Note: This is the original, unedited version of a review that
appeared in BERG'S REVIEW OF GAMES (BROG).  If you're interested
in seeing more of Richard Berg's celebrated wit and insight in
BROG, you can contact him at BergBROG@aol.com.

Shenandoah:  Valley of Fire

How many of you out there have completely given up hope on Rob Markham,
thinking him incapable of any longer producing a coherent, well-designed
game ?  Let's see a show of hands now, don't be shy... yes, well, I
thought so.  Count me in, because after a series of such disasters as
ALMA, IRONSIDES, and GIVE ME LIBERTY, I figured the sun had set on Mr.
Markham's creative muse.  So imagine my surprise when I opened up
SHENANDOAH: VALLEY OF FIRE, a nice little Rob Markham game from Just
Plain Wargames.  TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD it ain't, but it does show off all
of the elements of an quality game- creative system, solid development,
thorough playtesting- that 3W seems to have forgotten.

VALLEY covers the 1862 and 1864 campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley
during the ACW, one of those great wargame situations which nobody seems
to take advantage of, with Stonewall Jackson skipping nimbly past his
cumbersome pursuers and Phil Sheridan two years later leaving the Valley
looking like the bottom of a charcoal grille, offering the opportunity
for deft maneuver/pursuit and some good old-fashioned toe to toe
slugfests.

Just Plain Wargames/Pacific Rim believe in the plain brown wrapper
approach to publishing, which means that if you're searching for an
eye-catching graphical approach, look elsewhere. The rulebook looks like
it's straight out of an undergraduate's computer, the counters are
serviceably blah, and the map, while featuring an interesting
1860's-like appearance, has some rather odd terrain choices-- bridges
are tiny white smudges, invisible at more than six inches, and towns are
represented by pictures of a barn.   But then, you weren't expecting
Michelangelo, were you ?

Creativity has always been one of Mr. Markham's strong suits (even when
that suit was more like a 3W straitjacket), and VALLEY contains it's
fair share of "Hmm, why hasn't anyone else thought of that ?"-type
rules.  Units are divisions, hexes are two miles across and turns are
two days, all of which lead to a moderate size map with only 10 - 20
counters on it, so there's plenty of room for maneuver.  The method for
determining movement is rather ingenious-- Supreme Commanders roll on a
chart to determine the number of Command Points received that turn;
every subordinate unit's leader has a Command Rating, which is compared
against the Command Points to see how far that unit may move.  For
example, a leader with a Command Rating of 4 (the usual Union slowpoke)
who gets, say, 2 Command Points,  may move his unit 50% of the base
movement rate since the number of Command Points is 50% of his Command
Rating.  Supreme commanders must broadcast Command Points to distant
leaders, which may further reduce the number of Command Points available
to the units for movement.

Combat follows a similar pattern.  Unit leaders decide what kind of
battle they will fight (Probe, Assault, Withdraw, Stand, or Pitched
Battle) and roll on a Commitment Table to see what percentage of their
unit they can commit to combat based on their Command Rating and battle
choice.  A leader with a 1 Command Rating choosing Pitched Battle will
probably be able to commit his whole force, while a 4 leader choosing
Withdraw may be left with two old men and a sick dog to stand before the
foe.  A roll on the CRT compared against number of committed SP's
determines the enemy's loss.  Battles are fought in rounds (a perennial
Markham design decision, which I despise), the number of which is based
on the type of battle being fought, so line 'em up and roll again.
Pitched Battles continue until one side demoralizes and retreats, so the
main drawback of the round combat system is distinctly possible, i.e.
Armageddon-like battles where the loser is destroyed and the winner has
three men left.  Now, all of this use of higher mathematics to compute
commitment percentages and movement rates makes my teeth ache, so it
behooves one to keep a calculator handy to figure out the trickier
equations, although a percentage chart is included in the charts and
tables.

Leaders may also react to enemy units moving nearby, and the only units
that have zones of control are cavalry, so the game is quite fluid, to
say the least.  These aren't exactly big armies either, and this,
combined with lots of space on the map, means that the game's emphasis
is on maneuver,  with armies chasing each other up and down the Valley
trying to pin the elusive foe in a Pitched Battle.  I recommend playing
Scenario 3 (Harpers Ferry to Port Republic) first as an aid to learning
the game's mechanics.  It begins with Stonewall Jackson knocking at the
door at Harpers Ferry and the valuable arsenal therein, while three
seperate Union armies under Fremont, Banks,and Shields- now there's a
fine collection of turkeys for you- try to get their collective butts in
gear to cut off his escape.  An ingenious Union Panic rule allows the
boys in blue to only activate a variable number of superior commanders,
dependent upon just how well ol' Stonewall is doing, so the rebels
easily picked off the isolated Harper's Ferry garrison; but then the
chase began. Fremont moved with very un-Fremont-like haste and nearly
caught him, but Jackson's huge reaction rating allowed him to escape the
Union net.  However, Shields was close enough to the undefended
Confederate supply depots to take them out before Jackson arrived to
protect them, so the game ended in a Draw.  Play was fast and furious,
and in a couple of hours of this scenario new players should be able to
pick up VALLEY's more unusual aspects.

