Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog, page 9

A Tale of Two Crécy

Crécy is a battle I am both fascinated by and terrified of. I have read so much about this battle, and yet I still feel like I have only the most tenuous grasp on what happened that day in Ponthieu. It is one of the most famous and best recorded medieval battles, but the abundance of sources has produced such a confusing mess of contradiction and myth that untangling it could be the work of a lifetime. Many historians have offered their opinions on what happened, but there is still significant disagreement on elements of the chronology, the array of both armies, and even the battle’s location. Still, for all the hair pulling that thinking about Crécy causes me, I can’t help but be fascinated by it and the attempt to understand what happened at what might be the Hundred Years War’s most important battle (potentially rivaled only by Poitiers a decade later, really). If the English lost Crécy it is likely that they would not have been able to afford to keep the war going, but their dramatic victory, while it yielded only moderate success in its immediate aftermath, did much to sustain the war and encouraged Edward III to continue pursuing his claim to the French throne. With that fascination in mind, I decided to play a couple of games on Crécy that I had sitting on my shelf. Below are my general thoughts on both. As a note, I’m going to try and keep this brief because my options are really to skip over this topic lightly or to lose myself to it for months, and as much fun as the latter could be I simply haven’t the time.

Black Prince – The Battle of Crecy

Published in Strategy and Tactics magazine number 260 and designed by Dick Vohlers, this version of Crécy uses the medieval battles system first designed by SPI back in the 1970s – it is even packaged with a reprint of a game on Nájera, using the battle’s alternative name of Navarette, which uses the same system and was designed by Rob Mosca and originally published by SPI in 1979. So, this is a venerable system updated to use for a new battle.

So far, I have only dabbled in game designs from the 1970s, so I’m no expert in design trends of the era, but what I saw in this system has me really intrigued by it. It’s quite a light system that plays quickly and has far less table referencing than I expected. Combat is resolved by referencing the attacker’s armor type versus the defender’s armor type using a matrix that reminded me very much of Men of Iron, and presumably helped inspire that game. This will give you a range of numbers, like “2...6”, this is the range you must roll between using 2d6. Success means dealing a hit to the unit, who then rolls a d6 and compares it to a column on the morale chart that lines up with their morale rating. This will yield no effect or add a number of Rout counters to them.

The initial set up for Crécy. There was no turn track for the game so I have made an impromptu one on the top left with the various French reinforcements units that are due to arrive.

We’ll get to Rout later, for now let’s consider this system. It is light on dice roll modifiers and that means that it resolves quite quickly. I could see it getting bogged down if there are too many different unit types in play at a time, but Crécy had blessedly few, and I found it pretty easy to learn off the various tables without even trying. This meant that even though I spent a lot of time rolling dice, the game clipped along at a good pace because I wasn’t constantly referencing a play aid or combat results table. This is far from a perfect system, but for something light and quick I really liked it and would be curious to see how it has been used elsewhere.

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Apologies for my slightly wonky photo of the initial archery duel. The Genoese approached and did very little. Some English troops have engaged them in melee while the longbowmen plink at them at range. Meanwhile the French knights maneuver - I really like moving double-sized counters around on a map.

Rout is another system I quite like, and one that reminded me of this game’s approximate contemporary Manassas. At the start of each turn, both players rally any units stacked with a leader – removing all Rout markers from them – and then all units who still have Rout markers flee a number of hexes (usually equal to the number of markers on them) towards their board edge. This is much simpler than the system used in Manassas, and I think a little poorer for it, but I still really like the tempo of trying to rally units and send them back into combat. I also think it does a good job representing how in medieval warfare, victory was often determined more by who was prepared to stay in the field longer rather than by inflicting enormous casualties on the enemy. It’s a good start and I think with some tweaking this could be a really cool system.

The second turn brought far more dramatic results, the Rout counters have multiplied with the Genoese scoring a few successes but far more losses.

That’s my praise for the system, as for the game itself I am less positive. I’m not convinced by the scenario design present in Crécy. I, of course, must object to just how terrible the crossbows are – I can acknowledge that the Genoese had a bad day at Crécy but the disparity between them and the longbows is kind of ludicrous. There is also some pretty classic pro-longbow propaganda, which besides annoying my history of archery brain also makes for a mostly frustrating play experience. The French don’t really feel like they have much of a chance here. They are badly hampered by rules restricting their movement and effectiveness while they get machine-gunned by English longbows. Yes, the game played quickly thanks to the light system, but I just didn’t feel like it was a very interesting game.

The French knights finally charge and suffer very badly at the hands of the English longbowmen. After this point the game kind of lost its steam - with so much of the French army in Rout even if a few could be rallied and more troops brought in there wasn’t much chance of clawing anything back.

As a game about Crécy it very much traded in old myths and simplistic understandings of medieval warfare. The arrogant French ride down their own Genoese to charge the English men-at-arms, ignoring the archers as much as possible. Meanwhile, the steadfast dismounted English outperform the snobby French in every way. While it is possible to find primary sources that will give this narrative of the battle – as I mentioned there are many accounts of the battle – it represents a lack of serious source criticism to simply replicate those highly biased accounts. That this makes for an unsatisfying game means that this doesn’t even feel like a very interesting choice to me.

Playing this system got a lot of gears going in my head. There are some very cool ideas here and I’m definitely interested in exploring it further. I think with a little development this could be a great set of rules for some light medieval wargaming. I’m now very curious to try Navarette/Nájera to see if that game’s scenario design excites me more.

Men of Iron - Crécy

It will probably surprise no one that my second game was Richard Berg’s Men of Iron. I’ve written about this a few times in the past, to put it mildly. Crécy was the last scenario I had yet to play in the original Men of Iron box, so I wanted to do something a little special for it. I’m not going to bother repeating my thoughts on Men of Iron as a whole, instead I’m just going to jump straight to my thoughts on the Crécy scenario.

Initial deployment for Men of Iron’s Crécy. You can see already that the English formation is quite different from in S&T’s version.

Overall, I had fun playing Crécy but I also feel like it leaned in to some of Men of Iron’s most prominent problems. Notably it has far too many individual Battles. As I’ve said before, I find Men of Iron’s Continuation system really struggles when there are lots of options for who to activate as it’s usually just more worthwhile to keep activating the same two to three Battles over and over again rather than trying to bring a new force into play. I really felt that in Crécy, where I didn’t even both bringing on a single off-map French reinforcement. Philip VI sat back and watched the Genoese pretty much win the battle for him.

After a few turns the French manage to punch a hole in the English line. Edward III moves forward some reinforcements to try and plug the hole, but the Genoese are lethally effective.

I chose to use the variant rule that removes the penalty to Genoese archery, since I remain unconvinced that rain really impeded their missile performance that much. As a result, the crossbowmen ended up overwhelming their English opponents. The larger number of crossbowmen allowed them to overcome their inferior DRMs by sheer weight of numbers against the English longbowmen. Archery remains incredibly powerful in Men of Iron and having more archers was pretty critical for the French success.

The end of the game - the English kind of managed to form a new line but suffered too many casualties, including many leader casualties, and flee the field without Philip VI ever showing up.

While Crécy did remind me of all my criticisms of this system, I did have fun playing it and I think it’s a perfectly fine scenario. But I think there’s more to consider than just Men of Iron’s foibles and I want to dig a little deeper and consider Crécy’s historiography and how the game’s interact with that, at least a little.

Crécy: The Highlights

The very brief narrative of Crécy is that Philip VI succeeded in trapping the English in northern France as they ravaged their way across the kingdom, forcing the English to fight a pitched battle. That battle went disastrously wrong. The initial attack from the Genoese was repulsed and the French men-at-arms charged the English line to disastrous results. Why the French assault’s failed, what the English did to secure victory, and even where the battle happened are still contested. That presents an interesting challenge for anyone trying to design a game about the battle.

Take the terrain, for example. If we don’t know where the battle was, how specific can the terrain be? Both of these games took a generic approach, the English are on a slightly elevated position but there is very little terrain to impact the battle. The thing is, most historians would argue that the terrain (whether it was woods or a steep hillside depends on who you ask) funneled the French into a narrow approach for the battlefield and was far from irrelevant to the battle’s outcome.

