I've
played this once electronically on VASSAL (it's out of print), and I
want to play it again. It was my successful test run for whether I
wanted to preorder GMT's American Revolution Tri-Pack, a reprint of
three early games in the same series. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it,
and that's the essential conclusion here.
Let's
dig deeper. This is a “hex and counter” wargame of a battle in
1778 during the American Revolution, with each side controlling
armies of counters representing leaders, regiments/brigades of
infantry and cavalry, and batteries of artillery, fighting on a map
made up of hexagons. It's a pretty traditional game in that genre in
most respects – units project a “zone of control”, making it
harder for their enemy to do stuff near them; ranged and close combat
are resolved by cross-referencing a chart based on the strength of
the attack and the result of a ten-sided die; and so forth. There are
lots of games essentially like this, so why is this worth playing?
Four
essential components, which marry together well: mechanics, weight,
decisions, and aesthetics.
Mechanics
This
is a pretty old-fashioned hex-and-counter game, down to I-go-U-go
turns and mandatory close combat.
However, whilst pretending to be a staid design, this is actually
quite an inventive series as a whole, with some clever twists to the
specific iteration (the series has a unified core rulebook, with
exclusive rules accompanying each game). Army morale, which decreases
and increases over the course of the game based on combat results and
special cases, affects initiative rolls at the start of each turn and
modifies combat die rolls. Though players take turns moving and
attacking with all their units at once – with no push-pull within
the turn as in Great
Battles of History
with its Momentum and Trump rolls, for instance – the “passive”
player is always engaged. Only the passive player's artillery fires
each turn, followed by both sides having their rifle-armed units
fire. This gives a sense of agency throughout, especially as
successful defensive fire can be devastating to finely-tuned attacks.
Close
combat is determined on an odds basis (e.g. if the attackers have a
strength of 4 vs a defensive strength of 1, the odds are 4:1 and you
check the 4:1 column on the Combat Results Table or CRT), but the die
roll is modified by the net difference between the modifiers of the
two sides – which includes leader quality, troop quality, terrain,
and troop type. The CRT has a wide range of results, with a big
middle ground of non-destructive effects which models the relatively
bloodless field warfare of the era. For comparison, both sides
combined suffered under 1000 casualties at Monmouth, which was the
longest battle of the American Revolution, whilst at Pea Ridge in
1862 in the American Civil War, fought between very similarly sized
armies, nearly 3500 men were killed, wounded, or missing. But
Disruptions, Retreats, and Pins can all lead to counter-attacks,
damage, and unit captures in future turns, as well as damage to Army
Morale – and the relative bloodlessness makes the rare
damage/capture results all the more important, as those give you
Victory Points, which will very often determine the winner at the
end, unless sudden death conditions are fulfilled first. An
additional somewhat clever mechanic for close combat, which I didn't
use playing solitaire, is the Tactical Matrix, where each player
selects a manoeuvre in secret, and the two are compared – there's a
rock-paper-scissors element to this, with certain options being good
against other options, but boardstate and the presence of leaders
permitting or barring some options from being chosen. This isn't
actually, from what I can see, much more than a coat of paint over
the creation of hidden information and a bluff microphase, but that's
not a problem for me.
Finally,
there are Momentum Chits, gained from outlandish results on the CRT.
These allow rerolls in close combat and the manipulation of the
Initiative roll at the start of each turn. A little like Tactics
Chits, this isn't a terribly integral mechanic – and is marked as
optional – but adds some swing and chance to the game. Chits
definitely affected my game, and in a way that increased enjoyment.
The
Monmouth-specific rules consist of two types: integral and historical
“chrome”, which is more properly an aesthetic concern. The most
important instances of the former concern the initial American
commander's performance, and the extraordinary heat of the day –
until George Washington relieves Charles Lee on the field, randomized
American brigades are prone to freezing or retreating each turn. As
the battle progresses and the day gets hotter, draws on the
Initiative roll will cause the entire turn to be skipped unless
someone spends a Momentum Chit, and Morale Checks are penalized. Both
of these, especially the former, can really inform the flow of the
game – Lee's poor-but-not-horrendous performance more or less kept
the Americans in the fight in my play.
