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 (6^th to 7^th 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 2^nd, 3^rd, and 5^th 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.

REVIEW: Musket and Saber QP: Wilson's Creek 1861: Opening Round in the West, 10 August 1861 - by Chris Perello (Decision Games)

Musket & Saber Quickplay - Wilson's Creek: Opening Round in the West, 10 August 1861 – by Chris Perello (Decision Games)

Introduction

I am really interested in “intro games” for the wargaming hobbies – legitimately good, deep games with a short play time and easy-to-learn rules. I like the Commands & Colors system on that basis. I'm looking forward to Mark Herman's Fort Sumter for the same reason (you can pre-order it from GMT Games, people). Having enjoyed Decision Games' Fire and Movement system in its Folio Series representation of the Battle of the Scheldt in World War 2, I picked up several games from another system of theirs – Musket and Saber. My wife enjoyed the Scheldt game, but would prefer to play Napoleonic Wars/American Civil War – the core time period for Musket and Saber. Musket and Saber seemed like a perfect fit on that basis.

Of the games I bought, one was a Folio Series game (Pea Ridge), and three were Mini Series games (Wilson's Creek, Salem Church, and Mansfield). The Folio Series game has 8 pages of core rules for the series, and 4 pages for the specific scenario; the Mini Series has a “Quickplay” version of the rules, with 4 pages of core series rules, and 2 pages for the scenario. The Mini Series games claim a lower-end gametime of 60 minutes, topping out at a high-end gametime of 2 hours, and use around 40 counters total on an 11”x17” map (a gorgeous piece by Joe Youst). These are small games and can be played on a very small playing area. The only thing you'll need to add are two normal six-sided dice.

I've played one so far – Wilson's Creek – and have mixed feedback to offer. For the sake of this review, it'll be useful to, in a sense, discuss the two sets of rules in the ziplock, and ask – are the rules any good? And is the scenario any good?

Are the rules any good?

The core Quick Play rules for Musket and Saber are 4 pages long. Somehow a lot of system fits into that. This is a pretty standard hex-and-counter game in most respects, modelling grand tactical (i.e. whole battles) actions in the 19^th century – players take turns moving and attacking with their counters (usually consisting of Leaders, Cavalry, Infantry, and Artillery) on a hexgrid map. After a certain number of turns the game ends and the victor is determined. There are no surprises in the basic flow of the game for players who have any experience in the genre. The rules are fairly simple and clearly laid out.

Items of interest for curious gamer include: (1) Leaders chiefly function as stat buffs for units they are stacked with, if those units share the Leader's formation; (2) super-hard ZOCs (Zones of Control, the six hexes around the hex the unit is in), ending movement in but also restricting movement out to one hex, which cannot be another enemy ZOC; (3) Differential-based combat, where an attacking forces of 9 Strength Points against 3 defending is expressed as +6 rather than 3:1; (4) a simultaneous Combat and Morale roll during combat, with two dice rolled, one representing each; (5) a distinction between Safe, Unsafe, and No Lines of Retreat for units forced to retreat in combat, based on where enemy units are in respect of the retreating units, leading to different secondary results. There are also rules for cavalry and infantry forming square, but these aren't germane to the American Civil War scenarios.

There are some really fun things in the system. It's simple but has a decent amount going on behind the scenes, which is a big thing in its favour. It has the pleasing efficiency of simultaneously rolling the die which will determine the Melee results, whilst also rolling a die to determine any Morale checks which are a result of that Melee. Its approach to ZOCs is evidently an attempt to encourage the use of reserves and of modelling the stickiness of close engagement without resort to extra markers or dice modifiers. Differential-based combat is a satisfying way of providing better granularity (albeit necessarily over a smaller range of unit strength points/combat factors) in combat than odds-based systems.

