Harvest of Death (Steven Bucey, November 2003) Over the weekend I Solitaire'd Harvest of Death, from S&T 129. Not sure about this one. It is about the battle of Gettysburg, and focuses on the action around the Little Round Top and the southern portion of Cemetery Ridge on the second day, when Sickles' "controversial" move stuck his portion of the line out to the so called peach orchard. Longstreet's attack practically destroyed the III corps as a result. The game is very simple with just 4 pages of rules, and uses a standard move/shoot/melee sequence. There is facing, and leader rules, but no artillery units (an optional rule abstracts their use). It has more than a few problems. For instance, CSA units are half brigades, but may stack. Union units are divisions and may not stack, but have 3 or 4 steps each and are usually much stronger than a lone CSA half brigade. In the basic game there is no problem, but if you add in the leader rules then a corps leader MUST be part of an attacking force for them to combine, and then only units from the same corps may participate. The result is that two CSA half brigades stacked together but without a corps leader present can't combine to attack the same defender -- in fact only one of the two brigades can attack. This really hamstrings the CSA player. I quickly decided that CSA half brigades of the same division stacked together may combine when attacking. It's also very hard to hurt a unit without blocking its retreat path. Losses during a melee are numbers (1, 2 or 3), and the owner can choose to take them as step losses or retreats or some combination there of. I found it difficult for the CSA to get more than 2-1 odds so most results against Union units are a '1', which the union usually took as a retreat. A typical full strength Union division has a strength of 8 while a typical CSA division (half brigade pair) has a strength of 7, so it requires an entire CSA corps to get 2-1 odds against a Union division unit. A flank attack would give a +1 odds shift, so it would be possible for a CSA corps to get 3-1 odds against a full strength Union division, but doing so was very difficult. By the time the CSA had pushed the Union back far enough for the Union to have to take a stand (and take a step loss instead of a retreat) the Union had brought in 3 additional corps and substantially outnumbered the CSA both in divisions and total combat strength. Even with the Union restriction of moving just 2 corps a turn the Union was able to go over to the offensive and I just didn't see any chance for the CSA to get to the major victory hexes, much less contest them.