Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 8

We Intend to Move on Your Works Ep. 7: Shiloh 1862 by Worthington

It is once again April 1862 and Pierre and Stuart are lost in the woods near Shiloh Church. This time it is with the far less complex Shiloh 1862 from Worthington Publishing. How will they fair with naught but eight pages of rules to guide them? Will Stuart get extremely angry about the woods again? Was Albert Sidney Johnston's death a turning point in the war? Listen to find out as the deep dive into the Battle of Shiloh continues!

2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

I’ve now been running this blog for two whole years, but somehow it feels a lot longer. I’ve been very pleased with how it has grown over the past year and I’m hoping to continue that growth going into 2024. I received several review copies of games this year which was really gratifying and allowed me to cover games that would otherwise have probably been beyond my budget - wargame blogging is not particularly lucrative. To mark the end of the year I want to reflect a bit on how I feel the last two years have gone and then, of course, provide my top ten games of the year. As per last year’s list, these will be games that I played for the first time in 2023 not necessarily games that were released in 2023 (although unlike last year this year’s list does is that were released during the year).

During 2022 I focused on trying to get something out every week, posting many first impressions, session reports, and only a few reviews. This year I decided to let myself have a little more time to breath – I had initially planned to keep a bi-weekly schedule but ended up abandoning it for a more ad hoc approach to publishing new posts. This year I wrote far more reviews, as I felt my distinction between first impressions and reviews break down a bit. I found that sometimes I would write a first impression, play the game some more, and decide that actually I felt exactly the same as I did after my first play, which kind of rendered a full review a bit redundant. This means that I tried to be more selective this year of when I would write a first impression versus saving any thoughts for a full review. I kind of wish I had written a bit more, there were some months where I barely got anything out, but I am pretty happy with what I managed to publish.

I also started a project with reasonable ambitions that has quickly ballooned to become somewhat preposterous in scope. I am of course referring to We Intend to Move on Your Works, which consists of a series of game and book reviews and, most notably, a podcast in conjunction with Homo Ludens. This has been a lot of fun to work on even if it has somewhat consumed my year, and we’re not even halfway done. I’ve played some great games, and some less great ones, and it has been nice to give my year a bit of structure even if I do think it has cut into my time for playing other games. There are plenty of American Civil War games I’m looking forward to playing next year, but I am also hoping to strike a slightly better balance between ACW and non-ACW games in 2024 – but let’s be realistic, I’m going to try to do too much and not finish it all. I even already have another project planned for 2024 - one focusing on a 20th century conflict that I have a family connection to. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start playing World War II games! It will be something a little more obscure (but only a little).

But what were the best games I played this year, I can hear you asking? Per the rules established last year, my best of the year list is composed of games that I played for the first time this year – not necessarily (and in fact basically never) games that actually came out this year. Just like last year I have gone with a top 8 because top 10s are passé.

My Top 8 Games of 2023*#8 Stonewall in the Valley by Joseph balkoski

If I had started playing this earlier in the year, it is very possible that it would have ranked higher. As it is I only just squeezed a play of this in December. This is my first dalliance with the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, a fairly legendary system for American Civil War gamers. I was impressed with how smooth it plays and the options it presented for maneuver while also being very intimidated by how large the stacks of counters can get in the physical game. This is definitely a game and a series I’m interested in exploring more, we’ll see if another entry climbs to a higher position in a future year.

I’m such a sucker for a good map of the Shenandoah Valley - I grew up just off the right side of this map!

#7 – The British Way by Stephen Ranganzas

I’d been growing a little disillusioned with COIN as a system over the course of this year. I still mostly enjoy it, but they’re often too long for my taste and I no longer have quite the same enthusiasm for the system that I once did. That said, I’ve been very enamored with The British Way. With games playable in under an hour and what I would consider a more unflinching look at some of the horrors inherent to its subject matter, The British Way really addresses a lot of my misgivings about COIN. I’ve only played the Malaya scenario a couple of times and haven’t yet been able to play the full campaign, which is why I haven’t reviewed it. Possibly had I played the campaign this game would have ranked higher. It’s not very fair is it.

I actually played Malaya by post - swapping photos of the board state with a friend in the US. It was a great way to play and I’d love to do it some more, although finding space to leave the game set up for weeks on end can be a little challenging.

#6 – Inferno: Guelphs and Ghibellines vie for Tuscany, 1259-1261 by Volko Ruhnke and Enrico Acerbi

Probably top of my list of games I wish I had played more this year. I managed to play two games of Inferno but have yet to really dive into the full campaign. I love Levy & Campaign as a system and the additional chaos of Inferno added some excellent spice to the system while addressing some of my concerns with Almoravid. That said, finding time to play the full campaigns is a real struggle, so while I’ve put a good few hours into Inferno I have yet to really try it at its most grandiose. Instead, I’ve played lots of Nevsky thanks to the implementation on Rally the Troops. Here’s hoping that in 2024 I finally get to play the campaign game of Inferno.

Inferno continues the Levy and Campaign tradition of having a gorgeous production. This was also the first game in the series I was able to play against someone in person - the Vassal modules are nice but there’s something special about playing with the physical game.

#5 Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 by Robert DeLeskie

I managed to play Fire & Stone early in the year but haven’t had a chance to play it more since, sadly. I am obsessed with siege games and Fire & Stone really delivered by focusing on just one section of the walls of Vienna during its great siege by the Ottomans. This creates an experience focused entirely on a single potential breach rather than the full scope of the siege, and it’s better for it. It’s a simple CDG with a strong emphasis on attrition and a great little system for mining the walls, all covered in a lovely layer of art. It’s great.

I was lucky enough to be a guest on Homo Ludens for a live teach and play of Siege of Vienna with the designer Robert DeLeskie

#4 The Day Was Ours by Matt Ward

Blind Swords is quickly climbing in my estimation as one of my favorite hex and counter systems. While Longstreet Attacks had promise, it didn’t quite connect with me. However, both The Day Was Ours and Grand Havoc have really impressed me. In theory, both could go on this list, but I’m restricting myself to just one game per system, so I chose The Day Was Ours. I could offer some justification of why I preferred the more maneuver heavy context of First Bull Run over the swirling chaos of Perryville, but really, I’m picking The Day Was Ours because of the special gaming experience it offered me this year.

While the game is excellent, probably the most memorable part of my experience of The Day Was Ours was getting to play it with my dad (pictured).

#3 1914 Nach Paris by Bertrand Munier

By far the heaviest game I played this year – and I learned Great Battles of the American Civil War back in May – it was also probably my most intense obsession. I logged nine plays of this game in less than two weeks. I would play a scenario in the evening, then set up the next one so that I could jump right into it the following evening. Nach Paris is something of a monster game, with a four map 27-hour campaign game on offer, but its dedication to smaller quick playing scenarios on cardstock map sections made it very approachable for someone like me who doesn’t have space for the full multi-map experience. I have since given my copy to a friend because I feared that if I put it back on my shelf, I’d never get the courage to pull it back down and relearn the rules, and it is better in my opinion for games to be played than to sit unused. Still, I somewhat regret that now as I would really like to spend a bit more time with Vuca Simulation’s lovely maps and counters. Maybe I’ll convince that friend to play the Battle of Marne scenario with me over Vassal...

I really cannot stress how much I adore these tiny maps - being able to set up a little scenario and play through it in an evening was so satisfying. Complicated games don’t always need to be long!

#2 1212 Las Navas de Tolosa by Pablo sanz

The smallest game I played this year – 1212 is a tiny little game of about fifty counters and a deck of just nine cards. Despite its size it manages to deliver one of the most intriguing wargaming puzzles I’ve played in some time. It’s quick, it’s exciting, and it has gorgeous art. I am obsessed with 1212 and I cannot wait to play it more. Sadly, most of the people I have played it with have not been as enamored as I am, so I haven’t gotten it to the table enough to start experimenting with the advanced special power cards, but I’m very excited to get there!

The ambiance of playing in the aftermath of a child’s birthday party really added a lot to an already excellent game.

Runners Up

Before we get on to my favorite game I played for the first time in 2023, it is worth taking a moment to consider the games that didn’t quite make the list. All of these are good games that I had a lot of fun with this year, but there has to be a cut off somewhere or else the list becomes unmanageable and these were the games that fell just below the cut.

Seven Days Battles by Grant Wylie - An excellent light hex and counter game of the American Civil War that offers plenty of chaos to satisfy my needs.

Equatorial Clash by Marc Figueras - A gorgeous game with probably one of my favorite maps of all time, this rare (for me) venture into 20th century gaming packed a lot of punch into a fairly simple folio experience.

Sherwood by Buxeria - Another great light hex and counter system that cleverly adopts the Cry Havoc system to the stories of Robin Hood - you can leap out a window onto your horse, what more do you want?

Agincourt: The Triumph of Archery over Armor by Jim Dunnigan - Peeling open the shrink wrap on a 45 year old game was a surreal experience and exploring Dunnigan’s unusual (and not totally functional to be honest) design was a cherry on top.

