One 34 x 22 map, 425 counters. Rules booklet. Hell Before Night is designer Chris Perello's second title using the system he designed for his Fateful Lightning Gettysburg game, favorably reviewed by Peter Perla in BROG, some time ago. I never got around to FatLite, as I couldn't handle "still another Gettysburg game", and I was mind-melding with the Great Battles of History series at the time. It just so happens that, along with Antietam, Shiloh is one of my favorite battles. With the lack of new GBACW, or any other regimental Civil War games, other than 3DoG, I decided to take the plunge with HBN and see Chris Perello's "take" on regimental-level battles. Hell Before Night, as a design, is quite interesting, mainly because of its striking originality. Where so many designers build on the works of others, Chris has struck out on his own and produced an entirely original system. HBN does not have even the slightest resemblance to the popular GBACW system. (See Perla's review for details.) Chris has pretty much kept the original mechanics intact, although he has made some changes to the CRT, and other aspects of the design, to adapt to the circumstances of the Shiloh Battle, none of which prove overly fortuitous. After examining the map and counters, and reading the rules, I was excited about setting up and playing HBN. I had before me a totally new design on one of my favorite battles! It wasn't long, though, before I began hitting some bumps on the road to The Tennessee (remarkably, a no-show on the map!). The rules are simple enough for a regimental simulation, but they are poorly organized and require several readings to decipher. For example, Extra Strength (ES), one of the key rules in the game, is covered in three separate rule sections, each pages apart and vaguely enough explained to cause some head-scratching. We flip pages from section 5.9, to 9.1, to 5.6 to 5.8. This brings us to explanations of when eliminated units go to the USB (unit status box), what area of the box they are placed in, and how their position in the box is adjusted during the game turn. The USB rule itself refers to still other rules, which refer to yet others. Units returning by ES are placed adjacent to any undisrupted unit of the same formation, their leader, or a friendly entry hex, as long as that unit is not in an enemy ZOC. The rule states that the returning unit can engage in combat too. How does a unit not in an enemy ZOC engage in combat when the combat rule states that combat occurs whenever a friendly unit is in an enemy ZOC? My rulebook is getting dog-eared from page turning already. Game Killer The real game-killer, though, is the map … not how it looks, but what it does in terms of play. First of all, Chris decided to have the west edge of the map start just east of the Confederate army's start line. What this means is that you don't see where, or how, the Confederate army is deployed. Beauregard's deployment of the army was one of the main reasons for its defeat at Shiloh. With typical self-aggrandizement, Kid Creole deployed the army into three successive, Napoleonic massed echelons, totally inappropriate to the terrain. He also split the corps between echelons thus, likewise, splitting command of each attacking wave. These echelons were intended to steamroll their way through Sherman and McClernand all the way to Pittsburgh Landing. You see none of this in Chris's game. The Confederate brigades, instead, enter piecemeal, right in front of Sherman's and Prentiss's divisions, hurling in from the mapedge like dirty gray snowballs. The feeling is more of a meeting engagement than a massed surprise attack. Furthermore, since the Confederates have to bring their units on in the specific order and times given in the set-up and reinforcement list, you have to fight the battle the way Beauregard and Johnston did. Not having a map area in which the Army of the Mississippi is set up, you cannot attempt to redeploy the troops or alter the battle plan. Meanwhile, the Union player, after the game turn one "slows", can move and redeploy his army to maximize his defenses until order is restored and Buell arrives. Most of us play these games not only to study the battles but to try our hand at doing the historical commanders one better, and this is impossible in the critical opening turns of HBN. Another "play" problem with the map is the terrain. Woods have no effect on movement; they don't even slow artillery movement! Moreover, they don't even affect fire combat, since you can fire through two woods hexes and most of the infantry has a fire range of two. At the same time, the creek gullies that bisected the battlefield are given a complex rule section of their own. Some of the gully hexes are possible "morasses", which means that when you enter one, you have to roll on a table to see whether the hex is really a morass or just a creek. If the hex is a morass, and you try to leave it, you have to roll again to see whether you really enter the hex you're headed for or go wandering off in another random direction, possibly even bumping into and firing on your own troops. Gully and morass hexes have their own line of sight and ZOC restrictions, too, which lead to some interesting play anomalies until you've decided what the hex actually is. I don't understand