Cards on the table: I went into Jeff Davis already disliking the subject but still hoping to experience an interesting design within a distasteful shell. What I ultimately found was a universally terrible experience. Jeff Davis a game with what seems to me to contain no redeeming value. It is filled with bad history and an underwhelming and boring play experience. I want to put this up front to make this clear – I do not like Jeff Davis, both the person and the game. That does not mean that you have to dislike it, although I struggle to see how someone could find a positive in this mess, but if you read on any further I expect that you do so because you are interested in why I hold these views and what I see in Jeff Davis that I find so repulsive. Please do not read this with the hope of seeking validation for your own positive opinions of the game nor to simply make a bullet list of all the ways you think I am wrong. Save us both some time and go do something else with your day.
I played Jeff Davis multiple times, pulling levers and trying various strategies to see what the game contained. This is not an opinion arrived at simply by looking at the game’s concept (objectionable as it is), but rather an informed opinion based on spending far too many hours with this mediocre trash of a game. For the record, not that it matters, I did manage to “win” the game once.
The Game
Before we get to the subject matter and how I think Jeff Davis falls short in portraying the American Civil War while still supposedly attempting to tackle historical hard truths, I thought it would be worthwhile to consider the game itself.
Jeff Davis is a variant of the States of Siege game system, first designed by Darin Leviloff and published by Victory Point Games. These games vary in their topics, but all share a few core mechanisms. The game map is split across several tracks converging on one central point. Enemy forces advance along these tracks and the player must hold them off until the game ends. Each turn starts with the drawing of a card or chit that tells you which tracks advance and then if any events or other special rules come into play this turn. The player is then usually given a chance to respond to these events by rolling dice to try and push back enemy units or to manage a variety of resource or political tracks. For a review of a more traditional example of the form, I would point you to my coverage of Worthington’s reprint of Malta Besieged.
Ben Madison, the designer of Jeff Davis, has made something of a reputation for taking the bones of States of Siege and modifying them in a few crucial ways to develop a different but the same sort of game experience. Jeff Davis’ greatest difference is probably in how it handles player actions. In most States of Siege games, the card you draw will tell you how many actions you can take this turn. Instead, Jeff Davis builds an elaborate economy where no action is free – if the player wishes to do something they must pay for it somehow. This certainly increases the complexity, but for me also sucks much of the fun out of the game. I will go into the historicity of this economy later, but just in terms of play it nudged me more towards not playing the game. There were several turns where after resolving all of the events for that turn, I would simply not take any actions because it made more sense to conserve resources for later. This is certainly a choice, but in a game with so much to resolve before I can even begin taking actions it felt a lot like I wasn’t really playing the game. My experience playing Jeff Davis felt like it was 75% automation, 25% choice, and that’s a shitty ratio in my book. Maybe if this was an app on my phone that would be fine, but as an activity I do over several hours it was goddamn boring.
The Sequence of Play is not promising - the section dedicated to player actions is pretty thoroughly overwhelmed by everything else. This also shows off many of the special rules and other elements that you will frequently be looking up in the rulebook.
Jeff Davis is also a game very dependent upon luck. There is obviously the dice rolling, to push an enemy army back you must roll higher than its value on a d6. That’s very standard States of Siege and I don’t mind it – it’s part of the fun. Jeff Davis adds quite a few more layers of random in terms of the Foreign Intervention track, roll more d6s to advance France and England, as well as the very crucial randomness of when you draw US Frigates and Anaconda Plan counters from the counter cup. These counters will cripple your economy, which you need to take actions, and if you have the bad luck to draw them too early you will have lost the game before it even got started. Now, I am often an advocate for randomness in historical games. I think a historical game needs randomness to function, and I look askance at games without an element of luck in them. However, for a highly random game like Jeff Davis, I need it to also be short, and that is something that this game decidedly is not. To be both random and long is a sin I can only rarely forgive.
Besides just being plain boring to play, my other major gripe with Jeff Davis as a game experience is that the narrative is dreadful. Narrative is a large part of what draws me to historical wargaming. I want to see the arc of history, nudge it, and see where it goes. I love systems like Men of Iron not because they are the perfect example of their genre, but because they tell phenomenal stories. Jeff Davis is a game that feels both too on the rails and simultaneously insufficiently structured to tell a meaningful story.