Not all of it quite works, at least in all situations – the low counter density and generally short length of game (in terms of number of turns in the game) means that the hyperactive effects of ZOCs in the game is exaggerated. In scenarios where the ground scale is 352 yards and each turn covers 1 and a half hours, it feels strange that a regiment or brigade might take a whole 90 minutes to move 352 yards away from an enemy it's been fighting (where a routed unit might take no casualties whilst safely fleeing three times that distance in the face of the enemy). That's not to say they shouldn't be slow in withdrawal – but semi-porous ZOCs, with moving out costing extra movement rather than causing a flat cap, seems like a better bet, and would reward having a Leader stacked with that unit (as his Movement buff could be used to get your troops into the fight elsewhere quickly).

That's the most significant niggle, but in a small footprint, short playtime game it's no big deal. There are other small issues – Leaders are very powerful as unit buffs but not that important for command and control, for instance. However, on the whole, the system does give a sense of the major battlefield concerns of the era (keeping reserves to bolster armies with fragile morale, the complex battlefield logistics of massing forces, holding that terrain which aided contemporary weaponry), with a fairly small rules overhead. However, one vital thing is missing from the core rules – the Combat Results Table (CRT), which is instead customized for each scenario and included in the scenario rulesheet. The CRT is the final test of the system, which if successful gives the player a sense of being at the sharp end in the combat of the specific era; it's a serious litmus test for simulation realism and player engagement. To know how successful that element of the game is, we'll need to look at its iteration in a specific scenario. On that basis, let's turn to Wilson's Creek.

Is the scenario any good?

The types of results available on the CRT are nuanced and show some thought behind the design – for instance, a roll of 4 always leads to all Leaders on both sides in the combat rolling to check if they are wounded or killed. This makes close combat risky for all sides, no matter how otherwise overwhelming one force is – if you get that “middling” result on the CRT, your heroic general may be struck down at the moment of his triumph. The CRT in general emphasizes Morale Checks, which if passed allow you to hold your ground in a tight battle. A few of the results also create a decision space for players – do they withdraw, or stay close but apply a different negative result? It is a relatively bloodless CRT – except for “coincidental” losses to units from unsuccessful Routs, there is only one result (Ex) which guarantees casualties on either side. In the only other result which produces losses (Ax/Dx), the loss is an alternative to retreating which the player may choose if they pass a Morale Check.

Though this doesn't completely model the relative bloodyness of American Civil War battles (which often saw about 3 times as many casualties as in the same-sized battle of the American Revolution), the number of losses for each side in my play of this isn't far off the historical percentage. The Union took 3 step losses out of 15 total steps of infantry and artillery – historically they took about 20% casualties, so that seems right. The Confederates took 2 step losses out of 22 totals steps of mounted infantry, infantry, and artillery, not far from their historical loss rate of 10%. That said, the Confederates are able to “heal” damaged units using a special rule only available to them, so at the end of the game they actually had functionally suffered no step losses. That special rule, however, is pretty insignificant given the real issue with this scenario.

Essentially, given the bloodlessness of the CRT, and the relative possibility of escaping unscathed when Retreating or Routing from combat, the victory condition for the Confederates is next to impossible. For a major victory, they are supposed to eliminate or rout off the map all Union units (except Vedettes, of which more below) whilst also having moved some of their mounted infantry units off the board in pursuit. A minor victory for them still requires them to chase the Union entirely off the board and then score more Victory Points. The Union, to win a major victory, must simply still have a unit on the board at the end of the game, or they must take the Confederate HQ (but why would they even bother to try?).

Now, in one sense, given the time scale represented in the game, this is nearly the historical result – there are 9 turns in the game, running from 5:30am to 5:30pm. The main battle was over earlier in the afternoon, albeit via the Union forces formally withdrawing rather than being routed. However, as described, there are simply not realistically enough combat results forcing losses to do real damage, and even when Routed I was usually able to safely withdraw my Union troops.

