plantagenet fails to top the post in terms of my own personal preference for Levy and Campaign games, it is a phenomenal design and has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Levy and Campaign as a whole.

Plantagenet makes substantial changes to the Levy and Campaign core, so many that I found it harder to learn than I expected as a series veteran. For Almoravid and Inferno I was able to skim the rules, picking out the highlighted differences, and use my knowledge of Nevsky to propel me into my first games. This did not work for Plantagenet; the changes were too foundational. I gave up and just read the rules in their entirety, only then did I grasp what I was doing wrong. That is not to say that Plantagenet is more complex than earlier entries. For new players coming into the series without any baggage I believe this will be easier to learn but for series veterans I would warn you to prepare to challenge your assumptions about what a Levy and Campaign game can be. This is a good thing, though! Much as I’ve enjoyed Almoravid and Inferno, having the system shaken up like this is positive – as long as the final product is good of course!

One of the best decisions that designer Francisco Gradaille made in Plantagenet was in considering the mechanical weight of his design. What I mean is that he did not just bolt new ideas and mechanisms onto the Levy and Campaign core, instead for everything he adds he takes something away which helps prevent the game from becoming unwieldy. Consider first what is taken away. There are no sieges in Plantagenet. For those unfamiliar with Levy and Campaign that might not seem like a big deal, but the rules for sieges in this system are involved and removing sieges also removes rules for sorties, castle walls, garrisons, and arguably the main way players earn victory points. This is a huge chunk of the system to strip away, but it not only allows the addition of new systems it also fits the history. The Wars of the Roses were not entirely without sieges – several Welsh castles, most famously Harlech, were the scene of several major sieges – but by the mid-fifteenth century it had been a very long time since England had faced any kind of internal warfare so where previously there had been many fortified castles and walled cities, the former had mostly turned into residences for the wealthy and the latter left to decay as the cities expanded well beyond them. Unusually for a medieval war, the Wars of the Roses were defined by field battles, and so it makes sense to remove pages of siege rules that would only be necessary in a few niche situations.

Also befitting the battle heavy nature of the Wars of the Roses, the rules for battle have been subtly tweaked. Gone is the ability to endlessly avoid battle and there is now the potential for Lords to intercept any enemy force moving adjacent to them, which nudges Plantagenet towards a more aggressive posture. Instead of avoiding battle by marching away a Lord may choose to go into Exile – fleeing to a foreign haven where they can muster forces for a new invasion on a subsequent turn. Knowing when to choose battle and when to Exile is core to Plantagenet’s ebb and flow. Losing a battle runs the risk of a Lord being killed and permanently removed from play, so choosing to stay and fight carries even higher risks than in other Levy and Campaign games. Additional changes are the inclusion of special units like the Retinue, which is extremely powerful but if it is routed you lose the battle, or Vassals that you recruit from the map who act as a special unit themselves rather than adding more wooden unit pieces to the Lord’s mat. Hits in combat are now simultaneous, so it is no longer quite so advantageous to be the defender. Lastly, Lords have a Valor rating that gives you a limited number of re-rolls for armor saves in combat – this helps to mitigate the random luck element in Levy and Campaign’s core combat, but it does also add yet more dice rolling which will do nothing to win over anyone who already did not like how Levy and Campaign handles combat.

The Lord mats have also been changed to allow for the many, many unique lords that fought (and died) during the Wars of the Roses. The mats are generic and Lords are represented by cards that show their stats and starting units/resources.

Everything up to now could be considered tweaks to the system rather than a radical reimagining, but I have saved the best for the last: the Influence system. Influence is effectively victory points, tracked on an absolute scale. Players can spend Influence, shifting the track towards their opponent, and you will because you need to make Influence checks to accomplish pretty much anything that will push you towards victory. Influence checks are used when recruiting Vassals and when taxing, but the most common use for them is Parleying. Parleying lets you switch the loyalty of spaces on the board. You need spaces to be friendly to do several actions, but you also gain Influence at the end of the turn if you have the most of each of the three kinds of location (Stronghold, Town, and City) as well as for several key locations (London, Calais, and Harlech). By Parleying for control, you are effectively spending victory points now with the hope that you will get more in the future.

The summary of Influence point costs from the play aid looks really intimidating, but in practice it’s pretty easy to keep track and after a game or two you’ll mostly have internalized it. It helps a lot that if you play on Rally the Troops it does the math for you as well.

Influence checks are simple. Each Lord has an Influence stat between one and five and you must roll equal to or under that number, with a roll of a six always being a failure and a one always a success. You can bolster your chances by spending more Influence, but since Influence is essentially victory points this can be a risky prospect – especially if, like me, you have an uncanny ability to roll sixes. Influence underpinning so many disparate systems – control, Vassal recruitment, tax, etc. – is a great example of using one core system across several aspects of the design. It also means you are always thinking about your Influence costs – you want to spend Influence, but can you really afford to? There is constant pressure to spend: each Lord costs Influence to keep on the board between turns, and you must pay your troops every turn or they will pillage the land, which means you need to be taxing, and taxing costs influence. All these elements combine to burden the player with a constant sense of pressure – even when you’re doing well on Influence it feels brittle, a few bad twists of fate and it could all come crumbling down. You turn on fortune’s wheel.

Should you rise too high in Influence you also risk tipping the balance in England and forcing a drastic response from your opponent. Something I admire in Levy and Campaign games is how bad they make battles feel – battles are gambles and experienced players often try and avoid them as much as possible. This reflects how medieval commanders often saw them as well. However, medieval commanders still risked it all on a battle and sometimes I worry that Levy and Campaign doesn’t do enough to nudge you towards gambling on a fight in the open field. Plantagenet has a clever solution to this problem. Defeating enemy Lords can gain you Influence and driving them into Exile can give you the time and space you need to claw back a bad position. You can, and probably will, play entire games of Plantagenet where nobody fights a single battle, but at the same time sometimes you will be faced with no other choice than to abandon the game of political control and try your luck on the battlefield. This is made particularly risky with Plantagenet’s highways, that let Lords rocket across the map, so you are never truly safe from a large army that is determined to chase you down.

The green paths are very slow - taking a whole activation to move across them - but the gray highways can be moved two spaces at a time, which allows for some very rapid advances along the east-west and north-south axis.

If you focus too much on politics and you get too far ahead in Influence you may find yourself facing the full might of your opponent’s forces – and you had better hope you were preparing to fight because armies can ramp up in size very quickly in Plantagenet. The option to flee into Exile rather than fight avoids making this too punishing an experience. In fact, sometimes you want your opponent to overcommit to a large army because when you abandon England for a few turns they’ll be stuck paying for all those soldiers and they may end up having to disband their own Lords just to avoid pillaging and losing even more Influence.

The slow attrition inflicted on England and Wales provides another motive for combat. Every time you take provender or tax a space for coin you slowly deplete it. While it will replenish after certain turns, the tendency is towards a slow attrition of the island’s resources. This happens particularly fast if you have large armies, as they demand two or even three times as much food and coin. You can even deliberately deplete areas to deny them to your opponent. If you cannot afford to feed or pay your troops they will pillage, giving your opponent a pile of Influence and, if you are truly unlucky, disbanding that Lord anyway. This means that in certain contexts you may need to throw an army into battle just because it is too expensive to sustain – but if your opponent keeps refusing you that opportunity what are you going to do?

This interplay of when to play the area control game of abstracted politics versus when to risk it all in the field is Plantagenet’s shining gem. It works wondrously and really embodies the sense of the Wars of the Roses. This is not a game that will teach you in detail every aspect of the Wars of the Roses and make you an expert in its many battles and betrayals. Instead, it places you in the mindset of the two factions and poses many of the same problems they faced and asks you to figure out what you would have done in their place. In this way it is a shining gem of wargame design.

I must now make a grim confession – I don’t own Plantagenet anymore. The reason for that is simple: it’s on Rally the Troops and I just don’t see myself playing it any other way. Much as I love Levy and Campaign, I have struggled to find the time and space to play them in person. Virtually all of my games have been on either Rally the Troops or Vassal. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, the Rally the Troops implementations in particular are amazing, but it does put me in a weird place when I’m heaping so much praise on a game I gave away and don’t intend to buy again. Plantagenet has some of the best scenario variety I’ve seen in any Levy and Campaign game, but the scenarios also tend to be long. This maximizes their capacity for that glorious turn of fortune’s wheel feeling that I love so much, but it also makes it even less likely that I, personally, will play the cardboard and wooden version of this game. If this sounds like an interesting game you should absolutely try it on Rally the Troops and then maybe, if it fits your own personal preferences and lifestyle, consider buying the physical game.

