One 20" x 25" map, 480 counters, Rules Book, 8 Player Aid folders. Boxed. May be ordered from Boulder Games, et al. for c. $36.
In the one year I frittered away in graduate school, ostensibly going for my MA, but, in reality, attempting (vainly, it turned out) to avoid the draft, I took a class in the French Revolution. It was given by a professor who, from all appearances, had been a participant therein and whose voice - when you could understand him - rarely carried past his lips. That was not A Good Thing, as I usually sat in the back row, the few instances where I actually deigned to attend the class. The end result was that I understand virtually nothing about what happened, or why, attributing it all to a bad sound system. As it turns out, this lack of understanding has little to do with the sound system, and much to do with the topic at hand.
The French Revolution is sort of like an early version of "The Andromeda Strain", with political positions sitting in for the virus, and which appear to change shape and effect virtually at will. But the participants are fascinating, and their solutions to the problems of daily political life in France were often so off-the-wall, let's see if this works, that their creativity becomes as depressing as it is dazzling.
None of this has filtered on down to the gaming industry, in general, although there was a sort of role-playing game some years back, in which few people showed any interest. Recently, though, this shows signs of changing. About 3 or so years ago, a group of six French gamers, habitants of some local Wargame Club, designed - by committee, so it seems; individually they are Messrs. Caillat, Gerard, Goyon, Marcé, Roso and Ruelle - the first, full-fledged attempt at simulating the events of the Revolution, La Patrie en Danger. We gave this a brief, and rather superficial, look back in BROG Nr. Whatever. The folks at AWE, though, looked a bit deeper, liked what they saw, and issued a rather gussied up, but faithful, reproduction of LPD: La Revolution Français. And, although we have yet to see TimJim's promised game on this - they had the map back at Origins '96, and again in 97, but seem to have stopped dead at that point - this looks like the definitive work. Then again, being the only work gets you into that pantheon rather easily.
While LPD wasn't bad for a privately published item - their rules book is actually rather better, visually, than the one in LRF, and their colorful paper assignats (money) are far more fun than the counters AWE provides - what you get with the AWE edition is something else. AWE's propensity for remarkable counterwork has been evident with their Europa Universalis, and Rossyia, 1917. But, with LRF, they've upped the ante one level. Each "Personality" (there are 30+), from Louis XVI to Robespierre, from Hébert to Lafayette, has is own (facial) rendering, although we did note that Sieyès looked disconcertingly like Tom Jones. We also awarded Charette the "Best Chapeau in Brittany" trophy. And wait'll you see the Army and "In Revolt" counters! This countermix has so many marvelously individual, and individually illustrated, counters that they not only make you wonder how long it will take the rest of the industry to catch on (and up), but ruminate on whether it could get any better? (I'm sure it could, and will, but we're trying to stay fixed in "the present" these days.)
The map is attractive - it's simply a reproduction of 18th century France divided into 26 areas, plus some useful tracks, a prison box, a guillotine box, and areas for the Assembly and the city of Paris - with, again, a very nice period flavor. If there is one sore point, it is the rules book. Now, this may apply to only the English version, but it looks like it was run off in between editions of the Junior High Weekly News. Yes, it's readable (if totally confusing), once you grasp some of the unusual English words they've chosen: Les tendances politiques becomes "Currents", a term used to separate the Montaignards from the Marais, etc., and one which becomes somewhat confusing when they start using "current" as an adjective, as in "the current government". None of this is insurmountable, and the rules appear, at initial glance, to be more accessible than those of Europa Universalis. Then again, so is Mt. Everest.
Now, despite the presence of army counters, LRF is not a military game. This is a multi-player - six is best - game of life and death power politics, with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy-style play. The players are, almost literally, managing an ongoing revolution, and the player who does this best, wins. Our replay of LRF called upon an all-star, multi-continental cast of magazine publishers and on-line superstars, including such notables as Charlie Vasey ("Perfidious Albion), Mike Siggins ("Sumo"), Stu Tucker ("The General") plus two AoL notables who don't need the PR.
The game started off rather auspiciously and evocatively, with one of the players (not the above) accusing Charlie V, upholder of a Constitutional Monarchist approach, of fixing the dice. An immediate meeting of the Committee of Gaming Safety was called, and a quick call was made to Dr. Guillotine. A replacement was found immediately.
From there, it was all downhill.
