From: "Paul O'Connor" Subject: For The People first impressions I've had For The People on my shelf for several weeks. Buying it was a no-brainer. I count Hannibal and We The People among my favorite games, and the assimilation of Avalon Hill by Hasbro dispelled any notions I may have had about holding off and waiting for reviews. I've read the rules, clipped the counters, and followed the debates here and elsewhere about various game mechanics with an outsider's interest, but a brutal work schedule had prevented me from actually playing the game ... until last night. I quite enjoyed the game, and look forward to playing it again. Given that I did the primary rules reading, that I've read a bit about the war, and that I've played a couple games of Victory Games' excellent CIVIL WAR, I took the Union side, hoping to save my less experienced opponent from having to hack through the naval rules. I also expected the Union to be fragile in the first couple moves (having read about the vulnerability of Washington D.C. to direct assault), so I figured that if I played the Union and was paranoid about the capitol, the game would have a good chance of lasting beyond the first turn. My buddy Jeff took the Confederate side. Without any extensive knowledge about the war or the game system, he was somewhat at a loss about what to do, but after working through the first turn we both had a pretty good grip on the mechanics, and could concentrate on strategy (which boiled down to: face-off in the East, scramble for political control in the Border States, and maneuver in the Far West). About the game mechanics ... I found the transition from Hannibal easy to make, as the core mechanism of using cards as Operations or as Events remains essentially unchanged. You still get a hand of cards at the beginning of your turn; you still have to assess them for what you hope to accomplish this turn; you still have to be flexible in executing your plan, because the other guy is doing the same thing. You still can have a big army in your opponent's backfield with nothing but daylight between them and some juicy objective ... and that army will sit still if you don't have the right card to get them on the march, because your generals don't have your God's eye view of the campaign, and they're more concerned with their own lines of communication, army sick list, and rumors of enemy troops in the neighborhood than they are with any strident exhortations from Washington or Richmond. Love it. The movement mechanics are somewhat expanded from Hannibal. You have more options. You can pile a bunch of strength points and leaders into the administrative structure of an Army, which is a handy way to move big groups around (and allows you to maximize your leadership modifiers). Unfortunately, Armies are a bit slow on the march, and can't move by rail. You can move smaller groups, called Corps, without forming Armies, and you can detatch individual strength points to move as Divisions (which we did quite a bit, until I realized that I'd gakked a crucial rule preventing Divisions from entering enemy controlled territory ... you can't send strength points racing across the countryside of deep penetration raids; you need leadership to do that, either as an Army or Corps, or as part of the fourth type of movement: one strength point and an appropriate leader combining to form a Cavalry Brigade). The combat mechanics have been much discussed, and they do take some getting used to. The battle cards of Hannibal and We The People have been replaced by a CRT and a reasonable list of modifiers. The number of strength points you pile into a battle don't impact it's outcome nearly so much as does your leadership (unless you have a significant superiority in numbers, which also allows you to overrun the enemy, or at least keep marching after a victory). I can see where this approach would throw a lot of people, especially as it runs counter to every wargame I can think of, but advance word of the mechanism on this list innoculated me against any shock that might otherwise have occurred, and it didn't take me long to get used to the system. Much has also been made about the leader loss system, but as we never had a battle in our game that generated sufficient modifiers to result in a leader loss check, I really can't comment on it. Another largely new mechanic is Strategic Will, and attempt to measure each side's will to continue the war. You can see it's origins in the political control systems in Hannibal, where a big loss on the battlefield or the death of Hannibal requires that the losing player remove political markers from the map. In For The People, this system is largely abstracted into the Strategic Will index, which moves in the event of a big defeat, when Confederate states are conquered, when Border States are brought into the North or South, as a result of certain event cards, etc. It's a good system; it forces you to keep an eye on the big political picture, and maybe go hunting for a victory on the battlefield or launch some risky invasion when you might otherwise circle the wagons, which seems appropriate. I'll have to play a full game before I can appraise the Strategic Will system, but I like what I've seen so far. As to the specifics of our game ... none of the expected Union fragility arose. I piled troops into Washington at ever opportunity, established Armies in Cincinnatti and St. Louis, and marched on the Rebels every chance I had out West. I fell asleep at the switch and lost West Virginia to the Rebs, but I was able to win a couple victories that brought Missouri into the Federal camp, and quickly stamped out the rebellion in Arkansas, too. In this I was greatly helped by early Union control of the Mississippi, thanks to the Farragut card permitting a surprise raid on New Orleans ... with the Mississippi cut and the Rebs evacuated from their various river fortresses to chase my Army in Tennesee, the Rebs couldn't get across the river, and Pope was able to do as he wished out West. The Army of the Tenessee, under Fremont, marched slowly into Kentucky, making use of the very handy ability of armies to establish political control of the spaces they pass through by spending an additional movement point. I had good strategy cards, allowing me to make at least one Campaign move every turn (permitting me to move two or more armies on the same turn), and the Confederates just couldn't be everywhere at once. Despite this success, the 1861 scenario ended in a draw ... but just barely, with Kentucky's neutrality hinging on a single contested space. It was early, and we were just getting the hang of the game, so we imported a mechanism from Columbia's EastFront and decided to continue our drawn game into 1862, adopting the victory conditions of the 1862 scenario on the fly. Now the Union control of the Mississippi and the North's manpower advantage made themselves felt, as deep raids into the South started to cost the Confederates their vital resource squares. With the Strategic Will index running against the Rebs, and with the late discovery that we'd botched the Divison movement rule (by which I had unfairly torched several key Rebel areas), we decided to fold the game, re-read the rules, and give it another shot next week (which we both eagerly look forward to). Now I'm off to read the strategy article at Consimworld, and I'll have to give the rules another pass. I'm sure I'm missing a couple little things, and I have a nagging suspicion I misunderstood a couple naval rules. The Union naval control rules require special attention, especially as they relate to the Mississippi. Right now the game looks hard for the Confederates but I'm sure that will turn around once we learn a bit more. I do have a question about one event card that seems a bit harsh: The Crittenden Compromise. This card allows the Union to place two PC markers in any space free of Confederate SPs. Are resource squares and capitols exempt from this card? Unless the Confederate player has garrisoned those key locations, he can really get zapped by this card, with vital resource locations blowing up miles behind enemy lines with the placement of those PC markers. Maybe we missed something. Bottom line: we had a good time with the game, and want to play it again. It seems to fulfill the promise of being a strategic ACW game you can finish in a long evening. The mechanics are pretty simple, the cards add great atmosphere, the components are functional (even if the state borders are hard to distinguish, and the map is uninspiring to look at ... which is too bad, but at least it isn't the dysfunctional mess of other late AH offers, like Age of Renaissance or Monsters Ravage America). I'm really pumped up and excited about this game, and recommend it to anyone interested in the American Civil War, particularly if you're already a fan of the We The People series of games.