While I’m making dark confessions, I don’t love Plantagenet as much as I do Nevsky. To quote Mrs. Doyle, maybe I like the misery. Nevsky is a game of watching your plans crumble around you and stranding your Lord somewhere stupid when the spring rains make it impossible for him to move. It’s got grinding sieges that will take hours of your life only to ultimately collapse due to lack of food or funds. It’s brutal and at times tedious in a way that I just adore. Plantagenet softens many of these elements – there is more potential for coming up with a plan on the fly when something goes awry. Food sources are plentiful, even if taking it depletes the land, and you can always try and Parley for a little more territorial control. That’s not to say that Plantagenet is kind – instead it is a game of compounding error. In Nevsky your mistake is often immediate, and its repercussions drop on you like a stone, whereas Plantagenet pushes you inch by inch closer to an edge, maybe you see it coming maybe you don’t. It is a series of bad mistakes coming home to roost to Nevsky’s one big blunder hitting you in the face with the force of a hammer.

These are not dissimilar sensations, because Plantagenet is after all a descendant of Nevsky and it carries that semi-masochistic DNA. I expect many people will prefer Plantagenet’s particular brand of self-destruction, including its more open play environment thanks to the added layer of area control. And, for the record, I really like Plantagenet. This is an excellent design and the most exciting addition to the Levy and Campaign yet. It has set a high bar for the games that have to follow in its wake. Francisco and the rest of the team should be very proud of what they have made.

Appendix: on Archery

I want to conclude with something I haven’t done in quite some time: a far too long analysis of a game’s representation of medieval archery.

Archery in Levy and Campaign has traditionally been very powerful. Combat resolves in the sequence of Ranged, Mounted, and then Foot combat. Since routed units won’t contribute to future combat phases, you want to get as many hits in as early as possible. Plantagenet cuts the mounted combat, as virtually everyone in the Wars of the Roses fought on foot, and further reduces the advantage to the defender by making hits simultaneous rather than defender first, but still inflicting missile hits remains very strong. Your primary ranged unit – not the sole one, but the one you’ll often rely on the most – is the longbowmen. Longbowmen deal two hits at ranged, no hits in melee, and have very poor armor (although some cards can enhance that).

There are also handgunners, but I usually fail to recruit them. Fun fact, the leftover bullets from the guns was part of how historians were eventually able to locate where the Battle of Bosworth Field was fought.

Two hits is very powerful in Levy and Campaign, many units in the series only cause one half of a ranged hit (leftover halves round up). Longbows inflict no armor penalty, unlike crossbows in Inferno for example, but the armor values in Plantagenet tend to be lower for most units so in practice those longbow arrows hit pretty hard. Now, do I, a huge medieval archery nerd, think this is accurate? My instinct is to say that the archers in Plantagenet are somewhat over-powered, but it is actually very hard to say whether this is the case with any great degree of confidence.

Here's something that I think surprises a lot of people: we (at time of writing) have no surviving examples of a medieval English longbow. Despite being one of the most famous weapons of the Middle Ages, and one that was used in the thousands, none have survived to the modern day. This isn’t that surprising, really, when you consider that longbows were obviously made of wood and wood decays, especially if it’s not carefully preserved and there would have been no need to preserve longbows – they were weapons to be used and discarded when they were worn out. That’s not to say that no longbows survive from the Middle Ages – we have several from Ireland and a few from Denmark and other places with the kind of boggy terrain that more readily preserves wooden staves. At the same time, we do have a large collection of English longbows, recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose, but those date from c.1545 which makes them early modern longbows, not medieval.

Here's why this matters: while historians have done incredibly thorough studies of the power of the longbows on the Mary Rose we don’t know how far back that data is applicable. The handful of bows we’ve recovered from medieval Europe were all far weaker than the bows from the Mary Rose, but we have to caveat that with the fact that those bows may not have all been for military use. This has created an extensive debate among historians about what the draw weights of the average English longbows was and how that developed over time. Most historians would say that the draw weights probably increased over the course of the Middle Ages, although by how much and how frequently is hotly debated. Interestingly, this notion, drawn from the archaeological evidence, sometimes contradicts written evidence, especially in the sixteenth century, where authors bemoaned the declining quality of archers compared to those of generations before. These arguments are relatively easily dismissed as a handful of cranks whining about the kids these days, though.

I tend to be of the more conservative sort – I think many of the calculations and estimates represent a theoretical maximum, how powerful a bow used by an archer in peak form could be, and I argue that your average archer probably isn’t shooting with optimal form, especially in a battle, and may even be under-drawing their bow, reducing its power and making it easier to shoot all day in a battle. So if a calculations says that a Mary Rose bow has a draw weight of 140 lbs. at 30 inches, I always want to know what that draw weight is at 26 inches as well.

In his magnum opus of a work The Knight and the Blast Furnace Dr. Alan Williams provides estimates for what force would be required to reliably penetrate late medieval plate armor. Those estimates generally lie beyond the realm of your average longbow. This has been generally supported by some empirical tests – with some caveats. Medieval plate armor was not of universal thickness. Key areas, like helmets and breastplates, were generally thicker than limb protection, so a missile that might bounce off a helmet could dent or penetrate a limb. This has generally led me to support the position put forward by Kelly DeVries in his article “Catapults are not Atomic Bombs” that longbows were more of a support weapon – a way of breaking enemy formations and degrading unit morale/coherency in preparation for the melee engagement – rather than strictly a lethal tool in their own right.

What does this mean for Plantagenet? Honestly, not very much. From a game balance perspective, I like that longbowmen are purely ranged with poor armor, even if historically I would probably argue for more of a mixed ranged/melee unit with slightly better defensive equipment. I do quite like how in Levy and Campaign units are routed in combat and then only eliminated after the battle if they fail another armor test – so even if longbowmen are hugely effective in battles they are not necessarily meant to be lethal. This section isn’t even really intended as a criticism of the design, but rather a chance to wax on about one of my favorite historical niches and while Plantagenet may not align with my own sensibilities on the subject matter, I am perfectly able to admit that there is a lot we don’t know and my view is just one interpretation of the available evidence.

If you’d prefer your archery ramblings in audio format, I recorded an episode of my (incredibly) infrequent podcast on this subject with a special guest who has been spending a lot more time researching this than I have recently.

If you like the work I do here, and particularly if you like weird historical ramblings, maybe consider throwing me a cup of coffee on Ko-Fi? Reviewing wargames isn’t a particularly lucrative business and every contribution counts and is hugely appreciated.

Rebel Fury by Mark Herman

I’m not going to bury the lede, I don’t like Rebel Fury. Nobody is more surprised about it than me. I really like Mark Herman’s Gettysburg, the originator of this system. It’s not my favorite game ever, but a hex and counter game that emphasizes movement and doesn’t overstay its welcome will always find a space on my shelf. While I shamefully haven’t played the follow-up on Waterloo, even though it’s on Rally the Troops so I have no excuse, I was excited to see what Rebel Fury brought to the table. My initial impressions were positive – it kept that core movement system that I liked but expanded the play space to encompass a set of large (and gorgeous) Charlie Kibler maps. The added chrome seemed fine and offered the tantalizing prospect of a little extra depth to the game, so from my initial pre-release preview I was feeling positive. Unfortunately, once I got my hands on it and started playing more my experience began to sour. The changes to the original system started to grate and certain scenarios exposed some of the core’s weaknesses in less flattering ways. If it wasn’t for a certain game that shall go unnamed, I would say this was my most disappointing experience this year.

GMT Games provided me with a complimentary review copy of Rebel Fury.

Let’s start with the good: the movement is excellent. While I’m not necessarily in love with how chess-like it can feel at times, the back and forth causes me to get lost in my own head when playing solo, the act of moving the pieces across the map is phenomenal. The movement values are consistent for all infantry and all cavalry which keeps the game easy to parse and the rules for terrain and road are generally simple (although I wish some aspects were clarified more in the rules so I didn’t have to rely on the summary on the play aid). The ability to repeatedly activate units and the simple switch from maneuver to battle formation (enhanced in this game by the beautiful counter art) is, dare I say it, elegant. The slow march as you move your forces into position, block your opponent’s units, and eventually lock each other into a battle line remains incredibly satisfying. As a game of maneuver, it is thoroughly enjoyable – probably not my favorite ever but certainly high in my estimation.

Seriously, look at these counters and maps! Some of the best in the business. I love how the different art on the Maneuver and Battle sides reflects the different formations and makes it easy to see at a glance what formation every unit is in. A phenomenal mix of art and functionality.