Before going further, I must add a note. Our revolutionary replay took place some time ago. Between then, and now, I moved. The game, and many of my notes, got packed into a box. For those who have ever moved a large house, they will know what this means. It is still in that box, wherever that box may be (among the dozens of others holding treasures yet uncovered). To that extent, I call on memory and the few notes I do have at hand.
In one way, LRF provides an evocation of an era and event far beyond that of any other game I have ever played: before we got through even one half of one turn, each player was arguing about interpretation of rules (law) and how they were applied to the point that it started to resemble nothing less than the legislative assembly prior to the leftist takeover. Nothing was clear, everything was open to circumspection, not the least of which were what the game meant by "objectives", which each player had to declare. (It turns out that that this mechanic is not as important as it seems, but we didn't know that at the time.) How definitive did the players have to be? Could an objective be to not do anything? And on it went … .
The general flow of play - actually "play" is quite quick; it's the arguing that's endless - starts with some very nice random events which affect the position of a whole bunch of things, from the clergy, to foreign intervention, to the Paris Commune, to the economy (more on which later). Players, representing parties (or "currents") then declare objectives, which can run from passing laws on divorce to arresting malcontents (Marat spends most, if not all, of the game in hiding), to calling up the troops. (La Patrie en Danger!!) Each player's personalities are then placed, usually in their provinces of strength, and the players then set about doing what they had planned. Sounds simple, eh? Would be were it so.
We had great difficulty - now, remember, this is a bunch of gamers who not only play a lot of games but analyze and comment on them with regularity - in finding a single rule, even a single chart, on which we agreed. At the beginning, we each put it down to the strong personalities involved, together with the fun of the whole thing. Not so. It took us a month to determine which objectives were legitimate, and which had to be ignored.
What we did discover right away is that the economic system of the game pretty much played into the hands of the right (the Royalists and, especially, the Feuillants, most ably played by Charles Vasey). They have most of the money, and by spending freely, they cause massive inflation, which prohibits the poorly-funded left from even attempting to do what it wants. Now, this may be the designers' way of keeping the Right in the game as, historically, it didn't take much time (about one turn, in game terms) for the Montaignards (with the help of some of the center) to dump most of the Constitutional Monarchy types and swing into high gear. Obviously, this can't happen in a game, as that would eliminate at least 2, and probably 3, of the participants before lunch. However, what it does do is place the flow of the game directly in the hands of a good Feuillant player … and that's not what the Revolution is/was about.
Perhaps some of the comments from three of my fellow revolutionaries will summarize our feelings;
"Buried in that wretched rulebook is as a fairly simple and quick game."
"…very little in the game will happen naturally (politically), since the regional money issue is so predominant … it takes an omniscient expert in the convoluted game system to figure out a long-run self interest in subsidizing another current from across the spectrum."
And, most damning …
"I believe there is little worthwhile in this game. It is an unsightly marriage between a number of connected events (the steady increase of the crises, the interaction of the parties, the passing of Laws, and the external military/diplomatic situation) and a classic European game system.… this is not France on the eve of the Revolution, it is a first-draft attempt at the political dynamic in which the game hopes we will hurtle leftwards to the guillotine but grudingly [sic] admits we might not, and ends up getting nowhere."
To this I must add that, some months after we finished (in dismay, rather than with a decision), I had a conversation with a fellow (at Origins) who had played the game several times and really liked it. He said that his group, too, encountered some of the aforementioned roadblocks. However, they discovered that they simply had to ignore much of the window-dressing objective declarations and law passing, and focus all attention - at least for everyone from the Marais on left - on calling a Convention, dumping the Right, and start slicing off heads.
Unfortunately, we never reached that point. We did, though, reach the point where we all felt that a guillotine or two might come to some good use.
CAPSULE COMMENTS
:Graphic Presentation: Magnificent. One of the best-looking games of all time.
Playability: Interpretationally gruesome, but potentially rather fast-moving.
Replayability: I'd like to try, but I don't have enough Welbutrin.
Wristage: None, if you use the automatic AoL dicer. Otherwise, very little.
Historicity: Excellent in the details, but askew in the play out.
Creativity: Lots, but most of it unbridled.
Comparisons: It's sort of a loose cannon Republic of Rome, which is far more developed, but far less fun, or would be if we could understand this game.
Overall: A cardboard Robespierre. Damn!, I really wanted to like this one!
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© Copyright 1998 by Richard Berg
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