Each turn you draw chits from a cup, instead of the decks of cards used in the classic States of Siege titles, which in theory I don’t mind. The Blue Panther thick wooden chits give the pulling of individual pieces from a cup a satisfying tactile feel and the random mix of the cup is slightly more satisfying than the ordered chaos of a shuffled deck of cards. One critique of event decks I’ve seen, and felt myself on occasion, is that your chances of victory could be set before you even begin playing if the deck shuffle is particularly bad for you. You’ve lost, you just don’t know it yet. With a counter mix in a mug that isn’t true. However, the problem with the counters is obvious when you think of it – there’s far less space on each counter than there is on a card! That means that Jeff Davis must fill each counter with symbols and has no room for any context or storytelling. A card can say what offensive is being launched, what event these numbers are meant to represent. This is a thin narrative, but it is still a narrative. The chits all feel meaningless, and the innate abstractness of States of Siege comes even more to the fore, making for a rather drab experience. I used to doubt the value that simple names and a line of flavor text could bring to historical narrative, but after my experience with Jeff Davis I doubt no longer.
The game is also spectacularly ugly. Please, publishers, hire graphic designers and artists to do your games, don’t just use whatever the designer has put together. Staring at this is not a great way to spend an afternoon.
At the same time, Jeff Davis includes a variety of set events. The Campaigns events, triggered by a certain symbol on a chit, always happen in the same order every game but could happen all in the first year of the war, all at the end, or any time in between regardless of what else is happening in the game. Other events, like Kentucky’s neutrality being tested or the Emancipation Proclamation, all happen to a fixed schedule. The fact that most of the campaigns are ludicrously abstract, only the Peninsula Campaign even happens on the map, limits the potential impact any of this could have on the game’s narrative. At no point playing Jeff Davis did I feel like I was watching the American Civil War unfold – I saw only symbols and tracks and the fickle randomness of the dice. However, at the same time I could never not be aware of the fact that the game was about the Confederacy and that I was trying to defend slavery. The lack of another narrative to hang my experience on simply reinforced the grossness of the game’s topic and the bizarre decisions Madison made in his representation of it.
The Problem with the Economy
I really don’t want to get lost in the weeds when discussing how Jeff Davis represents history. There are a lot of strange decisions on display in this game and I’m not sure all of them are bad. Many of them are, but maybe not all of them. The inclusion of the failed experiment that was the C.S.S. Hunley submarine while the much more important ironclads are relegated to an optional rule is an odd choice but not particularly objectionable – it’s a designer’s prerogative to include the weird in their design if they so wish. I do want to single out the choices around the Confederate economy because they have such a large impact on how the game plays. Since you need to pay for each of your actions, how you acquire money and use other resources is going to be a core part of the game experience.
The core mechanism to earn money for the Confederacy is via blockade running, much like it was at the war. At the start of each turn, you will assign your blockade runners to various routes and then roll dice and consult a table to see where the available USA Frigates blockade, preventing and potentially eliminating your ships. You total the value of each ship that makes it through the blockade based on the value of their routes and then subtract the number of Anaconda Plan counters that have been drawn from the cup and placed on various ports on the map.
The end of my one “victory”, where I was out of resources but still held everything together. Early British intervention (based purely on luck of the draw and roll) held off an effective blockade for most of the game. Honestly, losing all my Blockade Runners was a relief as it meant one fewer step for me to resolve each turn.
This version of the southern economy includes all the key elements, but kind of jumbles them up as to make them almost unrecognizable. The Anaconda Plan was initiated in 1861 by General Winfield Scott to try and choke off the Confederate economy. The southern United States was an export economy before the war, they produced goods with slave labor which they exported either to the north or abroad. With the outbreak of war, they needed to export goods abroad to make any money to sustain the war effort. They didn’t even have much in the way of processing to turn raw cotton into usable material. The way that the south got goods abroad was on blockade runners, small ships that ran fast and tried to weave their way between the Union ships hanging outside their harbors as part of Scott’s plan.
What doesn’t really make sense in Jeff Davis is that the effectiveness of this plan is totally random. I once spent more than half of a game with only a single Union Frigate trying to block me, the rest being in the chit cup along with all of the Anaconda Plan counters. This makes no damn sense – if there is no blockade why would I even be using blockade runners in the first place? Blockade runners are only necessary once a blockade is happening! Surely a blockade like this should escalate naturally as the game progresses, not be left entirely to random chance. Especially since a blockade that comes in too early will completely scupper your victory. In many ways, it felt like how the blockade developed determined my chances of success.