I have some small reservations – please bear with me as I obsess over the experience of passing. From a strategic and game balance perspective it makes sense to me, but as an experience it can be incredibly dull. If you pass your opponent gets d10 moves plus one for every unit not near an enemy unit (basically). There is a cap on the maximum number of moves, but it’s quite high. This can lead to situations where your opponent is making fourteen moves while you just sit and watch. This is particularly apparent in scenarios where one player is on the offensive and the other tasked with holding a line – the defender will run out of moves they want to make, and the best option is to limit the attacker’s available moves. As a strategic consideration, when to pass is interesting. I found myself weighing whether it made sense to try and get a few more decent moves in or if it was better to hopefully hamstring my opponent by limiting what he can do. However, as an experience sitting and watching my opponent make more than a dozen moves while I had nothing to do was incredibly dull. I think some of my problem is down to scenario design and some of it is the change of dice from d6 to d10 in transitioning Gettysburg to Rebel Fury, honestly there are a few places in the design (cough combat cough) where I miss the tighter range of the simple d6.

If this game was all movement, I think I would adore it. Not a top ten game, but one that I would routinely break out for some satisfying hex and counter passive aggression. The thing I love about hex and counter is the freedom of movement it allows, so any system that really leans into that will always have a place in my heart.

But it wouldn’t be much of a wargame without combat, would it? What I loved in the original Gettysburg was that combat didn’t get in the way of the movement – it was a bit random, but it was quick and never delayed you from getting back to the part where the game really shined. Combat in Gettysburg was essentially a dice off with a few die modifiers on either side, most notably whether artillery is used or not which is determined via a blind bid. The disparity between the two results produced the combat outcome – usually a retreat, a unit being blown and removed to the turn track, or eliminated outright. In Rebel Fury the combat has been almost completely rebuilt and I must confess that I hate the result, and it has put me off this game completely.

Rebel Fury keeps the core idea of the blind bid for artillery bonus, but changes almost everything else about combat. Players must first calculate the total combat value of their unit by adding together elements like the unit’s inherent troop quality (the number stars on its counter, if any), adjacency bonus for being next to unit from the same corps, an attacker bonus for another nearby friendly unit, any terrain modifiers, if artillery (and in some scenarios what kind) is being used, etc. This produces a number between one and ten (results greater than ten are capped). Players then each roll a d10 and find the row matching the die result under the column for their combat value. This will yield one of four results: Significant Disadvantage (SD), Disadvantage (D), Advantage (A), or Significant Advantage (SA). Players then compare their results on a matrix to find the combat result. If the combat result is a counter-attack, roll again but with the roles reversed and a bonus to the attacker. If a retreat is rolled and one of several circumstances were true for the combat then roll the needless custom die (it’s a 50-50 result, it could be a d6, or even a coin) to see if it’s really a retreat or if it is a blown result. If, like me, you can’t remember every little nuance to some of the combat results, then add time for looking it up in the rulebook as it’s not printed on the play aid.

I will confess a bit of personal stupidity here - I cannot keep all these numbers in my head. Adding up DRMs and things is fine and I don’t struggle to calculate combat strength at all, but remembering my combat strength, die result, my opponents strength, and their die result, and referencing them to get a result is just too much for my poor brain. I inevitably forget a number and have to check it again and the whole process takes far longer than it should. If you wanted to design a “simple” combat system but still include maximum confusion for me, you could not do much better than Rebel Fury.

I am slightly annoyed by this combat system because of how significantly it favors the defender – it is almost trivial for defenders to reach the 9 or 10 space on the combat table which means that the only hope of uprooting them is to attack repeatedly and hope they roll badly. I’ve seen Mark Herman argue in a few places that this is essentially the main feature of the design – the way it requires sustained assaults to make any progress. I generally agree with the notion that in the America Civil War the defender had the natural advantage – it was often better to be the one who was being attacked than the attacker, and this is far from the first game on this topic that I’ve played that favors the defender.

Where I think this doesn’t click together for me is the combat outcomes – in particular the fact that if you get more than two Blown results in one turn subsequent units are eliminated instead. Add to that the fact that eliminated units are victory points and suddenly the idea of making repeated sustained attacks because incredibly unappealing. And your opponent picks which units are eliminated, so if you launch sustained assaults, you might find that your two worst units are returning to battle fine in two turns but all of your elite units have suddenly been completely eliminated. It’s narratively weird and makes me hyper aware that I am playing a game.

My main problem with this combat, though, is that it is tedious to resolve and takes more time than it should. As mentioned above it is very easy for defenders to hit the upper limit of the combat table, which reduces combat to who can roll better on a d10. The thing is, that was already kind of what Gettysburg’s combat was, it just had the decency to embrace that. Instead, Rebel Fury has me cross referencing multiple tables for every combat only to then ask me and my opponent to basically roll off to see if it works or not. It’s not that the combat in Rebel Fury is incredibly complicated, I’ve played games with far more complex combat systems, but even after four games I still found myself repeatedly cross-referencing the different tables with the rulebook and never getting to the point where I can look at the two die results and just know what the result is.

That is frustrating, what sinks this combat for me is that the longer combat resolution skews the game balance – not competitively but rather experientially. I want to be playing the maneuver side of this game, then I want to plug in some combats, get results, and get back to the movement. Ideally this game would be at least 50-50 movement combat and preferably more like 70% movement and 30% combat resolution. Rebel Fury causes the combat section to bloat and take up far more time and mental energy than it needs without producing a satisfying experience on its own. Every time the movement phase ends my desire to keep playing Rebel Fury plummets, making the game into a rollercoaster of fun and tedium.

At its core, this is an abstract system. Gettysburg was highly abstract, so there’s nothing radical about that, but I think Rebel Fury’s extra layer of complexity and attempt to expand that core system to a wider range of battles has just made me more aware of it. Without Charlie Kibler’s beautiful maps I’m not sure I would recognize this as a game about the American Civil War. At times this is fine – the movement puzzle is enjoyable enough that I don’t mind its abstractions, even if I do frequently end up with my army in some truly bizarre formation – but at other times it just yanks me out of whatever narrative I might be forming in my game. The victory conditions, especially the strategic ones, I find hard to envision mid-game (trace a line of 40 hexes across the map without entering into any enemy ZoIs - not a hope) and difficult to map onto my expectations for what I want to do in the battle. This is me nitpicking, the kind of thing that if I loved everything else about the game I would probably look beyond, but in a game that I’m already finding abrasive these are elements that push me further away from it.

Seriously, these maps are great, Charlie Kibler did amazing work. I give this an official "The Wilderness Fanboy" seal of approval. 

Consider the way Rebel Fury represents artillery. Before resolving a combat both players do a blind bid to determine whether they are committing artillery to the combat for a strength bonus, +3 for Attacker or +4 for the Defender. Each side has a starting number of artillery points – in Gettysburg it was asymmetric between the two sides but in Rebel Fury Herman has decided to give both sides an equal number which apparently represents the maximum he believes an army could carry with them on the march. Artillery, for me, seems like an example of either too much or not enough abstraction.

The abstraction is readily apparent, there are no artillery counters on the map and there is no limitation to when artillery is effective. Using your artillery to support an attack in the middle of the Virginia wilderness is equally as effective as using it when attacking in the open. Artillery on the whole is incredibly powerful and a crucial factor for successful combats – the fact that detachments and cavalry can’t use it is a significant weakness for them. The thesis of this system seems to be that artillery barrages were a fundamental aspect of attacking and defending positions and the loss of artillery support could cripple a unit’s effectiveness, but then I’ve also read Mark Herman saying the exact opposite thing and this creates a cognitive dissonance in me about what the game seems to say and what the designer says about the game. I would be generally of the opinion that artillery was useful but far from decisive - see something like Pickett’s Charge and the enormous artillery bombardment that preceded it and did basically nothing to prevent that disaster.

At the same time, linking the artillery numbers just to a notion of how much ammo an army could carry is to me a lack of abstraction. The artillery values should reflect an argument from the designer on the relative effectiveness of the artillery corps of the two sides at that battle. This would be a more interesting argument and making the two sides have asymmetric starting artillery numbers makes the game more interesting – in many of my games my opponent and I spent artillery points at an exactly equal rate which then made it barely a decision and completely uninteresting. I had assumed that in Gettysburg the Union had more artillery points because historically at Gettysburg they had better artillery.

I do want to stress that abstraction is not a bad thing! All wargames are abstractions, some aspects of history must be abstracted and simplified for playability and to make the games fun. What a given designer chooses to abstract forms a core part of the game’s argument - e.g. something like Nevsky abstracts away a lot of combat but keeps multiple transport types to emphasize the challenges of logistics in the medieval Baltic. Rebel Fury abstracts many aspects of American Civil War combat but I struggle to see what its core argument is - the abstractions, to me, seem to fit the purpose of making the game more of a game. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that Rebel Fury has not grabbed my interest the way a messier but more argumentative game might have. Other people will absolutely prefer this abstraction, though, and that’s fine!

