Any of you remember The Tin Can Quad? No, huh. Well, The Tin Can was the final incarnation of an idea first proposed by West End Games back in the mid-1980s. West End had already published three games in what became known as the "South Mountain Series": South Mountain, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. All these games were based on a design by Richard Berg, with the Chickamauga design work by Jon Southard. Then someone at West End decided to market the series to a fare-the-well by offering consumers a Special Deal. They would take the three games, add a fourth one, a somewhat extended design by Jeff Briggs on that most beloved battle of them all, Gettysburg, and place them all in a special quad game package: a large, old-fashioned, shortbread cookie-like, tin container. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on where you stand -- the idea failed to come to fruition when another, higher placed, personage at West End realized that few were the people who would plunk down $50+ for 4 games in a can, 3 of which most of them already had. And there the idea lay, until the fertile minds at Decision Games started to percolate. With the strains of Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again" filling the background, Decision decided that the time was now ripe to re-release the quad, which had done very well just ten years ago. (South Mountain had won the Origins/Charles Roberts Best Game of 1985, and the series was quite popular in the last half of that decade.) Thus, the birth of War of the Rebellion, and it was Cash Cow Time. Unfortunately, someone forgot that you "milk" the Cash Cow, you don't butcher it for its meat. Have you ever finished playing a game only to shake your head and think, "…there's a really good game in here somewhere -- if only I could wade through the morass of the rules?" If you can fight your way through the swamp and avoid the alligators crawling around your ankles in the swamp that is WotR, you may find the soul of what Mark Herman called "… the best brigade-level Civil War system around." I don't completely agree with Mark on that assessment, but there are a lot of good ideas here. Too bad ol' Doc Decision chose to push the game out the door before it was really ready. The basic game system lies at the crossroads between Berg's regimental-scale, "Great Battles of the American Civil War" series and his later brigade-level games such as 1863. Units are generally demi-brigades of infantry and cavalry and half-battalions of artillery. The ground scale varies from 190 yards per hex to 270 yards per hex. Turns represent anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. Combat includes both fire and melee, and units suffer "cohesion hits" both from combat and certain non-combat operations (like forced marching). There are leaders at division, corps, and army level, rated for Command Radius, Command (used to order the boys into battle), and Leadership Rating (a die-roll modifier for command rolls, forced marching, and combat). The sequence of play is a fairly standard variant of Igo-Hugo, with some wrinkles for command and activation of units. It is in these command rules - none of which were in the originally published games in the series, but were part of Briggs' Gettysburg design - that we find both the best and worst of WotR. It takes something like six pages of rules to explain the activation system. Basically, players must move all the units in one corps before they can move any from another. To determine the number of movement points the units may expend, the player must roll a 10-sided die. Unless they are within range of a leader, each unit must roll separately. Alternatively, a division commander may give orders to his units in range, and they all receive the number of MPs determined by a single die roll, modified by the commander's Leadership. In an extension of this approach, a corps commander may give orders to his division commanders, who may in turn activate their combat units, all using the corps commander's rating. In addition to determining the number of MPs available with the 10-sided die, the commander rolls a 6-sided die to determine how many units (for a division commander) or divisions (for a corps commander) may enter enemy fields of fire during the move. (A field of fire extends two-hexes from the front and flank of most units, and is distinct from the zone of control, which has its own set of effects.) The trick is that, if a unit begins its move in a field of fire, it does not need orders to remain or advance to the attack. Thus, a leader may have to feed his brigades into battle piecemeal, but he can often get all of them engaged in a couple of turns. Once you have figured out what the command rules say, and then understand what they mean, you have either given up in disgust (my first reaction) or begun to appreciate their subtlety. They are what really sets the game apart from the others. They taste a lot like a melange of Gettysburg '77, GBACW, and 1863. It is a flavorful mix, once you break the code, but I for one yearn for more of an alternating flow, such as that in SPQR or Breakout: Normandy, rather allowing all of one side's forces to move before the other can react. The biggest problem with the command rules, and with the game's rules as a whole, are the terribly dense way in which they are presented. The Standard Rules take up 34 pages of an 80-page rules booklet (the rest containing historical summaries, exclusive rules, and scenario instructions for the four games). Many, if not most, of the rules begin with a long-winded, pseudo pop-historical explanation of the reasoning behind the rule, none of which are especially witty or insightful. One of my favorites is the beginning of the rule describing the Sequence of Play (which, by the way, does not appear until page 12, which brings to mind the old Latin proverb: Beware Games with Sequences that Start After Page 6): "To be manageable, a military simulation must organize the confusion and complexity of battle into an understandable format that channels important aspects of tactics into an easily perceived smooth-flowing pattern of activities with equal player interaction ….This is the reason for a sequence of play." Too bad they didn't read their own words. "Easily perceived" and "smooth-flowing" are not words that