Also, as far as a gaming experience goes, the blockade runner minigame is fundamentally uninteresting. The decision on which routes to use for your blockade runners should in theory be interesting but it is pretty much entirely dictated by the number of US Frigates in play. With only one Frigate in play there is a pretty clear optimal placement that never seems to be worth altering – certainly not worth pondering for any length of time. Two frigates and one or two Anaconda Plan markers can be potentially interesting, but in practice I still found a fairly consistent placement that I didn’t change often. Once three frigates appear, or more than two Anaconda Plan markers, the minigame pretty quickly becomes pointless and not worth the effort. By the late game you probably won’t even be using it at all. This is both incredibly uninteresting as a design experience and isn’t particularly informative about the actual history. Yes, the tightening of the blockade would make blockade running harder, but blockade running was always essential to the Confederate economy. You wouldn’t just give up on blockade running in 1863 and try to pivot to an alternative economy. There was no alternative!
This may seem like a very small critique, but I think it is representative of the game’s approach to history. Madison has many of the details right (or, at least, mostly right) but he shows little to no understanding of (or possibly interest in) how they fit together. It’s like having the history explained to you by a reasonably well read drunk – he knows the facts, but his train of thought is a mess and the version he’s telling you makes no damn sense.
Slavery
There’s no way around it, we have to talk about slavery and how Jeff Davis handles it. One of this game’s sole merits is that it is the first American Civil War game I’ve played that actually committed to including slavery. That said, I’m not prepared to give it too many marks simply based on the failures of others. That this game includes slavery is a positive, but it would be utterly damning if it did not and how Madison has chosen to include it is deeply flawed.
Slaves are a resource. The player starts with a number of counters representing slaves which can be spent like money but with the added downside that spending them decreases the foreign intervention tracks and there is no way to replace them. I have several minor objections to how slavery is framed in the game – the barbed wire surrounded box that holds your slave counters is not a great choice no matter what Madison seems to think and it doesn’t really make any sense that the French and British only object to your use of slavery some of the time – but my core objection to the depiction of slavery in Jeff Davis is that Madison makes the use of slavery a choice by the player, one you can choose to not do if you so desire.
What does it mean when you use up slavery tokens? Are you working slaves to death? Are they running away because only now has your treatment turned to be objectionable? The entire southern economy and war engine was sustained on the backs of slave labor for the entire war. This is not something that just comes up when you need it in a pinch. The Confederacy wasn’t forced to use slaves when they ran out of money because the Union had finally cut off their foreign trade, they were using them the whole time, that was the whole point. In an attempt to game-ify slavery Madison has fundamentally missed the point and created a poor and troubling representation of slavery in America in the 1860s.
I can’t tell if the choice a famous photograph of the aftermath of the physical abuse of slavery on the slave counters is a bold choice or exploitative. What I can say is that the choice of using cotton for plantations and not, y’know, slaves is pretty gross.
Let’s consider how this works in practice in the game. Assuming your game is developing reasonably well, in the early game you should be able to fund your war effort from blockade runners. Only from the mid-game when the Union ships start strangling your exports should you be forced to turn to other resources, such as spending your slave tokens and tapping key Confederate figures to try and bolster your economy. As a game arc this is coherent, but as history it makes no sense. The money raised from blockade running and the slaves on plantations were not two separate but equally valuable resources. The merchandise that the blockade runners were carrying was goods and material made and harvested by slave labor. The slaves produce what the ships carry! These are two parts of the same system – no slaves meant no goods to sell. Unless General Jackson proposes that his men start eating slaves, you can’t use slaves to sustain the soldiers without the other parts of the economy functioning! By splitting these elements in twain, Madison confuses the history and presents a jumbled and troubling version of Confederate history.
In Jeff Davis you can try and win the game without “using” your slaves, and if you get very luck you might succeed. At the final scoring during the 1864 US Election you get points for each “unused” slave you have still on the board. This nudges you towards a strategy where you don’t use slaves to fuel the Confederacy when using slaves the fuel their economy and war was the entire point of the Confederacy. Jeff Davis claims proudly that it confronts its players with the truth of slavery, and then the design suggests that to win you maybe don’t even have to “use” those slaves – whatever that is actually meant to represent.
This is made even more troubling by Madison’s statement during one of his design notes that Jefferson Davis “treated his slaves well”. I wish I was shocked that this needs stating, but no, Jefferson Davis did not treat his slaves well. No slave was treated well in America, Confederate or otherwise. There were varying levels of cruelty, but none of it was nice and it was universally horrible for the enslaved. That Madison can write in one line that Davis treated his slaves well and then in that same line note that more than a hundred fled from his plantation for freedom in the Union army shows a shocking lack of self-awareness and a troubling failure to understand slavery in the United States.