Weight
But despite all those complex things
above, this is a surprisingly easy game to learn, and will, I think,
be alright to teach. It's not an absolute beginner's game, but I'm
confident of teaching the Tri-Pack when it arrives from GMT to some
of my “lighter” gamer friends. The simple core of all
hex-and-counter games is here – move your Movement Points somewhere
you want to go, attack if that makes sense, use your artillery to
break up the enemy. But the rules “on top” of that never feel
onerous. Some flirt with beer-and-pretzels mechanics, such as
Momentum Chits, but that's frankly a selling point to someone wanting
a more lively game. Some are actually quite finely balanced and
designed without being too onerous, such as the CRT (especially the
delicate agony of the PIN result). The passive player is kept engaged
both via the Fire Phases and via the Tactical Chit mechanic in close
combat, and though both add complexity, neither is really heavy at
all.
The comparison to other modern
hex-and-counter games series is useful. This isn't as simple as
Decision Games' Folio Series, not by a margin; but it's equally
simpler by a good clip than any of the Great Battles of History
entries, and simpler even than Musket and Pike. Some of this is due
to elision of favoured concepts encountered elsewhere in the
particular design tradition, such as facing – but only a little
granularity is lost via this, replaced by a close combat penalty for
being Surrounded combined with the well-tried mechanic of not being
able to ignore multiple adjacent enemy stacks when attacking (i.e.
not being allowed to bully one stack in the face of the others!). The
rules are also genuinely well written, and the separation of series
rules from module rules has its advantages, keeping the core rules to
a svelte 13 pages including cover, sequence of play, and plenty of
example pictures.
Decisions
The game has good mechanics without
being too heavy, and this allows the key element of any wargame
to shine: interesting decisions. The battle can develop along
historic lines, or it can lead to entirely different conclusions.
Some of this is down to specific design elements of the module –
some reinforcements being luck-based (but manipulable by Momentum
Chits), Heat Turns, Charles Lee's Command and Control problems. Some
of it is down to the dynamic of an essentially meeting engagement
which can spread in multiple directions to multiple natural lines of
defence – between Monmouth and Overlook Hill, for instance,
stretching to the north-west and south-east in a curve; well to the
west where the historic denouement happened; or even distinctly north
or south of Monmouth, if either army manoeuvres in strength and with
determination. It's also down to a fine balance between the sides.
The constant flow of reinforcements for both sides and the
interesting terrain make it viable for either side to turn the tide
til the very end, which makes it different from that other classic
meeting engagement, Gettysburg.
Aesthetics
Finally, these decisions seems to
matter all the more because the game is winsome. Its theme
communicates. This is not some interesting engine for calculating
moves on a hexagonal chess board. Nor is it even just a convincing
simulation of 18th
century civil war amongst English-speaking peoples. It is a beautiful
game, even on VASSAL – Mark Simonitch's map is right up there with
his best. The game itself pre-empts Hamilton's
take on Lee's malign influence (“Attack! Retreat!”), there are
delightful touches thrown in that are nearly entirely thematic
(“Molly Pitcher” auto-rallying an American artillery unit once
per game, for instance), and the mechanics lend themselves to
storytelling, especially in the to-and-fro interspersed with decisive
moments. In my game Charles Lee became a casualty to artillery fire,
whilst the Hessian mounted riflemen dispersed Washington's Life Guard
in the very last breaths of the game – but not before Washington
had relieved Lee and stabilized the American line at Overlook Hill,
and not before a lot of the combatants had fought their last in the
shaded, humid woods north and west of Monmouth, where the bulk of the
fighting occurred.
Brief
Conclusion
I would love to play this again, and
would certainly buy it if reprinted. It's good at what it does; if
you like that sort of thing, you will like this.
