The American Civil War is an extremely difficult topic on which to design a "game". A simulation? Easy; a game? a major challenge. There are, at least, two major reasons for this. One, there are an awful lot of people who know an awful lot about the ACW, and an awful lot of those often awful people are often quite "secure", shall we say, in their knowledge. And may the Ghost of Braxton Bragg reside in your briefs if you don't get it exactly the way they securely envision it to have happened.
Secondly - and more importantly - the ACW was an inexorable war. Oh yes, there are places where it could have gone differently, and there are opportunities for "changing" history. But, as an operational exercise, these opportunities are usually "evened out" by the fact that the Union Player is aware where - and why - they will occur. And he is rarely as ineffective as the Union leadership was for the first two years.
And thirdly (we said "at least", didn't we), the ACW is a war of maneuver - not combat. Yes, there were several, huge set-piece battles of major historical import, but, with certain exceptions and with the clear vision of hindsight, these big battles did not have the lasting impact that being maneuvered out of position usually did. Just ask Albert Sidney Johnston, of whom, more below.
All of which serves to introduce the latest effort to bring all of this to the gaming table, Richard Beyma's War for the Union, a design that has been lying around the tables of several companies for more years, I'm sure, then the designer cares to admit - which is one of the game's problems. Union is the latest in a not-very long line of efforts to simulate the ACW on a single map. As such, it is probably one of the better ones, although it is most certainly a (very) Flawed Beauty.
This is one of those games that when you open the box you want to like it, as many of the components are nothing short of excellent. The boxcover is more busy than effective - the game title seems to fade into the flag - but it is eye-catching. Inside is one of those hand-drawn, Rick Barber maps that have become one of CoA's hallmarks. Ignoring Barber's somewhat cryptic and sophomoric credit line (Costikyanitis must be catching), this is a handsome piece of work - if you close your eyes to the unfortunate mushroom-like effect the Appalachians produce, something that could have been avoided had CoA gone with a brown instead of a green to highlight the uncrossable hexsides.
The counters are neat, in the "Annie Hall" sense. Yes, the combat units use silhouettes, but each counter - and there are lots of them - pretty much has its own, individual picture! And check out all the different Zouaves! The other counters are similarly detailed to great effect, and one can only imagine how much work went into producing this stuff.
Union also sports three, separate rules booklets: one for the quickly forgettable basic game, one for the Advanced Rules, and one containing all the Scenario information plus some additional, optional rules. They're well printed and, although somewhat over-written and wordy, pretty easy to understand.
The reason for the latter is that Union is not really a difficult game, despite its rules length. Actually, if you ignore the depressingly overwrought naval rules - which one is sorely tempted to do - this is fairly Low-Moderate complexity stuff of the Igo-Hugo mold. And therein lies one of the game's almost fatal flaws: the Sequence of Play. Even embellished by its quarterly layers of administrative "inter-phases", this is still 1970's wargaming.Unfortunately, the ACW cannot be simulated using fifteen-year-old systems and mechanics. In an operational situation in which maneuver is paramount, using the Igo-Hugo format was a disastrous choice.
Abe Lincoln would have loved Igo-Hugo … at least all of his commanders would have been able to move at the same time. And not only that, but they all get to move before those vaunted CSA generals can even blink! It's hard to imagine under what historical theory the Union automatically gets to go first, especially when historical reality reveals a Union high command almost frozen in place for two years. There is no action-reaction, there is no ability to counter moves, and there is absolutely NO feel for 19th century operational warfare.
And as if that weren't bad enough, when these units do move they pretty much don't go anywhere. Jim Dunnigan, he of blessed memory, used to say that one of the few basic precepts you have to adhere to as a designer is the concept of The Illusion of Movement. Cutting to the chase, this meant no units with MA's of '2' and '3' - especially with terrain that virtually ensures those units will move only one hex per turn. Failure to obey that virtually Old Testament commandment pretty much killed off AH's old Bull Run; it's a slash across the hamstrings for War for the Union.