Neither of these games makes the French attack feel forced along a specific path – the only real limits are the borders of the game map itself. Movement restrictions on the French in The Black Prince limited my ability to exploit this empty space, but in Men of Iron the French enveloping attack was very successful where a narrower one likely would not have been. One could argue that the reinforcements for the French in both games are meant to represent the fact that the army had to arrive piecemeal due to the narrow battlefield, which is a valid theory but not a particularly interesting method of handling things I think. Key elements of the battle happening off map isn’t very exciting. Perhaps this is an issue of scale, and maybe Crécy would be better captured by a game that zoomed out a little bit.

Men of Iron did include rules for potholes that could interrupt charging mounted men-at-arms. Whether potholes were used or not is contested among historians, but there has been some agreement that the English tried to do something to the ground in front of their position to make it harder for mounted men-at-arms to charge across. It is a nice touch by Men of Iron to include this and make the battlefield be more than just an empty field with a very slight elevation change at one point.

A map of the battle from Kelly DeVries’ Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century. This represents a fairly classic view of the battle geography. Here we can see DeVries arguing for a variety of ditches and pits rather than a neat row of potholes.

Another key piece of defensive strategy employed by the English was the deployment of their wagons. Both games have the wagons in the rear, which was for a long time where historians chose to place them. However, more recent scholars have increasingly favored accounts that describe the deployment of the wagons in front of the English position, providing temporary fortifications to protect the archers and further restrict the avenue of the French attack. This is usually referred to as a wagenburg, after the famous tactic the Hussite general Zizka would use nearly a century later. While not a universal point of agreement, and potentially too recent in terms of historiography for either game to have reacted to, it would be cool to see a game take this approach – or even to make the wagons into counters rather than drawing them directly on the map so alternatives scenarios could be explored.

Michael Livingston’s map from his recent book on Crécy, The Battle of the Five Kings. Note that Livingston has proposed an alternative site for the battle that is not universally accepted. You can also see at the front and rear of the English (red) position the hashed line representing the wagenberg defenses.

Another theme in the games, more prominent in The Black Prince than Men of Iron but somewhat present in both, is the incompetence of the French. Philip VI gets a lot of blame for his failure at Crécy, but there is plenty of reason to view him as a competent commander having a bad day rather than a buffoon. His command in previous campaigns and his ability to lead his army to trap the English successfully show significant military acumen at the strategic and operational scale. Whether he lost control of his men at Crécy or was personally to blame for the disaster was contested in the fourteenth century and remains unresolved, but I think The Black Prince takes things a bit far in portraying the French as irrational and foolish by forcing the mounted knights to only charge directly at English men-at-arms ignoring everyone in their path. These were rational people; they deserve more respect than this.

I want to finish by placing a little more praise on Richard Berg’s use of many variants for Men of Iron. The Black Prince includes an alternative scenario which assumes a less chaotic French attack, but I much prefer Men of Iron’s many modular variants that can be used to explore different historiographical interpretations. With so many conflicting accounts and disputed views even among modern historians, offering plenty of variable perspectives on the battle seems like the best way to try and represent this complexity in game form.

Conclusion

Overall, I am really intrigued by the system in The Black Prince and want to explore it more, but I had more fun playing Men of Iron’s Crécy scenario. That said, neither one fully scratched my itch for a great Crécy game. If people know of any interesting takes on the battle, I would be delighted to hear them. One can never have too many takes on Crécy!

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Armies of Deliverance by Elizabeth Varon

For over thirty years James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom has stood as the gold standard single volume history of the American Civil War. Recently, a friend recommended Elizabeth Varon’s contribution to the genre, Armies of Deliverance, as a possible successor, or at the very least valuable supplement to McPherson’s venerable classic. Having now read Varon’s book I have to say that it is a very impressive piece of scholarship and a thoroughly enjoyable read. It certainly could act as an alternative to McPherson’s hefty tome, but with the caveat that it depends on what exactly you want out of your history of the American Civil War. It would be wrong to say that Varon is doing the same thing that McPherson did – these are two very different histories with different approaches, and both offer valuable insights into the war and the people who fought it.

Varon’s title, Armies of Deliverance, gives a very strong indication of what she focused on: the use of deliverance rhetoric in the American Civil War. While most people will probably be familiar on some level with the idea of deliverance rhetoric as it applied to emancipation, what Varon really focuses on is the use of deliverance rhetoric towards white southerners. In particular, the book explains how the belief that secession was the product of an elite minority in the south was used to hold together the fraught political coalitions of the northern states. The belief that the majority of the populations of Confederate states were loyal Unionists played a central role in the development of war policy and could define political fault lines. This perspective greatly expanded my understanding of why the war developed the way it did and why key political decisions were made when they were. It also does an excellent job at underlining tensions within the Union as well as juxtaposing the internal narratives of the Union and the Confederacy. It’s a radically different perspective than I was used to and an incredibly valuable one because of that.

That’s not to say that this is a niche academic book of little interest to anyone but specialists. While the first chapter, which lays down some essential theoretical foundations for understanding everything that follows, can be a bit dense most of the rest of the book is incredibly readable and an engaging account of the war. This is perfectly suited as a general history for anyone interested in learning about the American Civil War. That said, it may still not be for everyone. If what you want is plenty of minutiae, including in depth explanations of the build-up to the war, the mobilising of wartime economies, and the ins and outs of the main campaigns this isn’t really that book – you’d be better off with McPherson. Varon provides enough detail about the key chronology of the war so that after reading it you will be familiar with its major moments, but this is more of a hybrid political-military history. Varon’s book also does a lot more to explain the aftermath of the war, in particular the key fault lines that would define Reconstruction, than McPherson, who is much stronger on the build up to the war and how the American society changed between 1830 and 1865. Really, though, the best solution is to just read both. It’s what I did, and I can heartily recommend it.

Review - The Day Was Ours by Matt Ward

When I was initially looking for more Blind Swords games to try, I passed over The Day Was Ours because I thought that I had no need for another game on First Bull Run since I own and love Rick Britton’s Manassas. This was doubly true when I considered that The Day Was Ours didn’t even promise a faster playtime; I can only manage so many 5+ hour games in my life. That changed on a recent trip across the Atlantic to visit my parents in the Old Dominion. I was looking for a game I could possibly play with my dad, and I realized that Blind Swords was a good option because it would fit easily in a corner of the house, and I already knew how to play it so we could set up and get playing quickly. I also wanted to pick a topic my father already knew reasonably well, and First Bull Run fit that bill admirably. I’m glad I did because I was really impressed with The Day Was Ours. I am not without some reservations, but overall, I had a great time and I think I will manage to find room on my shelves for another First Bull Run game after all. Who knows, this may even be the beginning of an obsession.

As this is my second review of a Blind Swords game, I won’t be going into very much detail about how the system works. If you are interested, I would point you to my review of Longstreet Attacks, which goes into a bit more detail. Suffice it to say, all the basic stuff I liked about Blind Swords is also here and I still like it.

On Tempo

Something that I find really engaging about First Bull Run, and which was very limited in Longstreet Attacks, is the slow arrival of new forces and the wavelike nature this gives the conflict. Units clash, break off, and then the next line joins them and pushes everyone forward again. I wasn’t entirely sure how well Blind Swords would work for this pace because of its inherent randomness. Blind Swords is a system where having a brigade stall on a section of road for 2-3 turns is not exactly uncommon, and that seemed like it could risk ruining the tempo of the battle.

The opening movement - Union divisions rush down the roads towards Henry House Hill and Sherman gets an early crossing over the ford at Bull Run.

My experience with the game suggests to me that these fears were largely unfounded. While yes, I did have units get stuck for a time, the activation ratings of the leaders were good enough that most units would get to move on most turns and the game has enough turns that eventually everyone should be able to make it to the front. It did give the tempo the feeling of a vehicle that periodically stalls, coming to a jerking stop, before lurching forward rather than the smoother pace of something like Manassas. That’s not a criticism exactly, both were very enjoyable, it’s more of an observation of how the two games differ. The system used here is arguably a better fit for the smaller map – The Day Was Ours is played on a map maybe a third the size of Manassas, so to evoke that same tempo it was probably necessary to interrupt the movement sometimes where Manassas could use a much more consistent pace but drag it across a vast distance.

