WotR-LOGGED
THE WAR OF THE REBELLION by RICHARD BERG, JON SOUTHARD
and JEFF BRIGGS
from
DECISION GAMES
Four
22"x34" maps; 480 backprinted counters; 10-sided and 6-sided dice;
Rules and Scenario Book; Charts and Tables; Boxed. Decision Games, POB 4049,
Lancaster CA
93539. $50.
Reviewed
by PETER P. PERLA
Any of you
remember The Tin Can Quad? No, huh. Well, The Tin Can was the final incarnation
of an idea first proposed by West End Games back in the mid-1980s. West End had already published three games
in what became known as the "South Mountain Series": South Mountain, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. All these games were based a a design by
Richard Berg, with the Chickamauga design work by Jon Southard. Then
someone at West End decided to market the series to a fare-the-well by offering
consumers
a Special
Deal. They would take the three games,
add a fourth one, a somewhat extended design by Jeff Briggs on that most beloved battle of them all,
Gettysburg, and place them all in a special quad game package: a large, old-fashioned, shortbread
cookie-like, tin container. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on where
you stand - the idea failed to come to fruition when another, higher placed,
personage at West End realized that few were the people who would plunk down
$50+ for 4 games in a can, 3 of which most of them already had.
And there
the idea lay, until the fertile minds at Decision Games started to percolate.
With the strains of Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again"
filling the background, Decision decided that the time was now ripe to
re-release the quad, which had done very well just ten years ago. (South
Mountain had won the Origins/Charles Roberts Best Game of 1985, and the
series was quite popular in the last half of that decade.) Thus, the birth of War
of the Rebellion, and it was Cash Cow Time. Unfortunately, someone forgot
that you "milk" the Cash Cow, you don't butcher it for its meat.
Have you
ever finished playing a game only to shake your head and think, "…there's
a really good game in here somewhere -- if only I could wade through the morass
of the
rules?" If you can fight your way through the swamp
and avoid the alligators crawling around your ankles in the swamp that is WotR,
you may find the soul of what Mark Herman called "… the best brigade-level
Civil War system around." I don't
completely
agree with
Mark on that assessment, but there are a lot of good ideas here. Too bad ol'
Doc Decision chose to push the game out the door before it was really ready.
The basic
game system lies at the crossroads between Berg's regimental-scale, "Great
Battles of the American Civil War" series and his later brigade-level
games such as 1863. Units are
generally demi-brigades of infantry and cavalry and half-battalions of
artillery. The ground scale varies from
190 yards per hex to 270 yards per hex.
Turns represent anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. Combat includes
both fire and melee, and units suffer "cohesion hits" both from
combat and certain non-combat operations (like forced
marching). There are leaders at division, corps, and
army level, rated for Command Radius, Command (used to order the boys into
battle), and Leadership Rating (a die-roll
modifier for
command rolls, forced marching, and combat).
The sequence of
play is a
fairly standard variant of Igo-Hugo, with some wrinkles for command and
activation of units.
It is in
these command rules - none of which were in the originally published games in
the series, but were part of Briggs' Gettysburg design - that we find both the best and worst of WotR. It takes something like six pages of rules
to explain the activation system. Basically, players must move all the units in
one corps before they can move any from another. To determine the number of movement points the units may expend,
the player must roll a 10-sided die.
Unless they are within range of a leader, each unit must roll separately. Alternatively, a division commander may give
orders to his units in range, and
they all
receive the number of MPs determined by a single die roll, modified by the
commander's Leadership. In an extension
of this approach, a corps commander may give
orders to
his division commanders, who may in turn activate their combat units, all using
the corps commander's rating.
In addition
to determining the number of MPs available with the 10-sided die,
the
commander rolls a 6-sided die to determine how many units (for a division
commander) or divisions (for a corps commander) may enter enemy fields of fire
during the move. (A field of fire
extends two-hexes from the front and flank of most units, and is distinct from
the zone of control, which has its own set of effects.) The trick is that, if a
unit begins its move in a field of fire, it does not need orders to
remain or advance to the attack. Thus,
a leader may have to feed his brigades into battle piecemeal, but he can often
get all of
them engaged
in a couple of turns.
Once you
have figured out what the command rules say, and then understand what they
mean, you have either given up in disgust (my first reaction) or begun to
appreciate
their subtlety. They are what really sets the game apart
from the others. They taste a lot like a melange of Gettysburg '77, GBACW,
and 1863. It is a flavorful mix,
once you break the code, but I for one yearn for more of an alternating flow,
such as that in SPQR or Breakout: Normandy, rather allowing all of one
side's forces to move before the other can react.
The biggest
problem with the command rules, and with the game's rules as a
whole, are
the terribly dense way in which they are presented. The Standard Rules take up
34 pages of
an 80-page rules booklet (the rest containing historical summaries, exclusive
rules, and scenario instructions for the four games). Many, if not most, of the rules
begin with a
long-winded, pseudo pop-historical explanation of the reasoning behind the
rule, none of which are especially witty or insightful. One of my favorites is the beginning of the
rule describing the Sequence of Play (which, by the way, does not appear
until page
12, which brings to mind the old Latin proverb: Beware Games with Sequences
that Start After Page 6): "To be manageable, a military simulation
must organize the confusion and complexity of battle into an understandable
format that channels important aspects of tactics into an easily perceived
smooth-flowing pattern of activities with equal player interaction ….This is
the reason for a sequence of play."