This leaves one with the uneasy sense that this scenario was not properly playtested. That's a shame, given a lot of the scenario design is clever or interesting. For instance: Union Vedette units who can't fight but can slow Confederate movement; the Union player choosing where and when to enter the map; the Confederates being initially less able to move their units due to their surprise, and being unable to effectively co-ordinate the two groups that made up their army (Confederate and Arkansas troops and the Missouri State Guard); Confederate mounted riflemen being basically just quick but unwieldy infantry; and various historically elite units being represented nicely (the capable and robust Confederate Army troops under McIntosh and Hebert, the very good but very fragile regular US Army troops which have the highest Combat rating in the game but only one step per unit). Nonetheless, the final impression I took away was of a half-baked design which had been churned out upon demand.

Conclusion

The Musket and Saber Quickplay rules are very functional. I'll need to play them more to get a thorough sense of how they model, at a simple level, ACW battles. However, they do some key things well – for instance, the prevalence of poor drill and discipline, represented by the way Routs and Disruption work. As to the specific scenario, only play it with some kind of “fix” in place for the victory conditions – I've uploaded an alternative on BGG (and Confederate set-up information, as the module as published gives unhistorical set-up positions), which you can find at https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/150312/musket-saber-qp-wilsons-creek-unofficial-alternate.

REVIEW: Commands and Colors: Ancients - by Richard Borg (GMT Games)

Commands and Colors: Ancients by Richard Borg

Introduction

That Commands & Colors: Ancients is a great game, is a fact (nearly) universally acknowledged; but it ought to interest us why great games are great games. Naturally, the way we usually first respond to games we enjoy is along the following lines: “that mechanic was really fun”, “I enjoyed this decision”, and so forth. For C&C:A, the impressionistic statement that sums up what makes the game great is an unusual one, insomuch as it sounds negative: “why on earth is my hand of cards this bad?!”. However, what that statements represents is this: C&C:A may be the best, most satisfying simulator of command and control issues in warfare on the market.

Summary

First, a summary of the game: in C&C:A, each player controls an army of the ancient world – Romans, Carthaginians, Greeks, and so forth. Their army consists of various units, each of which consists of a number of wooden blocks (4 for infantry, 3 for cavalry, 2 for elephants and chariots, 1 for leaders). These are deployed on a hex-based map, which may be entirely open ground or may have some terrain hexes in place, as per the historical battle being fought. Each player has a hand of cards – more cards if their generals are better – and each turn they will each play one, before drawing a new card. These cards broadly fall into two types: one type activates units in each of the three sectors of the battlefield (Left, Centre, Right); the other activates units based on their formation and weaponry (Light, Heavy, Mounted, etc). Activating a unit allows you to move and attack at range or in close combat; each unit's capabilities in movement and combat are defined in one of the play aids. Light troops are fast, capable of ranged combat, and able to avoid the worst of enemy melee attacks, whilst being pretty bad up close themselves; Heavy troops are slow, can't fire at range, but are lethal in close combat. Essentially the game consists of stringing together moves and attacks from the cards in your hand, so as to destroy the number of enemy units and occupy victory hexes required by the scenario for victory.

You can learn it in just a few minutes with the right teacher, though the rulebook doesn't always make it seem that simple. The niggles there include: terrain effects could be made clearer (as they are with the TEC in the Napoleonics version of the game), and unit special rules could be collated better. Generally, one's induction into the game could be done better in the first few pages of the rulebook. But this is nonetheless all pretty trivial stuff. The components – mounted mapboard, command cards, wooden blocks, stickers – are all of a very high quality. Some players complain about having to affix stickers to the blocks (hundreds of blocks in the core set, 2 stickers each) – frankly I quite enjoy it. Your anal retention mileage may vary on that, of course.

