Few names loom larger in the, for lack of a better word, wargame-ology of current American Civil War games than Hermann Luttmann. A Most Fearful Sacrifice, his enormous game on the full battle of Gettysburg, has won countless awards and is easily among the most talked about games of 2022. Before that he was widely known for his Blind Swords system, which includes several battles from the Franco-Prussian War but is dominated by American Civil War games. Seeing as I am currently undertaking a tour of ACW designs it was inevitable that I would play a few Luttmann designs. As my entry point into the ludography of Luttmann I selected Longstreet Attacks. This wasn’t because I thought it to be the best entry into the system, many people have said it is not, but rather a choice based on the game’s subject. I wanted to play something Gettysburg to mark the 160th anniversary back in July and I thought playing a game about the second day on the 2nd of July would be appropriate. I managed to approximately time the beginning of my game with the timing of the famous attack, but the actual playing of the game took a fair bit longer than Longstreet’s disastrous assault did. I also think the figure of Longstreet and his position in the Lost Cause myth is an interesting one, and something that is very germane to my project.
Blind Swords
For those who may not know, Blind Swords is a chit pull, regimental level tactical hex and counter game system of I would say medium complexity. Lighter than Great Battles of the American Civil War, but by not without its chrome and complexity. The core is pretty easy to grasp, but there’s enough little nuance in the rules that you may find yourself having completely forgotten some small element until after you finish playing a game – I certainly did. To my mind, there are three things that stand out in Blind Swords and that I found utterly gripping, and please bear with me, they are: the chit pull, the combat results table, and the orders system. Wargaming baby, I’m nothing if not consistent in my love of the seemingly mundane at least!
I wouldn’t say I have a ton of experience with chit pull, but I’ve certainly played other systems that use it. I’ve played a few Great Battles of the American Civil War games, with its very complex chit pull, and I’ve dabbled in some lighter games where you just dump everybody in the cup and resolve to see what order each unit activates in. I mention this because I think the chit pull in Blind Swords is the most interesting version I’ve encountered so far by a mile. It’s relatively simple (although the Vassal mods implementation of it is a bit fiddly) but also really engaging. This is due to both how it handles events and how each activation is resolved.
I’ll start with the latter first. Unlike in something like GBACW where if you pull a division, you activate every unit in that division, in Blind Swords you first have to roll a die to determine if you activate fully or have to take a limited activation and then you only pick one brigade under that commander to activate. Then you mark that brigade as having been activated and if you have brigades under that commander that still need to activate you put the chit back in the cup to draw again in the future. I really like this, it makes the back and forth much faster as you’re usually only activated between two and five units on each chit pull, not entire wings of your army. It also makes for a more interesting flow to the battle, as you never know when another brigade in that division will activate or even if they will fully activate – so how risky do you want to play? A big aggressive move earlier could see that brigade stranded without support as your opponent plans their counterattack. It keeps the tension high on each chit pull and is overall a really satisfying experience.
The events also add a lot of excellent spice to the gameplay. Each turn you will place a number of events from your side into the cup, usually some you get to pick while others are added at random from the available pool. When you pull events, some will trigger immediately while others can be held and played later. This adds a lot more variety to what can happen in each round and for the most part the events are interesting without being game breaking. What I liked even more, though, was the Fog of War event that always goes into the cup. When this is drawn you roll on a table and an event triggers for one of the players. The best of these by far is the one that lets you move an enemy unit one space. Few things are more satisfying than taking control of an enemy piece. It is not only satisfying, though, it is also a great example of the chaos of battle and how sub-optimal decisions can be made in the heat of the moment. Game systems can struggle to capture one leader making a poor decision or an error that the commander, with their wider perspective, never would but by handing control to your opponent for one move you can create that sensation of a subordinate completely screwing up. If I had to distill Blind Swords down to one inspired rule, it would be this – I love it.