Shenandoah by Tom Dalgliesh and Gary Selkirk - I love Columbia block games and I love maneuver and Shenandoah offered me plenty of both, plus it satisfies my obsession with games set in the Valley.

#1 Manassas by Rick Britton

When I played Manassas at the start of the year, I knew it would end up on this list somewhere – I was immediately obsessed with this classic hex and counter game from 1980. It’s so chaotic and so exciting, with a grandiose map that it fully justifies. Every hex and counter game I have played since I have compared to Manassas on some level – it changed how I think about games and what I look for in a design. It’s an underappreciated masterpiece. While I knew it would be on the list after my first play session, I didn’t know it would be number one until I sat down to write it. While there are elements of the design that could have been clearer and it is such a long game with such a large map that I’ll struggle to get it played with any regularity, nothing else has stuck with me the same way that Manassas has. God, what a game.

I love this map, seriously, it’s so good.

If you have enjoyed what I have written this year, maybe consider contributing to my Ko-Fi. I have a goal up there now that if enough people support me I will buy and play a copy of Field Commander Robert E. Lee as part of my exploration of solitaire games where you play Confederates. Any contribution you can make will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Votes for Women by Tory Brown

I’ve really struggled with this one.

I wanted to review Votes for Women months ago, soon after I first got my copy. It took me a little while to get it to the table, but it was top of my list, just waiting for the right moment. I thought I’d have reviewed it by now, but I haven’t. It’s not that the game isn’t good. The game is really quite good. It’s a polished and beautifully presented card driven game (CDG) about an important movement in American history that is approachable without sacrificing interesting decisions or strategy. By nearly any metric it is a roaring success of game design and development. A great entry point into the hobby and something worth trying for any fan of CDGs.

The problem is, I don’t love it.

I don’t know why I’m not in love with Votes for Women. I can see the excellence in its design, and I vastly prefer lighter CDGs to their heavier counterparts. Votes for Women really centers its cards in the gameplay experience and the limited actions available when you discard a card, as opposed to playing it for its event, are easy to remember. The solo bot is very easy to learn, even for the solo-bot challenged like myself, and offers a satisfying opponent to play against that doesn’t get bogged down in minutiae. The rules are gloriously simple, I don’t think I’ve ever played a historical game with such an easy onboarding process to get you set up and playing – that alone is worthy of study by game designers and developers. But still, for all my admiration, it doesn’t strike joy within me. I played it a few times, and then it sat on my shelf waiting for me to try it again. I have played Fort Circle’s other game, The Shores of Tripoli, so many times but my plays of Votes for Women remain in the single digits.

It's not that I can’t see the systems at work in Votes for Women, and I admire them ardently. The bidding for cards at the start of the round adds a lovely little spice of auction games into a type of game that tends to eschew those kinds of mechanisms. The State cards provide a great strategic guide when you’re learning the game and do wonders to reduce the wide-open canvas of the United States into some more focused battlegrounds. The way the game shows the divisions within the suffrage movement, both with its multiple colored pieces and via event cards, is magnificent and represents a deeper relationship to the history than I have seen in games of much greater complexity. The decision space around when to pass the nineteenth amendment is tense, and the asymmetric victory conditions – determined by the U.S. Constitution but wisely chosen for the game – allow for the Suffragette player to feel like they are achieving more each turn while suffering a constant tension about whether it will be enough to meet the draconian standards of U.S. law. It’s all so well thought out and executed that I struggle to find fault with it. But I just don’t love it.

The production is so nice, excellent understanding of the way in which games are also physical objects and the importance in making them enjoyable to manipulate.

This is going to be a weird review, and kind of not a review. I have ultimately decided not to keep Votes for Women and I’m going to explore the reasons why. I don’t expect them to be particularly useful for deciding whether you yourself should buy or play Votes for Women. For the record, I think the answer to both is probably yes – if you are interested in this game, you should play it. At the time of writing, it has just been posted on the website Rally the Troops, so you can try it for free via the best digital implementation out there. Even though I have failed to click with it the way I had hoped, I’m so glad I played it and I’m even happier that this game exists, and that other people are in love with it. It’s a good thing for the hobby, and it may be a good thing for you, but I don’t think it is good enough to me for it to live on my shelf.

A bit of context, maybe. I live in a small European home in the south of Ireland. My shelf space is limited. I also believe that games should be played – I have no grudge against collectors and, in fact, given infinite space and money I probably would be quite the obsessive one, but I would rather a game be played with than have it sit forsaken and forgotten on my shelf. So, whenever I decide about whether to keep a game, I must balance my space against my desire that games, especially good games, be with people who will play and enjoy them rather than living with me as part of a dragon’s hoard that is worryingly susceptible to the local damp climate.

There are reasons I might choose to keep a game – and Votes for Women has a strong case to be kept. It is a simple introductory game about women’s suffrage in America. I have a four-year-old daughter who I very much would like to introduce to board games and engender a healthy interest in the past. A game like Votes for Women is ideally situated for that purpose. However, there are a few drawbacks. For one thing, while Votes for Women is very simple, it’s not “playable with a four-year-old” simple. I would be waiting a while. Another factor is that while I am American, my daughter kind of isn’t – she is half-American but she’s also half-Irish and lives in Ireland. I could cling to Votes for Women in hopes that it’s a topic she finds relatable and interesting when she’s older, or I could spread it into the wild and hope that over the next eight to ten years we see more games about women’s suffrage get designed and published. Because, if we’re serious, my daughter may find more excitement in a game about the extraordinary life of the Countess Markievicz than in her American contemporaries. Also, let’s be real, I could always just buy Votes for Women again later. There’s no harm in buying a game you once gave away, circumstances and tastes change.

But why am I even contemplating passing on my copy of Votes for Women? I clearly have such admiration for its design and subject matter, surely, I must love the game? The boring answer is that I don’t know why I don’t quite love this game, and that is incredibly frustrating to me. It could be the repetition involved in placing and taking away cubes, but I like man midweight Eurogames that are not much more than that. It could be that I’m more of an operational or tactical games person, but this is hardly the only strategic game I own and I’ve kept several that I think are probably technically worse designs. It certainly isn’t the production, which is top tier. I just can’t quite place my finger on it, which as someone who reviews games feels like a bit of a failure.

Okay, also in very minor complaints, I don’t like the checks and X marks. I just don’t enjoy manipulating them and I’m not wild about their aesthetics. I also don’t have an idea of what would have looked better, so it’s not much of a criticism really.

This malaise is not a unique experience for me, there are other times in my life when something I wanted to like so badly just didn’t click for me. Despite what some people may think based on my reviews of a few specific American Civil War games, I don’t actually like not liking things. I want to like things, especially things that other people I like also happen to like! It’s fun to be in the in-crowd, to be able to share your joy with other people and talk about what is so fun and exciting about something. This is especially true of something you were excited about before you ever played/read/watched it.

I was very excited for Votes for Women – I love Shores of Tripoli and the suffrage movement is such a great topic for a game. I love how it does not shy away from some of the more challenging elements of the chosen history. Its inclusion of the Southern Strategy and facing head on the racism that underpinned certain suffragettes’ views shows a more serious approach to history than many games currently out there. This is a game that takes history seriously, and that is something that I look for more than almost anything else when playing a historical game. But it doesn’t make me love Votes for Women. And I don’t know why.

That’s the end of it really – not a satisfying ending but the lack of a satisfying conclusion is kind of the point. I think you should play Votes for Women, but I also want to share that even if you ultimately decide that it’s not for you, that’s fine. I can support and cheer for a game that I ultimately am not very excited to play again because I can see its positive qualities, but I also think it would be slightly disingenuous to act like I do love this game. Maybe its addition to Rally the Troops will cause me to change my mind. Maybe I just need to play more games, or have the ability to play it on my phone. Time will tell.  

We Intend to Move on Your Works Episode 6: Longstreet Attacks

Apologies for the delay - we started playing Longstreet Attacks back in July to mark the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which is why this game breaks our chronology, but the game took longer than expected and then the editing took even longer than that. Thankfully this episode is a good one, so hopefully that makes up for the delay, and we aim to have the next one with you much sooner!

Remembering Pearl Harbor

Before he passed away in 2014, my grandpa wrote down a few short pieces about some of his memories from the years 1941-51. These were written for a cousin of mine as a way to record and share some of his stories. For most of my life he had been relatively quiet about these topics, but as he passed through his 80s and into his 90s, he opened up a bit more about it. One thing that struck me, though, was how when remembering Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into WWII what stuck in his mind 60 years later was not FDR’s speech or the horror of an attack on America. It was what America did to its own people. The stories below reflect the specific circumstances of growing up in relatively diverse rural communities in central California, and how what happened there shaped his memory of December 1941.

