One 22" x 34" map; 350 counters; 5 Play Aid Charts; Rules Book. Boxed, Spearhead, POB 523263, Springfield VA 22152; Sprhead@AoL.com. $35 Designing a Gettysburg game appears to have become the hobby's Coming of Age Ritual. I count eight in the past two years, including one each in France and Japan. As a pure marketing decision, it's tough to beat, Gettysburg always being a sure seller amongst wargamers. But is there really a need for that many ? The same old units come marching down the same old roads, with the same old dilemmas. Will Buford hold out long enough for Reynolds to arrive in time ? Can Ewell come crashing down on the Union right before Howard gets into position ? Will the Federals hang on until nightfall? The same answers, in a new set of clothing, appear in Spearhead's They Met at Gettysburg. TMAG is quite a testament to Courtney Allen's old Storm Over Arnhem game. For those of you not familiar with this system, it eschews hexes in favor of areas of varying sizes, each area normally dominated by some particular terrain feature: Little Round Top, the Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg town, etc. The size of each area depends upon the ruggedness of the terrain within it, so that Little Round Top only includes the hill itself, while the areas to the west of Cemetery Ridge are quite large since they feature wide expanses of open ground. The borders are rather inconsistent and generally follow roads, streams, or simply arbitrarily drawn lines on the ground. Whether or not you will like these games depends largely on whether you buy the notion of arbitrary areas being equivalent to the hexes found in most other games. In a four-hour turn you should be fighting for control of a terrain feature, not just a hex-sized chunk of it, and that's the sort of mindset that TMAG aims to create in its players. Infantry and cavalry are demi-brigades, and map scale is 1 inch equal to about 260 yards. TMAG's graphical package is pleasing, if not spectacular. I rather like the boxcover, and I found the map particularly striking without falling into the excesses of color found in 3DoG. The counters are less successful though, pale colors with small, rather indistinct figurines drawn on them. The counter-backs are very unfortunate. Units will spend much of their time flipped over. Unluckily every unit is white on the back with only a colored band to distinguish Confederate from Union, and it's very easy to mistake the enemy's troops for your own. Once you get used to the no-hex approach, your next culture shock is the sequence of play. Players alternate impulses, activating units within one area to bombard or volley fire an adjacent area, entrench, or move & assault. The first Confederate die-roll in each impulse is compared against the total number of impulses played during that turn; if equal to or less than that number, the turn is finished. Thus, while you can never predict how long the turn will last, commanders will soon learn that three impulses is about the most you're going to get in a turn, so activations must be carefully selected for maximum effect. A harrowing business, that high command. Third in the triumvirate of TMAG surprises is the combat system. Veterans of other ACW brigade-level games will be surprised to note a lack of morale ratings on the counters; these have instead been worked into the unit strengths, so that the Union Iron Brigade is one of the bigger outfits in the game, despite being of only average historical manpower. Rather than using the grand old odds-ratio CRT, TMAG has both attacker and defender choose one unit to spearhead the assault/defense. Each, then, rolls a die, modified for the number of attacking units, the terrain of the defender's hex, and defending artillery support. The totals are compared, with the lower player losing and taking losses equal to the difference between them. Losses may be absorbed by becoming Spent (fatigued), retreats, or eliminations. Sound like a lot to swallow ? It can be at first, but thankfully the rules are well laid-out with copious examples of play, and a very helpful step-by-step Player Aid card takes you through the more complicated bits. If you are new to the system, I reckon it will take 2-3 playings to get the mechanics down. None of the rules are very difficult or complex; they just require a little time to get used to. The combat system, though, is not easy for, or on, the attacker. To have any chance of a successful assault you really have to pile in attacking units to gang up on the lone defender, using as many divisions as possible to get lots of die roll modifiers. Given the historical difficulty ACW generals had of combining even brigades, I'm not sure I buy this. But defending an area in depth will generally allow the defender to absorb the losses from one attack without giving ground. So the trick is to attack in two waves, the first assault wearing down and fatiguing the defenders while the second, in theory, drives them out of their positions. Lest you think this is the secret to victory, remember that you'll normally only have 3 activations per turn, and you spend two of them pulling off the above operation to the neglect of other areas of the field. The game does a very good job of mirroring the command systems of both armies. Corps leaders are required to activate units in an area, and here the Union has the clear edge with a lighter, more flexible command structure. Unfortunately, for the sake of simplicity, TMAG sacrifices the interesting personality differences between the various commanders, so that Dan