Great Campaigns of the American Civil War

I’ve been playing a new-to-me American Civil War game system: Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (GCACW).

The Warwick Line scenario from On to Richmond II

My entry to the system is the fairly recent On to Richmond II: The Union Strikes South. I picked this up in a recent MMP Games sale (I think the Veterans Day sale) for a good price considering how much is in the box. This is a reprint of the original On to Richmond, but it contains:

• On To Richmond II (which covers the 1862 Richmond Campaign), a “fixed” version of the original, with some scenario and campaign game rebalancing.
• Grant Takes Command II (which covers the 1864 Overland Campaign) has had the various basic and advanced game scenarios revised as needed.
• The Petersburg Campaign (which covers the 1864-1865 Petersburg Campaign) is an entirely new module that covers the months of battles, mostly in the open field, that started when Grant marched across the James River in June 1864 and ended with the defeat of the Confederates at Five Forks in April 1865.

My main war-gaming friends (mostly Portland-based) all rave about this system, and with some settled-down time here in Napa, I wanted to spend some quality time diving into it. Supposedly, it solos well (more on that in a bit).

My fancy game room

I sort of have a game room now: a partially finished room in our unfinished basement, currently furnished with a second-hand Ikea extensible table and a new 5x5 Ikea Kallax shelf unit. The lighting is pretty awful, but two rechargeable LED desktop lamps are helping to compensate.

Let’s talk about GCACW. This is an operational-level game, so the counters you are pushing around are mostly brigades and regiments, with some divisions. Each hex represents just over a mile of terrain. So, it is more zoomed out than a tactical game, but more zoomed in than a strategic-level game like The U.S. Civil War.

And there are leaders: while still abstract, they bring flavor to the game and represent command and tactical leadership ability. In the first scenario I played, “The Warwick Line,” leaders such as Magruder (Confederate) and McClellan (Union) are present. This is a good learning scenario, though perhaps not a good contest; it seems tough for the Union to do much against the Confederate redoubts, but I still have much to learn.

The game solos well partly because both sides are constantly engaged: every turn has an action cycle of indefinite length, with initiative die rolls happening at the start of each cycle. Thus, it is possible to have back-to-back actions, or if your opponent doesn’t have much to do, then many sequential actions. This small amount of chaos/randomness makes for a good solo game because even if you are favoring a side, you just can’t predict when and how you’ll act. Also, you roll a die (or dice for cavalry) to see how much movement a unit (or group of units) gets. You make do with what the dice allow.

But oh, the stacks of counters. There’s so much to track for each unit (strength, fatigue level, fortification, and so on) that it seems normal for each unit to have 2-4 status counters. Have a stack of 2 or 3 units, with maybe 2 leaders? That might mean 12-15 counters stacked together.

GCACW on VASSAL

I had some quality coaching via VASSAL from friends Ken and Don. Ken is new to the system, but Don has been playing (I think) since the series began over 30 years ago. I also created a GPT to help coach me on rules and strategy. It definitely hallucinates at times (I mean it just makes things up!), but with feedback, it gets better and better. Even if it isn’t perfect, I’m finding GPTs a great way to learn new game systems. Asking questions and getting answers with references, to me, is easier than searching a PDF.

Back to the deep stack issue: VASSAL largely solves this by encoding the status information onto the counter face. I love playing with the physical bits, but when I’m ready to start a campaign, I’m not sure I want to attempt to do it on my game table.