Too bad they
didn't read their own words.
"Easily perceived" and "smooth-flowing" are not
words that come to my mind when describing the presentation for the second
incarnation of this game system. All the obtuse and overly solemn explanations
smack of a remarkably misguided effort to serve as an introduction for
newcomers to the hobby. Yeah, right.
It's not that the game system is bad.
It's not that the design doesn't have good features. It's just that there was too little
development and even less execution. In retrospect, execution was what they
should have reserved for the developer.
I tried
playing the new kid on the block, the Gettysburg game. I laid out the map and
started punching out counters, wherein arose the game's first problem. In addition to the main counter sheets, the
game includes a mini-sheet of 80 counters to replace those that had some printing
problem. Now, it was extraordinarily
nice of Decision Games to rectify these problems rather than wait for players
to complain, a decision for which they deserve
kudos galore. (Cheers, not candy bars.) But the sad fact is that the
most egregious of the
counter
problems remains unresolved. For
example, two of Ewell's II Corps divisions have the same color coding, making
it quite almost impossible to distinguish which units respond to which
divisional commander. In a game that
revolves around command and control as much as this one does, such a failure is
more than frustrating.
Even more
frustrating is the complete lack of several types of markers described in the
rules and essential for keeping track of the many tricky nuances of the
system: Moved
markers, to
identify units that have completed their movement; No Fire/No Assault markers
to mark moved artillery; "Reinf" markers to mark arriving
reinforcements still eligible for special movement rates; etc.
After opting
to throw a small temper tantrum, as opposed to simply tossing the game, my
sense of
curiosity and fair play compelled me to try again. I set up the "Second Day at Gettysburg" and set
to. Despite the command rules, the
Confederate's were able to mount the kind of full-scale, coordinated attack Lee
had hoped for but the CSA commanders
could not
deliver. The Union line buckled on both
flanks, but counterattacks regained both Little Round Top and Culp's Hill.The
tactical play seemed a bit too cluttered, but on the whole, things felt about
right. Unfortunately, play was slow.
The First
Day scenario, though, went better. With
only Heth and Buford on board at the start, play was faster (if not quite
furious). The Union reinforcements
arrived just in time to solidify a line on MacPherson Ridge, Rodes arrived just
in time to threaten to roll up
that line's
flank, and even Reynolds managed to get
shot at about the time he did historically!
The number and arrival of the opposing leaders created an interesting
effect, much closer to the type of alternating leader activations that I missed
so much in
the Second
Day scenario.
Despite its
problems and irritations, then, I slowly found myself warming up to the
game. There are, unquestionably, lots
of both big and little problems. In addition to the counter situation, the rules are poorly written and laughably
formatted, and proofreading was non-existant, with an enormous number of
mistakes in rules cross-references. Yet, somehow, the promise remains too good
even for an old cynic like me to simply dismiss the game as
fatally
flawed… and believe me, that was exactly the way I felt after my first
encounter.
The original
South Mountain and Shiloh were, as I said in a review a decade
ago, "elegant", even
"brilliant". The mechanics sported a clean, straightforward system
that almost effortlessly integrated combat losses, fatigue, command and
control, and just about anything you could want in a battle game. I never felt
quite the same affection for Chickamauga - too many changes to the
things I liked about the original games. Southard added the concept of engaged
units (units in the enemy Field of Fire) and elaborated on the
command
rules. (And he took away my
artillery. Realistic? Arguable.
Fun? Definitely not!) In WotR,
third-generation designer, Jeff Briggs, carried many of those ideas one step
farther. Unfortunately, he did not get enough help in paring the system down
and polishing it to as fine a sheen as the original.
Thus, while War
of the Rebellion gives players a good feel for Civil War battle at the
right level of detail and control for an army commander, it's neither as clean,
nor as elegant as the original. And it certainly is not as easy to play. Most of the problems can be - and should
have been - fixed. If you don't mind
spending 50 bucks for a nice "fixer-upper with a wet basement", then
go for it. As for me, I'm glad I have a
copy. But I'm also glad I didn't pay
for it.
CAPSULE
COMMENTS:
Graphic
Presentation: Professional but not pretty. Maps OK, but counters
overwrought
and full of errors. Replacement
counters correct most but not all printing mistakes.
Playability:
Poor out of the box, much better with experience. Good for
solitaire.
Can be quite slow.
Replayability:
If you can get through the rules, there is a wealth of play value. Each of the games provide players unique
problems and varied solutions.
Wristage: Fairly high, as dieroll resolution
abounds.
Creativity:
A wealth of good ideas burdened with sloppy development and
presentation.
Historicity:
Pretty good, but as with all Civil War games, many players will find
much to quibble with, particularly in the ratings of various units and
leaders. (CSA cavalry at
Gettysburg
with the same firepower as Buford's boys?
I don't think so.) A good blend of control and chaos.
Comparisons:
Much more effective than 1863, particularly for Gettysburg. Two
orders of
magnitude more realistic than the other Decision Games Quads. As complex in its own way as The Gamers'
Civil War Brigade series, but without the paperwork. I still like the original South Mountain and Shiloh
better.
Overall:
Frustrating and painful, as are many Decision Games products, not so
much for what it is but for what it could have been and wasn't.