The greater impact I noticed from Blind Swords’ semi-random activations was that it made it much harder to plug holes in your lines and form new defensive positions. While Manassas’ tempo really focused on desperately trying to plug holes in your defenses, The Day Was Ours would create similar situations but whether those holes could be plugged or even whether your opponent could exploit them was far more random. Manassas felt like screaming at your soldiers as they scattered in the face of the enemy while The Day Was Ours felt more like being frustrated at troops who won’t march forward into enemy fire. It’s a subtle difference, and I wouldn’t say one is better. Both are interesting.

Perhaps the most significant way that The Day Was Ours impacts tempo is in its mechanic of The Lull. At some point in the first half of the game, the Confederate player can declare a lull in the fighting. This triggers several turns where movement around Young’s Branch is restricted and combat becomes significantly harder to initiate. This creates a few turns where movement essentially becomes the only consideration for both players. The design notes say that this was done to deliberately slow the battle and make it less combat heavy – early iterations were proving to yield results that were too bloody and violent for what First Bull Run was historically. I don’t hate this mechanic – lulls in battles were a thing and while I think the rules could have used more examples of exactly how the movement around Young’s Branch works, they are mostly coherent. What I’m less convinced by is placing the decision of when the lull happens entirely in the hands of the Confederate player. This feels a little artificial, especially in a system that tends to favor chaos and randomness. I think I would enjoy it a bit more if the lull was semi-random (and maybe someone has designed a variant where it is). The idea is interesting, but I’m not totally on board with the execution.

Fighting stalls for the Lull and both sides try and bring troops to the front. The Rebels need to form a defensive line on the hill while the Union looks to prepare itself to attack any weak spot it can find.

The way Blind Swords represents unit deterioration feels particularly well suited to First Bull Run. While there isn’t Manassas’s pure chaos of disordered and routed units scattering across the map, the inflicting of Battleworn status and the ability to always rally and rebuild units makes a lot more sense to me in a battle like this where morale was the greatest scourge than in something like Gettysburg where men were actually dying by the thousands and a regiment may be so completely destroyed that it never fights again. This is a small detail, but one I thought I would mention. Whereas Longstreet Attacks gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance between the game’s narrative and my own understanding of the battle, I felt none of that with The Day Was Ours. I’m sure there’s room to nitpick, there always is, but by and large it felt like the system married well to the narrative of First Bull Run. The greater number of turns in The Day Was Ours as well as the lower unit count on both sides makes it a little easier to find space to rebuild units and maybe get them back into the fight.

On Victory

My greatest frustration with Blind Swords, and the thing that stops it from being one of my all-time favorite hex and counter systems, is the victory conditions. In the main battle scenarios I’ve played (and the one I’ve read the rules for but not yet played), victory is determined by victory points accumulated every turn for controlling certain hexes on the map. I really dislike this. This may seem like splitting hairs, but I don’t mind games where victory points are awarded at the end of the game based on who controlled what territory when the fighting concluded. Manassas does this with several general areas of the map. What I find tiresome in these Blind Swords scenarios is that victory points are counted at the end of every turn.

The Union assaults Henry House Hill - they apparently need the VPs here. Meanwhile the Rebels try and turn their flank. The whole tactical situation is a bit of a mess.

I think I understand what the idea is – both players are compelled to rush to key points on the battlefield and try and control them for as much of the game as possible. I have two objections to this. The first is simple: I think it’s tedious. Counting up the VPs every turn is boring, especially as I usually have to lift counters to remind myself where each VP hex is. It’s not fun or interesting.

My second objection is that it just feels too game-y and it takes me right out of the experience. I can understand why controlling certain locations at the end of the day could determine victory, but I don’t see how being the person who held this one section of the battlefield for 60% of the game should matter if you lost it in the end. This is absolutely a matter of personal taste, but this is my review and I continue not to like this victory condition.

The Day Was Ours does offer some interesting victory points related decisions for the Confederate player on whether they should abandon their position on the main ford across Bull Run. Moving units away involves surrendering VPs to the Union, but you may need those units. On the one hand, I can see this as an interesting decision for players, but on the other it still feels too game-y to me. I prefer Manassas’ approach where leaving the ford unguarded could result in Union units crossing there. The Day Was Ours doesn’t really allow for this option, at least in the standard rules. It does include many interesting variants to try, though!

I should note that for my play of The Day Was Ours I chose to just ignore the victory conditions, not bothering to count VPs, and instead decided to judge which side had won at the end of the game. I liked this quite a lot more, but I suspect that not everyone I play with would be inclined to agree to “arbitrary judgment” as a victory condition.

The end game state - technically this was a couple of turns early because we ran out of time. I decided this was a Union victory, but you’re welcome to offer an alternative interpretation.

(Note: I know that points are also awarded for the number of units on the Routed track, but this has not proven to be particularly decisive in either of my games)

On Memory

I played The Day Was Ours as a semi-solitaire experience; I wasn’t alone, but I was kind of playing on my own. As I mentioned at the start, I got this game to play with my dad while I was visiting my parents. What I didn’t mention is that my dad has pretty severe Alzheimer's. His long-term memory is still pretty good, but his short term is a disaster. While he could remember facts about First Bull Run, the battle, he couldn’t even remember the topic of the game we were playing all the time, let alone any of its mechanisms. That said, he was more than happy to sit with me and chat while I played and talked him through what I was doing each activation. We had a really good time and for giving me that experience with my father I will always be grateful to The Day Was Ours. My father was an old Avalon Hill gamer, and we played a ton of We the People when I was a teenager – I had hoped to get to play some wargames with him now that I’m getting back into the hobby as a parent myself. Sadly, we are very limited in that regard, but at least on this occasion we got to play the game together even if it was very different from what I had hoped for. The memories I got playing The Day Was Ours will stay with me for years – this may be the last opportunity I get to play a game with my dad and I’m happy it was this one.

Action shot of us playing with unclipped counters and no tweezers, like a bunch of barbarians.

As a solitaire gaming experience, I really liked The Day Was Ours. It is chit pull and quite chaotic, so it naturally works very well for multi-hand solo play. It also has fewer interrupt events than Longstreet Attacks did, so that helps minimize the one barrier to making it easier to solo since there’s less hidden information you have to consider. The game’s small footprint also makes it handy to solo. Yes, it is quite a long game, but the relatively small map can be set up in a corner somewhere and visited periodically when you find the time. I really enjoyed playing Longstreet Attacks against an opponent, but I suspect that I will have an easier time getting Blind Swords to the table as a solo experience and I’m looking forward both to trying more of them and to playing The Day Was Ours more.

To Conclude

The Day Was Ours addresses almost all of the concerns I had with Longstreet Attacks. It is a much smaller game than Longstreet Attacks – the map is the same size, but it has only a single sheet of counters which makes the entire experience far more manageable. The events in The Day Was Ours were a bit more interesting and I significantly preferred the more equal footing in terms of the unit and general ratings between the two armies. If the victory conditions were a bit better, I would judge it to be a near perfect hex and counter game.  I would highly recommend it to fans of the Blind Swords system and to anyone who is looking for a good entry point for the system to try The Day Was Ours. This is a great little game and I’m excited to get it back to the table.

Podcast: Into the Woods and GBACW

For Episode 5 of We Intend to Move on Your Works Pierre and I discussed the latest entry into the venerable Great Battles of the American Civil War: Into the Woods from GMT Games. This was our first experience with the series, although we have both played other games by Richard Berg who originally created it. To spoil things a little, we did not particularly enjoy our time with Into the Woods but despite that I think we managed to have an interesting discussion about the game and how it represents history. Please be aware that we discuss some pretty heavy stuff in places, including slavery and racism.

Crécy: Battle of the Five Kings by Michael Livingston

If you were to ask me to explain the Battle of Crécy to you, I would most likely make some kind of sucking noise, stare into the middle distance, and say something like “Oh boy, where do I even start?” Despite, or possibly because of, being one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, the story of Crécy is hopelessly difficult to unpack. The sources describing the battle are so extensive that Michael Livingston and Kelly DeVries published an entire book, the invaluable Crécy Sourcebook, that just contained ones from the roughly fifty years after the battle. There is so much information around Crécy and so much of it contradictory that putting together a coherent narrative is a challenge for even the greatest of scholars. That also means that it is a battle ripe for reinterpretation. Enter Michael Livingston, of the aforementioned sourcebook, and his new history of the battle, Crécy: Battle of the Five Kings. This is a new popular history of the battle wherein Livingston advances some probably quite contentious views on the history of Crécy.