I think these reminiscences make for interesting reading, and I thought others may also appreciate them. Please note that these are the memories of a man in his late 80s, they are a subjective version of the events as he remembered them and not intended to be objective history. That having been said, I believe they provide an interesting account of the past and I think it is important to remember what followed Pearl Harbor and how America turned on its own people when faced with an attack from abroad. I have only done light editing from his original writings – a few fixes for clarity and to remove names of family members for their privacy. Several sections are written in present tense - my grandfather passed away nine years ago but I have chosen to keep these sections as they were, a testament to the living voice they were written in.

Helping a Friend

When WWII began I was completing my first semester of my second year at the University of California at Davis. December 8 was the first day of final exams. It was about 10:00 a.m. on Sunda, the 7th when the student who lived across the hall came in and told me to turn on the radio. This was how and when I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

There were quite a few Japanese students attending Davis, one of whom, Frank Oyama, was a friend of my room mate, Luther Card. They had gone to school together in a suburb of Los Angeles. Luther had a car and Frank rode with him from Los Angeles to Davis and home again. A law was immediately put into effect that Japanese could not travel at night or for more than 20 miles from their place of residence.

Frank was stuck. It was about 500 miles from Davis to his home in the Los Angeles area. He talked about getting on a bus or a train to get home. We told him that this was a bad idea as he had on idea how the other passengers might react to his presence. As soon as finals were over Luther and I would be going home. He usually gave me a ride to and from Davis. My home was about equidistant between LA and Davis.

We pondered the problem of how to get Frank home. I decided that the best thing to do was to talk to the local chief of police and explain the problem to him. He did not have an immediate answer but said he would check and I was to come back the next day. When I returned he had worked out a possible solution with the federal authorities. Under no circumstances could Frank travel at night but if he had some place to stay, he could travel during the day. The location where he would spend the night had to be approved by law enforcement in that area and they had to be notified when he was to start, the type of car in which he was riding, the license number, and the route he would be taking. As soon as I heard the rules I phoned my family and asked if Luther and Frank could stay with us on the farm. My father asked me to stay by the telephone until he could check with the local sheriff who was a friend of his. After hearing the problem and the possible solution, the sheriff agreed to it. He contacted the chief of police who also agreed to the plan. As soon as we arrived in the area we were to let the sheriff know that we were there. He would contact the police in Davis to let them know where Frank would be staying. Before he could leave the next day, Frank had to see the sheriff and let him know that he was leaving the area. The sheriff then called the local police where Frank and Luther lived to notify them that travel was about to start and to advise him when the trip was complete.

After all the reporting was done, we drove out to our farm. My parents were most welcoming and had made sleeping arrangements for everyone. Luther went to the local gas station and filled the car tank with gas and did all the servicing needed so they could drive straight through to LA without stopping.

The next morning my mother prepared a hardy breakfast for all. She had packed a lunch for the travelers so they would not have to stop for lunch. The travelers next went to the sheriff’s office to check out and wait until he had talked to the police at their destination to notify them that travel was about to begin.

After the war, I went back to Davis as a graduate student. Frank had survived combat with the Japanese unit of the US Army. We would see each other once in a while on Campus. I completed my degree and left Davis. I never saw our Japanese friend again.

One of our Granddaughters graduated from Davis and joined the alumni association. Her father passes the alumni magazine on to me. One day, I was looking through an issue and Franks name was listed as a faculty member who had just died. He had received a PhD and was a world renowned authority on poultry diseases.

Shame!

When WWII began President Roosevelt signed a law requiring all Japanese to be removed from the west coast. There were three options: return to Japan, move at least 200 miles inland, or be removed and confined in internment camps. I only knew of one Japanese family that returned to Japan. They went to Seattle and boarded the Gripsholm, a Swedish ship bringing home Americans who had been trapped in Japan. This was a diplomatic exchange of citizens.

I was home on spring break from college. My parents and I went to Visalia to watch the movement of the Japanese leaving for internment camps. My father said we needed to go see this activity because he hoped none of us would ever see such a shameful sight again. My uncle owned a business overlooking the rail road tracks where the train would stop to pick up these people. The train came ina and looked like one of those from the old western movies. You could imagine arrows and bullet holes left from the Indians and cavalry shooting at each other.

The Japanese families were lined up in the streets – men, women, children, old and young. There were no exceptions to the evacuation order. They were allowed to bring only those possessions which they could carry. If you could not carry it, it could not go. Bundles of bedding, suitcases of clothes, bags of food, and containers of water were carried – a sad sight! Among the group there were many I had known in school. A particularly sad sight was a young man carrying a very old woman, probably his grandmother. Except for the crying of the very young children, it was a quiet and orderly procession.

When the train stopped, soldiers wearing steel helmets and carrying rifles with fixed bayonets got off at the ends of each car. No one was offered help boarding. It was difficult for many to make the high step up into the car because of age or short stature. I could not see any need for the military display. Once everyone was on board the train went rattling off.

After the war I met a young Japanese man who I knew had gone off in one of these trains. He described the conditions of the cars. The evacuation took place in late May which is the start of summer in that area. It was hot! He said the windows and curtains were fastened so they could not be opened and they could not look out at the passing country side. There was no ventilation. To get from Visalia to the destination in northern California would take 7-8 hours because of the slow speed of the trains and the stops along the way to pick up more Japanese people.

The internment camps were just being built so the people were moved to temporary quarters in various places. I know of two such sites – the stat fair grounds in Sacramento, the state capital, and a hors racing track south of San Francisco. Each family was allotted a certain number of animal stalls depending on the size of the family.

How these people were fed, provided medical care etc. I do not know. I never knew how long they were confined in these “temporary” locations before being moved on to permanent camps.

This was a shameful episode on the part of the United States in the act of war. The majority of these Japanese people were actually U.S. citizens, many of whom volunteered to serve in the army units and were highly decorated. Some enlisted in the Marines as “code talkers”. However, there were a few older men who were loyal to Japan and crated problems in the camps. One young man, who was my age and had formerly been our neighbor, went out each morning and saluted when the flag was raised. One day these older loyalists beat him badly. He suffered such extensive injuries that he could not enter the special Japanese military unit.

Most of the people in the internment camps eventually returned to the areas from which they were removed. They and their children continued to be good citizens of the United States.

Le Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil, trans. Craig Taylor and Jane Taylor

Le Jouvencel is an interesting work and a great example of the complexities of medieval literature. It is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction written for, and with input by, one of the greatest commanders of the end of the Hundred Years War. Jean de Bueil, who is credited as the author although it seems he at a minimum had help writing it and may in fact have only provided feedback on the writing of others, wished for a text to teach a new generation the art of war and to encourage fellow members of the nobility to pursue a life of combat rather than one of courtly or purely political life.

The story in question is about the life of a young, relatively poor noble who earns the nickname Jouvencel, which literally means “young man,” which he bears for the entirety of the book. The story charts his rise from obscurity through daring raids escalating to skirmishes, sieges, and full-scale battles, culminating in him marrying a princess and helping a foreign king regain his kingdom from a rebellion of some of his nobles. Interspersed throughout the story of his rise are didactic sections describing best practice in warfare, advising young men on how to be good nobles, and even an extended section on the proper method for resolving a trial by combat.

What makes Jouvencel particularly interesting is that the test draws very explicitly upon the real life of Jean de Bueil. Events in the fictional Jouvencel’s life are modelled directly on the life of de Bueil – and since he participated in many of the climactic moments of the Hundred Years War this makes the book almost a history of that conflict. These parallels are made even more explicit in a commentary written by another associate of de Bueil’s which is appended to the end of the text. In this commentary the author tells the reader which moments in the story can be read as representing real history and what that historical event was. At the same time, the main text includes extended descriptions of real historical events from some of its characters, creating a strange, blended reality where both the fictional and real worlds exist simultaneously.

Le Jouvencel is not the most engaging medieval text I have ever read, but it is one of the most interesting in terms of its structure and the view it provides of late medieval French writing and noble life. Soldiers’ memoirs would become more common in the following century, and Le Jouvencel exists as a strange cross between memoir and mirror for princes, or a book written for the education of the nobility. It is interesting more for the insight that it provides into its time period than for the actual literary style or story. There are other medieval texts that I would recommend to anyone interested in reading a medieval work for the first time, but for medieval specialists or anyone with a serious interested in mid-15th century French history this is a worthwhile read.

Craig Taylor and Jane Taylor have provided an excellent translation from the work’s original middle French into modern English. The text is readable and does a great job at conveying many of the complexities present in the original text – some of the challenges of which they explain in their introduction. The book also has ample footnotes to direct you to further scholarship on sections of the book, events described within it, or even to provide more context about what exactly the author meant. I wish all translations were this thorough and enjoyable to read.

