The (hopefully) final entry in my Confederate Solitaire Trilogy is a classic game from Hermann Luttmann, a name familiar to anyone with an interest in games on the American Civil War. Originally released by Victory Point Games, In Magnificent Style received a deluxe reprint from Worthington a few years ago. This is one of two solitaire games on Pickett’s Charge, where the player tries to outperform Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble in their disastrous assault on the Union position on the third day of Gettysburg. I don’t really want to bury the lede, I think this is a gross subject for a game. Despite that, I had quite a lot of fun playing In Magnificent Style – stripped of its topic this is a very enjoyable light solitaire game, but that theme severely degrades my ability to enjoy playing it. Before we get to the heavy stuff, though, let’s talk a little about the game’s mechanisms and why it’s fun!
Push Your Troops
The core of the game is an addictive little push-your-luck mechanism that is apparently borrowed from a German dice game. You roll two d6 and consult a table to find the crossover point where the dice roll representing the column meets the row of the other die. This is very quick to resolve, and the chart is helpfully printed on the side of the board. As your troops advance, they will leave behind their Rally point. At any point after your first roll, you can choose to stop rolling and move that Rally point forward. However, should you keep going you will run the risk of rolling a result that will send your unit packing back to its start. There are also leaders that can give you a re-roll for the one unit they are attached to and a few other elements to help mitigate bad luck, but across your advancing line this will only help you so far. It’s tense, it’s simple, and it’s a lot of fun.
This system will naturally produce irregular advances among your units, but the game’s Battleline formation will encourage you to try and keep units adjacent where possible in hopes of triggering a general advance of several units at once. The map also includes a few obstacles that can only be crossed by certain results, which can force you into making several rolls in a row without moving forward, praying for a good advance and avoiding the Rout result that will send your unit packing back to the start.
A fairly typical scene when playing In Magnificent Style - the charged advances in piecemeal fashion.
This simple mechanism can generate a surprisingly strong emotional response. A string of good luck can feel like that unit is performing above and beyond the call of duty – shaking off enemy fire and passing over obstacles as if they were nothing. In contrast, a unit rolling a Rout or suffering from repeated Heavy Artillery barrages at a key moment can make you want to scream at them not to run – they were so close, they just needed to push on! It’s impressive how a bit of art can make you identify with these people in what is really quite an abstract dice rolling game.
Worthington has also given the game a very nice coat of paint. I love the counter art – each unit has their state’s flag, which is a nice touch and avoids the inclusion of numerous Confederate flags (although the Rebel Yell counter is unfortunately emblazoned with it). It is a little strange that the Rally and captured position counters use the Stars and Bars and not the Stainless Banner. Overall, though, this is an attractive game, which I think is especially important for a solitaire game. In another game I have my opponent and our discussion to distract me but playing solo I’m spending an hour of my life staring at. My only critique (except for the flags) would be that the rulebook was oddly formatted – it’s readable and far from the worst rulebook I’ve encountered but it made referencing rules more work than I think it needed to be. Most of the key rules you need are printed on the board and most counters have what they do printed on their back, so you rarely need to go to the rules to look things up but on the rare times you do it can be quite frustrating.
My greatest “triumph” - most of the Union lines taken by units in reasonably good strength. You get VPs based on how many positions you control and the strength points in and adjacent to those positions.
Overall, this is a really fun little design. It’s not too complicated, and I didn’t find it particularly challenging, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I could almost find myself pulling this off my shelf every few months to give it another go. Almost. There is, however, one central flaw with In Magnificent Style.
A Glorious Failure
I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of how well In Magnificent Style does or does not model the events of Pickett’s Charge or how specific mechanisms do or don’t evoke that moment in history. I could complain about the Rebel Yell counter, or the frequent Lost Cause-ism in the names of the event cards, or how I think the game doesn’t accurately represent the messiness of how the charge advanced, but I think that’s obsessing over pieces when the problem is the topic as a whole. The design notes make plenty clear that this is not trying to be a simulation, and it wouldn’t be a valuable use of time to treat it as one. I really want to sink my teeth into the big question, and to my mind flaw, in this game: why the fuck is it about Pickett’s Charge?
If you are somehow unfamiliar with Pickett’s Charge, let me briefly get you up to speed. On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee elected to launch a frontal assault at the center of the Union lines in an attempt to secure a breakthrough. He pulled two divisions from General A.P. Hill’s corps as well as one from General Longstreet’s, the latter commanded by one General Pickett, whose name would adorn the charge forever despite just being one part of it. On the second day Lee had ordered assaults at both extreme ends of the Union position and been repulsed in both cases at great cost in lives. Now, with the Union having been reinforced overnight with the arrival of General Sedgewick’s corps, Lee decided to do basically the same thing again over the vehement objections of General Longstreet. The assault was preceded by the largest artillery bombardment in history, which proved to be remarkably ineffective thanks to poor coordination and problems with the fuses used for the explosive shells. Longstreet, despairing at his inability to block the charge, gave his consent for the assault to begin and the Confederate brigades charged straight at the exact point that General Meade, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, had predicted they would. The result was a slaughter – the whole charge lasted less than an hour and completely devastated its participants for no gain in ground and very few casualties inflicted on the Union.