Sickles is equal to Winfield Hancock , and both are the same as Longstreet. The overall commanders Meade and Lee take a much more sedate role, serving only to re-energize a subordinate corps leader when he becomes inactive. This is historically accurate, as each commander allowed his corps leaders to pretty much fight the battle as they saw fit. Where TMAG scores highest is the innate tension created by its sequence of play. It insures that neither player will be able to do all that he wants, leading to lots of tense decision-making: should I use this impulse to dig the guys in on Cemetery Hill, shuttle in reinforcements, or perhaps launch a surprise counter-attack? Chances are you won't be able to perform all three actions before the turn ends, so every turn becomes a balancing act between the important and the just plain critical. Adding to this is the Advantage marker, a subject of much hobby debate. The Advantage is held by one player who can use it to activate units in two different areas during the same impulse, conduct two activations in a row, re-roll any die roll, or deactivate an enemy leader. This is a very gamey device. I have no problem with the first two possible uses, reflecting perhaps a sudden shift in momentum or seizure of the initiative, but the latter two set off my "crack playtester" alarm bells. The "re-roll the die" mechanic is wargaming's answer to running a wire hanger along a blackboard, or an evening with Pauly Shore. And, as for "Deactivation", that sounds like a Magic card: "General Howard Takes A Nap; two mana, or a camp follower, needed to wake him up." The first two are a very powerful and aggressive game weapon, and the Union player will generally hold onto the Advantage for dear life to prevent the Rebs from dropping a double activation on him. The latter two? I just ignored them; I recommend you do the same. Despite TMAG's readily apparent strengths, there are two issues that stop me from giving it a rave review. First, Mr. Perla has broken Richard Berg's First Law of Strategic Movement, (Ed. Anathema!! Anathema!! Burn him; he's a witch!!): units that move onto the board as reinforcements will continue to move until they reach a specified point or bump into the enemy. Reinforcements in TMAG enter but freeze after each movement, requiring an activation to start rolling again. This is particularly a problem for the Union, with so many corps entering the map from so many different points that it's not uncommon for them to spend an entire turn activating reinforcements, and still not having enough time to move everybody. Yet these guys historically had no problem getting where they were supposed to be. I would suggest allowing units to strat move for free at the end of each turn, say at half-movement and not be allowed to move into an area adjacent to enemy units The second problem is endemic to the system. To simulate fatigue after movement and combat, units will usually become spent, greatly decreasing their combat strength. This means that when attacking units move adjacent to defenders to get into position for an assault in the next turn, they are spent after moving and then vulnerable to a sudden counter-attack. Since only one defending unit is counted during combat, and spent artillery can't use their defense bonus, this will often result in the would-be attackers being ousted from their area, and even losing a few units. And at the end of every turn all units become un-spent, so the counterattackers are no worse for their exploits. This has been a defender's trick ever since the system first debuted, and I'm surprised that it's never been dealt with. A good solution is one that the eminent C.Vasey suggested: create a special Spent For Movement status, meaning that you can't move again but still fight at full strength. In a four-hour turn, ACW brigades are certainly capable of moving the map distance without becoming exhausted afterward, and I think this rules change would reflect that. So, with TMAG do we have the American Civil War done better? Not really. I feel the same way about this game that I do about We the People. I enjoyed playing TMAG, but it's not a game on the Civil War, it's a game about the Civil War. The distinction is crucial. Gamers will play the system, not the situation, using various tricks and stratagems allowed by the rules that weren't available to their historic counterparts. The nuclear counterattack that I mentioned above is just one of the maneuvers that become apparent once you get used to the game, so playing it turns into which player is better able to exploit rules loopholes. Sort of like wargaming between lawyers. Now there's a scary thought. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphic Presentation: Mostly nice, with some counter problems. Playability: Get ready to spend about 2-3 tries before it starts to fall together and make sense. Replayability: Random turn lengths and the Advantage chit throw every game into the air. Lots of tense, exciting decision-making required. Wristage: Considerable, particularly for a game on this scale. Historicity: You play the game, not the battle. Creativity: Courtney Allen Redux. Comparisons: With about a million Gettysburg games out there, TMAG offers an original examination of the subject. Different is not necessarily better, tho. Overall: Innovative and exciting, but not really quite on target in terms of historical accuracy. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #24 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1996 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com