Because I am me, I also cannot help but note a few odd choices in how the game represents history. The Confederate troops seem to universally be superior to the Union – this was particularly obvious at Chancellorsville where Confederate units and generals vastly outshine the Union opposition in terms of quality. Hooker is strictly inferior to Lee in every sense at that battle and, possibly even more cruelly, is given identical stats to Sedgwick. This once again is very reminiscent of the myth of superior Confederate soldiers which always rubs me the wrong way. Also, as a general rule I prefer to let the gameplay decide which units perform better on the day – let player tactics and dice decide which units we remember after the fact rather than insisting that because a unit did well historically they must do so every time.

The designer notes also unfortunately repeat a popular and widely refuted Lost Cause talking point by referencing the idea that Longstreet was ordered to make a dawn attack on the second day of Gettysburg – a fact wholly invented by General William Pendleton after the war to smear Longstreet’s reputation because the general had joined the Republican party. This fact was openly disputed by Longstreet during his lifetime and has long been known to be false, so it is disappointing to see it repeated here. The inclusion of such a simple falsehood in the background material, along with the lack of a bibliography, doesn’t inspire confidence in the historical rigor of the design. That said, the game is very abstract, so maybe in expecting significant historical rigor is unreasonable of me, and perhaps I am merely comparing the game to what I wish it was instead of evaluating it on the merits of what the design is: an abstract game with a dose of Civil War flavor.

I have highlighted the passage in question from the designer notes. The designer notes have a lot more to say about the design of Gettysburg than they do about Rebel Fury and while I found the information on Gettysburg interesting, I did find that very strange. 

I’m disappointed that I don’t like Rebel Fury because there are aspects that I think this system gets very right. I loved the time scale of Gettysburg when I first played it, and I’ve only grown to appreciate it more as I’ve played more games on the American Civil War. Most games I’ve played struggled with the fact that many Civil War battles had significant lulls in the fighting. In most games, rather than getting tired my regiments or brigades are unstoppable robots that can attack and attack and attack hour after hour without ever tiring. Instead of being long days of movement punctuated by short, sharp fights, most games on big multi-day battles like Gettysburg or Chancellorsville have near constant fighting from dawn until dusk. This is something that initially impressed me about Gettysburg and remains largely true in Rebel Fury – you do all your movement before any combats are resolved, and since turns are each half a day in length, it means that the games more easily capture a sense of generals coordinating a grand multi-pronged assault and then seeing how it resolves before planning another set of assaults. Since in a given combat phase you can keep making attacks with each unit, rather than being one and done, it also captures that sense that you’re exploiting a breakthrough (or trying to, anyway). This staggering of movement and combat into completely different sections of the turn may be the most interesting thing this system does, and I wish I liked the second half more in Rebel Fury, but ultimately it doesn’t click together for me as tightly as it did in Gettysburg.

I’m sure Rebel Fury will have its fans – certainly many of my objections derive primarily from what I find enjoyable and interesting in wargaming. For me, though, Rebel Fury added more to its core system and ended up with less as a result. The more I played Rebel Fury the less I liked it so after four games I’m throwing in the towel. The second volume in the series will have to accept my terms of unconditional surrender, as I don’t expect I’ll be revisiting it in the future. I hope its fans enjoy it, but if you’re looking for me, I’ll be playing Manassas instead.

The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

I really enjoyed Cat Jarman’s River Kings – it takes complex archaeological practices and makes them understandable to general readers while also presenting a different perspective on Viking history than most people will be used to. I was understandably excited when I saw The Bone Chests in my local bookshop – I was hoping for that same marriage of archaeology, science, and narrative. Unfortunately, The Bone Chests left me underwhelmed. It’s not a bad book, but it’s not the book I hoped it would be, nor is it really the book that is promised on the blurb on the back. It’s undermined by its structure and core pitch, and in my mind fails to live up to the potential set by River Kings.

The framing device is six chests in Winchester Cathedral that contain the bones of early medieval English kings, bishops, and a queen. Dr. Jarman has numbered the chests in approximately chronological order – approximately because some of the chests contain multiple skeletons from different centuries, largely the result of some of the chests being destroyed during the English Civil Wars in the 1640s and the bone scattered and later recollected into new chests. Bone Chests takes each numbered chest in order and in theory examines the lives of the people whose skeletons are contained within them.

I say in theory, because in practice The Bone Chests is mostly a chronological narrative history of the royal family of Wessex and the foundation of the Kingdom of England. This is not in itself a bad thing, but readers expecting (based on the publisher’s blurb) a more archaeology focused book examining the contents of the chests, and the analysis of the skeletons therein will be disappointed. This is not strictly Dr. Jarman’s fault, while it is the case that the chests have been opened and are undergoing intense archaeological analysis, that analysis is still far from complete and so it cannot be the sole focus of this book. What I had expected from The Bone Chests was something more like vignettes examining the lives of the individuals in each chest by combining the narrative information we have on the people supposedly buried in them along with what the archaeological evidence of the skeletons inside tells us. Instead, The Bone Chests mixes a history of Winchester (only briefly) with a long form narrative of the royal line of Wessex, carrying on post-conquest up to the death of William Rufus, who is supposedly buried in one of the chests.

There’s plenty of interesting information in The Bone Chests, especially if, like me, you know very little about this period of English history (I’m more of a post-conquest guy). However, the book’s structure really does it no favors. The chests themselves feel entirely superfluous to the narrative and even Winchester only pops up every now and then. This leads to weird experiences like in the chapter that is supposedly on the chest containing Edmund Ironside, the chapter is fifty pages long of which fewer than eight pages actually cover the life of King Edmund. If you came to this book hoping to learn about the people in the chests (or at least who are supposedly in the chest) you will probably be disappointed.

The book also doesn’t really play to Dr. Jarman’s strengths. In River Kings she showed consummate skill in explaining complex archaeological and scientific practices, but The Bone Chests is mostly narrative history drawing from chronicle accounts. She is not incapable in this field, but it is not her strength and given the frequent repetition of old English names this is a particularly tricky narrative, and the writing sometimes lost or confused me. The Bone Chests is at its best when she is explaining the results of archaeological analysis, but all too often these are incongruous in their own way – like the fascinating but slightly bizarre aside about the discovery of Richard III’s body and the studies done on it.

I didn’t dislike The Bone Chests, but I was disappointed by it, and I wouldn’t recommend it. There are worse books you can read, but there are also much better ones.

Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

We’re living through a particularly excellent time for scholarship on Dungeon’s and Dragons, and this latest edited volume from MIT Press is a real showcase for the vibrancy of that scholarship. I’ll confess that sometimes these edited volumes make me a little concerned – it’s a real challenge to keep a book like this on theme while simultaneously ensuring that each chapter (twenty in total in this case) is interesting to anyone who might pick it up. That’s not to say that other edited volumes I’ve read have been bad – but rather that I often find myself enjoying at most one-third of these kinds of books with many of the other articles just being okay or simply not relevant to my interests. Given the range of fields on display in Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons I expected to find parts of it to be a bit of a drag, and while I cannot claim that I loved them all equally I found myself enjoying every single one of the book’s chapters. This is an excellent edited volume with plenty to offer anyone interested in the history, study, and culture of Dungeons and Dragons.

Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons’ core theme is that it is a showcase for the current state of scholarship about the titular RPG. To that end, it is subdivided into four sections which are roughly classified as Histories, Influences, Analyses, and Futures. Reviewing these big edited books can be kind of tricky since every chapter is unique and it can be hard to group all the disparate contributions into one summary of quality. Instead, I plan on giving an overview of each section, including highlighting some of my favorite chapters.

As a historian, it’s no surprise that I liked the first section, on the history of D&D, best. I am continually impressed with Jon Peterson’s contributions to the field, and his chapter on the development of experience and the concept of leveling up is fascinating, but the chapter that probably stood out the most to me was the interview with Ryan Dancey on the development of the Open Game License (OGL). Far more attention has been paid in scholarship to the origins and early years of D&D, the TSR era as it were, rather than the more recent editions and this chapter helped to cement that Fifty Years of D&D would be a book on the full life of the game, not just its origins and earliest iterations. The development of the OGL happened more than 20 years ago, it is hardly new, and it was fascinating to hear about its origins and impact during D&D 3.0 and 3.5, especially with the separation of the decades since. The other history chapters are comparably excellent – the chapter on the origins of the Basic Set is great and Evan Torner’s critique of D&D’s emphasis on combat helps to cement the book’s tone that while the contributors by and large are D&D fans they will not let that stop them from critiquing it. Overall, a great selection of chapters, I hugely enjoyed every one of them.  

