Cruel Morning Shiloh
1862, designed by Sean Chick, published by Tiny Battle Publishing
The
Review Bit
I want to accomplish two things with this review: explain what Cruel
Morning: Shiloh 1862 attempts
to achieve, and whether it does so; and to use that as a way of
connecting wargame design, in a very light way, to auteur theory.
The game is designed by Sean Chick,
with art by Jose Ramon Faura. The art is colourful and stylish
without being particularly “deep”; it's colourful and the colour
prints well, on map and counters. The counterstock is a little
dubious, though that has something to do (one imagines) with the
price point – this is a very affordable folio game. On the other
hand, the counters themselves are individually lasercut, and are a
generous size. The map is small (11x17) with large hexes and fairly
clear terrain and objective markers.
The situation is a brigade-scale
examination of the Battle of Shiloh (6th
to 7th
April, 1862, in south-eastern Tennessee), during the American Civil
War. The Rebels launch a surprise attack on the encamped Federals
beside the Tennessee River.
The game in most respects follows
typical hex-and-counter conventions: move units, attack with units,
roll dice to determine the results. There are three key mechanical
distinctives, however, relating to the 2nd,
3rd,
and 5th
phases of each player's turn – Artillery Bombardment, Activation,
and Combat (the other four phases, Initiative, Movement, Recovery,
and Victory, are slightly more familiar).
Artillery Bombardment is the first
thing to happen after Initiative is rolled – players alternate
place and firing with their artillery. Place artillery? Yes –
artillery is usually off-map in between turns. Instead, if it's
available, it's placed during the Bombardment phase in a hex with a
unit from the same formation of troops. It then, aside from
Bombarding (which isn't required), supports its hexmates through the
turn. Artillery can also be placed by a defender in Combat, if
available and if it passes a 50/50 check. After each player has done
all their own Movement and Combat, most Artillery is removed from the
map, and a six-sided die rolled to determine how many turns it will
take for the Artillery to be available again (there are, of course,
modifiers to the table based on situation). This makes Artillery
flexible and partially fungible – it does not have movement
restrictions as artillery in similar games do, and can, with a little
luck, dash between different points of crisis. An artillery counter
is more abstract than, say, an infantry brigade – it represents
several batteries, and its use indicates a particular commitment or
effort by some of its constituent units. It is more clearly a
“resource counter” than the other unit counters; its use is
actually half-way toward the entirely abstracted use of Support
Makers in the Fire and Movement
system. This is, generally speaking, something I appreciate – not
over artillery being a
normal unit, but as a different way of discussing the use of
artillery in the era.
The Activation Phase is the first
part of each player's own little sub-turn – Activation, Movement,
Combat. In it, the player checks how many Command Points he has –
he starts with a Base CP from the specific scenario, and, if he has
an Army Commander on the field, rolls to see if he gets any bonus CP
(the better the Army Commander the more likely he is to get a nice
bonus). CP are spent in varying denominations to activate either
individual counters or whole formations. Two factors influence how
this happens – first, whether you want to guarantee activation or
just want to gamble on the unit passing a Quality Check. The latter
is cheaper! Second, units that are “in command” - that is, within
a certain distance of their commander's counter – have an easier
time being activated than those outside. Some people hate “Action
Point” systems like this – I quite like them. They abstract the
general “luck” of command and control in a way that places the
decisions squarely in the hands of the player – look, your army
isn't going to do loads this turn; some commanders are being
sluggish, others are busy scouting, your staff officers are very
dispersed. But you get to pick what you focus on. Interesting
decisions make for good games.
I've touched on the final
distinctive – Combat is chiefly based on a Quality Check. A key
feature of the system is that, though units have a Strength value
showing how many men there are in it, they also have a Quality value
showing how experienced or motivated they are. In combat (which is
mandatory; all possible attackers must attack all possible
defenders), each side rolls a six-sided die for each of its Units
participating in the specific combat being resolved. The die roll is
modified by the relative strengths of the two sides – whoever has
more troops usually gets a bonus (which is, in this case, a negative
value!), which is higher or lower depending on their strength
advantage, expressed as an odds ratio. Units are trying to roll equal
or lower than their Quality, with a 6 an auto-fail and 1 an
auto-pass. If you fail, the unit is damaged. This is a really
interesting way of doing things – quality, not numbers, are usually
the main determinant, but numbers can eventually tell!
Here comes some criticism, however:
the game is incredibly bloody due to the particular interaction of
these systems and others in the game. Combat is mandatory, and it can
be practically hard to move away from the enemy; there is a 1-in-6
chance for every unit that they will take damage, usually amounting
to a 50% loss of their starting strength; and though there is a
chance in the Recovery Phase for units destroyed that turn to come
back at half-strength, it's a fairly small probability that they will
do so, all told (it must pass a Quality Check and must be able to be
placed back on the map outside of certain ranges of the enemy, and
within 3 hexes of their Division Commander – which given the high
leader casualty rates in the game can be impossible!). The net result
of this is the wholesale destruction of armies. The rules attempt to
model – in an intelligent and creative way – the way in which
morale was a massive factor, and ebbed and flowed during battle. But
the narrow probability range on a six-sided die and the difficulty of
Recovery make it very easy for formations to evaporate. The designer
has recognised this as a problem already, and intends to make
Recovery more likely in future games using this system; this is an
excellent pieces of news, as it will really help improve the system.