Command and Control

So what about my claim above that the command and control mechanics in this game are amongst the best? Well, for the sense of frustration I described, imagine this: your hardest hitting units are spread on your right and centre. You manage to get moving in the centre, but you're just not getting cards for the right section. You're having to use other cards (Move Heavy Troops, for instance, or a card allowing you to activate a Leader and nearby units) to get anything going there. Your centre units take out some of the enemy, but are shattered in turn. The enemy is just in reach of your right flank units, and it may all come down to what you draw at the end of your turn. If it activates those troops – victory! But if not – disaster.

Is this relying too much on luck? Well, over the course of a game, you should get at least some useful cards, and at any rate, your job at the start of Turn One is to see what strategy you can come up with what's in your starting hand. My experience of over 50 games of C&C:A is that what feels like bad luck in your hand – or on the dice – turns out to be far more nuanced, far more balanced. You always get some good cards and you always get some good dice, but we tend to assign disproportionate weight to those moments we *think* are key, and forget everything else. If nothing else, what goes around comes around. Sure, it seemed like your opponent had all the good cards one game, but watch their face fall in your rematch.

But why am I saying this is so good? Well, the cards themselves and the hand-management sub-game are very successful at creating the effect of “friction”, Clausewitz's concept of the confusion and efficiency degradation inherent on the battlefield. I say they produce the effect, because this is avowedly “design for effect” - the experience you have is a good simulation, but the way you accomplish that is not. You may be surprised to hear this, but real world generals don't manage their armies using cards of hands. Napoleon didn't lose at Waterloo because he couldn't get a card for Grouchy's wing. However, all wargame mechanics have a degree of “design for effect” involved, even at the basic level that gamemaps are tiny-scale 2D representations of real physical space. Abstraction always leads away from “design for cause” to “design for effect”. The fact that – as I'll explain – the cards in C&C:A do the latter so well is worth remarking and studying.

On a battlefield, two key things affecting command and control are the amount of information available to the command and the efficiency of the command and control structures. In C&C:A, the players know exactly where every unit is, they know what the victory conditions are, they know any special rules – but they don't know what units can move at any time. They don't know what choices are available to their opponent (as they can't see their hand of cards), and they don't know what future choices are available to them (as they can't see the ordering of the deck). They can try to guess what their opponent is doing based on what cards they've played, they can try to piece together a strategy of their own from what's in their hand and what they can hope to get from the deck, and those two pieces of speculation are a large part of the skill of the game. This isn't just a fun game element – it does (I'd argue) successfully challenge the player with the real lack of information generals suffer from, and force them to make the sort of speculative decisions necessary on a changing battlefield.

The card mechanic also helps model the effect of friction on the efficiency of command and control structures. The contents of the deck helps players with units spread evenly across the battlefield, but in adjacent groups led by Leader blocks (via its spread of Section and Leadership cards). The size of your hand is affected by the skill of your commanding general, so the number of choices and amount of information available to you is in proportion to your army's command and control capability. As the battle proceeds, and each player's formations begin to break up due to combat and due to only being able to order so many units each turn, command and control becomes harder to exercise. By the end, both players are desperately trying to mass forces at the point of decision via increasingly inefficient cardplays, each looking to strike the final winning blow.

Plenty of very good games don't offer this much simulation of command and control issues. The two previous games I've reviewed here – Fire and Movement: Battle of the Scheldt and BoAR: Monmouth – and three games I'll be reviewing soon – Rommel's War, ASL Starter Kit #1, and Musket and Saber: Wilson's Creek – all have essentially good core systems, but none seriously model command and control, whether at the squad tactical, grand tactical, or operational scale. Most of those games are the same sort of complexity as C&C:A or heavier. For a simple-ish game to so effectively give players the sort of difficulties and confusion proper to a general on a battlefield is, I think, a real success.

Sniffs and Coughs

The Commands and Colors series receives a lot of condescension. Critical grognards may allow that it's “more or less” a wargame, and that possibly it's an alright gateway game, but real wargamers will grow past it. The core of the criticism is about the game's depth – does it simulate at any deep level the way ancient (or Napoleonic, or WW2, or whatever) worked? I'll stick here to discussing how it deals with ancient warfare.