The first half to two-thirds of Crécy is essentially a history of “how we got here”. It covers, in brief, the origins of the Hundred Years War, stretching back all the way to Hastings in 1066 and navigating a variety of thorny political and inheritance issues that brought everything to a head in 1337. While not exactly breaking new ground, this is a very approachable account of what was at stake in the Hundred Years War and why exactly it can be such a confusing mess when you try and explain it. There are a lot of moving parts and Livingston does a good job at untangling them in a manner that should be entertaining to most readers.

Once the background is out of the way Livingston moves on to the events of 1346 - most importantly the campaign leading up to Crécy and the battle itself. His account of the campaign, of Edward III’s landing near what is now Utah Beach, his capture of Caen, and his race to cross the Seine and Somme rivers are well written and easy to follow. There are certainly nits to pick, particularly around his description of the battle at Blanchetaque ford, but these are fairly minor areas of scholarly dispute.

In terms of how to analyze Livingston’s account of the battle itself, I really need to separate my overall feelings about how the book handles the subject matter from Livingston’s dramatic claim that underpins a lot of the book. Let’s start with the big claim first, and then circle back to how I feel about the latter part of the book’s structure as a whole.

Livingston’s bold claim is that the traditional site of the Battle of Crécy is incorrect and that the battle was actually fought some distance to the south, more in the woods rather than near the village of Crécy. I will come right out and say that I’m generally skeptical of the accurate locating of medieval battles, especially without ample archaeological evidence. The archaeological evidence for the traditional battle site is thin, although Livingston does seem to discount without mention evidence mentioned in A.H. Burne’s venerable work on the subject, so I am amenable to it being potentially incorrect. That said, convincing me of an alternative site would require no small feat. While I am sympathetic to Livingston’s objections to the traditional site, both those objections and his arguments for the new site rely far too much on arguments of “what would make the most sense” and not hard evidence. I also find that Livingston relies too much on how many sources support points he is trying to make and not the quality of those sources - traditionally one would rank the accounts of someone like Geoffrey le Baker, who was at the battle, far above chronicles written decades later in far flung parts of Europe by people who had never even been to northern France. That’s not to say that I disagree with Livingston on the idea that these sources have value, all sources have value, but rather that I’m not entirely convinced by his use of them here. I cannot dispute that he knows the source material, I’m just not in agreement with how he has applied it.

Overall, I wasn’t wowed by Livingston’s account of the battle. Avant-garde reinterpretation of the battle site, and the restructuring of the battle narrative that follows, aside, I just found it hard to follow. He gets lost in the weeds at busting myths, some of which are so old I’m surprised anyone still believes them, and pushing forward his alternative interpretations that he doesn’t ever lay out a clear foundation of how exactly the battle played out. This account would have benefited enormously from a high level overview of just the sequence of events as Livingston sees them before digging into the weeds. His desire to sort of spring his alternative theories on the readers might make for punchy writing but it also makes it hard to follow.

In terms of other nits I have to pick with Livingston’s account, I think he vastly overestimates the power of the English longbow. Part of his dismissal of the traditional battle site is based on the notion of the French having to advance too close to the English, but this requires a vast overestimation of the effective range of the longbow. The attention he pays to the fact that the Black Prince probably advanced from his original position to attack the disordered French is excellent, if a bit undermined by a lack of clarity on where he is advancing much needed changes to modern scholarship and where he is contradicting early modern myths, but it goes a little far in terms of how critical he is of the Black Prince’s decision. It somewhat implies that he thinks the archers would have defeated the French on their own, which does not line up with what we know of the longbow’s power nor the supply of arrows available to them. The Black Prince may not have made the optimal strategic move, but a commander advancing to attack their enemy at their most disordered only to be repulsed in turn when the opponent commits their reserves is hardly a new event in the annals of military history. Livingston’s somewhat exaggerated writing might make for exciting reading, but I don’t love it for historical interpretation.

I think Livingston and I probably subscribe to very different philosophies of how to study medieval military history. In Chapter 9, Livingston outlines his “Four Maxims of Battle” that he uses to guide much of his reconstruction of the events at Crécy. Two of these in particular I found it very hard to agree with. The first was “A battle is its ground.” While in theory I agree with the notion that the physical ground a battle was fought on plays a very important role in determine its key events, my point of disagreement stems from the practicality of locating medieval battlegrounds. Crécy is far from unique in having a contentious traditional location, very few medieval battles have a generally agreed upon site, and that means I am generally skeptical of a history that relies extensively upon the physical geography of the battleground to explain the events. That does not mean that I believe we should assume all battles took place in a blank, featureless field. Instead, I think we should let the written narratives of the battle ground guide our reconstruction more than we should rely upon the conditions of our chosen ground where we believe the battle occurred.

My greater disagreement, though, is with his point “No man is a fool.” Again, I agree in principle that medieval people were no more foolish than we are now and largely behaved in manners they considered rational. That said, I found the application of this principle to skew very close to A.H. Burne’s controversial idea of Inherent Military Probability - where Burne would use his own judgement as a modern British officer to fill in the gaps in the sources with what he would have done in that situation. The thing is, no man may be a fool, but also humans are fallible. War is confusing, complicated, and chaotic. Mistakes happen all the time. Livingston seems to assume a degree of detached objectivity in medieval commanders that I cannot see aligning with the behavior of actual humans. It can both be true that Philip VI was an overall competent military commander and that he made a mistake on one day in September 1346. I think in deciding to push against ancient myths about Crécy Livingston overcorrects and presents a battle narrative that seems to be executed by automatons.

I don’t want to make it sound like this is a bad book, but it is a bit of an odd duck. Much of the book is a very engaging introductory history of the battle, but the radical reinterpretation Livingston proposes makes the book’s ending more like a contentious piece for academic debate rather than something aimed at the average layperson. I think this is a book that someone who is already familiar with the Crécy source material will get a lot more out of than someone for whom this is their first book on the subject. If you don’t already know who all of Geoffrey le Baker, Jean le Bel, and Froissart are, well the book isn’t going to do much to teach that to you and it will probably be important to your ability to appreciate its arguments. This is absolutely a valuable addition to the corpus of material on the Battle of Crécy, even if it didn’t totally convince me, but at the same time I’d be reluctant to recommend it to people as a first book on the subject. For my money, Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston’s The Battle of Crécy, 1346 remains the best book on the battle in no small part because of Ayton’s masterful introduction of the key sources for the battle, including their many strengths and weaknesses. While Ayton and Preston’s book is aimed squarely at an academic audience, and thus not as friendly for a general audience, I think it will do far more to upend people’s understanding of the battle than Livingston’s even if its overall claims are more conservative. Livingston’s book does an admirable job in parts by breaking down the work of a military historian and showing part of the sausage making process, as it were, but I think he could have gone a lot further by introducing the readers to more of his sources. I’m glad I read Livingston’s book, it was certainly thought provoking if not always entirely convincing, but despite its approachable writing I don’t think I will be recommending it to non-specialists any time soon.

Review - In Magnificent Style by Hermann Luttmann

The (hopefully) final entry in my Confederate Solitaire Trilogy is a classic game from Hermann Luttmann, a name familiar to anyone with an interest in games on the American Civil War. Originally released by Victory Point Games, In Magnificent Style received a deluxe reprint from Worthington a few years ago. This is one of two solitaire games on Pickett’s Charge, where the player tries to outperform Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble in their disastrous assault on the Union position on the third day of Gettysburg. I don’t really want to bury the lede, I think this is a gross subject for a game. Despite that, I had quite a lot of fun playing In Magnificent Style – stripped of its topic this is a very enjoyable light solitaire game, but that theme severely degrades my ability to enjoy playing it. Before we get to the heavy stuff, though, let’s talk a little about the game’s mechanisms and why it’s fun!