Grand Havoc by Jeff Grossman

Blind Swords is quickly climbing the ranks to be among my favorite hex and counter systems. The chaos of the chit draw, the unpredictability of the CRTs, the manageable footprint, and the elegant presentation from Revolution Games have all wormed their way into my heart. Longstreet Attacks showed me the potential of the system, but in a form that didn’t totally agree with me. The Day Was Ours showed me that it could do approach to battle and the chaos of First Bull Run. After playing that I was pretty sure that I would prefer Blind Swords as a single counter sheet experience – low counter density leaving me plenty of room to explore the map. It was with some trepidation that I punched the two counter sheets of Jeff Grossman’s Grand Havoc. Would this cement my love for Blind Swords, or would it be another Longstreet Attacks, an almost hit that doesn’t quite land? I’m delighted to report that it was the former – Grand Havoc delivers a larger scale Blind Swords experience and seems to resolve pretty much all my misgivings about Longstreet Attacks. This is a great game, and I’m excited to talk about why.

Revolution Games kindly provided me with a complementary review copy of Grand Havoc

What struck me most about Grand Havoc was its tempo. The casualty system in Blind Swords is relatively simple. Each unit has a normal side and a weakened Battleworn side, represented by flipping the counter to its reverse. Units that would suffer further Battleworn results in combat must make a break test, which can put them onto the off map Broken Track. It is in theory possible to rebuild units, flipping them to their original full-strength side or even returning them to play from the Broken Track if they are in the lowest numbered box. The thing is, in my time with Longstreet Attacks and The Day Was Ours I only ever really dabbled in these systems. Rebuilding units requires you to stop your momentum by giving an order that doesn’t allow for any movement or attacks for that regiment, and you must also be at least three hexes away from the nearest enemy unit. The Rally event lets you restore one unit at a distance of only two hexes from the enemy, which can restore a unit in a pinch, but the promise of fully or mostly rebuilding a regiment never quite seemed worth the cost. Maybe I’m just bad at the games though.

In Grand Havoc, however, I frequently found myself trying to rebuild regiments so that I could send them back into the fight. This is not a game of long-distance maneuver like The Day Was Ours, nor is it about a desperate charge with a ticking clock hanging over your head like Longstreet Attacks. Instead, you are fighting over roughly three closely connected fronts. The abundance of units available allows for a regiment to push forward, attack, and then fall back behind a friendly line to slowly recover and attack again. This gives the game a feeling of swirling chaos, as units flow into and out of combat across several different parts of the battlefield. The tempo can bleed across sections, and to some degree it must, but moving between sections can be a multi-turn undertaking so you have to be confident that it’s the right choice.

The early clashing of the lines, opening sparring before they got pretty much completely entangled. The Union units on the bottom right aren’t yet released, and can’t activate.

A key support to this tempo is the game’s victory conditions. I have been on record as saying that the victory conditions for Blind Swords have been my least favorite part of the games I’ve played. I must eat a little crow here, as Grand Havoc has tuned them to a fine point. There are just three spaces that score victory points each turn during the main scenario. Both sides will contest these points to try and wrack up an early lead of points. The push and pull over these spaces is what gives the game a lot of its tempo. The Union holds one on a hill that the Confederates must push them off to gain access to areas behind Union lines – while the other two are in ravines between the two positions and form an almost immediate push and pull between the two sides.

However, that’s not the full picture. While there is a need to get those VP spaces, or at least deny them to your opponent, they are just one of a number of victory hexes on the map. The other hexes are unique to one side and only score at the end of the game, but they each score 10 victory points. When you consider that the game is 14 turns, that means that one of those victory hexes is worth as much as controlling a contested space for most of the game. At some point you must weigh your options and consider whether it is worth abandoning one or more of the shared victory hexes to push for some end game hexes.

Here you can see the three tension points - the hill on the left, the gully in the center, and the gully and hill on the right. The lighter colored counters are all on their battleworn side. By this stage in the battle a good few Confederates were already on the broken track.

This also gives the game a reduced sense of urgency. In Longstreet Attacks, the Confederate player needs to take hexes from the Union as fast as possible to prevent them from wracking up an insurmountable number of victory points. In Grand Havoc the three central hexes are a bit more like triage – you probably won’t lose or win the game entirely via them most of the time. You need to deny your opponent total control of them, but if you can just deny them victory there you can win elsewhere on the map. This allows more time for things like rebuilding units and launching another wave of attacks. In Longstreet Attacks the Confederates rarely had time to slow down to conduct a full rebuild, while the Union were too hard pressed to get enough space from the attacking Confederates. In Grand Havoc it is much easier to build room and conduct your offensives in waves rather than all at once.

That’s not to say this is a game without attrition – in fact it’s almost more of one for it. You feel each unit on the broken track, especially as once a unit is returned from the broken track it can’t be rebuilt to its full strength. You also need to manage morale damage, which is easier to remove but that can sometimes feel like it’s just slapping a bandage on to a larger problem. Sometimes it may be worth pushing a regiment a little harder, or leaving them to hold that fence, because you need another unit to be rebuilt so they can exploit a crack you made or fill a hole in your line.

I don’t want to make it seem like rebuilding and refined victory conditions is all that Grand Havoc has to offer – all the other classic Blind Swords elements are in full swing. The chit pull is as interesting as ever and the events are a great selection. In particular, there are fewer hold events which makes the game easier to play solo, which I appreciate as I rarely have the time to play these full games with someone else. There is a fairly even distribution of unit and general quality between the two sides, which makes for an interesting game. The Union has slightly more green units, with some really wild units that have enormous strength values and terrible cohesion ratings making them something like glass cannons. The Union also has far more units in total, though, so they have several sturdier veteran units to bolster their positions. How they play with their mix of offensively powerful units that can’t take an attack with their more durable veterans who don’t hit as hard is an interesting challenge. Meanwhile, the Confederacy has a more consistent distribution of troop quality but still needs to think about how best to apply their overall lower attack strength and fewer number of units. It’s a fun balance that doesn’t feel like it’s letting the post-war reputation of one side or the other unduly tilt the game.

The game also comes with a great little starter scenario, only a few units (the Union does get more) and lasts only a few turns. I’m still not sure I’d recommend learning the system with Grand Havoc, but if you have to this scenario is a great place to start.

The Buell Notices track is one of the more visually obvious additions, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that radical a departure from other games in the series. Many Union units, and a few Confederates, start the main battle scenario On Hold, and cannot move until certain criteria are met. This was true of Longstreet Attacks as well, but in Longstreet the release of units was mostly scripted. In Grand Havoc, the Union player needs Buell to notice that the battle is happening by moving him along the chart via a series of end of turn rolls. As Buell progresses the Union player will eventually be able to begin releasing units at the end of each turn. Some people might find it too random, but there are DRMs that both players can influence and overall, I think it’s a lot easier to keep track of and more interesting than a scripted release of units. It also provides a much more interesting narrative to the game than a scripted release does.

The production of the game is also excellent. This is the first volume since the passing of Rick Barber [Edit: No it’s not, it’s the second, I forgot about A Greater Victory], so the map is without his signature look. However, if I may confess a moderate heresy – I like this map better than the Rick Barber maps from previous entries. Don’t get me wrong, Rick Barber maps are incredibly beautiful, but I also found them to sometimes be too busy. This map is clean and great to look at, the ideal balance. I also really appreciated the addition of sheets to track activation tokens on – no more must I scatter all my regiment chits across a section of the map that I’m hoping won’t see any action. The counters themselves are also of a very high quality, just a really nice production overall.

The initial set up for the main battle scenario. I only just about fit it on my table, and I had to hide the Broken Track under the map so I just tracked broken units on the VP track - they count for VPs at game end anyway so it felt appropriate.

If I were to levy a critique at Grand Havoc, I do have an extraordinarily petty one. In a move that is far from unique, the game includes, with its victory conditions, an explanation in the rulebook of the consequences of a dramatic victory for one side or the other. These include sweeping events, such as the Confederacy successfully securing the state of Kentucky for their cause. While these descriptions can be mostly harmless, I object to the overly deterministic perspective they take on the outcomes of battles. They reflect the obsession with decisive battles, somewhat notoriously the dominant viewpoint of the scholars in the Prussian military leading up to World War I, and which still have a legacy in modern historiography. There is so much more to war than just battles, and I think it’s important that we admit that a battle like Perryville, while not without purpose or significance, was also basically never going to be “decisive.” After all, the Confederacy technically won the battle, but Bragg’s Kentucky Campaign was ultimately a failure. Grand Havoc is hardly the most egregious example of this phenomenon – the current reigning champion is probably In Magnificent Style – but it was the game that came across my table at a point in time when I’m feeling particularly inclined to object to it.

Petty nitpicks aside, Grand Havoc is an excellent addition to the Blind Swords system. I still think I will prefer the smaller footprint entries in the series, but Grand Havoc has shown me that a two counter sheet Blind Swords can absolutely deliver an exciting and not too overwhelming experience. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as an entry point into the series – it has a few too many deviations from the core rules across its two rulebooks (side note: I don’t like that the series now has two rulebooks) and it’s probably a bit big to take on if you’re totally new to Blind Swords. Instead, I would point to The Day Was Ours as a better starting point. However, for people with some experience with Blind Swords I highly recommend exploring this title. You may not have known it, but Perryville was a battle you probably want to play.