Except for those units that are being shuttled up to the front by rail, nobody appears to be in any great hurry to get anywhere here. Now, from a historical view, it is true that the armies of the day were rather lethargic. But the actual distances covered - or not covered - by those massive sloths is not really what we're not talking about (although limiting an unopposed, "veteran" army to 75 miles a month seems a mite harsh); what we're involved with here is Perceived Reality. Do you really want to play a game that could take, oh, more than 50 turns, turns in which most of your combat capable units move one hex at a time. This is supposed to be fun, not cleaning up a molasses spill. The culprit here is the decision to use monthly turns, an affectation that not only withers under even the most passing scrutiny - what does it accomplish, other than to make Movement Allowances almost non-existent? - but was distinctly ignored by all other designers of one-map, ACW games. At 25 miles a hex, to keep the game moving, to provide just the teensiest illusion that these armies are marching, not just imitating Sysiphus with a set of bad knees, you have to go to seasonal turns.
All of the above is too bad, because, in terms of combat, this is a dandy little game. It uses the old six-sider, odds/ratio mechanics to great effect, and the battle results, especially with Fatigue levels built in as a battle result, are all era-evocative and well within the parameters of happenstance. Battles are resolved by a single dieroll - although aggressive-rated commanders can opt for a second dieroll - and that dieroll is augmented by several key factors, such as the commanders' combat ratings, the morale-training levels of his troops, a terrain element here and there, plus the Fatigue levels of the armies. Much of this is geared towards protecting the number-hungry rebels from being overwhelmed by the population-superior Yanks, and, to that extent, it works quite well. It does, however, produce some mightily laughable - and assuredly avoidable - idiocies. Our favorite was having McClellan - who is far too effective in this game - and his 95,000 man Army of the Potomac steamroller a rearguard force of 5,000 battle-hardened rebel veterans. Although outnumbered 19-1, the Southerners gain an automatic, and a not inconsiderably effective, "-1" dieroll adjustment simply because they're veterans.
Just why they're "veterans" is another of the game's sillier mechanics. The combat units come in three varieties: militia, volunteer and veteran - plus some "regulars" thrown in for flavor. The CSA always seems to be one level ahead of the Union, a mechanic more in place for play balance than historical accuracy, to be sure. The big question, though, is just how does one get to increase one's status? Through the smoke and flame of battle? Through hard fighting and hard training? No, siree. Come the beginning of Spring, every unit magically increases one level! Even units that are sitting in some backwater swamp, untouched by anything except malaria, get their promotion papers. Not only is this unrealistic, but it means that the game stops dead while the players replace hundreds of counters with another set of "hundreds of counters". The whole process is so clumsy, so archaic, and so stone-dead wrong, that you just know it was a design attempt to avoid coming up with rules to cover how it really should be done.
And along those same lines comes the game's system of "forced" reinforcements and removals. You don't raise troops - well, yes, the CSA has some minimal opportunities along those lines - they arrive as if by UPS, and exactly on time, too! Leaders also appear right on schedule, as if dance-cards were handed out in 1861 to everyone between the ages of 15 and 55. And regardless of what is happening on the map, some of them simply have to go away! This is probably an attempt to recreate the confusion of Washington political in-fighting, but it rarely, if ever, reflects what is happening in the war, or in the game.
