Blind Swords is quickly climbing the ranks to be among my favorite hex and counter systems. The chaos of the chit draw, the unpredictability of the CRTs, the manageable footprint, and the elegant presentation from Revolution Games have all wormed their way into my heart. Longstreet Attacks showed me the potential of the system, but in a form that didn’t totally agree with me. The Day Was Ours showed me that it could do approach to battle and the chaos of First Bull Run. After playing that I was pretty sure that I would prefer Blind Swords as a single counter sheet experience – low counter density leaving me plenty of room to explore the map. It was with some trepidation that I punched the two counter sheets of Jeff Grossman’s Grand Havoc. Would this cement my love for Blind Swords, or would it be another Longstreet Attacks, an almost hit that doesn’t quite land? I’m delighted to report that it was the former – Grand Havoc delivers a larger scale Blind Swords experience and seems to resolve pretty much all my misgivings about Longstreet Attacks. This is a great game, and I’m excited to talk about why.
Revolution Games kindly provided me with a complementary review copy of Grand Havoc
What struck me most about Grand Havoc was its tempo. The casualty system in Blind Swords is relatively simple. Each unit has a normal side and a weakened Battleworn side, represented by flipping the counter to its reverse. Units that would suffer further Battleworn results in combat must make a break test, which can put them onto the off map Broken Track. It is in theory possible to rebuild units, flipping them to their original full-strength side or even returning them to play from the Broken Track if they are in the lowest numbered box. The thing is, in my time with Longstreet Attacks and The Day Was Ours I only ever really dabbled in these systems. Rebuilding units requires you to stop your momentum by giving an order that doesn’t allow for any movement or attacks for that regiment, and you must also be at least three hexes away from the nearest enemy unit. The Rally event lets you restore one unit at a distance of only two hexes from the enemy, which can restore a unit in a pinch, but the promise of fully or mostly rebuilding a regiment never quite seemed worth the cost. Maybe I’m just bad at the games though.
In Grand Havoc, however, I frequently found myself trying to rebuild regiments so that I could send them back into the fight. This is not a game of long-distance maneuver like The Day Was Ours, nor is it about a desperate charge with a ticking clock hanging over your head like Longstreet Attacks. Instead, you are fighting over roughly three closely connected fronts. The abundance of units available allows for a regiment to push forward, attack, and then fall back behind a friendly line to slowly recover and attack again. This gives the game a feeling of swirling chaos, as units flow into and out of combat across several different parts of the battlefield. The tempo can bleed across sections, and to some degree it must, but moving between sections can be a multi-turn undertaking so you have to be confident that it’s the right choice.
The early clashing of the lines, opening sparring before they got pretty much completely entangled. The Union units on the bottom right aren’t yet released, and can’t activate.
A key support to this tempo is the game’s victory conditions. I have been on record as saying that the victory conditions for Blind Swords have been my least favorite part of the games I’ve played. I must eat a little crow here, as Grand Havoc has tuned them to a fine point. There are just three spaces that score victory points each turn during the main scenario. Both sides will contest these points to try and wrack up an early lead of points. The push and pull over these spaces is what gives the game a lot of its tempo. The Union holds one on a hill that the Confederates must push them off to gain access to areas behind Union lines – while the other two are in ravines between the two positions and form an almost immediate push and pull between the two sides.
However, that’s not the full picture. While there is a need to get those VP spaces, or at least deny them to your opponent, they are just one of a number of victory hexes on the map. The other hexes are unique to one side and only score at the end of the game, but they each score 10 victory points. When you consider that the game is 14 turns, that means that one of those victory hexes is worth as much as controlling a contested space for most of the game. At some point you must weigh your options and consider whether it is worth abandoning one or more of the shared victory hexes to push for some end game hexes.
Here you can see the three tension points - the hill on the left, the gully in the center, and the gully and hill on the right. The lighter colored counters are all on their battleworn side. By this stage in the battle a good few Confederates were already on the broken track.
This also gives the game a reduced sense of urgency. In Longstreet Attacks, the Confederate player needs to take hexes from the Union as fast as possible to prevent them from wracking up an insurmountable number of victory points. In Grand Havoc the three central hexes are a bit more like triage – you probably won’t lose or win the game entirely via them most of the time. You need to deny your opponent total control of them, but if you can just deny them victory there you can win elsewhere on the map. This allows more time for things like rebuilding units and launching another wave of attacks. In Longstreet Attacks the Confederates rarely had time to slow down to conduct a full rebuild, while the Union were too hard pressed to get enough space from the attacking Confederates. In Grand Havoc it is much easier to build room and conduct your offensives in waves rather than all at once.