I am less certain that I am in love with the combat results table, but I am certainly intrigued by it. After calculating your attack strength you roll a d66, meaning you roll two d6 one of which represents a tens and the other a ones digit, so you get a number between 11 and 66. You then consult that row of the CRT against the column for your strength and look for the cohesion rating of your target – if you hit it will be in a colored band that will tell you what table you’re opponent has to roll on to see how their unit responds to being shot at. This could have no effect, or it could be utterly disastrous. I’m honestly not convinced by the first table; I think it works but I don’t love it. My issue is less with the table and more with how central the Cohesion Rating is to many of the game’s systems and the mixed feelings I have about it – but I’ll talk more about that later in the review.
An excerpt from the first of the two CRTs. You can see the dice results on the righthand column, the columns for attack strength, and the colored boxes for target CR values. You can also see here the many, many column shifts you factor in each combat, which can be a little overwhelming at times.
The second table, though, I think I love that. The defender must now also roll two d6s, one of which will determine whether his units are Battleworn (flipped over to a weaker side) and the other (brilliantly known as the Skedaddle Table) determines whether they retreat and if so, how far. Splitting these two outcomes and having them be randomly determined separately is great, I love it. It can create interesting situations where units take a ton of punishment but refuse to give up their position, or where completely healthy units break and run but are perfectly healthy and able to be sent back into the fight. It generates a valuable diversity of outcomes to combat with only a minimum amount of rules overhead – the best of both worlds.
The table that defenders will be rolling on - this one is for ranged combat, close combat has a separate one. I love the use of Skedaddle here. If I had a critique it is with the choice to use a D for Depletion as the result that inflicts a Battleworn status. We spent most of our game saying Disordered or Disrupted instead of Battleworn because of this.
Now, let’s talk orders. I think orders in wargames are really interesting. Last year I picked The Flowers of the Forest as my favorite game I played that year, and that’s a game entirely about giving orders and then regretting them utterly. Blind Swords is not that, and in fact is quite forgiving in how it handles orders but still manages to be interesting. When you activate a brigade, you pick an order from the four options: Attack, Defend, Maneuver, or Regroup. What order you pick will determine what they can do with their activation, with no order allowing you to do everything you want. The key factors you have to balance are how far you can move, what kinds of attacks you can make, and what options you have for rallying and rebuilding injured units. While Attack and Maneuver will be by far the most frequently used in any game, the situational usefulness of the other two cannot be denied and they certainly gave me food for thought as I was planning my strategy. This system isn’t the greatest thing in wargaming, but it does strike just the right balance between complexity and generating interesting decisions and I think that is worth praising.
Before we get on to my main critique of Longstreet Attacks, I wanted to do a quick bullet list of my nitpicks with Blind Swords. These are not irredeemable flaws, but they are things that annoyed me enough that they provided a mild detriment to my truly loving what is otherwise an excellent system. My complaints are thus:
I hate calculating strength ratios. When I saw the initial combat system for Blind Swords, I was excited that it used unit strength, and then I saw that you have to calculate strength ratios to determine column shifts in close combat. I hate this.
Cohesion Rating is a cool stat, but it feels a bit too critical. CR 4 and 5 units are so much better than CR 2 ones. CR not only determines how likely you are to be hit in combat, it also can trigger column shifts in close combat and having a CR of 2 or less makes you susceptible to Panic results triggered by neighboring combats. It just feels a little too critical of a stat and that makes the variability present in some units a bit frustrating, which is something I’ll go into more below, but it was a frequent source of frustration for me.
The leader death rules are pretty underwhelming. Given the high rate of wounding and death for officers in the ACW this is now something I look for in the games I play. Leader death is a possibility from drawing the Fog of War chit, with a separate table to see who, if anyone, died. It doesn’t happen all that often, and in my game the only leader who died was replaced by a leader with the exact same activation stat. This was pretty underwhelming and basically had no impact on the game, which was disappointing. I’d like to see it trigger more often.
The games are too long. The grand campaign of Longstreet Attacks took me over a dozen hours and from what I can see this seems to be pretty standard for the system as a whole. If my opponent and I had played in person in one sitting, as opposed to over Vassal across a number of evenings, it would have gone faster but I have yet to see a Blind Swords ACW game with a full battle playable in under four hours and that’s a bit of a bummer. Don’t get me wrong, I love a long game some of the time but it’s not an every week kind of gaming experience and long games have to be really amazing to warrant me returning to them again and again.