The Influences section is much more social science, and to wear my heart on my sleeve I bear the classic historian’s mistrust of the social sciences. That’s not to say that this section is bad, these are still excellent chapters! Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s chapter on the “Mercer Effect”, which examines the impact of Matt Mercer and the Critical Role actual play series on how players and dungeon masters approach playing D&D. Critical Role and its ilk are probably the most impactful thing happening in D&D culture at the moment and it’s great to see it receive some serious academic attention. I also enjoyed Dimitra Nikolaidou’s discussion of the impact of D&D on contemporary speculative fiction, which doesn’t look for easy answers or draw simple conclusions. My minor critique of this section is that some of the chapters would be better served by being in a volume on roleplaying games generally, rather than about D&D specifically. For example, Premeet Sidhu’s chapter on D&D in the classroom is interesting but seems a little restricted by having to focus on D&D when arguably other (probably simpler and cheaper) RPGs might find a better application in classrooms. It’s a small criticism, all things considered, and while I preferred the history section this one has a lot to offer – especially for the more social science inclined out there.

The third section splits the difference with a mixture of history and more social science perspectives, as well as a dose of personal memoir, to form a wider cultural analysis. Daniel Heath Justice’s reflection on finding D&D while growing up in an almost abandoned mining town and how to relate his indigenous identity to the race politics of the game is fascinating, but to me the real standout chapter has to be Kellynn Wee’s analysis of the D&D scene in Singapore. There has been quite a bit written on how D&D handles race, including several chapters in this volume, but in Wee’s chapter that interplay of 1970s American conceptions of race with the complex racial order of Singapore brings something new and fresh to the scholarship. Singapore’s colonial history and the interplay of language, Chinese and South Asian cultures, and the specific tropes of D&D provide many avenues for analysis and most of them are in display in this chapter. While other chapters click better with my historian’s taste for the kind of niche stuff that I adore, I think that this may be the best one overall in the book.

The final section is a theoretical look at D&D’s future, considering what a similar book published in another fifty years would look like. In keeping with the spirit of D&D it includes tables for randomly generating potential futures. This is a fun homage to D&D and a novel idea. I’m not sure it totally works for me, but I do love to see experimentation within academic spaces, particularly around writing and communication.

Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons’ explicit goal was to showcase the impressive state of contemporary scholarship on D&D and in that it absolutely succeeds – I can say that without reservation. It also strikes a great balance between being academic and being readable by D&D’s fans. Some chapters suffer slightly from being a little too academic in their writing, but overall, the quality is high, and I never felt the tedium that plagues some of the worst academic works out there. This is a great volume, and I hope that many of the authors who provided chapters go on to write books of their own. The state of scholarship on RPGs and D&D is truly in a wonderful place, and based on the promise in this book will only go from strength to strength.

Chancellorsville by Stephen W. Sears

I’ve always had a weird relationship with Chancellorsville, but I like to think it’s not entirely my fault. Growing up in Virginia it’s hard to avoid it, especially if, like me, you lived an hour away and your dad liked to take you and your brothers there on random weekends to get out of the house. Chancellorsville looms large in the mythic lives of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. It was also top of the pile in the “what’s the biggest Civil War Battle” debates that were somehow considered small talk in my home state. With all that baggage, it was hard for me growing up to not develop a slightly contrary preference for battles like Gettysburg and The Wilderness. That meant that I never really dug all that deeply into Chancellorsville, and I let the battle’s myths define it rather than learning about it for myself. On a recent trip to my parents’ house, I decided to correct this and I chose my father’s copy of Chancellorsville as the method since I had previously been really impressed with Stephen W. Sears’ book on Gettysburg. I am pleased to announce that Chancellorsville is at least as good as Gettysburg and may even be a bit better. This is a great book.

Chancellorsville picks up its narrative right after the disaster at Fredericksburg and charts both sides’ efforts to reorganize their armies in the wake of that battle. Lee’s supply issues frustrated him from taking the offensive while a revolt of the generals in the Army of the Potomac resulted in Burnsides’ eventual replacement with Joe Hooker. Hooker’s revival of the army and plans for a grand offensive in spring 1863 set the stage for the battle narrative proper, which takes up the bulk of the book as you would expect. I really appreciate how Sears takes a wider campaign focus in his battle histories. While he assumes some familiarity with the subject – someone ignorant of the events of 1862 would struggle with Chancellorsville – he doesn’t just drop you into the main event without context. That context is key to good analysis and this emphasis lays a strong foundation for the reader to better interpret the significance of what happened when the armies started shooting.

The main battle narrative doesn’t look for easy answers and does a lot to challenge popular misconceptions about Chancellorsville. I really appreciated how much detail he provided for Hooker’s campaign leading up to the battle which gave me a newfound respect for the general. Sears also doesn’t rely on easy answers – he doesn’t point to a single event as where the battle was lost or one. Instead, Chancellorsville shows a battle that teetered on the brink for days on end. It remained winnable by both sides for a very long time, and a compounding series of bad luck and bad choices helped to push it over against Hooker and his generals. I also particularly liked the coda in the appendix that examined the “romance of Chancellorsville”, focusing on many popular myths that cropped up in subsequent decades.

Sears spends significant time on the many things that went wrong and right for both sides. More than just listing mishaps, Sears goes into detail about how the mishap came to be and the decisions that made it such a disaster. For example, consider the frequent problems Hooker had coordinating the disparate parts of his army once he divided it for his grand turning movement. Sears goes into great detail about the available wire telecommunication technology available to Hooker, what he chose to use, what factors influenced that choice (such as infighting between military departments), and the ramifications of that choice. This kind of detail provides valuable information beyond just the movement of troops and shows the complexities of command. Sears doesn’t use these mishaps to excuse the poor decisions that commanders made. Instead he provides a holistic view of the campaign, not pinning success or failure on any one moment.

Overall, this is an engaging narrative of the Chancellorsville campaign that provides plenty of detail without getting too lost in the weeds. I mildly criticized Gettysburg because I thought it went into a little too much detail, but I didn’t have the same problem with Chancellorsville. This book hit a real sweet spot for me and gave me newfound respect for and interest in one of the Civil War’s most famous battles.

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

I have mentioned a few times that the Wars of the Roses are not my favorite subject. For some reason they have never caught my imagination the same way the Crusades or the Hundred Years War have. However, I was really impressed with David Grummitt’s biography of Henry VI, which I read last year, and seeing as the Wars of the Roses are intertwined to some degree with the end of the Hundred Years War I figured I should read a little more about them. I was also previously impressed with the A Short History of the Hundred Years War by Michael Prestwich, which was part of this same series, so this seemed like a great place to brush up on the subject.

One problem I’ve long had when trying to read about the Wars of the Roses is that it often feels like the histories are written by and for people who have had a private education in one of England’s posher schools. The authors assume a familiarity with the English nobility that I just do not have. It doesn’t help that the Wars of the Roses are naturally confusing - there are a lot of people involved and many of them die only to be replaced by more nearly identical English nobles you have to remember. It’s a lot to keep track of and if the writer doesn’t help you it can make for a confusing and tedious read. I bring this up because Grummitt does a great job at making the Wars of the Roses more approachable - in fact one of his stated purposes in the book is writing something that can be read by people who aren’t familiar with the war already. He mentions that it has been dropped from many school curriculums in Britain and you can’t assume that readers have a basic literacy in its key events and players.

Another element that I really appreciate is that Grummitt draws the war back to its origins in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry IV. Maybe it’s just because I find this period of history far more interesting, but in general I love when histories trace a line into the deeper past to show how events often have their origin far earlier than may seem obvious. While it introduces more names and people to remember, it also avoids that feeling of being dropped into the middle of a story and having to play catch up.

Grummitt does an admirable job narrating the history of the Wars proper, although military history enthusiasts may be disappointed by the lack of battle details, but his wider perspective on the wars origins combined with his analysis of what the Wars of the Roses meant to English political culture make the book shine. He shows you why the Wars of the Roses happened and why they were important then and continue to be today.

I would absolutely recommend A Short Introduction to the Wars of the Roses. This series has (in my admittedly limited experience) done a great job of getting senior scholars to write engaging and approachable histories of large and complex historical topics. If the rest of the books are like the two I have read then I must say it is a tremendous achievement.

WItMoYW ep. 10 - Fire on the Mountain by John Poniske

This episode Pierre and I branch out into the Maryland Campaign, with John Poniske’s take on the Battle of South Mountain, published by Legion Wargames. This is a hex and counter tactical game with a beautiful Rick Barber map and unusual rectangle unit counters. We liked but did not love it, and had some thoughts on some last minute errata that was introduced post-publication. I hope you enjoy it!