There are also some great ways in
the game of offering variation and replayability. One is the chance
every turn of a random event, like Poor Weather or an Obtuse
Commander ruining things. The other is a massive variety of both
scenarios and optional reinforcements – 4 scenarios, including two
alt-history ones; 3 blocks of optional Confederate reinforcements
(one of which may bring in extra Union reinforcements too) and 1
change to normal reinforcement entry; and 7 optional rules or normal
reinforcement changes for the Union. This is just excellent and to be
learned from by designers of bigger games – how about GBACW or LOB
having a Shiloh game with the possibility of a division escaping
Donelson, or Charles F. Smith remaining in command of the Army of the
Tennessee?
The
Designer-as-Auteur Bit
All wargames have a view of history; all wargames offer some sort of
interpretation of their history. GBACW, as a series, has always
argued that weaponry and troop quality were the key features of the
American Civil War – though the latest incarnation adds in
chit-pull to handle command-and-control (units activate based on when
their chit is pulled out of a cup, broadly speaking). I suppose I
don't know if this is what Richard Berg himself thinks about the
American Civil War, but the stats used in the game and the weight
assigned to them suggest so. Across Five Aprils also
uses chit-pull, but implies that the key factor about the troops
themselves was their number, with troop quality as a modifier to
combat resolution dice rolls; on the other hand, it also emphasizes
the incredible difficult of executing tactical planning via its
Combat Chit mechanism (combat only happens when Combat Chits comes
out of the cup). The relatively simple Battle Cry
uses a randomized hand of cards to determine what units you can use
each turn, and uses strength as pretty much the sole determinant of
combat effectiveness.
Cruel Morning, on the other
hand, gives players more control over who does what when – rather
than using randomized chit pull or card draw to determine who moves
or who attacks, you get to decide. But you don't know how much you'll
be able to do each turn. This makes a different statement about
battle: rather than emphasizing chaos, it emphasizes command
decision. It has an element of chaos (a die roll), just as the other
games let you decide how to manage that chaos – but Cruel
Morning reflects its designer's
stated belief that command problems are better represented via Action
Point systems, and indeed that this makes for a better and more
interesting game. Cruel Morning
also emphasizes troop quality over strength; it is the precise
inverse of Across Five Aprils
in that way, with strength being the modifier rather than troop
quality. Chick is claiming that – at least in the American Civil
War – élan and experience matter more than numbers.
The massive variety of alt-history
options also show the designer's view of that history – history
isn't inevitable, at least before it happens! What if some other
relatively small thing had happened? Would it have changed history?
What if Napoleon had been killed by that pike at Toulon? What if the
Valkyrie bomb had done its job? On a smaller scale – what if
Buckner had been permitted to finish the break out at Donelson? Sure,
Shiloh still happens, as Donelson and Nashville still fall – but
Johnston has several thousand extra troops, who have seen combat and,
in a sense, triumphed.
The designer's work is not
inevitable either – they make decisions. They don't just make
decisions about what specific factoids they believe – did the Nth
Division take this or that road? Why was the message delayed? They
also make statements about how they think whole wars were fought, and
ultimately, even how human beings work. All designers live inside a
broader tradition – and interpret the history of that tradition as
much as the history of their game – but some are bolder, or make
different statements. There is absolutely nothing wrong with someone
faithfully reproducing the tradition in a sharper form – we need
that. But we also need those with a distinct style and willingness to
disagree or diverge. Jim Krohn is an obvious designer in this mould,
especially with Band of Brothers
– “how did WW2 squad tactical battles actually happen, because I
don't think they happened like in ASL?” Another might be Carl
Paradis - “man, these million-year-long Barbarossa games are
ubiquitous and boring, what might be a simple but good simulation and
game?” Sean Chick is definitely in this vein. He is willing to
abandon hex-and-counter truisms to do with strength and focus very
tightly on quality; he wants the ability to explore all sorts of
alternate timelines. Of course, one may robustly disagree with Krohn
or Paradis or Chick – I do sometimes! - but they have succeeded at
making us think, which is for me a key objective in my wargaming. We
need “auteur designers” - to push forward the hobby, and to
challenge its players.
Conclusion
Cruel Morning is seriously
flawed – its combat ends up significantly impinging on its simulation
value and its gameplay fun. But the sheer scope of what is offered –
in 9 or so pages of rules! - is remarkable and impressive. It's also
a genuinely promising system – it has essentially quite clever,
fun, and thought-provoking systems, offered on a small footprint at a
low price. Its one real flaw is being resolved. This is genuinely
a system to get into, if you are into simple-but-good games, or if
you're more generally into the American Civil War. I highly recommend
it.