The heart of the system, though, is the leaders and how they are used. Mostly every corps-level leader pops up sooner or later, and they are each rated for their combat ability (a dieroll adjustment that is usually -1 to +1) plus the number of men they can command, a nice but somewhat artificial limit in that it cannot be exceeded! ("OK, let's have a head count here … what's that, 40,005 men? … well, send those last five home, or we can't go anywhere."). Combat units cannot move unless stacked with a leader - or being shuttled around by rail, which gives the Union a massive, behind-the-lines advantage. Granted, some of the leaders are useless for front-line operations, especially the Sigels, Popes and their ilk. What these monumental incompetents do do well, and in doing so provide the Union player with the type of advantage I do not think the designer envisioned, is to taxi stacks of combat units from place to place. There appears to be no rule that stops a leader, most of whom have MA's 4x greater than the combat units, from moving a stack of units from A to B, returning back to A, picking up another stack, moving it to C and then returning back to A, etc. In the crowded Virginia theater, this is the best (and, parenthetcially, rather realistic) way to avoid those arbitrary leader/stcak rules. The result? Since most operations are under the command of 2, 3, maybe 4 leaders at the most, the remaining half-dozen bozos are best used herding troops like it was a Montana cattle drive.One doesn't Fight mit Sigel … one Rides mit Sigel. Say, Franz, does this bus stop at Culpeper?
One of Union's problems is that the designer seems not to have realized that the problem with the Union's leaders was not that they moved too slow, or that they were tactical buffoons, but that they rarely moved off their collective duffs in the first place. Here, these historically classic inepts are as busy as Teamsters on overtime, flitting hither, thither, and, especially, yon. Oh, Taxi!!
Alas, the rebels don't seem to be able to reap the benefits of the Yellow Cab Gambit. They have all these units sitting around in Texas, Alabama, Deep South-here, Deep South-there, and they can't spare a single one of their hard-pressed command staff to escort them to the front. So there they sit, growing, interphase by interphase, unable to move because they're not on rail lines, and apparently socially unfit for combat, as no one will come to get them. If the CSA player attempts to take one of his front commanders and send them to the rear for such purpose, his front line troops - now themselves leaderless - are quickly cut off and annihilated by even the meanest of Popish-type federals.
Even stranger are some of the ratings for some of these leaders. Let's face it; personal personnel evaluation is a tendencious topic at best. You can argue till apoplexy sets in over whether Joe Johnston should get one point more, or one point less. That's not what we're harping on here. I want the joker to raise his hand, he who decided that John Bell Hood was NOT an "aggressive" commander but that Albert Sydney Johnston was. A.S. Johnston, he who got his johnson faked off at Forts Donelson and Tennessee, he who came up with that disastrous attack plan at Shiloh (or didn't have the cujones to tell Beauregard otherwise; either way, not a good sign), and he who, for all his troubles, got killed three hours into his only battle! Aggressive?!? We looked in vain to see if the last name "Davis" popped up in the credits, because Jeff Davis was pretty much the only person who would consider Johnston "aggressive". Well, Davis and a few recently toasted Mormons. We're not arguing basic capability here, although it is our belief that ASJ was, at best, a second-rate field commander with little appreciation of strategic niceties. We're talking about a specific, positive trait that the game uses to elevate command capabilities. It got to the point where we were wondering whether the game's designer was Richard Beyma or Richard Beymer!
And then there are the naval rules. They're quite well done, they reflect historical problems pretty well at this level, and they have good flavor. But they are eminently Shakespearean in terms of value; i.e., Much Ado About Nothing. The rebels were truly "first man up the siege [spelled "seige" on all such counters in the game] ladder" when it came to naval combat - willing, but dead to rights. On the scale chosen, fiddling with naval rules - and naval counters - becomes a distinct , and clutter-ridden, chore that produces little change in the military situation. The South has a very little navy, the Union has a very big one. This basic premise can easily be handled by one page of "naval supremacy" rules. Instead we get half a dozen pages of stuff that we rarely used, mostly because it was simply too much of a pain for too little gain.
By now, we're sure, Clashmeister Ed Wimble is even redder than he usually is, and His Eminence, The Boinker, has dialed the name of some bent-nosed ethnic he knows in South Philly. Well, Clashers, relax a bit. Even given all of the above, and despite The Fox's insistence that his name be severed from what follows, your intrepid but spiteless editor found the game sort of perverse fun to play. Amazingly, with all the false turns delineated above, the ultimate results are remarkably faithful to history! (Quick, guys, grab the scissors … we got a usable quote!)