Those are my main nit-picks. The core system is good but we’re not here to just talk about Blind Swords in the abstract. This is a review of Longstreet Attacks specifically, so what did I think of that game specifically? The short version is that while I really like Blind Swords as a system and I’m sure there is a Blind Swords game out there for me, I’m sure that that game is not Longstreet Attacks. The long version is below.
Longstreet Attacks
I want to open with the fact that I think Longstreet Attacks is a fine game. I enjoyed my time playing it. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have played it for nearly as long as I did. I found the Little Round Top scenario a little tedious, but it was also a learning scenario so that’s kind of understandable. The main campaign battle was definitely more interesting, but I also found it at times very frustrating. This was the kind of frustration where I wanted to love this game, but there were elements of it that prevented me from doing so and that drove my frustration with it. It’s a very specific kind of frustration, maybe the worst kind, and I want to try and explain why. I’m going to open with a few minor critiques of things that just didn’t work for me, but I can understand may be the result of my own personal preferences, before getting to the real meat of my problem with Longstreet Attacks: the narrative of the battle that its systems create.
While I think it seems natural to pick Little Round Top as an intro scenario with its small counter density, the terrain proved incredibly frustrating while I was playing the game and in both games (this and the grand battle) the Confederates barely launched a sustained assault due to be bogged down in the rocky terrain.
In terms of pure mechanics, the element of Longstreet Attacks that frustrated me the most was its victory conditions. Across the map are scattered various victory point hexes for one side or the other, or both, that grant VPs at the end of each turn. There are also three hexes that if the Confederacy can take them will generate an automatic victory. I’m generally not a fan of victory points in wargames and I’m really not a fan of wargames that generate points every turn for controlling a space. I need a solid justification for why controlling this hex is so important to overall victory and if it’s going to be for a number of turns, I really need to understand why controlling this hex for 20 minutes (the in-game turn length in Longstreet Attacks) matters as much as who controls it at the end of the game. Victory conditions are something I have a mild obsession with, and I don’t like ones that are too game-y. I want the terms of victory to convey something about the historical objectives of the two sides.
This gets to my other problem with Longstreet Attacks’ victory conditions, and one that I accept is derived from my own opinions on what I want to see in a historical game. The victory point hexes are scattered in a way that nudges players towards control of areas that were central to the historic battle. To put it another way, the victory conditions are set to direct players towards recreating the historical course of the assault. This means that hexes that objectively would be worthless to control in terms of overall strategic value to the battle can be worth quite a lot of points because historically that was a point of fierce fighting. This feels too artificial to me. I want the game to have victory conditions that make me understand the strategic goals of the battle, not ones that try to move me along on rails to recreate what the historical commanders did. I know for other people this won’t be as big of a problem, but this is my review and so I get to say I don’t like it.
I haven’t really brought it up in the review because I think its already widely covered elsewhere, but the game does come with this very nice Rich Barber map. If I had to be a slight heretic I would say that I found the terrain around the Round Tops to be a bit too busy and hard to read at times, but there’s no denying the map’s overall aesthetic appeal.
The victory conditions frustrated me because they felt more tedious and less interesting than I wanted, but they were not my greatest issue with Longstreet Attacks. My objection to Longstreet Attacks could arguably be oversimplified into the idea that the Union units Cohesion Ratings are too low, and the Confederates’ ratings are too high, but it’s more than that. Explaining it, however, is going to take a bit of time so I ask you please for your indulgence.
I want to talk about the narrative of Longstreet Attacks, and in examining that narrative I am only considering the emergent story that comes through via the game’s mechanisms. Not the framing that might be in the rulebook or with the scenario description, nor any designer notes. Instead, I just want to consider what version of Longstreet’s attack on the 2nd of July this game told me when I spent many hours of my life playing it. To understand why I care so much about this we need to talk a little bit about Longstreet as a man and his unusual position within the historiography of the American Civil War.