Gettysburg 1863 by Grant and Mike Wylie

I set up the second day first. I did this because I wanted to tackle something that seemed a little more straightforward to put the changes to the system through their paces. I figured I would want to try the full battle at some point, which meant playing the first day, so for my experiment I chose the second day. Because Pickett’s Charge sucks. This was potentially a mistake – the logic was sound, but I forgot how boring I find playing the second day. Don’t get me wrong, from a historical analysis standpoint I think I prefer the 2nd of July, it has such drama and tension, but when it comes to wargames, I often find it tedious – mostly ill-conceived charges and brutal death. A tedium of attrition to resolve.

Day 2 in progress - maybe I should have waited for Longstreet to fully come up before attacking but I saw little incentive to do so. Apologies as well for the lighting in these photos, my parent’s dining room was not the ideal environment for game photography.

In wargaming I’m much more of a 1st of July guy. That approach to battle and the knock-on effects that approach has throughout the next two days is where the real gaming goodness lies. I bring all this up because to review a Gettysburg game is to confess one’s own preferences about Gettysburg itself. It is impossible to talk about this battle without revealing something about yourself. Gettysburg 1863 is the fourth entry in Worthington Publishing’s Civil War Brigade Battles series and is designed by Grant and Mike Wylie. This is a series I have covered previously and one that I enjoy. I had some trepidations about Gettysburg 1863 because, well, it’s Gettysburg. Whether you enjoy this game or not will depend a lot on how you feel about the battle and what you get out of wargames – which makes it a challenge to review. All I can offer is my experience, hopefully that will be enough. Preamble finished, let’s get ready for the charge.

Worthington Publishing kindly provided me with a review copy of Gettysburg 1863

There is some admin we need to see to first. Gettysburg 1863 uses the series 1.4 rules, an update from previous volumes I covered before, and a rather substantial one. The core remains the same, it is only a +0.1 update after all, but there are some new systems added and some tweaks to existing ones. Some rules are modified for greater clarity and cavalry now have a negative DRM in combat, but the biggest changes are the addition of breastworks, melee attacks, panic modifiers, and column marching. I’ll go in reverse order.

Column replaces the previous rules that assumed a sort of column formation when units were in the clear and far enough from enemies – now units enter column formation which lets them speed along roads but not over open terrain. I like this a lot honestly. The previous system was relatively simple but too abstract and game-y for me. I also just like switching infantry between line and column and debating how long I can keep a unit in column for maximum maneuver. It’s small, but I like it.

Panic modifiers are also easy – when a unit is Routed you place a panic counter in the hex it exited. Each panic counter adds to the Morale tests for any adjacent units. This enables more potential line collapses and creates greater risks where entire lines of green units can crumble in sequence. I did find this to be one of the places where the rules weren’t as clear as I’d like – especially around whether panic markers are side specific or if they apply to everyone. It also has some usability issues, as if you place a panic counter and then advance into the vacated hex you kind of have to place it on top of the advanced unit and it’s a bit ugly. These are minor quibbles, though, and overall, this is a cool addition.

The XIth Corps vastly outperforming their historical equivalents by Routing, and placing Panic Markers, against Jubal Early’s attack.

Melee attacks are an optional attack that units can utilize after the first set of combats are resolved. You can’t combine multiple units for a melee attack, but within that restriction it essentially lets you attack twice. In doing so you must endure defensive fire again, but the possibility to attack twice could be quite strong in the right context. I must confess that this is one where I’m still working out how best to use it tactically – it has the potential to shake up how I play these games and I’ve found myself having to unlearn some muscle memory where I just skip the melee phase and move on to cleaning up the end of the turn. I have a small concern that adding yet more combat resolution into the game, especially one as big as Gettysburg, could throw off the balance of making decision to resolving die rolls. I think this is probably a good change, but I’m still processing the full implications of it.

Breastworks can be built by units who don’t move in a turn (it’s a little more complicated than that, but not by much) and then offer defensive bonuses. It’s straightforward. I find the addition of breastworks a little tedious, but I must acknowledge that any American Civil War game covering the latter half of the war absolutely must have some kind of breastworks system. I think the digging of breastworks may be potentially too fast and lacking any random element – they are too easily dug and abandoned, rather than something that represents a considerable effort. It’s not bad, but I’m not totally in love. I also don’t love adding yet another counter to the stack – placing it on top obscures the unit but placing it under means I sometimes forget about it. It’s probably good but I’m on the fence.

Overall, the new rules additions have the potential to add a little more depth to a game system that I felt was just an inch too shallow for me. I’m not sure that this is the exact extra that I wanted, but it is a positive development. I found some changes easier to remember than others – small tweaks are easier to learn but also easier to forget when I’m playing a system by muscle memory. There are also some unfortunate proofing errors in the rulebook and some examples seem to have been cut to make room for the new rules, which is unfortunate as overall it hurts clarity. The 1.4 rules changes are interesting, the overall rulebook is a bit of a step down from 1.3 in terms of production. I do still really appreciate how Worthington highlights all the changes between versions, a huge help, 10/10 marks for that.

Day Two, Day One, Day Two

I aborted my attempt at 2nd of July after about 5 turns. The scenario started very early in the morning, and maybe I should have spent more of it maneuvering forces into position, but I just didn’t really click with this part of the battle at this scale. For all the faults I had with it, I found the zoomed in view of Longstreet Attacks made me more invested in the nuances of that part of the battle. I almost found myself imitating Sickles’ poorly conceived forward position just to add some more spice to the scenario. I didn’t relish resolving huge lines of combat turn after turn. Instead, I cleared the game away and set up the 1st of July, with an eye towards maybe playing on to the full battle. I’m glad I did, because the first day of the battle rips.

The first day of Gettysburg is perfectly designed for wargaming. There is basically no set up, only a few federal troops, and the rest of the day unfolds as reinforcements arrive from different directions, shaping the battle dramatically with each new arrival. It’s a tense game of deciding where and how long to hold your ground as the Union, and when to push the attack or try to outflank as the Confederates. It’s phenomenal and it really shines in Gettysburg 1863. The combat and routing rules do their thing by generating tension and chaos and ensuring that no two situations develop the same way. The addition of the column rules and the map spread across two mounted boards creates a vast play space with numerous potential angles of attack and flank. The number of victory point scoring hexes are few, but each one is incredibly valuable.

Look at that beautiful blank canvas, just waiting for you to fill it.

When I reset to the first day, I went from grinding my way through a couple of turns to blasting through a full day (14 turns) in pretty much the same time. The game developed along approximately historical lines but with enough difference to create a unique narrative for my play – I love to see it. I had begun to wonder if I was burned out on the system, but this reminded me of everything I like about it. A great experience.

But where to go from there? After playing through the first day, I had my own unique set up for the 2nd of July, which was already more appealing than the historical scenario. While I was more excited and I did keep playing into the second day, I did feel the drag begin to kick in. I said previously that this is a series I enjoy best at the 7-9 turn window. Gettysburg 1863’s 1st of July scenario kept me thoroughly invested for 14 turns, but it’s a big ask to make me excited about playing for 30+ turns. I kept playing through the second day, but as it became increasingly clear that the Confederate attack was crumbling while only half the Army of the Potomac had arrived, I had to call it quits for them. Much as I love seeing rebels crushed under the heel of liberty, rolling on the CRT does eventually wear out its welcome.

This isn’t really a game made for me, though. This is a system I want to experience in bite-sized chunks and Gettysburg 1863 is it blown out to maximal proportions. For all of that, I enjoyed it far more than I expected when I saw how big it would be. The game ships with zero single board scenarios, you need the full set up to play it at all, and while I understand Mike Wylie’s justification for this it does pretty much preclude me from playing it. I borrowed my parents dining room table to play this, nowhere in my house will fit it. I cannot deny that I’m impressed with how much Gettysburg sucked me in, it asked more and more from me and at a certain point I couldn’t give it what it needed.

My Gettysburg at the very end of the 1st of July, right before dawn broke on the 2nd and fighting resumed.

This is a game for people who want something maximal but manageable. If you want the full three days of Gettysburg (and for my money, that’s probably where the game is at it’s best) but you don’t want three days of rules, then Gettysburg 1863 has you covered. It’s got enough grit to be historical but not so much that it will demand your constant mental energy. I could complain about how there are no victory off-ramps, no way to automatically win early on day 2 and render the rest of the game moot, but I think that would miss the point. You aren’t playing all three days (or four, as the game allows for a theoretical 4th of July Union offensive) for competition, you’re doing it for the narrative and the experience.