Push Your Troops

The core of the game is an addictive little push-your-luck mechanism that is apparently borrowed from a German dice game. You roll two d6 and consult a table to find the crossover point where the dice roll representing the column meets the row of the other die. This is very quick to resolve, and the chart is helpfully printed on the side of the board. As your troops advance, they will leave behind their Rally point. At any point after your first roll, you can choose to stop rolling and move that Rally point forward. However, should you keep going you will run the risk of rolling a result that will send your unit packing back to its start. There are also leaders that can give you a re-roll for the one unit they are attached to and a few other elements to help mitigate bad luck, but across your advancing line this will only help you so far. It’s tense, it’s simple, and it’s a lot of fun.

This system will naturally produce irregular advances among your units, but the game’s Battleline formation will encourage you to try and keep units adjacent where possible in hopes of triggering a general advance of several units at once. The map also includes a few obstacles that can only be crossed by certain results, which can force you into making several rolls in a row without moving forward, praying for a good advance and avoiding the Rout result that will send your unit packing back to the start.

A fairly typical scene when playing In Magnificent Style - the charged advances in piecemeal fashion.

This simple mechanism can generate a surprisingly strong emotional response. A string of good luck can feel like that unit is performing above and beyond the call of duty – shaking off enemy fire and passing over obstacles as if they were nothing. In contrast, a unit rolling a Rout or suffering from repeated Heavy Artillery barrages at a key moment can make you want to scream at them not to run – they were so close, they just needed to push on! It’s impressive how a bit of art can make you identify with these people in what is really quite an abstract dice rolling game.

Worthington has also given the game a very nice coat of paint. I love the counter art – each unit has their state’s flag, which is a nice touch and avoids the inclusion of numerous Confederate flags (although the Rebel Yell counter is unfortunately emblazoned with it). It is a little strange that the Rally and captured position counters use the Stars and Bars and not the Stainless Banner. Overall, though, this is an attractive game, which I think is especially important for a solitaire game. In another game I have my opponent and our discussion to distract me but playing solo I’m spending an hour of my life staring at. My only critique (except for the flags) would be that the rulebook was oddly formatted – it’s readable and far from the worst rulebook I’ve encountered but it made referencing rules more work than I think it needed to be. Most of the key rules you need are printed on the board and most counters have what they do printed on their back, so you rarely need to go to the rules to look things up but on the rare times you do it can be quite frustrating.

My greatest “triumph” - most of the Union lines taken by units in reasonably good strength. You get VPs based on how many positions you control and the strength points in and adjacent to those positions.

Overall, this is a really fun little design. It’s not too complicated, and I didn’t find it particularly challenging, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I could almost find myself pulling this off my shelf every few months to give it another go. Almost. There is, however, one central flaw with In Magnificent Style.

A Glorious Failure

I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of how well In Magnificent Style does or does not model the events of Pickett’s Charge or how specific mechanisms do or don’t evoke that moment in history. I could complain about the Rebel Yell counter, or the frequent Lost Cause-ism in the names of the event cards, or how I think the game doesn’t accurately represent the messiness of how the charge advanced, but I think that’s obsessing over pieces when the problem is the topic as a whole.  The design notes make plenty clear that this is not trying to be a simulation, and it wouldn’t be a valuable use of time to treat it as one. I really want to sink my teeth into the big question, and to my mind flaw, in this game: why the fuck is it about Pickett’s Charge?

If you are somehow unfamiliar with Pickett’s Charge, let me briefly get you up to speed. On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee elected to launch a frontal assault at the center of the Union lines in an attempt to secure a breakthrough. He pulled two divisions from General A.P. Hill’s corps as well as one from General Longstreet’s, the latter commanded by one General Pickett, whose name would adorn the charge forever despite just being one part of it. On the second day Lee had ordered assaults at both extreme ends of the Union position and been repulsed in both cases at great cost in lives. Now, with the Union having been reinforced overnight with the arrival of General Sedgewick’s corps, Lee decided to do basically the same thing again over the vehement objections of General Longstreet. The assault was preceded by the largest artillery bombardment in history, which proved to be remarkably ineffective thanks to poor coordination and problems with the fuses used for the explosive shells. Longstreet, despairing at his inability to block the charge, gave his consent for the assault to begin and the Confederate brigades charged straight at the exact point that General Meade, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, had predicted they would.  The result was a slaughter – the whole charge lasted less than an hour and completely devastated its participants for no gain in ground and very few casualties inflicted on the Union.

Despite being Lee’s greatest single tactical blunder, Pickett’s Charge lived on after the war as “The High Water Mark” of the Confederacy. The point of the Confederacy’s greatest achievement right before their defeat rendered their cause doomed. Entire books have been written on the mythmaking of Pickett’s Charge, too much to summarize here, but to put a point to it if you wanted to distill the Lost Cause down to just one single moment you could do worse than picking Pickett’s Charge. The epitome (at least in memory) of the glorious and noble but doomed act of resistance against the Yankee oppressor. A romanticized picture of what was really an ill-conceived and poorly executed attack by slavers in pursuit of their vile cause.

In Magnificent Style asks me to take control of these slavers and try and succeed where they failed. Can I punch a hole in the Union lines and win one for Dixie? What it doesn’t seem to spend any time thinking about is what that means. Based on how many victory points you score at the end of the game you are allocated one result, from overwhelming victory to disastrous defeat, each with a paragraph of text. This text is purely military in focus, it tells you what the armies do in the wake of your failure or success. Do you force the Union to surrender or sue for peace, winning the war for the South or are you butchered like your historic counterparts?

The victory descriptors from the rulebook

What is notably absent from these descriptions is any reference to what you are actually fighting for. When I won a Decisive Victory in my second game it told me about how I drove back Meade’s army and marched on Washington to bring the war to a favorable end. It didn’t at all consider the consequences of what my victory might look like: that I had potentially secured the rights to own slaves in the Confederacy for generations to come. I had ensured the exploitation, torture, rape, and murder of my fellow humans based solely on the color of their skin. A glorious victory. I should be so pleased with myself.

Winning a game of In Magnificent Style filled me with revulsion, I hated it. When I mention a reaction like this to a game it is inevitable that someone will come along and suggest that this was the designer’s intent – history can be dark, and I am just experiencing it as it was. There can be no such argument in support of In Magnificent Style, this is very explicitly meant to be a light bit of fun, not a serious meditation on the horrors of slavery and war. This isn’t an Amabel Holland game as art project, it’s a push-your-luck light bit of entertainment. This is a fatal flaw at the heart of this design that I cannot overlook.

When playing, if I had a very good run of dice, I would feel a moment of elation and want to sing the praises of these stalwart soldiers who have overcome obstacles to help me seize victory from the jaws of defeat. Then I would remember what it was these men were fighting for and I would want to throw their stupid counter in the bin. This is a game for generating empathy for slavers who are killing their countrymen just so they can keep treating black Americans in a monstrous fashion. I cannot overlook this, and I don’t think anyone should be asked to – it’s a bad look for this game and for the hobby as a whole to be putting Pickett’s Charge on this pedestal. It is Lost Cause-ism at its most essential.

Why Not Literally Anything Else?

The design notes freely admit that there is nothing specific about Gettysburg to this game design, it is a fairly abstract system that could be adapted to nearly any major offensive. So, then, why is it about Pickett’s Charge? The ACW is filled with poorly conceived and/or executed assaults. The Union attacks on Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor are both major battles that would be far superior uses of this system. Fighting on behalf of the army of liberation in an attempt to bring the war to an end and free thousands of slaves would be a far better experience, and one that could actively push back against Lost Cause narratives of the war.

If you don’t believe me, here is Luttmann himself saying that the game is not really specific to the topic of Gettysburg.

The obvious explanation is that Pickett’s Charge is more famous than those battles, and the original designer/publisher wanted that Gettysburg brand to sell more copies. This is a weak excuse. For one thing, as discussed above, Pickett’s Charge is famous in no small part because of Lost Cause narratives of the war, so it is crass capitalist mathematics to further promote that Lost Cause ideal in hopes of selling a few games. I’m not here to give out a free pass to someone because they want to make a buck profiting off of a racist historical narrative. I also just fundamentally don’t buy it. Nobody is publishing historical wargames to make big money and I can’t imagine the sales would be very different if the game were about a different famous ACW battle like Cold Harbor – if anything the novelty of the latter might encourage more interest as Gettysburg is a bit overdone.