Longstreet was a general who spent almost the entire war serving under Robert E Lee. Lee affectionately called Longstreet his “Old War Horse” and he was one of the few generals who was able to complain to Lee about his strategies and openly disagree with the general. They were very close, especially after the death of “Stonewall” Jackson in May of 1863, and so you would expect Longstreet to hold a similarly hallowed position within the halls of Confederate memory as Lee and Jackson do. You would be wrong, and to understand why you need to know what Longstreet did after the war. To cut a very long story very short, Longstreet moved to Louisiana, joined the Republican party, and argued in support of other ex-Confederates joining the party and accepting Reconstruction – not out of the pure goodness of his heart, mind, he believed it necessary to dilute black involvement in politics, but still a radical approach for a man of his legacy. This put him in direct conflict with Redeemers like the KKK, the White League, and other organizations that sought to violently restore a white supremacist order to the southern United States. This came to a dramatic head in 1874 at the Battle of Liberty Place, when an armed group of white supremacists attempted to storm the Louisiana capital and depose the Reconstruction era government there. Longstreet, as an officer in the state militia, led a force of mixed-race militiamen to oppose them. Over a hundred men died, Longstreet was captured trying to negotiate with the White League, and President Grant eventually sent in Federal troops to quell the unrest. An ex-Confederate hero leading black troops against his fellow white southerners was an unforgivable sin. Former comrades in arms, including notorious Lost Cause promoter Jubal Early, denounced Longstreet and set about rewriting the annals of history to make him a scapegoat for the failures of the Confederacy. Most prominent among these was the great defeat at Gettysburg, now placed solidly at the feet of one General Longstreet.
The beginning of McLaws attack in our game. Hood has stalled out trying to take the Round Tops and Devil’s Den (he eventually took the latter but it was a very long time coming). McLaws would prove far more successful against the Union center. It may look like he is outnumbered but those Union counters don’t stand much of a chance against his attack.
The reason this is relevant for Longstreet Attacks is that there are kind of two conflicting possible narratives for what this attack means. Longstreet famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective) did not like the plan of attack on the 2nd of July 1863. He thought it risky and unlikely to work and argued strenuously with Lee for a different plan – ideally a movement of the whole army towards the Union rear to cut off their access to Washington and force them to attack the new Confederate position instead. Lee refused to consider this idea, and Longstreet was forced to go ahead with his assault. The assault ultimately failed, securing no significant ground and causing the death and wounding of hundreds of soldiers the Confederacy couldn’t afford to lose. Yes, the Union suffered casualties too, but not enough to seriously endanger the Army of the Potomac. This narrative is one where Longstreet’s attack is a doomed assault, well executed but ill-conceived from the start. Not quite so disastrous as Pickett’s Charge, but still a flawed strategy that came at enormous cost.
The alternative narrative accuses Longstreet of dragging his feet, launching his attack too late in the day and failing to really put his heart into the attack. It was doomed not because it was tactically unsound but because its commander did not believe in it and botched the operation. No surprise this was the narrative pushed by Early and other architects of the Lost Cause, and for a long time it was the dominant narrative, but it was built on a foundation of lies (often literally, such as a fictional order that Longstreet was to launch his attack at dawn. He was to ready his troops at dawn, not attack). My problem with Longstreet Attacks the game is that in many ways it feels more in line with this narrative than with the actual history, an experience that was exacerbated by my choice to read Stephen Sears’ massive history of Gettysburg at the same time I was playing Longstreet.
In Longstreet Attacks the Confederate units are just better than the Union ones. They often have higher strength, and they always have a higher cohesion rating. Unless they suffer morale penalties from combat most of the units are immune to a Panic result in combat. The smell of the notorious Confederate sentiment “one southerner could whip any ten Yankees” comes off the game in waves. One cannot deny that the Confederate generals gave the attack their all and that many units withstood stunning amounts of punishment to attack Union positions, but the defenders were no callow bunch of cowards breaking at the first sign of attack. The battle on the Union left was chaotic because General Sickles had left his position and stretched his lines too thin. Arguably the low cohesion ratings could reflect this poor position and chaotic command, except that even the units that were outside of Sickle’s Corp often have this same poor cohesion rating – it is a trait of the Union army not just those units that were in chaos. And surely that chaos could be reflected in the game’s use of Disruption morale penalties rather than baked in stats. It seems a bit egregious that often Confederate units on their reduced Battleworn side are still superior to many Union regiments – especially when cohesion rating is so crucial to determining when a hit is inflicted in combat.