Agincourt: The Triumph of Archery over Armor by Jim Dunnigan

When I read the subtitle “The Triumph of Archery over Armor” I knew I had to play this game. That sentence is like red to my bullish need to overshare the history of archery with anyone and everyone. That it was also a classic game from Jim Dunnigan, published by SPI, and thus a piece of gaming history made it all the more interesting. Luckily, I was able to secure an in-shrink copy from avid collector and all-around good guy Nils Johansson. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this game, I had never played a Dunnigan or SPI game before, and I was pleased to find some very intriguing design ideas in this box.

Due credit must be given to illustrator and collector extraordinaire Nils Johansson who sold me this copy of Agincourt that had been in its original shrink since 1978!

I obviously have a lot of thoughts about the version of Agincourt that is on display in this game – it is a very specific vision of what Anglo-French warfare looked like in 1415 and I think picking it apart can show a lot about how our understanding of history can change over time. At the same time, this is a game, and so it must be considered as such. As a game, it is one that makes some very interesting decisions I’ve never seen before, but that is also not without several key flaws. I had fun playing Agincourt, but then I also stopped when it ceased to be fun. Let’s start with the good, move to the bad, and then finish with the history.

Robin Hood Was Never This Good

The game is about the triumph of archery, and so it is logical that much of this review will be dedicated to discussing that exact topic. The version of medieval archery on display here is fascinating because it gets some things so very right and others so very wrong, and in the end, it yields a pretty interesting gaming experience. It was quite the rollercoaster.

How fast your average longbowman could shoot his bow has been a subject of intense debate by historians over the years. While you will still find people repeating the frankly ludicrous figure of 12 arrows per minute, popularized by Napoleon III (yes, the emperor), the much more reasonable number of 6 arrows per minute has become far more widely accepted. Jim Dunnigan clearly agreed, because in Agincourt each impulse is approximately a minute, and each archer unit can shoot up to six arrows per impulse. So, in an impulse a French unit could move one to two hexes (depending on if they’re mounted charging units or not) and then the English can choose how many volleys to shoot in response. Thankfully for playability purposes, this simply changes the table that the attack is rolled on rather than forcing players to resolve between one and six attacks per counter. There are also restrictions where once units get too close it is no longer possible to shoot six arrows, presumably to reflect the enemy speeding up and not allowing a full minute before they close to melee range. Or something like that. The CRT is such that the longbowmen are at their most effective against targets 3 or 4 hexes away, which made for some very cool gameplay decisions but which I did not understand from a historical perspective. Longbows would be at their most lethal at the shortest range, but then because the game limits how many arrows could be shot in the last two hexes of approach you only get the full six shots at that 3-4 hex range.

But why would you not shoot the maximum number of arrows every time? The simple reason is that you might run out of arrows. Every unit’s ammunition is tracked on the edges of the map. Each unit has a supply and then once deleted will receive a semi-random amount as a secondary supply, after which they will be forced to fight in melee or be rendered useless (French archers aren’t allowed to melee). There are rules for retrieving arrows from the dead that are, if I’m honest, a little too complicated for what they are but they do exist as an option. I would argue that the arrow supply is probably overly generous, but that is me nitpicking. What I really like about this is it does reflect the very real reason why debates around the rate of fire for the longbow are often missing the point. Most armies probably only had enough arrows for a few minutes of sustained firing at maximum rate of fire, and that meant that either the period of active archery was very short, or archers rarely shot at their theoretical maximum speed. Baking this into a game design that is so much about archery was very cool to see.

The initial set up of the historical scenario - you can see the many tracks along the side for line strengths and ammunition. In this photo I have set up the lines the wrong way around, something I fixed and then forgot to photograph. #nailedit

The game’s subtitle is “The Triumph of Archery over Armor” so you must have suspected that I was going to raise some objections. Archery in Agincourt is insanely lethal. Each hit, and hits are frequent, generates a marker representing the dead and a marker for fugitives who semi-randomly flee backwards, interrupting movement and generating more fugitives as they go. This creates a state of total chaos pretty quickly, as three impulses worth of archery generates corpses and fugitives, which can in turn generate more fugitives during the morale phase at the end of each player’s turn. Here’s the thing, I kind of love this except for the fact that it’s terrible history. If I close my eyes and ignore the historian of archery party of my brain the chaotic battlefield situation in Agincourt is incredibly engaging.

An extra wrinkle that is interesting it that all these losses do not impair the combat effectiveness of any of the units – on the attack at least. Instead of steps, each unit has “lines” which are tracked along the map’s edges. Each time you take a hit you lose a line, but a new set of fresh troops advances forward and so combat effectiveness is not reduced. Loss of lines will cause problems during the morale phase, but a unit is in theory at full fighting strength until it is completely eliminated. I’m always on the lookout for alternative systems for tracking injuries in hex and counter games beyond just full strength on one side and somewhat impaired strength on the reverse. This is a cool example, although like with the archery I’m not really sure if it reflects the history. Medieval formations generally broke all at once, after hitting a critical mass of disorder, rather than melting away piecemeal like in Agincourt. Also, while the game includes penalties for “crowding” when counters bunch up near each other, the benefit of soldiers in the rear preventing troops from breaking is absent.

Overall, though, many of the core systems in Agincourt are interesting and unlike anything else I’ve played before. The game state is constantly shifting and it had that feeling of barely being in control that I love in hex and counter games. It also has some glorious aesthetics and graphic design, which makes it a delight to spend an afternoon with. But. There’s always a But isn’t there. I have some problems with this design.

Leaders and Melee and Admin Oh My!

My time with Agincourt ground to a halt the moment the armies clashed. The French had survived a brutal storm of arrows to finally reach the English line, some miraculously unscathed, only to fall at the hurdle of the rather crushing melee combat CRT. The problem was that the French had no opportunity to inflict any archery combat of their own on the English men-at-arms which meant that the two sides were pretty much equally matched, and nothing really happened as they fought. The archery and morale systems were far more lethal than anything done up close with blades, and that was really disappointing. I know the game is about the triumph of archery, so perhaps the historical perspective on display shouldn’t have surprised me, but it also left me feeling deflated. I had enjoyed the tense game of pushing forward and allocating archery fire to French attackers, but once the lines hit I wanted some excitement that the game really failed to deliver. A more chaotic and potentially lethal melee system could really have elevated this game.

The moment when the lines clashed - you can see the many fugitives, in white, and dead, in blue, scattered across the field.

The leader combat system was probably meant to provide that spice that I was looking for in the melee combat. Leader combat happens before melee combat is resolved whenever two leaders are in adjacent hexes – so in my experience it will happen often as both sides have an abundance of leaders and a strong incentive to stack them into melee combat for their leadership bonus. Leader combat is fought over five rounds with each player picking one of the far too many available posture options and then rolling on a table to see which, if either, leader receives a hit. If a leader receives more hits than they have strength in a round, they are captured – removing them from the map and awarding victory points to the opposing player.

This is kind of tedious to resolve and most leaders have 3 strength or higher, so usually after the first two rounds you will know if it is possible for one side to lose or not. It’s basically a whole mini-game unto itself that interrupts the flow of the main game to disappointing results. It’s also very poor history. Medieval commanders postured a lot about challenging each other to single combat in letters, but almost nobody ever actually fought those combats. It was part of a wider political culture, a way of shaming your opponent and showing off masculine bravery, not actually how they thought wars should be resolved. I like that the game emphasizes capturing nobles and taking ransoms, a key aspect of medieval warfare, but how it approaches it is flawed and, worse, not very fun.

The leader combat is not the only excessively tedious piece of admin in the game. While I broadly liked the morale system, especially that the game put such an emphasis on morale as a subject, resolving morale checks can quickly become tedious. To resolve a morale check for a unit you must first add up how many points of negative morale it is suffering. These can come from how many lines it has lost, how many fugitives and friendly dead there are near it, and the placement of neighboring units. As the board quickly fills with corpses and fugitives, this can become very time consuming to calculate for every unit. Technically not every unit has to make a morale check, but one of the triggers for determining if you need to do one is if you moved this turn, so in practice most will. If you have more than 10 negative morale points, and in many cases you will, you must roll on the table multiple times. So, you might find yourself making 2-3 rolls for half your army. It’s a lot of admin, and it spawns more fugitives, which will increase your admin next turn. The system at its core is interesting, but it needed more tweaking. In its current form it wanders into excess, which grinds the game to a halt.