I can see no reason why this game (or, for that matter, the game Pickett’s Charge, another solitaire game on the same topic) is about this subject besides the long arm of the Lost Cause and a failure to critically engage with what that means. This is unfortunate, because with another topic I would really enjoy In Magnificent Style – I could see myself keeping it and periodically pulling it off my shelf for a bit of light fun. As it is, winning In Magnificent Style makes me feel like shit and playing it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t like this game and I think both we as gamers and the American Civil War as a topic deserves better than Confederate apologia for its solitaire game designs. Designers and publishers: do better.

If you have enjoyed this or my other reviews on solitaire Confederate games, first of all, thanks! They aren’t easy to write. I have to extend thanks and some credit to Liz “Beyond Solitaire” Davidson for sending me the copy of In Magnificent Style and to Stephen “COIN Multipack” Rangazas who sent me a copy of Mosby’s Raiders. I also have to thank my Ko-Fi backers who made it possible for me to buy a copy of Jeff Davis. If you have enjoyed this project and would be interested in contributing to its continuation, I would really appreciate it. You can do so at: https://ko-fi.com/stuartellisgorman

I am hoping that I have now put playing these solitaire games behind me, but I know that I haven’t even played half of them yet. If for some reason you wish to see me suffer further I will simply state that I will play any game that I am sent at least once.

In Magnificent Style by Hermann Luttmann

The (hopefully) final entry in my Confederate Solitaire Trilogy is a classic game from Hermann Luttmann, a name familiar to anyone with an interest in games on the American Civil War. Originally released by Victory Point Games, In Magnificent Style received a deluxe reprint from Worthington a few years ago. This is one of two solitaire games on Pickett’s Charge, where the player tries to outperform Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble in their disastrous assault on the Union position on the third day of Gettysburg. I don’t really want to bury the lede, I think this is a gross subject for a game. Despite that, I had quite a lot of fun playing In Magnificent Style – stripped of its topic this is a very enjoyable light solitaire game, but that theme severely degrades my ability to enjoy playing it. Before we get to the heavy stuff, though, let’s talk a little about the game’s mechanisms and why it’s fun!

Push Your Troops

The core of the game is an addictive little push-your-luck mechanism that is apparently borrowed from a German dice game. You roll two d6 and consult a table to find the crossover point where the dice roll representing the column meets the row of the other die. This is very quick to resolve, and the chart is helpfully printed on the side of the board. As your troops advance, they will leave behind their Rally point. At any point after your first roll, you can choose to stop rolling and move that Rally point forward. However, should you keep going you will run the risk of rolling a result that will send your unit packing back to its start. There are also leaders that can give you a re-roll for the one unit they are attached to and a few other elements to help mitigate bad luck, but across your advancing line this will only help you so far. It’s tense, it’s simple, and it’s a lot of fun.

This system will naturally produce irregular advances among your units, but the game’s Battleline formation will encourage you to try and keep units adjacent where possible in hopes of triggering a general advance of several units at once. The map also includes a few obstacles that can only be crossed by certain results, which can force you into making several rolls in a row without moving forward, praying for a good advance and avoiding the Rout result that will send your unit packing back to the start.

A fairly typical scene when playing In Magnificent Style - the charged advances in piecemeal fashion.

This simple mechanism can generate a surprisingly strong emotional response. A string of good luck can feel like that unit is performing above and beyond the call of duty – shaking off enemy fire and passing over obstacles as if they were nothing. In contrast, a unit rolling a Rout or suffering from repeated Heavy Artillery barrages at a key moment can make you want to scream at them not to run – they were so close, they just needed to push on! It’s impressive how a bit of art can make you identify with these people in what is really quite an abstract dice rolling game.

Worthington has also given the game a very nice coat of paint. I love the counter art – each unit has their state’s flag, which is a nice touch and avoids the inclusion of numerous Confederate flags (although the Rebel Yell counter is unfortunately emblazoned with it). It is a little strange that the Rally and captured position counters use the Stars and Bars and not the Stainless Banner. Overall, though, this is an attractive game, which I think is especially important for a solitaire game. In another game I have my opponent and our discussion to distract me but playing solo I’m spending an hour of my life staring at. My only critique (except for the flags) would be that the rulebook was oddly formatted – it’s readable and far from the worst rulebook I’ve encountered but it made referencing rules more work than I think it needed to be. Most of the key rules you need are printed on the board and most counters have what they do printed on their back, so you rarely need to go to the rules to look things up but on the rare times you do it can be quite frustrating.

My greatest “triumph” - most of the Union lines taken by units in reasonably good strength. You get VPs based on how many positions you control and the strength points in and adjacent to those positions.

Overall, this is a really fun little design. It’s not too complicated, and I didn’t find it particularly challenging, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I could almost find myself pulling this off my shelf every few months to give it another go. Almost. There is, however, one central flaw with In Magnificent Style.

A Glorious Failure

I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of how well In Magnificent Style does or does not model the events of Pickett’s Charge or how specific mechanisms do or don’t evoke that moment in history. I could complain about the Rebel Yell counter, or the frequent Lost Cause-ism in the names of the event cards, or how I think the game doesn’t accurately represent the messiness of how the charge advanced, but I think that’s obsessing over pieces when the problem is the topic as a whole.  The design notes make plenty clear that this is not trying to be a simulation, and it wouldn’t be a valuable use of time to treat it as one. I really want to sink my teeth into the big question, and to my mind flaw, in this game: why the fuck is it about Pickett’s Charge?

If you are somehow unfamiliar with Pickett’s Charge, let me briefly get you up to speed. On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee elected to launch a frontal assault at the center of the Union lines in an attempt to secure a breakthrough. He pulled two divisions from General A.P. Hill’s corps as well as one from General Longstreet’s, the latter commanded by one General Pickett, whose name would adorn the charge forever despite just being one part of it. On the second day Lee had ordered assaults at both extreme ends of the Union position and been repulsed in both cases at great cost in lives. Now, with the Union having been reinforced overnight with the arrival of General Sedgewick’s corps, Lee decided to do basically the same thing again over the vehement objections of General Longstreet. The assault was preceded by the largest artillery bombardment in history, which proved to be remarkably ineffective thanks to poor coordination and problems with the fuses used for the explosive shells. Longstreet, despairing at his inability to block the charge, gave his consent for the assault to begin and the Confederate brigades charged straight at the exact point that General Meade, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, had predicted they would.  The result was a slaughter – the whole charge lasted less than an hour and completely devastated its participants for no gain in ground and very few casualties inflicted on the Union.

Despite being Lee’s greatest single tactical blunder, Pickett’s Charge lived on after the war as “The High Water Mark” of the Confederacy. The point of the Confederacy’s greatest achievement right before their defeat rendered their cause doomed. Entire books have been written on the mythmaking of Pickett’s Charge, too much to summarize here, but to put a point to it if you wanted to distill the Lost Cause down to just one single moment you could do worse than picking Pickett’s Charge. The epitome (at least in memory) of the glorious and noble but doomed act of resistance against the Yankee oppressor. A romanticized picture of what was really an ill-conceived and poorly executed attack by slavers in pursuit of their vile cause.

In Magnificent Style asks me to take control of these slavers and try and succeed where they failed. Can I punch a hole in the Union lines and win one for Dixie? What it doesn’t seem to spend any time thinking about is what that means. Based on how many victory points you score at the end of the game you are allocated one result, from overwhelming victory to disastrous defeat, each with a paragraph of text. This text is purely military in focus, it tells you what the armies do in the wake of your failure or success. Do you force the Union to surrender or sue for peace, winning the war for the South or are you butchered like your historic counterparts?

The victory descriptors from the rulebook

What is notably absent from these descriptions is any reference to what you are actually fighting for. When I won a Decisive Victory in my second game it told me about how I drove back Meade’s army and marched on Washington to bring the war to a favorable end. It didn’t at all consider the consequences of what my victory might look like: that I had potentially secured the rights to own slaves in the Confederacy for generations to come. I had ensured the exploitation, torture, rape, and murder of my fellow humans based solely on the color of their skin. A glorious victory. I should be so pleased with myself.

