REVIEW: Fort Sumter – by Mark Herman (GMT Games)

Mark Herman invented the modern card-driven game (CDG), particularly in its most common formulation – players take turns playing a card from their hand either for the amount of action points denoted at the top of the card, or for the special event described on it. The former is much more flexible, whilst the latter is much more specific but more powerful.

These games range from the former BoardGameGeek #1 Twilight Struggle to the six-player game of diplomacy and warfare Here I Stand. A lot of these games run long – though a few examples might take 2 or 3 hours, some of the big boys like Herman's own Empire of the Sun can run at least 6 hours. Fort Sumter, Herman's latest from GMT, is a CDG that takes 25-40 minutes, and is intended to be played over a single lunchtime. It's a game about the efforts by Unionist and Secessionist politicians to see their side win out leading up to the American Civil War,

Very quick run-down: over three rounds plus a final minigame, two players vie for control of four areas (Public Opinion, Political, Secession, Armaments) on the board, each of which is made up of three spaces. One space is in turn the “Pivotal Space” for that area – control of it allows manipulation of the control tokens in that area at the end of the round, before scoring. Players alternate playing cards, generally to place or remove their tokens or their opponents from the spaces on the board (both action point use and most card events have to do with this). They are trying to control areas at the end of the round, and to control a specific space defined by a secret objective card they drew at the start of the round. They also set aside a card each round to use in the final minigame, the “Final Crisis”, which has three mini-rounds of its own, the result of each of which gives players another chance to manipulate the control of spaces on the board (this is a way in which Fort Sumter is very like 1960: The Making of the President, for those familiar). Each card has a characteristic matching one of three areas of the four you want want to control during the game – if you and your opponent play a matching characteristic in a Final Crisis mini-round, you both remove cubes from that area, if you play different characteristics, you both can place cubes into that area.

There are a couple of garnishes on this fairly simple salad. A bit of saucy drizzle, if you will. There is a Crisis Track, which is where the cubes you use to mark your side's control of a space are stored. This is divided into four zones; as you escalate the crisis by putting more influence into the struggle to win over key constituencies, certain effects come into play. Basically, if you breach Crisis zones before your opponent, you generally receive a penalty. One of the zones involves a VP penalty (but you get more bonus cubes than your opponent will); another lets your opponent play the Peace Commissioner, a piece who blocks placement, movement, or removal of pieces from a particular space. That's the second garnish – the Peace Commissioner lets you lock down a piece of the board, and can be moved by certain cards being played for their event.

It's fun, simple, clean. It's a solid introduction to CDGs, with fairly open interactions which allow you to consider whether you should play a card for points, its event, or put it into the Final Crisis. The order in which you play your cards each turns matters, whether because it masks or exposes your objective card, or because of the roving Peace Commissioner. The Final Crisis itself has some borderline meaningful bluffing and pop psychology involved (“if they have Armaments, when will they play it?!”). It's a lovely little palate cleanser with real content. But.

But it raises for me the complex question – especially with wargames, which this is adjunct to – of the relationship of theme and rules. Yes, the cards are called things like “Frederick Douglass” (a Unionist event who boost Public Opinion for your side) or “Russell of the Times” (a neutral event who lets you convert Public Opinion into Secession or Political influence). There's some slight connection between card theme and area of influence here, yes – Frederick Douglass writes a book which increases Abolitionist sentiment, Russell is an influential journalist who affects local politics. But it's skin-deep, really. The areas are broadly interchangeable, except Politics can't be shifted during the Final Crisis, and the Armaments space Fort Sumter is the tiebreaker space. That's cute, but ultimately bland.

In the strongest Euros – at least those which I engage with best – the theme communicates the rules. In the best wargames, the rules teach you the theme, that is, the history behind the game. There's little of either here. At best, the theme, so far as the cards and map go, can act as a mnemonic to remind you of something – Fort Sumter is the tiebreaker! But that's it. That's not issues, necessarily – if it's a traditional wargame with abtruse rules which aim to simulate the conflict.

But you learn little about the actual events leading up to Secession, either. You might perhaps be prompted to find out why Frederick Douglass might be considered to have swayed public opinion at the time, but the card itself, and its interplay with the game, gives you nothing concrete. The card gives you a set of mathematical options, not an insight into history. It's a prod to learning, but not a form of learning itself.

I think many – though not all – of us wargamers play games to learn history. We don't believe the game is “historically accurate” in some sort of Emperor's Map form – of course it's abstracting everything to one degree or another. But we play games to help us learn and reflect upon aspects of war. OCS or the Campaigns of Napoleon help us comprehend a bit more about logistics, whilst something lighter like Napoleonic 20 gives us a simpler insight into operational manoeuvre.

Fort Sumter does not accomplish that goal. The mechanics of the game do not meaningfully teach me anything about the Secession Crisis. The game may be a spur to education – but the artefact itself teaches the basics of CDGs far better than it teaches American history.