Having a way to end early wouldn’t be satisfying. You want to get to Pickett’s Charge no matter how well or badly the rest is going, because that’s the story of the battle that you’re spending your Saturday recreating. If this sounds like an experience you want, then this box can offer you it. For me, I want something shorter or that has a little more grit to it. After too many hours with the game it begins to feel rote, I’m doing whatever the gaming equivalent of watching a video at 1.5 speed while I’m checking my phone is, it doesn’t have my full attention, and at that point the appeal dries up. That’s a me thing, though, and for many people this game will land.

I wouldn’t recommend Gettysburg 1863 as an entry point in the series - its maximal size is a lot to take on board if all you want is a taste. Something like Seven Days Battles is a much better first entry. Instead, Gettysburg is for people who have had that first taste and what they want is the 20oz. big gulp coffee. I’m more of an espresso person most of the time, something smaller and more intense suits me better. I can’t see myself getting Gettysburg 1863 back to the table again, in part because I don’t know if I can fit it anywhere. This is a fine game, but it’s not the game for me.

Banish All Their Fears by David Fox and Ben Hull

There was very little material available on Banish All Their Fears before its publication, and so it largely flew under my radar. However, when some images came out right before the game was printed and shipped it triggered something in whatever the wargamer equivalent of my lizard brain is and I got weirdly excited about it. I reached out to GMT Games about a review copy, and they kindly provided me with one. Then it sat on my shelf (as these things do) while other games took up my time. In those intervening weeks I started to develop some concerns about the game. For one thing, I finally tried Ben Hull’s Musket and Pike series and struggled to really get invested in it (despite how beautiful the latest version is). Worse still was the buzz around rules and printing issues on BoardGameGeek (BGG). I hadn’t found Musket and Pike’s rules that easy to follow, and if these were worse, I despaired that I would never actually play it. Nevertheless, when I managed to clear some other games off my schedule, I determinedly set about reading the rulebook and setting up the game. Over the past few days, I have been slowly playing through the Blenheim scenario (chosen because it seemed to have fewer errata issues) solitaire, and I have been pleasantly surprised by what I found. I think this could be a real gem of a game, and certainly one I prefer to Musket and Pike, but I do also have some reservations. I think it makes the most sense to start with some of my reservations first, as they inform much of my experience playing Banish All Their Fears.

GMT Games kindly provided me with a review copy of Banish All Their Fears

Vibes, baby, vibes

The Banish All Their Fears rulebook is a curious beast. I found it relatively easy to read, certainly less frustrating than many other wargaming rulebooks I have tackled, and it is not overly long. However, the wording is, to put it nicely, inexact in several key places. The rulebook does a good job of explaining the game’s intent (or at least, I think it does) but in terms of using it to execute the mechanisms of the game it runs into trouble. Stacking seems relatively simple, but there are many implications to the stacking rules that it does not cover. Same with the Charge order and target priority – it looks straightforward, but there are some nuances that the language does not help to cover. When you combine these two, things get even more complicated. There are also some cases where the rules just don’t seem to cover what to do at all – for example, when infantry who have expended their initial volley attack cavalry. In this latter case there is a fairly straightforward clarification on BGG (the cavalry automatically retreat and the infantry don’t advance, which is simple but raises some tactical challenges in play), but it is still very frustrating to have that not be properly addressed in the rulebook.

I think it is very likely that this rulebook was not run through sufficient blind playtesting. To someone who is already intimately familiar with the game and how it is supposed to play, I doubt many of its problems leap out. However, had it been given to blind playtesters and had they in turn learned the game entirely from the rulebook then proper feedback could have been incorporated into the writing of the rules. This is not an all-too-common pitfall within the hobby – games that are tested and played most thoroughly by a small group without bringing in enough new sets of eyes to check over everything before sending it out into the wider world. While Banish All Their Fears isn’t a bloated mess, like some games with this problem, the rulebook has certainly suffered for it.

Initial set up for Blenheim, in which I hopefully didn’t make any mistakes.

For some people, the rule’s oversights will be enough for them to shelve the game until the promised living rules are made available from GMT Games. Me, however, I’m prepared to play on Vibes. I’ve often embraced a certain level of Vibes based play – sure I could exactingly check every instance of line of sight in a game that has over a page of line-of-sight (LOS) rules (for example), but usually I would just go with the Vibes of whether LOS is plausible or not. Applying this methodology to Banish All Their Fears produced an eminently playable game. As I said, the rulebook does a good job of conveying the intent of the game even if it too frequently falls down in the exact wording of the execution. By taking the intent and playing with that I had a great time.

There are, of course, two major caveats here. The first is that I am playing with my own best interpretation of the intent of the game, which may not be the designers’ intent. This is honestly my greatest fear for the game: that when the living rules are published, they will yield a game that is so radically different from the one I played that I will no longer like it. Some of the rules clarifications on BGG have felt a little too fiddly or complex – injecting what I thought were needless layers into what should be a mid-weight hex and counter game. It is possible that this is just the result of trying to jot off a quick clarification on the fly, which is understandable, but it leaves a slight fear in me that when the fully revised rules come out, they will be far fiddlier than I want them to be.

The second caveat is that I played Banish All Their Fears solo. I think this is a great way to play the game, but I must also acknowledge that it makes my more Vibes based approach far easier to execute. When playing opposed, you and your opponent need to be on the same page. Usually this is easy, because you are both playing from literally the same rules. However, when Vibes start to come into the game, then you need to be on the same nebulous wavelength, and that is more challenging. I probably would be prepared to teach and play Banish All Their Fears with another person, but I would be very selective about who I chose – a Vibes based game is better played for the experience and narrative than for pure competition, if that makes sense.

Fears Banished

The big “thing” in Banish All Their Fears is the wing command display. This is a side card that is split into six rows, three for each player, and a number of columns as dictated by the scenario. Each column represents a wing, and each row the line within the wing (i.e. Front, Support, or Reserve). Each brigade, which is represented by between two and six counters on the main map, is assigned a spot on this display. The brigade’s position in each wing and line is important, of course, but so is its position relative to other brigades in the same wing and line. This is line tactics, so movement is very restricted – brigades must not overlap, and lines must stay in their place, not moving ahead of the forward line or falling behind the rear line. During the first phase of each turn players can activate leaders to attempt to move units between wings or between lines in a given wing – pushing units forward, switching them with other units, or reinforcing a wing that is weakening. This requires a die roll with various DRMs, so in some contexts it’s easy while in others it is nearly impossible. The section of the rulebook explaining all of this could be much more clearly worded, but thankfully it includes examples and I found that in play it was much easier to parse than it was when I was reading about it.

My initial wing command display, positioned on a side table before I managed to clear enough space to put it on the same table as the map.

There was always the risk that this system could be a load of faff with very little payoff, but thankfully Banish All Their Fears avoided this. To make this interesting what the game needs is chaos, something to make you engage with the system unexpectedly and to frustrate your plans. This is something the combat system injects into the game in spades. And it is the combat that I think is Banish All Their Fears greatest strength. Combat is very simple, units have a combat strength (basically they’re only statistic), and you subtract defender’s strength from the attacker’s, factor in a very manageable number of modifiers which will give you a column on the relevant Combat Results Table (CRT): infantry vs. infantry, cavalry vs. cavalry, or cavalry vs. infantry. Then you roll a d10, check that row, and apply the result. I’m a little obsessed with the distribution of results, how retreats vs. damage hits are distributed across the chart, but I don’t know that I’m fully prepared to articulate that after just one game.

In many games the key to a good outcome is in stacking DRMs and always making attacks at the best possible advantage, but in Banish All Their Fears there are actually pretty good outcomes for either side on almost any table, so making lower value attacks can be beneficial. This is especially true if you have multiple attacks to make in a turn. Attacks cannot be combined, instead they are executed independently, so you can use multiple sub-par attacks to slowly wear down a stronger enemy via mutual attrition, for example. Infantry units also all can once per game inflict an automatic hit, but in doing so they flip to their wounded side. At first this seems rather poor, because you’re basically just flipping both attacker and defender together for no effect, but it makes attacking already weakened units with fresh infantry incredibly powerful. One free hit, without needing to roll, which is followed up by resolving a normal combat can inflict devastating results.

It didn’t take very long for things to get very chaotic. I have to confess that early on I was pretty bad at remembering to put down all the Rout counters I was supposed to, but I got better at remembering as I went on.

The results of combat are all the more devastating because of the morale system. Each brigade that has a unit rout in a given combat must, at the end of the combat, check morale. You roll a d10 and add the total number of routed units in that brigade. You then compare this number to the brigade’s morale stat. If it is higher then the brigade breaks, and every unit from that brigade is removed from the map and replaced by a rout marker. This can cause enormous holes to appear in a line if just a single unit routs and the controlling player has an unlucky morale roll. This is such an exciting result that I basically rooted for it to always happen. It injects enormous uncertainty into the game every time a combat happens. A combat could result in a Firefight, effectively a standoff locking both units in place, or it could result in an entire brigade disappearing from the battle. That variability makes it hard to predict what the outcome will be and makes each combat feel like an exciting gamble.

