For The People

reviewed by David Fox

Mark Herman's full-time job is for a major American consulting firm, and I am told that some of his business includes working with the Department of Defence and the Pentagon. So what we have here is a wargamer with some influence over American military policy-- what a scary thought! I am waiting for the diplomatic crisis that is sure to erupt when he and Nicky Palmer play an e-mail game of 1776. (CHV: Scary for us anyway).

This means that Mark is a very busy man, and it takes him a long time to finish designing a game. We The People was published in 1991, and soon afterward Mark began work on a strategic American Civil War sequel using the same system. Since I rate We The People as one of the best wargame designs in many years, I had very high hopes for a Civil War game done with that design. Yet when the years of waiting were over, and I finally played it at Origins, I mostly felt disappointed. The creativity and ingenuity that was so dazzling in WTP is sadly lacking in For The People, a very pedestrian game that has little to make it stand out from the other strategic-level American Civil War titles that fill my shelves.

The lack of spark begins with the title. For The People (a quote from the last line of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) is a mighty bland title for such a sweeping subject (much like Atlantic Storm, eh?) ; couldn't anybody have thought of something a little jazzier? The map, too, is exceedingly blah, done in shades of tan that make the verdant eastern United States look like Libya. This is a problem, since the state borders are light brown, and light brown on tan is invisible without strong lighting-- I recommend drawing over the state borders with a black marker before beginning play. Still, game title and map graphics are only superficial details, and poor grades on both may still conceal a very good game. Unfortunately, for FTP they were a warning of what was to follow.

For The People is a point-to-point game, meaning no hexes, movement instead being location to location via the American road/railroad/river network. Done this way, map scale is hard to measure; suffice to say that an army moves six spaces per activation-- this means about two weeks to march from Baltimore to Richmond.

Turns are seasonal, each strength point equals 5-6000 men. Like We The People, players operate by alternately playing Strategy Cards. Each player is dealt an increasing number of cards as the game goes on, beginning with four as hostilities open in 1861, maxing out with seven from 1862 onwards, when both sides finally turned to the business of total war. The Strategy Cards contain both a historical Event and an Operations number ranging from 1 to 3; Events deliver historical effects such as the North losing troops as the 90-day enlistments expire or Gaining them from Negro Volunteering, while Operations allow players to move armies, build forts, or place the dreaded Political Control (PC) markers. A card may be played as either an Event or an Operation, not both, which does lead to some sticky decision-making. Most of the events are so neat-o that you hate to not use them, yet too much of this nonsense means that your armies never move.

The above is familiar to anybody who has played We The People, and so provides FTP with a solid foundation. However, the American Civil War was a much larger, more complex conflict than the American Revolution, and thus requires considerably more detailed rules. And here is where the cracks begin to appear in FTP's walls.

We The People was a great design because Mark Herman took standard wargame questions like Sequence of Play and Combat Resolution and came up with thoroughly creative, non-standard wargame answers. Unfortunately he did not do that in For The People, and when faced with writing rules for Reinforcements or Combat Leaders he fell back on standard wargame solutions that have appeared elsewhere. Many of the game's mechanics are borrowed from Victory's The Civil War, an outstanding game to borrow from, true, but there's that creativity word again. And isn't The Civil War a couple of notches higher in complexity than FTP is meant to be?

Reinforcements

Reinforcements gain an entire phase in FTP's sequence of play, and it's a fairly involved procedure with both players plopping down strength points into states they control; the Confederate also rolls against the Union Blockade Level in each Blockade Zone to see if he can place an additional point in that zone. Do we really need all that die-rolling just to place two strength points on the map? This is followed by a very odd Reinforcement Strategic Movement Phase, where newly placed reinforcements skitter around the map to join the armies in the field.

Taken in all, the Reinforcement Phase is very cumbersome and quite lengthy, slowing the game down by as much as 20 minutes with all that counter shuffling and die-rolling. Why do not we just skip ahead to placing a few more points in the bigger armies, which is the usual result of this stuff anyway? Since we've got a bunch of cards already, why not use them for reinforcements? Krieg gave a clinic in how to use cards to easily place reinforcements and resolve logistic issues. But For The People doesn't do that.

Every leader in FTP has a Strategy Rating (from 1 to 3, that being the Operations card needed to activate the leader) and Battle Rating (also from 1 to 3, the die roll modifier the general receives in combat). Rating Civil War generals is a very subjective business, and everybody has their own idea of a general's specific value. Yet some of FTP's ratings are questionable: Halleck and Buell, two of the most inept combat commanders ever, receive a 1 Battle Rating? Ulysses Grant, the best general of the war, receives the maximum 1 - 3 rating, yet he is equalled by Jackson, Longstreet, and Bedford Forrest? Such important leaders as Holmes and Hunter do not appear at all.

Unlike We The People, FTP allows more than one general per force. Building an Army costs an Operation, but is very valuable, since this allows an Army Commander to add a Cavalry General and up to two Corps Generals to a combat. Gone are the very clever Battle Cards, replaced with a standard d6 CRT, and your combat die-roll is modified by adding together the Battle Ratings of your Army and Corps commanders. Every other Civil War game does this, too, which predictably allows a player to create a 900-pound Gorilla army (Question: What does a 900-pound Gorilla eat? Answer: Anything it wants), since combining all of the good generals in one army gives a whopping die modifier and a maximum combat result every time. Nothing like knowing what the combat result will be before you roll the die. A historic 1862 Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, for example, with Lee in charge, Stuart as Cavalry General, and Jackson and Longstreet as Corps generals, gains an unbeatable +9 drm EVERY TIME ! The best that the Union can do in combat is whittle them down a couple of strength points while being peeled by the Gorilla.