I then progressed to Scenario 6:  Sheridan in the Valley, 23 turns of
sheer mayhem.  Sheridan's juggernaut is poised to the north, ready to
sweep the valley clean, while Jubal Early has the unenviable task of
stopping him while outnumbered 2 to 1.  Anyone who enjoys playing the
Mongols or the Apaches should definitely get the Union, as the earlier
scenarios' mobility flies right out the window-- Sheridan is strictly
looking to loot and pillage, with Early lurking out in the wings, hoping
to pounce upon an isolated portion of the blue host.  Which he was able
to do, quite smartly, by the way, catching Crook's corps at Staunton and
giving them a right trouncing.  But then Little Phil got a couple of
those amazing die rolls and set upon the Confederates with his remaining
two corps, practically chasing them right off the southern map edge.  By
the end of the scenario Sheridan had the valley (or what was left of it,
anyway) pretty much to himself.  Other scenarios cover Jackson's earlier
valley adventures and a nifty pre-Sheridan  situation with Franz Sigel
(gawd) trying to polish off a small Confederate army led by
Breckinridge, the campaign that led to the Battle of New Market.

Now, this wouldn't be a Rob Markham game without having its share of
confusing or misplaced or altogether missing rules, to whit: The first
three scenarios handle Jackson's first valley campaign; why not include
rules for combining the scenarios together into one long campaign game ?
Players should be able handle it on their own with a minimal amount of
research, but that's the kind of thing that the designer should be
doing.  As I said earlier, I am heartily against rounds-type combat
systems, and in VALLEY I found it a disappointingly standard Markham
element in an otherwise inventive game.  The reaction rule, while good
in theory, lends itself to appalling abuses.  Certain commanders-namely
Jackson and Sheridan-  are nigh on unapproachable, and since commanders
can react an indefinite number of times, attempts to sneak up on them
actually act as movement accelerators, giving them all kinds of freebie
mobility.  You gotta be able to do in the game things that happened
historically, and while both Jackson and Sheridan were suprised in real
life- Jackson at Port Republic and Sheridan at Cedar Creek- it's almost
impossible to hit them in VALLEY unless they want to be hit.

My final complaint is one that not even the most skillful designer, not
even Richard Berg, can fix.  History.  The victory conditions are so
narrowly, geographically based and the opposing commanders are so poorly
matched that all of the scenarios play the same while none of them are
particularly well-balanced.  Not to say VALLEY isn't fun-- it is, with
lots of opportunities for maneuver, pursuit, feints, raids, attack and
counter-attack. It's just pretty easy at the start to see who's going to
win the scenario.

I am told that this same system appears in LEE INVADES THE NORTH and TO
MAKE GEORGIA HOWL !, games which I have not played but don't recall
hearing very good things about.  It may be that it doesn't work well
with major battles, being more suitable for sideshows, so that Mr.
Markham might be better off in the future in using it for games on say,
the Missouri/Arkansas or Carolina campaigns.  VALLEY is good, cheap fun,
and what more can you ask from it ?

CAPSULE COMMENTS:

Graphic Presentation:  The company is called Just Plain Wargames. Need I
say more ?

Playability:  A little tricky with all of that higher math, but once you
get the hang of it, good, fast, fun.

Replayability:  High.  Variable activations, movement rates, and battle
commitments offer wide differences in each game.  The situations are not
well-balanced, though, so most scenarios tend to go in the same
direction every time.

Creativity: Lots of ingenious, neato rules.  Shows what Markham could do
at 3W if the developers over there would only take their jobs seriously.

Wristage:

Historicity:  Too much so.  The commanders are historically good or bad,
the victory points are historical, so the games tend to be historical
(but not hysterical).  There is a lack, however, of seeing just how the
Valley campaigns fit into the big picture.

Comparisons:  Other Valley campaign games ?  Nope, although COA's
CAMPAIGNS OF ROBERT E. LEE does include the valley in some scenarios,
but only as a sideshow.  A small horde of games are around that cover
the individual battles, some of them quite good:  SDI'S GUNS OF CEDAR
CREEK (complete with the 98-pound weakling counters), SPI's  STONEWALL &
CROSS KEYS/PORT REPUBLIC, Mayfair's SHERIDAN'S RIDE, somebody else's NEW
MARKET.

Overall:  A nice game, finally, from Rob Markham.  

David Fox        fragilfox@aol.com