why Chris wasted so much ink on gully rules, then played it rules-light on the battlefield's tangled second-growth vegetation which so disorganized the advance of the raw Confederate troops. Combat is simple enough. You can fire or bombard with infantry and artillery, subject to line of sight restrictions and stacking (all combat is by top unit in the stack only, except for artillery), or you charge with infantry against adjacent units. Where the friction comes in is that combat is subject to numerous modifiers: the state of army morale (leading one to ask just how Johnny Reb knows how his butternut cousin, 400 yards away and vegetationally invisible, feels about what's going on … but we'll take Chris' word for it for now), unit combat intensity (aggressiveness), the presence of heroes, charge and volley markers, and leaders. A lot of modifiers. These mods, which you constantly refer to, are not on the CRT, nor are they printed anywhere on the map; they are printed (and in some cases, such as army morale, buried) in the rulebook. More page flipping (sigh). The combat modifiers are all reasonable and accurate, but computing modifiers, flipping pages and rolling a die, all for one resolution, is not what players call "elegant". The game's combat resolution process is about as confusing, and almost as painful, as that in the actual battle. While we're talking combat, let's take another look at Extra Strength (ES), probably the most discussed mechanic in the system. In HBN it produces some numerically suspect anomalies. Each division has its own allotment of ES, which is the number of eliminated units that can be returned as per ES rules. What ES represents is the depth of the formation. The counters represent the front of the regiment, the units in the battle line. When they are eliminated, it means that the regiment has temporarily lost enough men and cohesion from the part of it which is engaged to render it hors de combat until it is recovered and pushed back up to the front. The extra strength thus represents exactly what it says, the number of men behind the guys fighting in the front lines. What's wrong with its use in HBN is that Grant's Army of the Tennessee and Johnston's Army of Mississippi were of roughly equal size. That's the reason Johnston and Beauregard attacked when they did; they wanted to whip Grant before he was reinforced! In HBN, the ES allotments swell the size of Grant's Army beyond recognition. Using several other games in which unit sizes were quantified as well as a number of books, I did some comparisons of division sizes at Shiloh and discovered that the Perello/Grant divisions are real monsters compared to the opposing Rebs. Sherman's division, which numbered about 7700 men, has 19 points of ES. Meanwhile Hindman, with about 6900 men, has a paltry 4 points of ES. Withers' division of some 6100 men has 7 ES and McClernand (also about 6100 men) has 11. Only one Confederate division, Clark's (4800 men, 17 ES!!), has more than 10 points ES, while all of the Federal divisions have more than 10. The ES anomalies defy logic, not only within the armies themselves (Clark and Hindman) but in comparison to each other. The result is that you can kill and kill and kill Federal regiments and, like the Russians in 1941, they just keep coming back to life. Confederate divisions have such low ES allotments that it takes very little time before eliminated units stay eliminated and the army is badly hurting for men to put in line. Meanwhile, back in 1862, the initial shock of the Confederate attack sent quite a lot of Sherman and Prentiss's men running for cover along the bluffs at Pittsburgh Landing. This doesn't happen in HBN, and, as in the case of the starting set-up and the terrain, the flavor of the battle loses out to the designer's juggling of reality to produce a "player". One wishes Chris had explained how he reached these numbers, and why he chose to do so in this way. I was deeply disappointed with Hell Before Night. Not only does the rules layout make it bothersome to play, but there are some real issues with the veracity of the game's ratings and numbers. I admire, even like, Perello's originality, but until the rules are tightened up and some of the anomalies addressed, there are much better Shiloh games available. I'm hoping the system gets cleaned up and we see some more (maybe smaller) battles without any more of HBN's game-balancing ES sleight-of-hand. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphics: Tolerable, functional but not attractive map. Without the Tennessee, you lose any sense of reference to where you are. Playability: Rather good for a regimental game. Replayability: Not me; I'm outta here. Wristage: No different than any other game on this level. Creativity: A highly original design. Historicity: Massively disappointing, with what appear to be gross distortions in division strengths. Comparisons: Almost any Shiloh game I've seen is better than HBN. Overall: Pluto-time for this one. A real pity, because HBN's relative but rule-obscured simplicity and originality could have given us a completely fresh look at a familiar old battle. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. 2 #26 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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