When taken all together, these elements combined to generate a historical scenario that felt too on the rails. I learned the game’s systems playing the historical scenario, and now I can’t help but wonder if the free deployment scenarios are how the game part of this experience is meant to be played – with the historical option really being more like watching an interactive movie with a preordained conclusion. Which brings me to:

The History

The game wears its intention on its sleeve – this is game about triumphant archers defeating the French knights. The historical scenario feels like a pre-programmed game to show you why the French failed tactically, with the free deployment giving the French player the option of exploring alternative strategies to improve upon the historical commanders. This is a version of Agincourt very much rooted in certain somewhat nationalistic understandings of the history. You can see it in how the rules deny the dismounted French men-at-arms the possibility of attacking archers through their stakes, as they would view attacking such peasants as “beneath them”, but then the cavalry can because, of course, historically they did. It also leans in to the notion of a vastly outnumbered English army, with fewer than half the strength of the French, securing an unexpected and overwhelming victory. A triumph not just of the longbow, but of the common Englishman over the snobby French. Anne Curry has made a very strong case for the French and English armies having been nearly equal in number, actually, and there has been plenty of recent scholarship that has helped us gain a much better understanding of the types of men who fought in the English army.

The idea of the longbowmen as the common English “yeoman” has its roots in modern understandings of English histories. Sure, some archers probably were yeoman, but many archers recruited for the Hundred Years War were members of the lesser nobility – often younger sons who were joining their elder sibling or richer relative who was serving as a men-at-arms. Other archers were probably semi-professional soldiers, not farmers who had been given bows and sent out into the field to fight. But then, the cited expert in the historical analysis is Sir Charles Oman, who was writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. I almost expected the game to make the classic comparison of the English archer to the “Tommy” in WWI, which was a very popular and deeply flawed understanding of the history of both wars.

The game is rooted in classic examples of longbow triumphalism. Lethal arrows penetrating plate armor, something that has been pretty substantially refuted by now, as well as the rapid rate of fire and the fact that they can fight in melee as well. The French have short bows as well as their crossbows, which is another notion that has fallen far out of favor – bows are bows, there was not some magical technological evolution in bow technology that made the English weapon mysteriously superior to those available to their continental opponents. This game is as far from Kelly DeVries notion, in his excellent article “Catapults are not Atomic Bombs”, that archery was primarily a support weapon used to disrupt enemy formations and make them vulnerable to defeat by the melee soldiers. Not that DeVries’ view is the exclusive perspective of historians, but even the most ardent supporter of lethal longbows would stop short of endorsing the level of death on display in Agincourt.

Also, look at these lovely coats of arms on the counters. Just some gorgeous but not too complicated counters - you love to see it.

I don’t want it to seem like I’m damning this game for not being up to date with the latest scholarship – it is 45 years old after all! While I would suggest that it was probably a bit out of date even for its time, the lack of reference to A.H. Burne’s work from the 1950s is a bit unusual, overall it is a fascinating lens into a specific view of history and I want to highlight how much our understanding of these events has changed in the past four and a half decades.

Despite what some angry people may shout at me on the internet, history is not “what happened.” What happened is the past, history is our attempt to understand something that is fundamentally unknowable. We can never know everything about the past – even if one of us had been at Agincourt, we would only have firsthand experience of the small part of the battle that we participated in. Historians try and pull together all the available evidence, including accounts written by people who were there, to put together a best possible argument for what happened and, importantly, both why it happened and what that means. As we uncover more evidence, or apply new methods to existing evidence, we can often construct better theories about the past and these changes in historical arguments are interesting and important! Agincourt is a fascinating example of wargame historiography, and while it is deeply flawed in many ways it is also thoroughly engaging and utterly spellbinding to someone like me.  

Conclusion

I’m so glad I played Agincourt and I fully intend to play it some more. Not all of its pieces clicked together, but I have not played anything else like it, nor have I seen obvious examples of games that have modelled themselves on it in the intervening years. There are some really interesting design ideas on display in Agincourt, some better than others, and as an example of design and historiography it is fascinating. I wouldn’t encourage everyone run out and buy a copy – for one thing it’s very out of print – but for people interested in the design of medieval grand tactical games or just interested in the historiography of Agincourt it is one worth looking into. I can’t promise you will have the best gaming experience of your life, but I can promise an interesting one. I for one will be thinking about how it handles archery and morale far beyond when I’ve stopped remembering how many different leader combat postures there were. There is a gem in this design, I just don’t think the final product is constructed quite right to emphasize that. I’m still so glad I played it and I fully intend to pull it off the shelf periodically to try it again and show it to others.

Race and Reunion by David Blight

Every so often I read a book that so overwhelms me with its breadth and depth of information that I wish I had already read it twice in the hope of clinging to just a little bit more of its knowledge. Race and Reunion is such a book. David Blight documents the aftermath of the American Civil War, when two previously warring factions had to come to terms with still being part of the same country and make sense of the bloody years that had just passed. Conflicting ideologies competed to interpret the events of the Civil War, sometimes with violent outcomes, and in the end they created a vile system of white supremacy and oppression alongside unfulfilled potential. How emancipation transitioned to Jim Crow isn’t the core focus of the book, it is far more expansive than that, but it would do as a pithy summary.

I would love to give a comprehensive account of what Race and Reunion covers but I don’t feel like I’ve fully internalised all of it. In an unusual move, for me at least, I listened to this as an audiobook and while I have no complaints about that as a production, I certainly don’t feel like it was the optimal way for me to take all this information in. I took a lot on board, but I think I may need to read a physical copy to really understand all of the threads that David Blight pulls together to create his portrait of post-Civil War society. Each chapter in Race and Reunion is a comprehensive deep dive into one aspect of Civil War memory that all build together to create a masterful portrait of approximately five decades of American memory.

For me the standout theme, the one that will stick with me the longest, is the tripartite division between Lost Cause, Reconciliationist, and Emancipationist narratives. The slow triumph of Reconciliation, and how it surrendered to Southern terms and opened the door for Lost Cause interpretations, was a prominent theme throughout the book and really helped me to better understand how the Lost Cause, being a philosophy of the defeated South, eventually became such a dominant element in American society. This is far from the only theme in Blight’s book, but it was the one that stood out the most to me and had the most profound impact on my understanding of the end of the nineteenth century. Blight also makes clear the internal conflict that existed within those groups and expanded my understanding of who belonged to those movements. History is complicated and I love it when works of history embrace that complexity and do their best to explain it, even if the end result can make my head hurt.

My second favorite section was Blight’s coverage of post-war literature and how popular literary trends shaped both memory of the war and pre-war society. In particular, I was fascinated and horrified by his coverage of the dominance of plantation stories written by whites with a delusional notion of what black life was like in the antebellum south. While much of this section of the book was deeply distressing, something that is true for most of its length really, there were some bright spots, including a small number of emancipationist post-war works of fiction that I may end up reading myself. Given how much the popularity of the Lost Cause owes to works of mass media and pop culture this section felt particularly relevant and important to our understanding of how the Lost Cause became so pervasive.

Blight also does a good job at not limiting himself to just white memory of the war. The book dives deep into how black Americans, both freed slaves and those born free, had to come to terms with what the war meant as well as the slow slide into Jim Crow and white supremacy that followed. This analysis helps to ensure that Blight’s portrait of postwar memory is diverse and complex, which is probably the book’s greatest strength.

Blight is a good writer and the information is presented clearly and coherently, this is not dense academic prose, but at the same time this is heavy stuff. The book documents the triumph of white supremacy and does not shy away from the many crimes committed against Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s an unflinching look at American history, and so can be quite difficult and enraging to read. This is a valuable work of history and one that I would highly recommend but also brace yourself before you dive in because the water is shocking and cruel.

The Worthington Civil War Brigade Battle Series

Worthington Publishing’s Civil War Brigade Battle Series by designer Grant Wylie is a rules light hex and counter system on, you guessed it, American Civil War battles at the brigade scale. It also should not be confused with The Civil War Brigade Series (CWBS) from The Gamers, which is also a brigade level hex and counter system but is far more complex and also much older, with its first published entry from 1988 as opposed to Worthington’s system which began in 2019. It’s a little confusing. Worthington’s system currently spans four games, three by Grant Wylie and published by Worthington and one game by Pascal Toupy and published in French wargame magazine Vae Victis. There are already plans for quite a few more entries as well. These are rules light games, the system rules are eight pages long with each game adding at most one page of extra game specific rules on top of that. They also generally play in two to four hours. These are fun games for fans of hex and counter Civil War gaming and are also a great entry point into hex and counter gaming for anyone who has always wanted to try them but has been hesitant to do so. They are probably not going to blow your mind, these aren’t radical designs the likes of which you’ve never seen before, but I’ve had a lot of fun playing them and if simple hex and counter is your cup of tea then I think you’ll enjoy them too. But you probably didn’t come here for the tl;dr, you came here for some nitty gritty detail, so lets get to it!

Worthington Publishing kindly provided me with complementary review copies of Antietam 1862, Shiloh 1862, and The Seven Days Battles. Cedar Mountain 1862 I bought with my own money because I’m an obsessive completionist.