We played the 1862 scenario, and we'll be damned ("darned", for those of you with Family Values who are, by now, convinced that we will, indeed, be "damned") if it didn't turn out just like the actual war. The Virginia theater quickly bogged down into a stalemate, even though the Union distinctly outnumbered the CSA, a result of a poor pool of army-level leaders and the threat of Stonewall loose in Pennsylvania. But in the west, superior Union leadership, a Confederate front that even Marlborough would have been hard-pressed to hold, and the implementation of a pure-Grant, grind-it-out offensive eventually produced the major break-through in Tennessee that allowed the huge, and competently-led, Army of the Ohio to slice through the Confederacy like that proverbial hot knife.
A subsequent run-through of the 1863 scenario - or at least half a year of it - produced pretty much the same results. Combat was fun, tense and fairly realistic, although the designer greatly overrates the defensive capabilities of trench systems in the early years of the war, and the supply rules, although interesting, are somewhat obscure in application. Even more amazing was that the game moves very quickly, turns without interphases taking not more than 10-15 minutes to finish. The game's basic simplicity and ease of play helps greatly; inability to move much of what you have is also a factor.
Combat fun notwithstanding, War for the Union, if it accomplished anything, did more to convince us that, at a one-map, monthly turn level, the ACW is ungameable … and that the Confederacy could not have won the war. They can, under certain circumstances and good play, capture some key cities… although, after 1861, the likelihood of this happening is scant. The problem is, if they do, they can't hold them (which is realistic), and (but?) the Victory system does not reward such temporary feats of military legerdemain.
War for the Union is a handsome, professionally and lovingly produced game that is saddled with passée systems redolent of the mid-70's, systems which fall far short of solving the many problems the ACW presents to a designer. It is certainly not without a certain amount of tension, and this tension is sure to bring the game adherents. These adherents, though, are those gamers who relish the art of head-banging, as opposed to avoidance, maneuver and positioning. The system presents many opportunities for battle, but there is little room for subtlety or guile.
Union is an ACW game to gladden the heart of Eastfronters. For The Fox, Union was a disappointment; for the Editor, it was simply a re-affirmation.
CAPSULE COMMENTS:
Graphic Presentation: Excellent, evocative, professional … if one ignores the garish Appalachians.
Playability: The overwrought Naval rules notwithstanding, this is a very playable game. It's easy to learn, it's rather tense and involving, and it moves quickly.
Replayability: For us, little. Others may be more tempted by the tension-filled combat system, but there is an inexorable sameness to the game - and the war.
Historicity: As an overview, quite acceptable. In its details, severely wanting. It doesn't help when a flyer included informs us that "… the South had been plotting Sucession [sic] for years". So has Princess Di.
Playing Time: The one-year scenarios are playable in an evening, the whole war in a long weekend.
Comparisons: For one-mappers, the Eric Smith/Victory Civil War - yes, we know it has more than one map, but no one uses the western stuff - is clearly the benchmark, and nothing Union does erases that view. It's certainly better than the TSR/S&T fiasco American Civil War but, surprisingly, is not as inventive - although it is certainly more colorful and evocative - than the first SPI/S&T American Civil War. The two-three mappers do this sort of thing much better, as prevailing sentiment for a return to Terry Hardy's flawed but beloved War Between the States seems to indicate. FGA's Brother Against Brother is not a game; it's a misdemeanor.
Overall: Union looks good, but it could have been a better game. You won't dislike it, but some of it can be annoying. Like the Confederacy and its theories, it's somewhat behind the times … blissfully ignorant of the march of history.
from CLASH OF ARMS GAMES
One 33" x 22" heavy stock map, 600 counters, 4 Charts & Tables cards, 3 rules books, boxed; from Clash of Arms, Box 60668, King of Prussia PA 19406. $39
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© Copyright 1992 by Richard Berg
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