That’s not to say this is a game without attrition – in fact it’s almost more of one for it. You feel each unit on the broken track, especially as once a unit is returned from the broken track it can’t be rebuilt to its full strength. You also need to manage morale damage, which is easier to remove but that can sometimes feel like it’s just slapping a bandage on to a larger problem. Sometimes it may be worth pushing a regiment a little harder, or leaving them to hold that fence, because you need another unit to be rebuilt so they can exploit a crack you made or fill a hole in your line.
I don’t want to make it seem like rebuilding and refined victory conditions is all that Grand Havoc has to offer – all the other classic Blind Swords elements are in full swing. The chit pull is as interesting as ever and the events are a great selection. In particular, there are fewer hold events which makes the game easier to play solo, which I appreciate as I rarely have the time to play these full games with someone else. There is a fairly even distribution of unit and general quality between the two sides, which makes for an interesting game. The Union has slightly more green units, with some really wild units that have enormous strength values and terrible cohesion ratings making them something like glass cannons. The Union also has far more units in total, though, so they have several sturdier veteran units to bolster their positions. How they play with their mix of offensively powerful units that can’t take an attack with their more durable veterans who don’t hit as hard is an interesting challenge. Meanwhile, the Confederacy has a more consistent distribution of troop quality but still needs to think about how best to apply their overall lower attack strength and fewer number of units. It’s a fun balance that doesn’t feel like it’s letting the post-war reputation of one side or the other unduly tilt the game.
The game also comes with a great little starter scenario, only a few units (the Union does get more) and lasts only a few turns. I’m still not sure I’d recommend learning the system with Grand Havoc, but if you have to this scenario is a great place to start.
The Buell Notices track is one of the more visually obvious additions, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that radical a departure from other games in the series. Many Union units, and a few Confederates, start the main battle scenario On Hold, and cannot move until certain criteria are met. This was true of Longstreet Attacks as well, but in Longstreet the release of units was mostly scripted. In Grand Havoc, the Union player needs Buell to notice that the battle is happening by moving him along the chart via a series of end of turn rolls. As Buell progresses the Union player will eventually be able to begin releasing units at the end of each turn. Some people might find it too random, but there are DRMs that both players can influence and overall, I think it’s a lot easier to keep track of and more interesting than a scripted release of units. It also provides a much more interesting narrative to the game than a scripted release does.
The production of the game is also excellent. This is the first volume since the passing of Rick Barber [Edit: No it’s not, it’s the second, I forgot about A Greater Victory], so the map is without his signature look. However, if I may confess a moderate heresy – I like this map better than the Rick Barber maps from previous entries. Don’t get me wrong, Rick Barber maps are incredibly beautiful, but I also found them to sometimes be too busy. This map is clean and great to look at, the ideal balance. I also really appreciated the addition of sheets to track activation tokens on – no more must I scatter all my regiment chits across a section of the map that I’m hoping won’t see any action. The counters themselves are also of a very high quality, just a really nice production overall.
The initial set up for the main battle scenario. I only just about fit it on my table, and I had to hide the Broken Track under the map so I just tracked broken units on the VP track - they count for VPs at game end anyway so it felt appropriate.
If I were to levy a critique at Grand Havoc, I do have an extraordinarily petty one. In a move that is far from unique, the game includes, with its victory conditions, an explanation in the rulebook of the consequences of a dramatic victory for one side or the other. These include sweeping events, such as the Confederacy successfully securing the state of Kentucky for their cause. While these descriptions can be mostly harmless, I object to the overly deterministic perspective they take on the outcomes of battles. They reflect the obsession with decisive battles, somewhat notoriously the dominant viewpoint of the scholars in the Prussian military leading up to World War I, and which still have a legacy in modern historiography. There is so much more to war than just battles, and I think it’s important that we admit that a battle like Perryville, while not without purpose or significance, was also basically never going to be “decisive.” After all, the Confederacy technically won the battle, but Bragg’s Kentucky Campaign was ultimately a failure. Grand Havoc is hardly the most egregious example of this phenomenon – the current reigning champion is probably In Magnificent Style – but it was the game that came across my table at a point in time when I’m feeling particularly inclined to object to it.
Petty nitpicks aside, Grand Havoc is an excellent addition to the Blind Swords system. I still think I will prefer the smaller footprint entries in the series, but Grand Havoc has shown me that a two counter sheet Blind Swords can absolutely deliver an exciting and not too overwhelming experience. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as an entry point into the series – it has a few too many deviations from the core rules across its two rulebooks (side note: I don’t like that the series now has two rulebooks) and it’s probably a bit big to take on if you’re totally new to Blind Swords. Instead, I would point to The Day Was Ours as a better starting point. However, for people with some experience with Blind Swords I highly recommend exploring this title. You may not have known it, but Perryville was a battle you probably want to play.