Yet Sharpsburg, one of the most significant Confederate defeats of the war, took place in September, 1862 against this seemingly invincible army. Did not anyone in playtesting see a problem with this? The answer would be to resume the card-based combat system, where an army's combined Battle Ratings determine which combat cards it has available. A skilful army would have better battle cards than its clumsy opponent, yet the Gorilla could still have a bad day, be unable to counter an enemy card, and take a beating like Lee's Confederates did at South Mountain or Sherman's Federals at Chickasaw Bluffs. But For The People doesn't do that, either.

You win FTP by reducing your opponent's Strategic Will, a rough measure of his nation's willingness and ability to support its war effort. Both Strategic Wills begin at 100 and rise or fall due to battle results, tightening of the Union Blockade, military control of enemy states, and various Strategy Card events. This mechanism is lifted almost completely from Victory's Vietnam game, and is a very accurate model of the Union's political situation, with President Lincoln struggling to hold together the North's war effort in the face of continuous, humiliating military defeats. But for the Confederacy it's way off the mark.

True, the Confederate government (such as it was) faced a very divided nation, with every state governor imagining himself an independent potentate, but failure of Confederate will to fight never became an issue until the very end of the war. If Confederate Strategic Will was to measure the Confederacy's logistic base, its ability to keep its armies fed and equipped, that would be a different story, as rampaging Union armies and the tightening blockade squeezes the life out of the Confederate economy. But then you'd expect Strategic Will to affect the game as it goes up or down. As Will rises you should get more reinforcements (increased volunteering) , as it goes down supply lines shorten (as the bluecoats smash your railroads). But For The People doesn't do that, either. Instead, Strategic Will rises and falls with no effect until, boom, you drop off the chart and lose the game.

Not Bad

Lest I give the wrong impression, For The People is not a bad game. There's still lots to like. The game's strategic scope is awesome. We The People featured one, maybe two theatres of operation. The options open to the FTP players, particularly the Union, are huge. Attrit down the Rebels in Virginia? Consolidate the border states of West Virginia and Kentucky? Tighten the screws on the blockade? Go to work early on the Mississippi River? Invade the Texas coast? It's all there.

And the Event Cards are great. You can lay all sorts of deviltry on your hapless opponent: Missouri Guerrilla Raiders removing Union PC's from Missouri, Rampant Confederate Inflation reducing the Confederate Strategic Will, Elite Units arriving to bolster the armies, the Union gaining more troops from Negro volunteers or losing them to draft riots. Some of the Event effects are a little questionable- is Choctaw Indian support for the Confederacy really worth removing a Union Strategy Card?- but they're so cool that you really do not mind.

With that said, I was not very happy with how the game played, either. I had a chance to try an advanced copy at Origins, with me as the Rebels. My Union opponent sensibly eschewed the Washington DC/Richmond arena at the start- normally an expensive stalemate until Grant shows up in 1863- and launched an invasion of Kentucky under Buell.

I immediately collected the Confederates in Tennessee under Albert Johnston and set upon him, utterly routing the Yankee hirelings. I followed this up by crossing the Ohio River at Louisville and invading Indiana, which seemed like a neat idea, and much to my surprise managed to stay in Indiana for the next TWO YEARS ! I built up my 900 pound Gorilla Army (Albert Johnston in charge, Forrest leading the cavalry, Smith and Longstreet as Corps generals for a big ol' + 7 drm ) and withstood the Union's impotent attempts to dislodge me, as first Rosecrans and then Meade bounced off my unbreakable wall of die-roll modifiers. After two years of game time, with the Confederates controlling Indiana and expanding into Illinois and Ohio, my opponent gave up in disgust. (CHV: I too have had some odd experiences especially where leaders like Lee get loose with reasonable sized armies. The boy can outdistance Xenophon in long marches).

Baffled

I was baffled, too. The Confederacy never had the ability to launch a long-term invasion of a Northern state, let alone gain military control of one for two years. Yet in FTP it is a very viable Confederate strategy which I saw repeated by two other Confederate players at Origins. The answer here is also easy. At the end of every turn, armies suffer attrition to reflect disease, desertions, etc. Rebel armies in a Northern state at the end of a turn should suffer double-attrition to simulate the inept Confederate commissary trying to supply an army in enemy territory, and this is a House Rule which I now always use.

Brief Interruption: Mark Herman has a For The People website at http://members.tripod.com/~MarkHerman/index.html. It contains errata, player questions, and designer notes. It may have fixes for some of the game's problems that I mentioned above, but I can't say for sure. Anybody looking to play the game should certainly check it out.

Is For The People a bad game? No. Could it have been a much better game? Yes, yes, yes. If Mark had showed the same creativity, the same design discipline that was so obvious in We The People, I think we'd have a classic game on our hands. Instead it's just another strategic American Civil War game, stuck on a shelf where Victory's The Civil War still reigns supreme.

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© Copyright 1998 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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