I've already vigorously lauded its command and control mechanics. The most popular approaches to modelling that in the current wargames market, as far as I can see, rely on either chitpull or on Berg-style leader activation (ala Great Battles of History or of the American Civil War). Chit pull is slightly more complex than C&C:A, and the contents of a chit cup or the order of activations can be manipulated in various ways; Berg-style systems are almost by their nature a lot more complex, though they do bring a lot of depth with them. Chit-pull, then, is almost as simple to integrate into a system, though arguably less intuitive to the non-wargamer, and seems easier to granulate. However, the same can be done with Commands and Colors – specific cards can start in player's hands, for instance. One could argue either way as to dramatic value (which chit comes out next, which cards comes out from the deck), but C&C:A's Igo Ugo play probably helps keep the newer player better invested. So, yes, as to command and control, C&C:A is a great beginner game, but – for the reasons offered above – it keeps giving.

Another critique as to depth is as to whether the way unit types act is deep or realistic. Well, it's not deep in detail, and detail can be fun, but it can also be distracting. I have theorized that C&C:A draws inspiration from the DBx series of miniature rules before, and the key innovation there was designer Phil Barker moving from granular equipment-based unit rules in his previous WRG rulesets towards a “battlefield function/activity” system. In the Ancients iteration of the system, for instance, troops with bows might be either Psiloi or Bow, depending upon whether they functioned as skirmishers or as massed missile fire. Psiloi aren't very dangerous but are hard to kill and good at screening other troops; Bow are dangerous but easier to break up in the field. Same weapons, different effect. The same logic is applied to unit types in C&C:A – Heavy Infantry covers heavily armoured, formed troops armed with with pikes, spears, and swords, for instance. This is more abstraction than in DBx, but the same principle is in play – these are your slow-moving, heavy-hitting troops. And on the field the way the rules work for each unit type does make it feel like it. Light Infantry can skip forward and fire a bit (but not always very effectively), before Evading mele attacks and thereby making it harder to kill them. Heavy Infantry move half the speed of Light but once they're in combat they're deadly. Warriors (a special type of Medium Infantry) can move quickly into combat and whilst full-strength and high morale can do loads of damage, but their willingness to fight degrades once they take damage. This is more than enough unit detail for a game that takes an hour to play.

One also hears critique not about whether the behaviour is detailed but whether it is realistic. I can only really see this having much weight in one instance – in the case of the slightly more complex rules for Elephants. Beyond that, I'd argue unit behaviour is realistic to the depth the system goes. Elephants, on the other hand, can be a frustration – not so much with their unique attack dice situation (they attack with whatever their opponent attacks with, so they are much better against Heavy Infantry than Light, which is a fantastic way of modelling their battlefield strengths and weaknesses), but with the propensity for them to be a decisive factor in their army winning or losing, essentially on two or three rolls of the dice. Let's say you line up your Elephants perfectly and release them into the middle of your opponent's Heavy Infantry – there's a perfectly good chance they'll either shatter two or three enemy units, or that they'll do one block of damage and then be instantly killed in return. Of course, that's not entirely untrue to history, but it's an area where the luck involved does not always feel either a leveller or a challenge to be dealt with, but a punishment for one player or the other. However, again, with the weight of much experience of playing this game behind me, things do even out, both within the individual game and over a series of games. Elephants could be improved, certainly, but given that's the worst I have to say about the unit depiction, I think the game's doing pretty well.

Conclusion

Obviously I think this is a really good game. It's one of four games I've given a 10/10 on BGG. I think it's a great introductory game – I've played it with two of my preteen nephews and nieces, I've played it with my non-gamer dad, and I've introduced several other people to wargames via it. Furthermore, those people enjoy it! But it's a game I still enjoy playing, too. The variety of scenarios, the variety of unit types, the tension and challenge inherent in the core card mechanic, all combine to make this eminently playable for the veteran as well as the beginner.

