I want to open with two confessions straight out of the gate. The first is that I have only played half of Steve Ruwe’s The Late Unpleasantness: Two Campaigns to Take Richmond. As the sub-title implies, there are two games in this box and I have only played one of them. The two campaigns are If It Takes All Summer, on Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign, and The Gates of Richmond, on the Seven Days Battles in 1862. I have only played the latter, but I feel like my experience with it is sufficient to review that part of the game even if this is not a review of the whole box. My second confession is this: I didn’t really enjoy The Gates of Richmond. Usually games I don’t enjoy I don’t write about, because expressing my lack of enjoyment isn’t very much fun for me and this blog is first and foremost a hobby. However, in this case I had what I felt were sufficient thoughts on the game and its representation of history that it would be worth writing about it, even if in the end I don’t think the game itself is very interesting to play.
The Game
The initial set up - there is a reasonably important element of free deployment for both sides. This is revealing all the units - in theory you should mask what units are where but we both found it clunky and eventually abandoned it.
I want to talk a bit about the game itself and why I don’t think it quite works before moving on to what I think is interesting about it and why I wanted to write about my experience playing it. The Late Unpleasantness: Gates of Richmond is an operational level game of the Seven Days Battles in 1862 between Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan. The Seven Days Battles made Lee’s reputation and was yet another major setback for the United States after the disaster of First Bull Run the previous year. The game is played at Division level with a relatively low counter number on a point to point map. It uses a fairly simple fog of war system, including dummy units, supply rules, and some card play (but it is not a card driven game). All the relevant rules to play the game fit in to about 8 pages, which is a positive. The core problem with The Late Unpleasantness is that it’s disparate elements don’t fit together very well and the whole experience is a bit wonky, which made for an overall unsatisfying game in my opinion. To my eyes the three main flaws with the game are the cards, the usability, and how it chooses to represent the history. It is not entirely without positives, though, and there is an element of the combat system that I did actually quite like.
The cards in The Late Unpleasantness are just really unsatisfying. Both players draw from a shared deck but many cards only benefit one side, so you can end up with a hand of cards that are just useless to you. You start with eight cards and can play as many as you want almost whenever you want (with one exception to be covered later), furthermore the usefulness of the cards varies wildly. These elements can create some extremely swingy outcomes. They should at a minimum have been separate decks for the two sides and the cards needed a lot more refining and development, but honestly you could probably just remove them from the game and have a better experience.
End of Turn 1 - AP Hill pushes the Union flank and Lee and Stuart push past to threaten Union supply. Instead of focusing on the idea of destroying the United States’ army, the goal of Lee in this game is takin the supply points which I wasn’t a fan off if I’m honest.
In terms of how the game handles fog of war, this game should have been a block game. Each Division is only one counter and having divisions with counters representing current strength stacked under them and fog of war counters on top is just very clunky. This game should have used blocks and a separate sheet to track damage, like the Conquerors series from Shakos games. While this wouldn’t fix all of its problems it would have been a step in the right direction by making the game much easier and smoother to play.
In terms of how the game represents history, I am sympathetic to the challenges the designer faced. The history of the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles is a tricky thing to represent. Most historians blame the disastrous outcome for the US as being the result of General McClellan’s unwillingness to fight. He outnumbered the Confederates but due to his own reluctance, deception on the part of the Confederates, and Lee’s aggression he was ultimately defeated. The challenge for game designers is that the solution to the Peninsula Campaign, and in particular this phase of it, is obvious to anyone who has studied history. McClellan should have attacked the Richmond works - they were badly undermanned and only looked strong due to trickery on the part of the Confederate commander. McClellan almost certainly could have punched through them and taken the city - but he didn’t believe he could and so he didn’t. The only way to capture the history of this campaign is to make the player think like McClellan. This game doesn’t do that, and so our game ended with my opponent punching through Richmond’s weak defenses - something that was only slightly delayed by rule that causes 50% of attacks on these positions to fail - and take the city on like turn 3. It was pretty underwhelming and did make me wonder if the game’s system was designed around the more aggressive tactics of Grant’s Overland Campaign and only moderately adjusted for this radically different campaign.
Some good rolls allow the US Army to break a hole in the Richmond defenses and then a card that gives +1 movement allows a Union division to march straight into Richmond unopposed, ending the game late in the second turn. A very underwhelming finish.
