Although a thorough examination of the systems of these games is beyond the scope of this article, some brief comments on how the design affects play may give you an idea of how the games play.

To begin with, Gamble does not use the Zone of Control concept, although your opponent's units will limit your units' movement to one hex if they start the turn adjacent to or within one intervening hex of the enemy a sort of "loose" ZOC. So the old ploy of surround and destroy by giving your enemy no uncontrolled hex to retreat into doesn't apply in this game: and the resulting tactics will reflect this part of the design. If a routing unit "can trace a path of hexes (of any length and direction) free of enemy units to its train, place it in the Routed Units box.

If it could not trace such a path, it is captured - hand it over to the opposing player." Routed units may return to play (at the end of the owning player's turn) from this box under certain conditions; if they are not met, the unit counts as victory points, as do captured units. Protection of the Train becomes very important to the tactics: it must be moved very deliberately and protected even more carefully.

The combat plays out as infantry versus infantry, nose to nose: the CRT has an "eliminated" result scattered throughout it, and a further die roll against its "elimination rating" (in the rules, "loss rating" on the counter) may remove it to a routed box. Advance after combat is optional if the defending hex is empty. But the CRT is not very bloody; most results will be morale checks and retreats and routs. The stacking rules relegate combat and combat results to the top-most unit in each stack.

Command control, one of the optional rules, has some interesting aspects. At the beginning of his turn, the player rolls two dice and establishes the "Command Control State" of his army by comparing the die roll to the commander's "Command Span" and "Panic Rating."

For both leaders, the Panic Rating is four, which means that a roll of three puts the army in a panic state; the opposing player then gets to roll one die, of which the result is the number of chances he gets to control the moving player's units. He gets at least one, and perhaps six chances, each of which has a 50% chance of controlling the unit and a 17% chance of not controlling it but putting it out of action for that turn.

This concept makes for some very interesting play. (The designer gives credit for the idea for this rule to the old SPI Creature That Ate Sheboygan.)

Lightning has a number of similarities with Gamble; but, given the difference in scale (roughly half as large), far fewer differences (especially with the "advanced" rules) than you might expect.

As already mentioned, the turn sequence has six game turns (of two phases and a variable number of "couplets") for each of the four days. If you play none of the "advanced" rules, the game is quite ordinary, indeed: one player moves and resolves combat, the other player does the same, and both players return eligible units to their normal (un-disrupted) state.

If the "advanced" rules form the basis for your play, the game is quite different and much more like Gamble. "Advanced" rules include weather, army initiative, "extra strength" (to return units from the Eliminated Units Box), commander initiative, charges, bombardments, and so on.

Strategies in both games are quite similar. Both sides must attack: the Union may adopt a passive attitude and dare the Confederate to attack, but the Unio n must attack to gain the necessary victory points. Both sides must protect the Train with great care: I found myself, in both games, spending much more time over the movement and protection of the Train than in any other activity - in Lightning, even unsuccessful attacks on the Train gain VPs.

And both sides must understand that their overall objective is the destruction of the enemy I s army, not the control of any particular piece of ground: there's just nothing magic about the Round Tops or Cemetery Hill, only about capturing or eliminating enemy strength points.

If you've not already gathered by my quotation marks, I don't believe that the "advanced" and "optional" rules in either of these games were intended to be "advanced" or optional." Both games are so fundamentally ordinary without them that I can only conclude that the designer never thought of them as "chrome" but as an integral part of the design from his first gleam of the concept.

In Gamble, rules are only revealed as optional when you get to them, and they're intermixed with non-optional rules - both signs that the designer never thought of them that way. The case for Lightning is much stronger: you were to make a copy of these rules and cut out all the rules marked with an omega, the remaining structure looks like a skeleton with more than half its bones missing; and in earlier comments about the structure and sequence of these rules become very pertinent Neither you as potential player (nor the designer) should take this comment as an adverse criticism, merely as a warning that you'll find little of value in these games unless you take the trouble, in both games, to learn an play with all the rules.

I invested about three hours preparing play the first scenario of Gamble, and a little longer for Lightning. (Those of you who can read without moving your lips will require less; there may be others who will require more.) Because of the larger counter mix, Lightning will take longer to set up; but, surprisingly (for me), the game mechanics for Lightning seemed to take about the same amount of time as Gamble's.

If you play the full rulesets, and if you're Civil War buff, both these games will rep your investment (of time and energy to learn and play them) with an enjoyable reconstruction of the battle.

The Armchair Gamer Gettysburg, by XTR, and Gettysburg, by XTR; An Important Retraction; and a Lengthy Aside

Introduction
Gamble and the Standards
Lightning and the Standards
How They Play