REVIEW: Fire and Movement: Battle of the Scheldt: The Devil's Moat - by Eric R. Harvey and Christopher Cummins (Decision Games)

An Introductory Wargame

So – what makes an ideal introduction to wargames? Well, you'll need to define ideal, introduction, and wargames. I'm cheekily not going to it, but I'm going to say that Battle of the Scheldt: The Devil's Moat by Decision Games is, at least, a very good introduction to hex-and-counter wargames. I say on the basis that my wife played it and enjoyed it. She plays hobby games generally (and successfully), and wargames in amongst that, but her only hex-and-counter experience previously was The US Civil War (GMT Games, designed by Mark Simonitch). She simultaneously enjoyed it and found it bafflingly dense. My current campaign game of Rommel's War both bemuses her and takes up a lot of precious space in the dining room she could probably use better. But this worked.

Battle of the Scheldt, designed by Christopher Cummins and Eric R. Harvey, utilises the Fire & Movement system, one of a number of simple systems Decision Games use in their Folio Game Series. Fire & Movement covers 20^th century warfare (where Musket & Saber, for instance, covers 19^th century warfare); the main rulebook is 8 pages long, whilst the exclusive rules for this scenario are 4 pages long. The game also includes a 17”x22” map and 100 counters. All components are functional-to-good – the rule are pretty clearly laid out, the counters are alright (with nice national colour schemes), the map by Joe Youst is as simple and attractive as his usual work. But why is it good – at least as an introductory game?

Well, I suppose in one sense it has to be a good game, and we should address mechanics. But there's something about the “feel” - accomplished both by the core mechanics and the scenario chrome – which means that, once it's proven to function as a game proper, it can also function as a way to understand and engage with wargames as history and as conflict simulation (which are slightly different things, I'd argue, without desiring to prove why at this point).

A Short Mechanical Overview

A Fire & Movement game will consist of a number of turns, each of which will consist of one player taking their own turn and then the other player taking theirs. Each player turn consists of 4 phase – Movement, Combat, Mobile Movement, Mobile Combat. All units can move and attack in the first two, as appropriate; units marked as Mobile that have not already acted can move and attack in the Mobile phases. This allows armoured exploitation, which obviously fits the WW2 dynamic. Only one unit (counter) can be in a hex, though movement and retreat through friendly hexes is possible. There are soft zones of control (ie the 6 hexes around a unit), limiting but not blocking enemy movement, and affecting retreats after combat.

Combat is resolved by totalling the attacking units' Attack stats, comparing them with the defender's Defence stat, and then adding Support markers (on which more in a moment) to find a “differential” (the difference between the two totals). The attacking player then rolls a six-sided die and checks the result on a combat result table (CRT), with the column being the differential and the dice result being the row – the better the differential for the attacker, the worse the column's results are for the defender, and so forth. Fire & Movement does something quite clever with the CRT, integrating terrain into the CRT directly. You look at the top of the CRT, where the terrain is listed, find the right terrain row, and read along to the differential; this scales results in favour of the defender in a simple way. Of course that loses some of the delicacy possible with a separate terrain effects chart (TEC) – you can't have one terrain type double defence points whilst another just gives one column shift in favour of the defender.

Support markers replace specific counters for air and artillery assets, and are rated with a number which influences the differential (+2, +7, etc). In Battle of the Scheldt, you randomly draw from your side's pool of facedown counters each turn; in other games in the system your pool is fixed. You return all your counters at the end of each turn and draw again. These are used as part of a bidding mechanic in combat; the attacker gets to put one down first, or not; then the defender; then the attacker again; and finally the defender. There's a bluffing element in here (is he going to put down a marker or not? can I get him to waste a token for minimal cost?); there's a question of resource management (what other combats are going to happen this turn? am I going to attack in my player turn and so need to conserve markers?). This is clever and fun.