My somewhat crude illustration showing the distribution of Cohesion Ratings between the two sides. The far left are units with CR 5 while the far right are those with a CR of 2. It can be hard to fully grasp the significance of this without knowing from experience how much better a CR of 4 is over a CR of 2. It also doesn’t show the strength distribution, where many of the higher CR Union units are either very low strength and/or sharpshooters, who only have a single step of strength. This is only infantry counters, artillery are mostly CR 3 on both sides.
To avoid getting too lost in the weeds let me try and distill the matter. Playing as the Union in Longstreet Attacks I did not feel like I was a general trying to fix a mistake made by my inferior officer, i.e., Sickles. I felt like a man tasked with taking green troops into combat and repeatedly frustrated by their failure to perform while my opponents stormtroopers ran roughshod over my positions. My only saving grace being the terrain and a desperate prayer for night to come soon and bring an end to the attack.
I made little progress in stemming the Confederate attack – for all its strengths Blind Swords seems like a system poorly suited to highly attrition conflict. Battleworn status can be recovered more easily if your CR is higher, like for nearly all Confederate units, and there is no permanent loss that cannot be restored in time. Confederates could push my lines back so far that the handful of units I forced to be Battleworn could end up being far enough from the front line to rebuild the next turn, undoing all my hard work. This may be a slightly more fundamental issue with Blind Swords, at least as it is in this early entry. It’s not built for sustained attrition and may not be suited to horrifically bloody engagements like the second day of Gettysburg. Perhaps it is for that reason that there are no Blind Swords games on other particularly violent engagements like Shiloh, Antietam, or the many battles of the Overland Campaign. Not every system can do everything and this may be a limitation of Blind Swords.
Near the end of our game of Longstreet Attacks. McLaws has successfully pushed back the Union center - many of those units are broken and useless in combat. Anderson is having a harder time on the Union right, while Hood’s attack on Little Round Top never really came to anything and now Law is engaging in a wildly ahistorical flanking maneuver that has placed him awkwardly in the middle of the Union activation chits. While the position is bad, this a strong Union victory as the attack went too slow to secure the VPs it needed to win.
I also saw no sign of fatigue in the Confederates as the game progressed, no indication that their losses were adding up, no indication that the assault was running out of steam and that it was asking more of its men that they could deliver. Instead, it seemed as if the only way to stop the Confederate attack was for night to come, suggesting that maybe had Longstreet attacked earlier he would have been victorious. I got no sense that maybe Longstreet would see that his attack had failed, his forces were stalling, and he had no reserves to commit, and order a withdrawal of his units. No, given infinite time these Rebels would nearly always overrun the Union army, and to me that reeks of the story of Jubal Early and his cohort discarding history to settle a personal vendetta. And it saps my ability to enjoy the game.
Conclusion
In my final assessment I did really enjoy Blind Swords as a system, but I found the emergent narrative of Longstreet Attacks somewhat poisoned my ability to love it. I was frustrated, and not in a fun way. Blind Swords is a system that really embraces the chaos of warfare and historical simulation, and that is something I love dearly. I think historical games need chaos because history is not predictable. However, I also think historical games need to be honest about what they are saying, and I think the romanticism of the Confederate attack presented in Longstreet Attacks pushes aside the actual history and muddles the game as a whole. Playing it while reading a very thorough history of the battle at the same time made its flaws that much more apparent and made me less inclined to forgive them. Longstreet Attacks is not a failure of a game, and I am glad I played it, but I also know I will not play it again. However, I am very excited to try more Blind Swords games. I have a copy of A Greater Havoc sitting on my shelf waiting for me to find some time to try it. I believe that there is at least one Blind Swords game out there for me, but I know that Longstreet Attacks is not that game.