Sequence of Play

A good sequence of play can really make a game and I think the one used by these games manages to fit a lot of interesting decisions into quite a simple order. The order is that the active player shoots all their artillery, moves, is then shot at by the other player, then they get to make their infantry attacks, and finally they can (hopefully) rally any routed units. There are a lot of little interesting bits in there, but to me the most intriguing is that the opposing player gets an entire shooting phase every turn. Reactive fire isn’t exactly new to wargaming, but most games I’ve played have it as something that is triggered by a specific action the active player takes. In these games it is instead guaranteed, the non-active player will always get to take as many shots as they legally can every turn. This actually makes the other players turn almost more enjoyable than your own. On your turn you have to make hard choices about where to move forward, knowing that your units may be routed before they even get to attack, but on your opponents turn every time they move forward you get to think about the attacks you’ll get to make. It’s a lot less stressful.

The way that artillery and infantry combat is split on the active player’s turn is also really interesting. On your turn your opponents infantry will shoot before yours do, but your artillery will shoot before that. This can create difficult choices on your turn when it comes to thinking about what will happen on your opponent’s turn. For example, if on my turn I force an enemy unit to retreat – do I advance to take their space? If doing so moves me adjacent to an enemy infantry unit, I know that I will get to shoot him before he shoots me on my opponent’s turn, but if I move adjacent to artillery I will take a face full of cannister before I can attack. It’s a critical difference, and an interesting decision space.

I really like how artillery and ranged combat work in general. Artillery are double strength against adjacent units, but only half strength against infantry at further distances. This makes artillery much better for long range counterbattery to prepare for your melee offensive – reducing the enemy’s strength so that they don’t obliterate your infantry once they get in close. Again, a great way to nudge you towards using artillery for counterbattery without making it an explicit rule in the game.

I’m a big fan of systems where units shoot each other at adjacent hexes – reduces the fiddly-ness of line of sight and keeps things easy and doesn’t slow down play. Thankfully the LOS rules aren’t too complex here, so even for the artillery I didn’t suffer too much. The one wrinkle that’s really interesting is only units adjacent to your target block LOS. This allows for some really interesting shots, and also makes positioning artillery tricky. Before the lines engage you have a lot more shots, but once fighting commences things get messier.  

Attrition

This is a system built for attrition, full stop. Individual units have many steps, some over thirty, and almost every result on the CRT inflicts at least one step loss. Over the course of a game you will be placing and adjusting many strength counters (something that is made blessedly less annoying by the design of the counters, so you only need to rotate or flip them most of the time not dig out a fresh one every time a step loss happens). Step losses then trigger morale checks which can cause routs which can trigger more morale checks which can trigger more routs – and every artillery that routs will likely suffer more step losses as they limber to flee. At the end of a full game, you will see the toll that the fighting took on your troops – both on the battlefield and on the score track, as each step loss is also a victory point. Attrition is baked into the essence of these games.

I don’t say the above as a value judgement. I love games of maneuver, and there is some maneuver to be had here, but I also want the game’s systems to align well with their topic. In this regard I think Worthington has made excellent choices in terms of which battles to adapt for this system. Antietam, Shiloh, the Seven Days, and soon Gettysburg. These are all extremely bloody battles defined by the toll they took on both sides. They wrote their name in American history in blood, and I’ve found some systems did not do a great job at capturing that feeling. Where something like Jackson’s Valley Campaign, while far from bloodless, is probably best captured by a system that emphasizes supply and movement, these battles are, to my mind at least, about attrition and the horrible cost of war. I think this system does a great job at conveying the high casualties and chaos of these battles within a relatively rules light and still fun to play game. Certainly the final product is still far from the realities of these battles, but as a cardboard equivalent they are quite good.

Narrative

As I spend more time thinking and writing about wargames, I have come to understand how important narrative is to my enjoyment of the hobby. I want my games to tell a story, to hook me in with it, and for that story to convey some of the history behind the game. I bring this up because I think the Worthington Civil War Brigade Battle series strikes an excellent balance in how it constructs the narratives of these battles without an immense weight of rules behind it. Nothing about the game’s system feels like you’re on the rails, it isn’t forcing you along a narrow path, but I’ve found that in each of my plays the arc of the game’s narrative conforms with what you would expect from these battles. The fighting is hottest near where it was historically and there is a real pressure for an attacking force to take ground but that generally happens at extraordinarily high costs to its units.

This is where the grand battle of Antietam begins.

I worry that this could make it sound like it’s a bit bland, or too restricted by history. These games are quite open-ended, I’m glad to report a general lack of onerous rules that restrict your decisions and force you towards historical decisions. Where they do exist, like in the grand battle scenario for Antietam, they provide a very general limitation (e.g., you can only activate two Corps a turn instead of your whole army) which can in turn inspire more careful decisions on the player’s part.

And here is where Antietam ended. You can kind of see how the narrative unfolded, where Union attacks succeeded and where it ran into more trouble. This arc to the game’s narrative is so much of the appeal to me.

I think part of why this works so well is that the grand arc of the games’ narratives conforms to historical expectations, but that is not exactly true on a turn-to-turn basis. Each turn presents specific challenges and will spit out various results, usually chaotically in my experience, but over the course of three or four turns you will see the narrative develop. The number of dice rolls will conform to the mean and chaos of the individual turns will produce a more consistent strategic outcome. This interplay between the chaos of the moment and the arc of the overall battle is really satisfying and a large part of each game’s appeal, for me at least! There are times where I wished that I could see the overall narrative a little faster, where I wish turns went a little quicker, but overall the stories that these games tell over an evening is really enjoyable and among the best I’ve found in this kind of game – especially for a system that is so light!

Playing Solo

I really enjoy playing hex and counter games solo. Leaving a game set up and periodically moving counters around, rolling some dice, and then wandering away to do something else is just a really meditative experience for me. That said, not all hex and counter games are suited to this kind of play – while I adore Great Heathen Army, I don’t think it’s a great solo game. On my personal ranking of hex and counter games that are enjoyable to play solo, this series is very near the top. It has a lot of the elements I want in a solo hex and counter experience. The dice generate so much chaos each turn that you can only plan so far ahead, which stops me from getting lost constructing plans within plans, and then counters to those plans. It is easy to take a turn, play it as optimally as you can, and then switch sides and try to figure out what to do in the aftermath. I think I even prefer this series as a solo experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had fun playing it with others and I would do so again, but I also just enjoy playing games with my friends so the floor for having a good time is pretty low. I think I am more excited about setting up one of these games to plod my way through slowly over a few days than I am to show them to a friend – I have so many other games I want to play with people instead and these are so good solo.

The Material Itself

While the art in this series is not going to blow you away, I find it very pleasing to look at, especially the maps. The game maps strike a nice balance between simple aesthetics and usability, they are not so gorgeous as, say, a Rick Barber map but they are also not nearly so overwhelming to play on. I’m not going to frame one and hang it on my wall, but I’ve enjoyed looking at them as I’ve played the game. The counter art is simplistic but functional, and I believe getting an update in the next game. I quite like it. I also really appreciate how in the Worthington published titles there are no Confederate flags on the counters. It may seem like a small thing, but it is great to see someone understand that you don’t actually need to slap the Confederate battle flag on a game to prove that it is about the American Civil War.

I also like how while there is a lot of rotating and swapping of strength counters to track the game’s attrition, each type of counter has distinct coloring on the numbers which makes it much easier to identify at a glance what each one is. This is a lovely bit of usability in design that plenty of publishers would have overlooked. It is also a nice touch that the CRT is split into ranges of four strength points, so every time you flip or swap a strength counter you know you’ve dropped a level on the CRT when making attacks. This is a really nice piece of design.

The Less Good

It’s not all sunshine and cake here, every game has its issues, and this system is no exception. While not enough to stop me from enjoying my plays these are the elements that keep me from pulling one of these games off my shelf on a more regular basis. These are just my complaints about the system, any issues with individual games will be covered later in the review.

The games are long for what they are. There’s not much that I would take out of the games to speed them up, but the grand battles will easily last you at least two hours and probably up to four. I know for some wargamers this will feel short, but for me, for a game this light, I would like it if they could consistently stay within two hours.

I would like an earlier cut off for some of the battles. While it is very possible for the fortunes of war to turn, sometimes one side is down 100 victory points at just over the midway point in the game and you have to accept that it’s finished. There is always the option to agree with your opponent that it is over, but I would like more mechanical options for ending the battle. Just agreeing to stop doesn’t really provide a satisfying narrative ending for me.

Resolving all of the defensive fire every turn can slow things down in some of the bigger battles. It’s a lot of dice rolling to resolve attacks with almost every unit on the board twice every single turn. I wonder if removing the ability of the defender to shoot their artillery at more than one hex would speed things along a little, but maybe it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

I think I would like just a little more complexity in the system. I love its simplicity but sometimes I’m missing a little extra chrome.

Which is the best?