These are not the sum total of this game’s flaws. It feels weird to me that the map is clearly for a longer Peninsula Campaign but the scenario on the box is just the Seven Days Battles - the game would be better if it started earlier and I wonder if the designer’s unfortunate early death may have cut short the development of a more robust campaign scenario. The rest of the game just doesn’t quite click, but it is not without a few diamonds, small though they may be.
Overall, I’m not very impressed with combat in this game but I will spare you a list of its faults and focus instead on what I liked. Each CRT result has a column you roll on to determine if the battle has concluded. You roll a d6 and it will tell you if one side or the other retreats, or if you keep fighting. I quite like the idea that at the start of a fight you might not know how many rounds it will last. There are options open to you to try and abandon a battle that is still going but they are no sure thing, and together I think these systems represent an interesting way to inject a bit more chaos and unpredictability into the combat - which are things that I like in my wargame! Unfortunately, I think they are let down by the rest of the design, but if there is one idea I would be curious to see used elsewhere this is it.
The Lost Cause
One of my current topics of fascination is how the Lost Cause is represented in tabletop wargames. I want to preface this now that while I will be talking about neo-Confederate ideas and myths, I’m not declaring that the designer or publisher of this (or other) games are dyed in the wool neo-Confederates. The Lost Cause has been pervasive throughout American culture for well over a century. It is possible to believe its tenets without fully supporting its cause but if we never take the time to interrogate those tenets and how the appear in our lives we will never uproot it’s malicious influence on our society.
To my eyes The Late Unpleasantness has two noticeable elements of Lost Cause-ism in it - its name and the representation of the respective leadership between the two sides.
What to call the American Civil War has actually been a contentious subject since the war’s beginning. In the eyes of the Confederacy, they were a sovereign nation after they seceded and as such the conflict should be named in the manner of a war between two equal parties. They prefer names like The War Between the States or, even more absurdly, The War of Northern Aggression. In contrast, the United States (we tend to refer to them as the Union but properly it is the USA we are talking about) saw the war as an attempted rebellion and hence the name The Civil War. In fact, an alternative name of The War of the Rebellion was popular for a chunk of the nineteenth century and The Civil War is almost a compromise - although one that Confederates still hated. The Late Unpleasantness, whether intentionally or not, engages with this issue by choosing a slightly comedic euphemism for the war that I certainly remember encountering growing up in Virginia. While nowhere near as extreme as the preferred Confederate names, it still sidesteps the Civil War/Rebellion naming convention and thus is a concession to a more Confederate perspective. I’m not telling you that this game is unredeemable neo-Confederate propaganda, but I do think it is worth being aware that even this war’s name has been contested territory for over 150 years and that the title of this game does lean in a more pro-Confederate direction.
A popular myth of the Lost Cause is that the Confederacy had better, smarter, and more charismatic generals (for the most part) than the US did but lost the war due to the overwhelming manpower of the North and Midwest, and to a degree I think The Late Unpleasantness reinforces this notion. By and large the Confederate generals had better leadership ratings than the US ones - not universally, but in many of the most crucial and important units. Since leadership is the primary stat that affects combat this is doubly important. The Union has more units with a higher strength value but strength only matters if you have double that of your opponent in the battle. I think this naturally leans the system towards modelling a conflict where an understaffed but better led Confederacy can beat the US unless they are overpowered by sheer weight of numbers. Now, this is a complicated topic because it isn’t entirely unfair to say that in this specific series of battles the US did have more men than the Confederacy and McClellan was certainly a sub-par commander in the field. The thing is, though, that the Lost Cause exploits this one little bit of truth and distorts it into a broad, sweeping, over generalised narrative that supports their view of the war. In the effort to be a simple and approachable game I think The Late Unpleasantness reinforces a Lost Cause narrative - it is not a driving force pushing this narrative forward but it is one more voice in the choir that sustains these myths in our society.
This might seem like extremely niche and minor points for me to spend so long writing about them, but I think it can show how even small decisions can have an impact in how history is portrayed. I don’t think this game is going to transform anyone into a neo-Confederate, but at the same time I don’t think it’s doing anything to contradict the sorts of lies neo-Confederate organisations have been pushing for over a century. And it is worth remembering that these lies were used to build and continually reinforce a system of racial segregation and violence that has dominated American culture and politics for decades. If we want our games to represent accurate history and not lies or propaganda we need to be challenge them when they fall short, and I think The Late Unpleasantness falls short.