From: Markus Stumptner Subject: [Consim-l] Gettysburg 1863 (Six Angles) The last game of the Six Angles Collection we played ftf - Gettysburg 1863. This game covers the second and third day of the battle, and one of the participants now doesn't want to play it again, although that's less the fault of the game than the dierolls. On the other hand one could say the game shows the problems of stateless dierolls - it took ten attempts to get Longstreet to attack (on a chance of 50%) and by then the game was essentially over as he ran into a solid wall of Union reinforcements. A.P.Hill's fate was similar. Despite this the Confederates had a good shot at taking either Little Round Top or Power's Hill which would have given them a victory. As it was the Union had 12 VPs versus 6 Confederate ones, leading to an "Operational" (i.e., major) Union victory. The first game the attacks went in fairly smoothly giving the Confederates a major victory. Like the other games from the Six Angles Collection, the system is very simple, strong ZOCs, required attacks against enemy units in ZOCs (more on this later). Union units are divisions (two steps), Confederate ones are brigades (one step but two can be stacked). One artillery unit can be stacked on top. ZOCs do not extend up slopes or across breastworks (which are printed on the map). The simplicity sometimes moves into crudity. Leaders in ZOCs are required to attack (and thereby kill themselves). The victory conditions are fixed in terms of terrain (Little Round Top, Power's Hill in the Union rear, Cemetery Ridge, and Culp's Hill) so a breakthrough in the wrong place leaves Meade pretty much cold. The slopes that block ZOCs include the faint hills of Cemetery Ridge. The key to the game though is the fact that the players have chits that permit a certain number of attacks in certain multidivisional combinations for the Confies and individual Corps for the Union. You use a chit, it's gone from the game. You have to roll for it to be used and if the roll fails (the abovementioned 50% chance) then you can try again later. Only if the chit works can the units named on it enter enemy ZOCs (although, once in a ZOC, combat remains mandatory and so after the first push it can take a couple of turns for an offensive to die down). More controversially, this also doubles movement (more on this below). The net effect is that the style of battle is neatly incorporated in the chits (assaults on the Confederate side, limited counterattacks, at most one per corps, on the Union side), essentially an order system where the orders are distilled out. The disadvantage is that one sometimes feels one is played by the available chits rather than playing out the battle, a feeling comparable to the attacks in Lee's Greatest Gamble where you had everything ready waiting for the moment when Lee made up his mind, or (as patched by that game's errata) you went for the Clinging Amoeba attack, bringing more and more pseudopods to bear every turn. Another good comparison is the operations in Empire of the Sun (which come prepackaged in cards) instead of the Command Point based planning in Pacific War (which could lead to fantastic offensives becoming available when the units for them are not around and then not any more during the game. Too often you don't plan, you react. However, that is essentially nitpicking with a game that plays in 2-3 hours, has about a tenth the rules of Empire of the Sun and gives a good feel of the battle. There is one real drawback in the application of the chit system and it leads to our strongest problem with the game. The movement rates are very low. This reduces ahistorical shuffling along the line but makes the historical pace of advance almost impossible. Normal movement rate is 2, that means 2hexes in clear terrain over a 4-hour turn which means 150m per hour!! (300m per hour on roads. :-) This is doubled only when a chit is successfully played, and doubling such a low number doesn't give you much. The upshot of this, together with some reinforcements not coming in on roads, is that the Confederates have a hard time even reaching Devil's Den on the first day of the game (second day of the battle), much less Little Round Top. Longstreet's attack is more likely to go in on the last day, in parallel with Pickett's Charge (or Pickett's Crawl as we got to call it). I suspect the idea is that both of Longstreet's chits should be used immediately (and both succeed in the dieroll!) to have a chance of getting a remotely historical timeline. Not too fond of this since I don't consider Longstreet's assault to have been that unusual a feat. It also leads to droll effects on the Union side as one looks at a division coming on the map and knows it will take it twelve hours (three turns) to march the two kilometers to reinforce Culp's Hill. Even worse, artillery moves at one hex per turn (two on roads). As a result, the 'L' Confederate artillery, which is specifically mentioned on two chits (and presumbly intended to show the pre-Pickett bombardment), never got to bombard anything in our games because we simply couldn't get it close enough. Ahem... We haven't decided what to do about this yet, some extra mobility while further away from the enemy is certainly needed. (Or perhaps a tripling of the movement rate when activated by a chit.) If that is fixed, I think the appeal of the game would go up quite a bit - the chits mean every game is different and there is surprising replayability in a game of such limited size. On the other hand, combat happens at a reasonably historical pace, none of this grinding both armies into dust to the last cardboard man nonsense. The overall picture that this paints is pretty good, certainly on a par with Lee's Greatest Gamble, and probably not that much worse than Across 5 Aprils; light years beyond Blue and Gray. The last, ironically, despite the similarity in CRTs. The CRT here is pretty unbloody (essentially a push-and-shove CRT with the ability to convert retreats into losses as in all the other Six Angles games) but given the relevance of the victory hexes we still racked up a fair bit of losses in clinging to them, or pressing the attack (because, once out of ZOC, you can't go back in unless you have another chit to spend!). So the chit system also cleverly converts a fairly flexible CRT into an imperative to keep pushing and taking losses. Very clever, and good feel. So, certainly at least average in terms of history per hour played, certainly above the curve in interesting concepts, and really quick to get into. 2-3 hours for a full game. Not bad at all. >From the two games played we drew two conclusions. The difference between victory for one side or the other is very small, and the game may favour the Confederates a bit. This would then imply that the Confederates are overrated in combat, because they have such a good chance of winning despite being totally screwed in the maneuver department. May be worth some experimentation to find this out. Now where did I put the Perfidious Albion review of this game... Markus Last 3 games played: The Chaco War, Clash of Steel, Fallschirmjaeger --------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ --------------- "Bakayaro! Bakayaro!" ("Stupid Bastards! Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942 _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net http://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l