Thursday 18 January 2018

REVIEW: Cruel Morning: Shiloh 1862 - by Sean Chick (Tiny Battle Publishing)

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.

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