Winning a game of In Magnificent Style filled me with revulsion, I hated it. When I mention a reaction like this to a game it is inevitable that someone will come along and suggest that this was the designer’s intent – history can be dark, and I am just experiencing it as it was. There can be no such argument in support of In Magnificent Style, this is very explicitly meant to be a light bit of fun, not a serious meditation on the horrors of slavery and war. This isn’t an Amabel Holland game as art project, it’s a push-your-luck light bit of entertainment. This is a fatal flaw at the heart of this design that I cannot overlook.

When playing, if I had a very good run of dice, I would feel a moment of elation and want to sing the praises of these stalwart soldiers who have overcome obstacles to help me seize victory from the jaws of defeat. Then I would remember what it was these men were fighting for and I would want to throw their stupid counter in the bin. This is a game for generating empathy for slavers who are killing their countrymen just so they can keep treating black Americans in a monstrous fashion. I cannot overlook this, and I don’t think anyone should be asked to – it’s a bad look for this game and for the hobby as a whole to be putting Pickett’s Charge on this pedestal. It is Lost Cause-ism at its most essential.

Why Not Literally Anything Else?

The design notes freely admit that there is nothing specific about Gettysburg to this game design, it is a fairly abstract system that could be adapted to nearly any major offensive. So, then, why is it about Pickett’s Charge? The ACW is filled with poorly conceived and/or executed assaults. The Union attacks on Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor are both major battles that would be far superior uses of this system. Fighting on behalf of the army of liberation in an attempt to bring the war to an end and free thousands of slaves would be a far better experience, and one that could actively push back against Lost Cause narratives of the war.

If you don’t believe me, here is Luttmann himself saying that the game is not really specific to the topic of Gettysburg.

The obvious explanation is that Pickett’s Charge is more famous than those battles, and the original designer/publisher wanted that Gettysburg brand to sell more copies. This is a weak excuse. For one thing, as discussed above, Pickett’s Charge is famous in no small part because of Lost Cause narratives of the war, so it is crass capitalist mathematics to further promote that Lost Cause ideal in hopes of selling a few games. I’m not here to give out a free pass to someone because they want to make a buck profiting off of a racist historical narrative. I also just fundamentally don’t buy it. Nobody is publishing historical wargames to make big money and I can’t imagine the sales would be very different if the game were about a different famous ACW battle like Cold Harbor – if anything the novelty of the latter might encourage more interest as Gettysburg is a bit overdone.

I can see no reason why this game (or, for that matter, the game Pickett’s Charge, another solitaire game on the same topic) is about this subject besides the long arm of the Lost Cause and a failure to critically engage with what that means. This is unfortunate, because with another topic I would really enjoy In Magnificent Style – I could see myself keeping it and periodically pulling it off my shelf for a bit of light fun. As it is, winning In Magnificent Style makes me feel like shit and playing it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t like this game and I think both we as gamers and the American Civil War as a topic deserves better than Confederate apologia for its solitaire game designs. Designers and publishers: do better.

If you have enjoyed this or my other reviews on solitaire Confederate games, first of all, thanks! They aren’t easy to write. I have to extend thanks and some credit to Liz “Beyond Solitaire” Davidson for sending me the copy of In Magnificent Style and to Stephen “COIN Multipack” Rangazas who sent me a copy of Mosby’s Raiders. I also have to thank my Ko-Fi backers who made it possible for me to buy a copy of Jeff Davis. If you have enjoyed this project and would be interested in contributing to its continuation, I would really appreciate it. You can do so at: https://ko-fi.com/stuartellisgorman

I am hoping that I have now put playing these solitaire games behind me, but I know that I haven’t even played half of them yet. If for some reason you wish to see me suffer further I will simply state that I will play any game that I am sent at least once.

Review - Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith

By my count there are at least seven solitaire wargames where the player is asked to play as the Confederacy, which feels like too many. In contrast, I have found only one dedicated solitaire game where you play the Union. I find this imbalance a little distressing, and since I’m doing a project on the Lost Cause in American Civil War games, I think it behooves me to play some of these games. I have previously reviewed Ben Madison’s Jeff Davis, and this week I’m going back in time forty years to what must be the first game in this suspect genre: Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that this game has something of a pedigree. Eric Lee Smith was a co-designer on Ambush!, one of the original and most influential solitaire wargames, and also designed The Civil War 1861-65, potentially the most influential strategic game on the American Civil War. The confluence of an influential solo and ACW designer making a solitaire ACW game is certainly worthy of attention. What I found in Mosby’s Raiders was an interesting game and a less interesting representation of Virginia history.

The thing that struck me first upon reading the rules for and then playing Mosby’s Raiders was its tempo. At the start of the play phase for each turn, once you’ve drawn a hand action cards, resolved d6 random events, and finished set up, you have near total freedom to take actions with Mosby without retribution. Mosby can move within his “Confederacy” (i.e., non-Union controlled territory) with complete freedom. Things only get dicey when you want to move into Union territory or, more advisedly, peek into that territory to see what threats may lurk there. Nearly every action Mosby can take besides wandering aimlessly through the wilds of northwestern Virginia could trigger Activation Checks, where you must roll a d6 and roll under the current Union Awareness value (which will tic up as you engage in fights and destroy Union infrastructure). Once a Union unit successfully activates the game pivots to Rounds, where now Mosby’s movement is restricted, and you have to contend with pursuit from Union forces and a potential spiraling of activations as more and more Union soldiers join the hunt.

I actually quite like the aesthetics of Mosby’s Raiders, even if it does show its age. The charts and tables along the side of the map are also really useful once you know the game reasonably well.

This tempo is fun, and it is further enhanced by the fact that you get to choose when to disband – moving the turn forward and resetting the activations and how aware the Union is of your actions. Each turn you need to have achieved a higher Notoriety level than that turn number, though, so you can’t just advance that game clock arbitrarily. This creates an interesting push-your-luck element to playing Mosby’s Raiders and that can be quite satisfying. It also helps to prevent the game from lasting longer than necessary, as a run of bad luck will bring it to an end rather than forcing you to limp on through all eight turns.The tempo is not without its lurches, though. During Rounds the game can slow to a crawl as you resolve half a dozen activation checks, followed by a similar number of movement rolls. The game can produce very satisfying moments of tension, but just as often it can generate a foregone conclusion - either favorable or unfavorable. That said, for a game of this vintage I was very impressed with how fresh it felt.

Another great extension of this system is that the map begins largely empty and only fills with Union troops as you explore it – each peek or activation causes you to draw a unit from the cup of available troops. This allows the game to act as a sandbox, where nothing is populated until Mosby goes searching for something there – sort of like a video game only loading a section of the map when you look at it. You never know exactly what will be where so even the first turn can produce interesting decisions rather than a scripted optimal strategy that only deviates after several minutes of play. More chits are added as your Notoriety rises which gives the game a natural feeling of escalation. While I don’t think the game totally lives up to its sandbox idea, I did like this core system as a way to generate new situations with relatively little rules overhead.

I have not generally been wowed by event decks in games, especially solitaire ones. My experiences have ranged from fine to underwhelming, which is why I was pleasantly surprised with how diverse a set of outcomes Mosby’s Raiders’ event deck could generate. The arrival of kidnap victims, Union patrols, and the extension of Union positions are all covered in this deck and when you flip d6 cards at the start of a turn you can radically change your game state before you get a chance to act. Even the situations where the event deck drops a soldier on top of Mosby and sends him home before he even gets a chance to play felt exciting, at least in part because it seemed like the outcome was at least partly my fault for choosing a stupid starting position. I’m not saying the event deck is beyond reproach, but I was genuinely impressed with how different each of my games of Mosby’s Raiders developed and I think a lot of that was down to the variety of the event deck. It significantly exceeded my expectations.

A pair of Union sweeps drop themselves onto Mosby. One slight problem I found was that the rulebook had extra processes for these cards than the card text themselves did, which radically changed their impact on the game. I suppose this could be the result of the game’s time, but I’m used to cards having all their relevant rules on the cards themselves.