The relevant passage from the Jeff Davis rulebook
The Lost Cause without the Lost Cause
At the start of the rulebook for Jeff Davis Ben Madison proclaims that this game will include none of the Lost Cause mythmaking that is present in so much American Civil War history. To some degree he is correct. He clearly lays out that the reason for the American Civil war was slavery and slavery alone – flatly rejecting the core tenet of the Lost Cause, that the Civil War was about “States Rights” or some similar alternative explanation to avoid the actual truth. Leaving aside that Madison also expresses his support for the Confederacy even while clearly being aware that it was all about slavery, a stance that certainly implies that Ben Madison is pro-slavery, this would be a more convincing statement if the rest of the game didn’t lean so hard into the Lost Cause.
I’m genuinely not sure how else this can be interpreted besides Ben Madison declaring that he knows the Confederacy was for slavery and that he has still chosen to support it.
The thing is, while Madison rejects the revised justification for the war, this is a game about playing a lost cause that tries to avoid being the Lost Cause. While as Davis you are struggling to hold your coalition together against the inexorable march of the Union (or are meant to anyway, if I’m honest the mechanisms for disunion among the CSA felt half baked), no attention is given to political struggles within the Union itself. If you get very lucky, you could potentially try and attack Washington and give them a bit of a fright, that’s as far as things will go. The Union is an unstoppable war machine that has you outnumbered and is better supplied than you will ever be. Their armies march forward on virtually every turn no matter how effective you are at driving them back. This conception of a noble south being slowly crushed by a more powerful industrial north is a key principle of many Lost Cause narratives after the war.
Similarly, we see a superior Confederate generalship in old favorites Lee and Jackson. While Grant is given his due, being the scariest Union general on the map, Madison cannot shake the worship of Jackson and Lee. The two Virginians, along with Stuart should he enter play, get a bonus when fighting in Virginia (and happen to be restricted to that theater anyway). They also have multiple counters that you can have in play, which allows them to make two to three times as many attempts to drive off a Union attack as any other Confederate general. These are the backbone of your military effort, and their superior character is clearly on display. And wouldn’t you know it that worshipping at the altars of Lee, Jackson, and (what a surprise) Jefferson Davis are core elements in many Lost Cause narratives.
The choice to name the reforms undertaken by the Confederacy in 1862 “The Davis Revolution” screams gross hero worship. The other counters that go in this box are called States Rights and The Lost Cause. I’m genuinely not sure what to do with this information as, like much of the game, it just seems like a confused jumble of gross ideas.
Madison declares his rejection of the lie that sits at the heart of the Lost Cause in Jeff Davis, but he removes none of the other structures, which are fully capable of standing on their own as neo-Confederate propaganda. And even when he denounces the lie, he lets it quietly in the back door with his declaration that Davis was kind to his slaves – a horrific lie that hints at an even more extremist pro-Confederate stance: the idea that the slaves were happy in their bondage.
Conclusion
The kindest thing I can offer Madison is that maybe he does not understand the full implications of what he says and what he has done with this design. That he has made a boring and troubling game out of a form of ignorance. That is a bare excuse, a topic like this deserves far better, but the alternative is far more troubling: that Madison believes the cause of the Confederacy was noble and that, at least in the Nineteenth Century, black Americans were better off enslaved. We want to insist that no one in this year could hold this belief but given recent developments in Florida’s school curriculum it seems that this kind of racist historical denialism remains alive even as progress has been made in tearing down monuments to the Confederacy elsewhere in the country. I sincerely hope that Madison has simply not thought through what Jeff Davis the game is saying, but I can only judge it by the evidence I have before me and that is not promising.
As a game Jeff Davis is a poor entry in the States of Siege system, a fiddly, overcomplicated mess of a design that long overstays its welcome and whose appeal I genuinely cannot understand. As history, it claims to offer hard truths and an unwavering look at a dark time in American history but while it is prepared to (partially) admit one truth it sustains so many other lies as to be barely better than neo-Confederate propaganda like Gods and Generals.
I expected to find troubling history when I opened Jeff Davis, and I in fact looked forward to it because I find engaging with odd historical viewpoints to be genuinely interesting and worthwhile. What I didn’t expect was to find a game that was so boring. Jeff Davis isn’t even bad enough to be interesting, it’s just bad.