come to my mind when describing the presentation for the second incarnation of this game system. All the obtuse and overly solemn explanations smack of a remarkably misguided effort to serve as an introduction for newcomers to the hobby. Yeah, right. It's not that the game system is bad. It's not that the design doesn't have good features. It's just that there was too little development and even less execution. In retrospect, execution was what they should have reserved for the developer. I tried playing the new kid on the block, the Gettysburg game. I laid out the map and started punching out counters, wherein arose the game's first problem. In addition to the main counter sheets, the game includes a mini-sheet of 80 counters to replace those that had some printing problem. Now, it was extraordinarily nice of Decision Games to rectify these problems rather than wait for players to complain, a decision for which they deserve kudos galore. (Cheers, not candy bars.) But the sad fact is that the most egregious of the counter problems remains unresolved. For example, two of Ewell's II Corps divisions have the same color coding, making it quite almost impossible to distinguish which units respond to which divisional commander. In a game that revolves around command and control as much as this one does, such a failure is more than frustrating. Even more frustrating is the complete lack of several types of markers described in the rules and essential for keeping track of the many tricky nuances of the system: Moved markers, to identify units that have completed their movement; No Fire/No Assault markers to mark moved artillery; "Reinf" markers to mark arriving reinforcements still eligible for special movement rates; etc. After opting to throw a small temper tantrum, as opposed to simply tossing the game, my sense of curiosity and fair play compelled me to try again. I set up the "Second Day at Gettysburg" and set to. Despite the command rules, the Confederate's were able to mount the kind of full-scale, coordinated attack Lee had hoped for but the CSA commanders could not deliver. The Union line buckled on both flanks, but counterattacks regained both Little Round Top and Culp's Hill.The tactical play seemed a bit too cluttered, but on the whole, things felt about right. Unfortunately, play was slow. The First Day scenario, though, went better. With only Heth and Buford on board at the start, play was faster (if not quite furious). The Union reinforcements arrived just in time to solidify a line on MacPherson Ridge, Rodes arrived just in time to threaten to roll up that line's flank, and even Reynolds managed to get shot at about the time he did historically! The number and arrival of the opposing leaders created an interesting effect, much closer to the type of alternating leader activations that I missed so much in the Second Day scenario. Despite its problems and irritations, then, I slowly found myself warming up to the game. There are, unquestionably, lots of both big and little problems. In addition to the counter situation, the rules are poorly written and laughably formatted, and proofreading was non-existant, with an enormous number of mistakes in rules cross-references. Yet, somehow, the promise remains too good even for an old cynic like me to simply dismiss the game as fatally flawed… and believe me, that was exactly the way I felt after my first encounter. The original South Mountain and Shiloh were, as I said in a review a decade ago, "elegant", even "brilliant". The mechanics sported a clean, straightforward system that almost effortlessly integrated combat losses, fatigue, command and control, and just about anything you could want in a battle game. I never felt quite the same affection for Chickamauga - too many changes to the things I liked about the original games. Southard added the concept of engaged units (units in the enemy Field of Fire) and elaborated on the command rules. (And he took away my artillery. Realistic? Arguable. Fun? Definitely not!) In WotR, third-generation designer, Jeff Briggs, carried many of those ideas one step farther. Unfortunately, he did not get enough help in paring the system down and polishing it to as fine a sheen as the original. Thus, while War of the Rebellion gives players a good feel for Civil War battle at the right level of detail and control for an army commander, it's neither as clean, nor as elegant as the original. And it certainly is not as easy to play. Most of the problems can be - and should have been - fixed. If you don't mind spending 50 bucks for a nice "fixer-upper with a wet basement", then go for it. As for me, I'm glad I have a copy. But I'm also glad I didn't pay for it. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphic Presentation: Professional but not pretty. Maps OK, but counters overwrought and full of errors. Replacement counters correct most but not all printing mistakes. Playability: Poor out of the box, much better with experience. Good for solitaire. Can be quite slow. Replayability: If you can get through the rules, there is a wealth of play value. Each of the games provide players unique problems and varied solutions. Wristage: Fairly high, as dieroll resolution abounds. Creativity: A wealth of good ideas burdened with sloppy development and presentation. Historicity: Pretty good, but as with all Civil War games, many players will find much to quibble with, particularly in the ratings of various units and leaders. (CSA cavalry at Gettysburg with the same firepower as Buford's boys? I don't think so.) A good blend of control and chaos. Comparisons: Much more effective than 1863, particularly for Gettysburg. Two orders of magnitude more realistic than the other Decision Games Quads. As complex in its own way as The Gamers' Civil War Brigade series, but without the paperwork. I still like the original South Mountain and Shiloh better. Overall: Frustrating and painful, as are many Decision Games products, not so much for what it is but for what it could have been and wasn't. from DECISION GAMES Four 22"x34" maps; 480 backprinted counters; 10-sided and 6-sided dice; Rules and Scenario Book; Charts and Tables; Boxed. Decision Games, POB 4049, Lancaster CA 93539. $50. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 13 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com