The core mechanisms behind each game are nearly identical – they all share the same core series rulebook, and each scenario has only a page or so at most of unique rules that set it apart from the others. Beyond that the key differences are in the order of battle, the maps, and the scenario options. For scientific accuracy I have played every entry in the series so far and I have written my abridged thoughts on each one below.

Antietam 1862

Antietam is the originator of the series and thus arguably the game at its most simple – not that there’s a huge difference between any of the published designs. It has the greatest variety of scenarios in terms of scale, with several scenarios on just section of the battle as well as one big grand tactical full battle option. I have to confess that I’m not generally very keen on playing parts of battles – give me grand tactical or bust – and so while these shorter and smaller scenarios are a great way to mix up the game’s length, they also don’t really appeal to me. With my limited interest in these smaller scenarios, that kind of limits Antietam to just one big scenario.

I think Antietam is the game in the series where I like the art the least, but I do still quite like it.

I quite enjoyed the rules restricting McClellan’s activations during the full scenario. Whether (or how) to restrict McClellan at Antietam is an interesting area for debate – designing around a general who was so indecisive and terrified of nonexistent Confederate reserves is no small feat. The limit on McClellan’s activation does seem a bit like a restriction to nudge the game towards its historic outcome rather than one that puts you in his shoes, which is something I don’t usually like, but I did actually find that this restriction made for a more interesting game. Activating every piece on a map with this many units can be a bit exhausting and time consuming, so this limit on the Union turns really helped keep the game moving at a good clip and kept each turn interesting for me. I actually had more fun playing the Union under these restrictions than the more open Confederate side. I think the degree to which this is a good model for McClellan’s generalship is open to debate, but as a game experience I really liked it.  

Overall, the narrative the full scenario in Antietam told me was really engaging and I had a lot of fun playing this scenario. That said, it took me a long time and I don’t know how often I would unpack it to play it again. With my very limited time (and even more limited shelf space in my tiny European house) I don’t think this would be the game I would keep in my collection. It’s a lot of fun and I would happily play it again, but I think other entries in the series better fit my needs.

Shiloh 1862

Shiloh is probably the most complicated entry in the series so far, but the barrier separating it from the rest is razor thin. Shiloh adds rules for the Union army being caught unawares and having to slowly wake up and organise a counterattack, Confederates getting distracted by looting the Union camps, and the occasional bombardment by Union gunboats on the river. None of these are particularly complicated, and the alert rules will be discarded about a third of the way into the game once the full Union army is activated, but they are a little bit more chrome than I’ve seen in the other entries.

Where Shiloh really stands out is its length - this game is long! The full two day battle can last 31 turns, more than double the length of Antietam. This makes sense, as Antietam is a one day battle and Shiloh was two days, but it is still a very long time to be playing the game! This makes the full battle at least a full afternoon game if not a whole day experience, rather than something you might be able to cram into an evening. For me this makes Shiloh just too long. I like this system the best when scenarios are in a seven to ten turn window, for me that is the sweet spot, and Shiloh’s shortest scenario being fourteen turns is just too many for me.

The opening deployment of the first day of Shiloh - the Union sleep soundly in their camps while the Confederates swarm out of the southwest. The Union will get major reinforcements at the end of the first day, while the rebels have pretty much all the troops they’ll get.

I do want to end on a compliment, and that is that Shiloh has the best map of the lot. The confluence of the rivers creates a naturally blank space in one corner of the board that has been used to place the casualty track and several useful tables which reduces the need to constantly be glancing at the player aids. This makes Shiloh smooth to play, but I also just really like the aesthetics of the map and how it all comes together. It’s also really interesting to play on. The bonus to defense for being in the woods means you want to be in them more than not, and there’s plenty of woods here, but you will at times need to push units out into the open for key attacks. There’s plenty of interesting decisions to be made here about where to move units and how to manage the shape of the battlefield and its varied terrain. It’s great, love this map.

Overall I like Shiloh a lot, but it is too long for me to see myself reliably playing it. One to check out if you’re a fan of the topic and/or you like your games to have lots of room to breathe and develop, best avoided if your time is limited and you need your games to go quickly!

Cedar Mountain 1862 by Pascal Toupy

Cedar Mountain is kind of the odd one out. It was published in Vae Victis magazine, not by Worthington, and it was designed by Pascal Toupy rather than Grant Wylie. As a magazine game it has a smaller footprint than the other games in the series, although it does still manage to pack quite a lot of game in, so it doesn’t feel very much smaller than some of the scenarios in the Seven Days Battles.

The flow of the battle is really interesting. The Union starts strong but has to take Confederate ground – the victory conditions bar them from winning, no matter how many more VP they might have, if they can’t secure some of the Confederate position. The Union starts with all of its troops on the map (excluding an optional alt-history you can use to bring in reinforcements) but the Confederates will receive periodic surges of reinforcements. This means that the Union must act quickly to secure a foothold and then pray they can hold on to it in the face of Confederate counterattack. It’s a nice little narrative and one that I enjoyed.

Cedar Mountain is just such a neat little package. The smaller counters could be fiddly for some, but I didn’t have any problems with it and I really like having this as a smaller alternative. My one gripe is that differences in European and American standard paper size means the map won’t fit inside one of the boxed games.

Those victory conditions are also very clever because they always give the Confederates a chance at victory no matter how well those opening turns go for the Union. In a game where victory is determined by points alone it can be a bit discouraging to see yourself fall so far behind that you can’t feasibly catch up – it can make the final turns of a game feel pointless. Having a way to secure victory outside of just points is a great way to ensure that both players stay on the edge of their seats for the entire game.

Cedar Mountain also alters the re-rolls mechanism to grant each individual general a single re-roll to use in the game rather than one per side. This gives a little more in the way of options to mitigate the dice in a game where you will be making a lot of dice rolls. I also like how this is restricted to units that are in command range, so it makes the positioning of generals a little more important – being out of command isn’t too punishing in this system (and some units can be in command of their overall leader but not their division leader), so having a little extra reason to think about it is very nice.

Unfortunately, I think Cedar Mountain is mostly out of print now, being as it is a limited run magazine game, but I would say that if you can find it this is absolutely the best entry point into the series thanks to its much lower price point and footprint. It’s a great little game.

Cedar Mountain also has its own art style and while I generally love it, I am not in love with the decision to include Confederate flags in the art – especially because the absence of these flags was something I really liked in the rest of the series.

The Seven Days Battles

I’ve already written an extensive First Impressions article on The Seven Days Battles, and my observations from those initial games remain relatively unchanged so I want to focus on just a few elements of why I like The Seven Days Battles and why I think it is the volume I will keep.

First and foremost, it is the variety of scenarios. With four maps, and the option to combine those maps into bigger scenarios, The Seven Days Battles just has the most variety in terms of scenarios and I’m someone who really craves variety in my hex and counter games. There are single battle games that I adore, but more often than not if you give me a box with 4+ battles versus one with just a single battle I will basically always take the former.

Beaver Dam Creek definitely develops differently based on when and how often Stonewall’s units (at the top of the picture) actually succeed in activating. I don’t mind randomness in my games, but this could skew matters significantly which may be frustrating for a game that could last nearly two hours.

Seven Days Battles also has a lot of variety in the size of its battles. Where Shiloh just offers a grand battle and a slightly shorter grand battle, and for Antietam I just don’t care for the smaller options, with Seven Days Battles each individual battle is generally a manageable scale and then if I want something really big (which I do from time to time) I can put two boards together and play several battles in sequence.

I do have some reservations about The Seven Days Battles, though. I’m still not totally convinced by the Jackson sleeps mechanism; it just feels a little too random and like it could upset the balance in some of the smaller scenarios. I’m also not totally sure about the balance of some of the scenarios – I don’t care a lot about game balance, especially when playing solo, but if the outcome feels a bit predetermined after a while it may reduce my enthusiasm to revisit certain scenarios over time. For the time being, though, I really enjoy Seven Days Battles and I’m looking forward to playing the rest of the battles in the box that I haven’t tried yet.

Conclusion

I had a good time playing each and every one of these games, but I also don’t think I need to own them all. Of the three boxed games (ignoring Cedar Mountain because it’s easy to find space for) I think I only really need to keep one volume. Especially when you consider that Worthington has already Kickstarted a Gettysburg game and has plans for many more volumes in this series, I just don’t think I’ll be revisiting them all enough to justify owning more than one, or at most two, entries in this series. Maybe if I had an enormous basement with nigh infinite shelf space I would feel differently, but for the moment this is a series which I really like but that I’m also content to probably just keep my favorite entry – unless a new one comes along and dethrones it!

The one I’m keeping for the moment is The Seven Days Battles, and while I’m not prepared to declare it the best game in the series it is the one that appeals the most to me. The variety of scenarios and the scale of those scenarios really hit a sweet spot, followed closely by Cedar Mountain’s small footprint offering. Really, though, I think any of these are worth a try if you get a chance and you should probably be guided by your own interest in the topic of the game. These are really solid bits of design that are a great way to spend an afternoon or a (long) evening.

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