The other way you can use them – as part of an attack without an attacking counter, as part of a “bombardment” - is pretty lame. Not inherently, but the lack of restrictions on where bombardments can happen and the fact that if the attackers lose they have to damage their nearest counter (“friendly fire”) mean you'd have to houserule to make this worth the risk in most situations, and to ensure the breach in immersion isn't too extreme. In my two and a half plays, I haven't bothered doing that. No harm is done by leaving them out.

                                                       Initial Setup and Support Markers

The Feel of a Wargame

That question of immersion brings me back to what I in fact think is a great strength of the game and system. A good wargame, for me, isn't simply a good game (though it is that); it's a game which utilises the theme (war – and a specific war or battle) to engage the player in interesting decisions and to help them understand historical situations. Perhaps in a more nuanced sense, it combines the two so that players inhabit something like the historical decision space (or an interpretation of it).

This game achieves that. What's most interesting from a design perspective is that the game offers a relatively small number of big decisions. It offers any number of small decisions and tests of skill, but for the German player there's really only one big decision (seek to hold the Allies short of Beveland for most of the game, or defend the peninsula's neck whilst counterattacking further up the map to mess with the Allies). Indeed, for the Allies there isn't even a decision on that scale – the biggest decisions are about where to stick amphibious landings on a very limited coastal stretch.

But it is by limiting that decision space but making the management of it challenging, and adding in small bits of historical feel, that the game triumphs. The Germans have initially useful reinforcements and can even heal damage from some of their units early in the game – but they have very few counters and very soon their forces are in irretrievable decline. The Allies have a lot of units and a lot of replacement points, as well as useful batches of reinforcements later in the game, but they suffer from very real time pressure which makes every delay infuriating, whilst the need to cycle out weakened brigades and preserve their limited Mobile units means a lot of thoughtful management and manoeuvre. The scenario-specific movement rules and CRT help with this – moving through the ubiquitous Flooded areas is painfully slow, whilst the high likelihood of indecisive combat results in urban areas can make the Germans very hard to shift from their basement bunkers and church spires. Meanwhile, the Canadians landing in the Breskens Pocket in their amphibious vehicles or the special German 88mm Anti-Tank support marker (which can be played as a bonus marker against Allied tanks) are really nice small touches which make the era seem more real – this isn't just a wargame, but a wargame about World War 2. The scenario accurately depicts the superior numbers and firepower of the Allies, whilst also showing what a slog the campaign was – but in an enjoyable and immersive way. It does all this in a simple way, as well, which shows up many more complex systems.

A Primer for Wargaming

The relative obscurity of the battle and the useless Bombardment rule are the only downsides to this system. Those are trivial issues, and as a hex-and-counter to introduce a new player to, this is an attractive proposition. It does many of the things which the subgenre ought to do, and it does them well – from the tactile illusion of moving markers in a battlefield war-room to immersing the player in the nuances of the conflict through the big movement and combat rules and the little historical add-ons. It does them with simple and readable rules, running the same length as or shorter than some popular Eurogame rules (12 pages to Catan's 16 or Pandemic's 8). It can even play to more or less its stated length – 2 hours. No good wargame is, I think, going to be strictly “light”, but the clarity of the rules and the surprising depth of the simulation mean this feels to me like a great primer for people who might be interested in wargames but find them intimidating or inaccessible. There are other very good primers to wargames in other subgenres, but this is my favourite so far in hex-and-counter. Decision Games' Mini Series may be even better; I'll be playing some entries in that soon.

Conclusion

Aside from one rules niggle, and the general issues of sourcing non-GMT wargames outside the USA (Esdevium Games do have Decision in their catalogue, but it's a very spotty selection), this is a solid game, and potentially a very good primer for hex-and-counter wargames.

REVIEW: Battles of the American Revolution Volume V: Monmouth – by Mark Miklos (GMT Games)

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 18^th 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.