Despite being Lee’s greatest single tactical blunder, Pickett’s Charge lived on after the war as “The High Water Mark” of the Confederacy. The point of the Confederacy’s greatest achievement right before their defeat rendered their cause doomed. Entire books have been written on the mythmaking of Pickett’s Charge, too much to summarize here, but to put a point to it if you wanted to distill the Lost Cause down to just one single moment you could do worse than picking Pickett’s Charge. The epitome (at least in memory) of the glorious and noble but doomed act of resistance against the Yankee oppressor. A romanticized picture of what was really an ill-conceived and poorly executed attack by slavers in pursuit of their vile cause.
In Magnificent Style asks me to take control of these slavers and try and succeed where they failed. Can I punch a hole in the Union lines and win one for Dixie? What it doesn’t seem to spend any time thinking about is what that means. Based on how many victory points you score at the end of the game you are allocated one result, from overwhelming victory to disastrous defeat, each with a paragraph of text. This text is purely military in focus, it tells you what the armies do in the wake of your failure or success. Do you force the Union to surrender or sue for peace, winning the war for the South or are you butchered like your historic counterparts?
The victory descriptors from the rulebook
What is notably absent from these descriptions is any reference to what you are actually fighting for. When I won a Decisive Victory in my second game it told me about how I drove back Meade’s army and marched on Washington to bring the war to a favorable end. It didn’t at all consider the consequences of what my victory might look like: that I had potentially secured the rights to own slaves in the Confederacy for generations to come. I had ensured the exploitation, torture, rape, and murder of my fellow humans based solely on the color of their skin. A glorious victory. I should be so pleased with myself.
Winning a game of In Magnificent Style filled me with revulsion, I hated it. When I mention a reaction like this to a game it is inevitable that someone will come along and suggest that this was the designer’s intent – history can be dark, and I am just experiencing it as it was. There can be no such argument in support of In Magnificent Style, this is very explicitly meant to be a light bit of fun, not a serious meditation on the horrors of slavery and war. This isn’t an Amabel Holland game as art project, it’s a push-your-luck light bit of entertainment. This is a fatal flaw at the heart of this design that I cannot overlook.
When playing, if I had a very good run of dice, I would feel a moment of elation and want to sing the praises of these stalwart soldiers who have overcome obstacles to help me seize victory from the jaws of defeat. Then I would remember what it was these men were fighting for and I would want to throw their stupid counter in the bin. This is a game for generating empathy for slavers who are killing their countrymen just so they can keep treating black Americans in a monstrous fashion. I cannot overlook this, and I don’t think anyone should be asked to – it’s a bad look for this game and for the hobby as a whole to be putting Pickett’s Charge on this pedestal. It is Lost Cause-ism at its most essential.
Why Not Literally Anything Else?
The design notes freely admit that there is nothing specific about Gettysburg to this game design, it is a fairly abstract system that could be adapted to nearly any major offensive. So, then, why is it about Pickett’s Charge? The ACW is filled with poorly conceived and/or executed assaults. The Union attacks on Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor are both major battles that would be far superior uses of this system. Fighting on behalf of the army of liberation in an attempt to bring the war to an end and free thousands of slaves would be a far better experience, and one that could actively push back against Lost Cause narratives of the war.
If you don’t believe me, here is Luttmann himself saying that the game is not really specific to the topic of Gettysburg.
The obvious explanation is that Pickett’s Charge is more famous than those battles, and the original designer/publisher wanted that Gettysburg brand to sell more copies. This is a weak excuse. For one thing, as discussed above, Pickett’s Charge is famous in no small part because of Lost Cause narratives of the war, so it is crass capitalist mathematics to further promote that Lost Cause ideal in hopes of selling a few games. I’m not here to give out a free pass to someone because they want to make a buck profiting off of a racist historical narrative. I also just fundamentally don’t buy it. Nobody is publishing historical wargames to make big money and I can’t imagine the sales would be very different if the game were about a different famous ACW battle like Cold Harbor – if anything the novelty of the latter might encourage more interest as Gettysburg is a bit overdone.
I can see no reason why this game (or, for that matter, the game Pickett’s Charge, another solitaire game on the same topic) is about this subject besides the long arm of the Lost Cause and a failure to critically engage with what that means. This is unfortunate, because with another topic I would really enjoy In Magnificent Style – I could see myself keeping it and periodically pulling it off my shelf for a bit of light fun. As it is, winning In Magnificent Style makes me feel like shit and playing it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t like this game and I think both we as gamers and the American Civil War as a topic deserves better than Confederate apologia for its solitaire game designs. Designers and publishers: do better.
If you have enjoyed this or my other reviews on solitaire Confederate games, first of all, thanks! They aren’t easy to write. I have to extend thanks and some credit to Liz “Beyond Solitaire” Davidson for sending me the copy of In Magnificent Style and to Stephen “COIN Multipack” Rangazas who sent me a copy of Mosby’s Raiders. I also have to thank my Ko-Fi backers who made it possible for me to buy a copy of Jeff Davis. If you have enjoyed this project and would be interested in contributing to its continuation, I would really appreciate it. You can do so at: https://ko-fi.com/stuartellisgorman
I am hoping that I have now put playing these solitaire games behind me, but I know that I haven’t even played half of them yet. If for some reason you wish to see me suffer further I will simply state that I will play any game that I am sent at least once.
(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi so I can keep doing it.)