In addition to the risk of routing, the CRT is filled with retreat results and, in the case of cavalry, mandatory advances. These all combine to ensure that more often than not combat is going to muck up your formations. If you do well the mandatory advances are going to force your units forward out of their lines, requiring you to reform them next turn rather than pressing the attack on all fronts. On the other end, if your units are forced to retreat too far, they might wind up even with the line behind them, who will – in order to maintain line formation – have to push back so that integrity is maintained, possibly forcing your lines further and further backwards. You will also need to leave gaps in your lines, because routed units are tracked as counters on the map and if they flee over your units, they will inflict casualties. The combat marries perfectly to the game’s emphasis on formation – combat will ruin your formations and then you will need to use the very restrictive formation rules to find a way to put it all back together again so the two opposing lines can smash together next turn.

A few turns later, some wings are going very well for the Allies while others are looking much better for the French. In a way it plays out like several smaller interrelated battles than one big one.

One thing I liked but struggled to really wrap my head around in Musket and Pike was how it used orders and how orders determined initiative. Banish All Their Fears keeps this, although the orders are reduced to just three: March, Charge, and Dress Ranks. March is the default, all units without an order marker are in March. Charge is for engaging the enemy and Dress Ranks sacrifices mobility for the ability to restore injured units (to a point). Changing between orders requires a die roll with a target number based on the order the unit is currently in as well as their current position within the wing (it’s easier to get units in the Front to Charge, for example), with a few DRMs to mix things up. In each turn, all units in Charge order are activated before any in March who activate before any in Dress Ranks.

What makes this more interesting and easier to grasp for me versus what there was in Musket and Pike is that this is all managed at the brigade level, not the wing level. So, you can end up with a wild assortment of different orders even within a single wing. It also gives you many more chances to try and change orders – if you have four brigades in the Front of a given wing that is four chances to successfully get some form of Charge off this turn. It keeps the game dynamic, and the varied orders also interact well with the wing formation requirements – even if your whole Front isn’t under Charge orders they are all going to have to move forward so that your rear lines can keep advancing as well.

Overall, Banish All Their Fears delivers an excellent emergent narrative. The many die rolls, the chaotic combat results, and the irritation at maintaining formation combine to tell an excellent story. The way the lines shift in each wing is like its own little sub-story within a grand narrative of the battle. This is especially true because the path to victory is by achieving a breakthrough – which means eliminating all the enemy brigades in one wing. The battle as a whole may be going terribly, but it remains tense because this one wing is going great for you and if you can break through there first maybe you can win! It also embraces the game’s emphasis on formation, as you will need to shift brigades between wings to try and reinforce a position that’s in dire straights, weakening yourself somewhere else in the process.

Despite its many new systems, Banish All Their Fears plays relatively smoothly and clicks together well. I had to look up rules, of course, but I never felt like it bogged down play and I wasn’t playing mostly with my nose in the rulebook. I played most of the game at the table, with the play aids, and only checked the rulebook occasionally even on my first game. I’m someone who really wants a good narrative in my wargames and Banish All Their Fears has delivered one of the best all year, and for that alone it is something special.

Fears, Enduring

I already discussed many of my core concerns with Banish All Their Fears, but I have a few that didn’t quite fit in there, so I’ve added them here. These aren’t exactly deal breakers, but they are rough patches that I wish were a bit smoother.

The set-up instructions leave something to be desired. To some degree I can see what they’re going for. I generally prefer to have a defined set up for my historical games, rather than a free set up, but I can see the potential for how a semi-free set up allows Banish All Their Fears to be more replayable. However, one of the things I don’t like about free set up is that it asks you to make an important strategic decision before you even know how to play the game. Add to that the fact that Banish All Their Fears has quite new and unusual restrictions on how units can be positioned on the map, and you have a recipe for players making strategic decisions they don’t fully understand and the risk of them making significant set up mistakes as units end up being illegally positioned from the very start. Also, setting the game up takes a long time. The playbook would have benefited enormously from a set historical set up with a picture showing you what exactly that looks like. This may seem like a minor nitpick but set up is the first thing you’re going to do when playing a game like this and so putting up barriers at this stage will stop people before they ever get to the game part. I wouldn’t blame people who looked at the set up requirements for Banish All Their Fears and just gave up on the game there, and I think that’s a failing on the part of the design and development.  

While most of the play is smooth, I do worry that in some places it could drag and become a bit tedious. Since I’m playing solo, I’m happy to interrupt the strict order of play for the sake of moving things along. For example, moving reserve units is something that is usually only done with reference to your own units, not your opponents, because they are at the far back of your formation. For that reason, I just tend to do all the reserves for one side of one wing all at once, then the other, and often out of order, because it’s easier. So, if all of the Front units have activated in a given Wing, and there’s no risk of the further back units engaging in a fight, I’ll often just do all those moves in one go. My slight fear is that in a two-player game there could be a lot of excitement in the front line, and then the game could drag some if you carefully alternate activations for all these reserve troops. This is a minor issue, because I haven’t tested it, but it is the kind of element I see in a game that makes me think I might enjoy it more solitaire than versus an opponent.

The turn track kind of sucks. Well, technically it’s kind of two tracks. Each turn represents about twenty minutes (there’s a printing error that makes this inexact, but it’s not important) and there is a track for each twenty-minute turn and then after three of those you advance the hour marker on a second track. All of this is on a separate card that just has a generic minutes track and a generic hours track. This is a bit tedious, but more frustrating to me is that the game only has two battles so why not just print two bespoke turn tracks on the separate turn card? Fitting the wing formation sheet and the map on my little table in my small European house is already a challenge, finding room for this big awkward turn track that also requires me to check what time Blenheim started and ended so that I can know when the scenario starts and ends is a bridge too far for me. In the end, I just didn’t use it. This felt like it was something of an afterthought and didn’t show the same care as is clear in most of the rest of the game’s graphic design.

Look at this and tell me you couldn’t fit two different turn tracks, one for each battle, on this. I also am not wild about the fact that because the track is hours, turn 12 is followed by turn 1..

I’m also not sure on the time scale to some degree – not necessarily disagreeing with the historical analysis, but rather that by my count Blenheim could run for something like twenty turns, but in my little experience I struggle to see how it could go past a dozen unless players are being extremely conservative with their tactics. With how impactful combat is, I think you’d have to be very unlucky for there to be no breakthrough before the twentieth turn. It just seems like a place where the game’s model and the gameplay don’t align properly – but again it’s not a big deal because I ultimately just didn’t keep track of turns and had a fine time.

I should also note that there are several printing errors in the game beyond just the rulebook. Several counters have the wrong counter on the reverse, which is frustrating, and there are some issues with the extended example of play I believe (I must confess, I didn’t read it). These are frustrating for sure. The counter errors have not been enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, but they certainly show a lack of quality control on the part of the design team, and you just never want to see that in a game. Hopefully new counters come with a GMT errata sheet in the near future. These haven’t ruined my experience with Banish All Their Fears but they certainly are an issue and will be more objectionable to some people than they are to me, which is totally fair.

I also should point readers back to the first section, about playing vibes and the flaws with the rulebook. Those are significant drawbacks, but I already talked about them, so I won’t repeat them here.

To Conclude

I’ve only played Banish All Their Fears once and I’ve done so before the living rules have been published, so take this with a grain of salt. This is hardly a final conclusive judgment on the game, but it is a positive first impression. I like what I have seen in Banish All Their Fears, and I am very much looking forward to tackling Neerwinden. I’m going to wait until the Living Rules are published and take some time to fully digest them before playing the game again, that way I can properly compare my experiences. For the moment, though, Banish All Their Fears is one of my great surprises of 2024 – this game provides a dramatic and satisfying narrative which is something I look for in my wargames. It’s a radically different game in terms of how it is played, but it reminds me to some degree of Men of Iron in that both systems create interesting emergent situations, often via your units moving out of formation in ways you wish they wouldn’t, and both keep me excited throughout the game. While certainly not for everyone, Banish All Their Fears is a very promising start to a new series. If they can clean up the rulebook and fix the printing errors this can be a real gem.

SDHistCon 2024 Second Front - We Intend to Move on Your Works Panel

My podcast co-conspirator Pierre and I were invited to present a panel on We Intend to Move on Your Works at the online San Diego Hist Con Second Front in 2024. In this panel, chaired by Andrew Bucholtz, we discuss the origins of this project, how we balance thinking critically about games with our own personal game preferences, and how we feel about the project so far. This was originally streamed live at the convention, but it is available as a recording on YouTube.