The action deck left me altogether less impressed. There are some great cards in it, but they were drowned out by overly situational cards or ones that just weren’t very interesting (I’m still not totally sure I understand the value of counterattack). What I wanted out of my hand of action cards was a set of tools that could radically alter my plans for that round. Cards like Cannon, which gives Mosby a bonus in battle but radically reduces his movement in Rounds, so you can fight better but running away from a fight is nearly impossible. This pushed me towards looking for easy fights I could win and praying not to flip over a strength 8 Union unit who would crush me despite my small complement of field artillery that I’d dragged along with me. Sadly, most of the cards are not this exciting. Plenty of cards let Mosby examine a space for free or possibly enter one without triggering Activation(s), but one card that does this isn’t enough to radically alter my plans that turn. The action cards weren’t terrible, but most didn’t do enough to push me towards trying different strategies and instead created a feeling of sameness to each of Mosby’s activations.  

In conjunction with the event cards, these lackluster action cards began to generate an experience where I was more excited to see how the board state would shift each turn than I was in actually playing as Mosby. By the middle of my third game, I was kind of done being Mosby – I wanted to see how the Union counter response developed and I was far less interested in making a bunch of activation checks and hopefully blowing up a few railroads. There just weren’t quite enough interesting things for me to do with Mosby – it was all sneaking in, blowing up infrastructure, maybe fighting someone, and getting out. That was fun, but once I’d done it over fifteen times, I was kind of bored of it. Being Mosby wasn’t holding my attention.

In my second game, Mosby got straight up killed on the second turn. An inglorious (but deserved) outcome for the rebel.

Playing as Mosby is a weird experience. If you’re not familiar with the career of “The Grey Ghost”, it is worth considering it in brief. John Singleton Mosby was born in eastern Virginia but moved around the state quite a bit, spending a lot of his childhood in my hometown of Charlottesville, including a brief attendance at the University of Virginia. He was expelled after killing a man over a matter of honor, for which he was sent to prison but was eventually pardoned and then went on to become a lawyer. During the American Civil War, he served in the cavalry, but he made his reputation as a guerilla leader operating in the northern half of the Shenandoah Valley, which was known as “Mosby’s Confederacy” in recognition of the level of control he exerted over the region. Mosby’s band of guerillas was active from the start of 1863 and on to well into 1865. He stayed at large until the 17th of June 1865, more than two months after the surrender at Appomattox. Despite being one of the last Confederate holdouts, Mosby’s postwar career was defined by aligning himself with the Republican party, supporting Grant for the presidency, and even a brief stint as the American consul in Hong Kong. While he did not receive the same level of scorn as other “scalawags” like Longstreet or General Mahone, Mosby is among the few Confederates to actively support the Republicans in the post-war order. This makes him an interesting and complex figure when one considers portraying him in a game like this – his war record was deplorable, but he was better than your average Confederate after the dust was settled. Engaging with an individual with this kind of messy history can be challenging and leaves me wondering just what Mosby am I playing - the notorious Confederate or the man who will make some small effort to redeem himself later?

Mosby’s Raiders chooses to just focus on the early months of 1863, before Lee’s Gettysburg campaign. From a gameplay perspective this short timeframe makes sense – making a game about Mosby’s full career over the last two- and a-bit years of the war would be a mess, especially with the need to incorporate the times where he joined Lee’s army in various capacities. Potentially the most notorious, and absent from the game, was Mosby’s participation in the slave raiding that accompanied the Gettysburg campaign. Mosby’s guerillas joined sections of the Confederate cavalry in participating in vast raids across Pennsylvania, including rounding up black residents and taking them off to Virginia to be sold into slavery.

In fact, the game includes no elements representing slavery, which is a disappointing oversight. While the Shenandoah Valley did not have the dense slave populations of the plantation heavy tidewater region, it certainly was not without slaves. More importantly, the game opens soon after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the nature of how the Union army interacted with slavery. The game could have been made more interesting by engaging with the exodus of slaves searching for freedom behind Union lines as well as the fact that wherever the Union army went slaves were declared free. The game has Union soldiers venture beyond their lines and even includes events that expand the extent of Union control in the Valley. The ebb and flow of who controlled what territory had significant impacts on the fates of black Americans who were there – the arrival of U.S. troops promised freedom, but often only as long as those troops were there. Including events representing slaves running to U.S. lines and potentially providing intelligence on Mosby’s position would have been an acknowledgement of their presence and participation in the war.

The game also doesn’t say very much about the efforts to catch and capture Mosby, which is arguably the more interesting side of the story. How do you pin down a man like Mosby and his guerillas in a largely hostile population and stop him from cutting your supply lines? The focus on early 1863 means that the game charts Mosby’s rise from relative obscurity to being a figure of legend and scorn – but it ends well before the 1864 valley campaign and General Sheridan’s efforts to crush Mosby, which brought widespread destruction to the region. By making Mosby the hero of the piece we get a reasonably fun raiding game but lose a lot of what could be said about guerillas and the nature of controlling hostile territory during the American Civil War.

My third game ended up being a victory, but the Union had burned and/or expanded into much of Mosby’s “Confederacy”. The game including the destruction of the Valley is a nice nod to Sheridan’s controversial tactics, but they didn’t seem to have much of an impact on the gameplay.

Overall, I think the core system of Mosby’s Raiders is pretty cool and has aged quite well for being 40 years old. There are places it could use some more polish and would benefit from developments in game design over the past four decades, but it holds up well and I had fun. I was far less impressed with its ability to tell the history of Mosby and guerilla warfare in the American Civil War. Beyond just not being keen to play as a slaver shitbag, I don’t think I understand Mosby or his war any more than I did before playing the game. The mechanics feel better suited to a topic that is just about raiders rather than guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency. I would love to see someone take this system, give it a little more polish, and adapt it to a group of dedicated raiders. This would make a great system for a solitaire game about being a Viking is what I’m getting at. Until someone designs that new take on the system, though, I probably won’t revisit Mosby’s Raiders. I had more fun than I expected to, but it won’t hold my attention for more than a handful of plays.

Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam by James M. McPherson

I have immense respect for authors who are able to do more with less. While it cannot be denied that writing a massive, multi-volume epic history of a subject is an impressive achievement, I am often more enamored with historians who manage to convey nearly as much in a fraction of text. I recently read Stephen Sears’ impressive tome of a history on the battle of Gettysburg, and there can be no denying that it is impressive, but it is James McPherson’s far shorter history of Antietam that has left me stunned with what it achieves.

McPherson is no stranger to impressive book lengths. Earlier this year I read his classic Battle Cry of Freedom, which, while also a very admirable example of compressing an enormous amount of history into a single volume, clocks in at over eight hundred pages of history. That is a book worthy of all of its praises, and while I love a good doorstopper to read, sometimes I want something quick and to the point. McPherson’s history of Antietam shows that he can deliver this in spades.

Measuring in at under two hundred pages, just over 150 if you discount notes and bibliography, Crossroads of Freedom manages to cover not just the battle itself but almost the entire American Civil War up to that fateful September day in 1862. The central framing device of Crossroads of Freedom is the notion that Antietam was a crucial turning point in the American Civil War, possibly the turning point. Certainly it suggests that the Confederacy came very close to winning the war in the late summer of 1862 and that their defeat at Antietam and its political aftermath (the Emancipation Declaration and favorable mid-term election results for the Lincoln administration) kept the war going and led eventually to the Confederacy’s defeat (albeit with many more bumps along the way). Antietam also marks the dividing line between the American Civil War as a war for reunion and one for emancipation - a critical difference which has had a lasting impact on America. While often overshadowed by Gettysburg in popular memory, McPherson makes a strong case for Antietam being the war’s most important single battle.

This is not a history for people who want every little detail of the order of battle, which regiment fought where, casualty numbers, etc. Instead it is a history of the importance of the battle in the context of its time - especially the pressures facing both sides leading up to the conflict and the impact it had on the overall shape of the war. While from time to time I enjoy the nitty gritty detail, I must confess that this kind of history appeals to me much more and that McPherson delivers it so well and so quickly is a master stroke. Highly recommended.

Podcast: Discussing the Lost Cause with Beyond Solitaire

I was lucky enough to be invited to appear on Dr. Liz “Beyond Solitaire” Davidson’s podcast a few weeks back. We discussed my ongoing project on the Lost Cause in historical wargaming as well as a range of subjects, including why we are drawn to difficult subjects and why we might want to play and write about games we know that we won’t actually enjoy playing. It was a great discussion and I think provides some excellent context to the We Intend to Move on Your Works project. You can listen to the podcast via all main podcast distributors or you can watch it on YouTube below: