By my count there are at least seven solitaire wargames where the player is asked to play as the Confederacy, which feels like too many. In contrast, I have found only one dedicated solitaire game where you play the Union. I find this imbalance a little distressing, and since I’m doing a project on the Lost Cause in American Civil War games, I think it behooves me to play some of these games. I have previously reviewed Ben Madison’s Jeff Davis, and this week I’m going back in time forty years to what must be the first game in this suspect genre: Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that this game has something of a pedigree. Eric Lee Smith was a co-designer on Ambush!, one of the original and most influential solitaire wargames, and also designed The Civil War 1861-65, potentially the most influential strategic game on the American Civil War. The confluence of an influential solo and ACW designer making a solitaire ACW game is certainly worthy of attention. What I found in Mosby’s Raiders was an interesting game and a less interesting representation of Virginia history.
The thing that struck me first upon reading the rules for and then playing Mosby’s Raiders was its tempo. At the start of the play phase for each turn, once you’ve drawn a hand action cards, resolved d6 random events, and finished set up, you have near total freedom to take actions with Mosby without retribution. Mosby can move within his “Confederacy” (i.e., non-Union controlled territory) with complete freedom. Things only get dicey when you want to move into Union territory or, more advisedly, peek into that territory to see what threats may lurk there. Nearly every action Mosby can take besides wandering aimlessly through the wilds of northwestern Virginia could trigger Activation Checks, where you must roll a d6 and roll under the current Union Awareness value (which will tic up as you engage in fights and destroy Union infrastructure). Once a Union unit successfully activates the game pivots to Rounds, where now Mosby’s movement is restricted, and you have to contend with pursuit from Union forces and a potential spiraling of activations as more and more Union soldiers join the hunt.
I actually quite like the aesthetics of Mosby’s Raiders, even if it does show its age. The charts and tables along the side of the map are also really useful once you know the game reasonably well.
This tempo is fun, and it is further enhanced by the fact that you get to choose when to disband – moving the turn forward and resetting the activations and how aware the Union is of your actions. Each turn you need to have achieved a higher Notoriety level than that turn number, though, so you can’t just advance that game clock arbitrarily. This creates an interesting push-your-luck element to playing Mosby’s Raiders and that can be quite satisfying. It also helps to prevent the game from lasting longer than necessary, as a run of bad luck will bring it to an end rather than forcing you to limp on through all eight turns.The tempo is not without its lurches, though. During Rounds the game can slow to a crawl as you resolve half a dozen activation checks, followed by a similar number of movement rolls. The game can produce very satisfying moments of tension, but just as often it can generate a foregone conclusion - either favorable or unfavorable. That said, for a game of this vintage I was very impressed with how fresh it felt.
Another great extension of this system is that the map begins largely empty and only fills with Union troops as you explore it – each peek or activation causes you to draw a unit from the cup of available troops. This allows the game to act as a sandbox, where nothing is populated until Mosby goes searching for something there – sort of like a video game only loading a section of the map when you look at it. You never know exactly what will be where so even the first turn can produce interesting decisions rather than a scripted optimal strategy that only deviates after several minutes of play. More chits are added as your Notoriety rises which gives the game a natural feeling of escalation. While I don’t think the game totally lives up to its sandbox idea, I did like this core system as a way to generate new situations with relatively little rules overhead.
I have not generally been wowed by event decks in games, especially solitaire ones. My experiences have ranged from fine to underwhelming, which is why I was pleasantly surprised with how diverse a set of outcomes Mosby’s Raiders’ event deck could generate. The arrival of kidnap victims, Union patrols, and the extension of Union positions are all covered in this deck and when you flip d6 cards at the start of a turn you can radically change your game state before you get a chance to act. Even the situations where the event deck drops a soldier on top of Mosby and sends him home before he even gets a chance to play felt exciting, at least in part because it seemed like the outcome was at least partly my fault for choosing a stupid starting position. I’m not saying the event deck is beyond reproach, but I was genuinely impressed with how different each of my games of Mosby’s Raiders developed and I think a lot of that was down to the variety of the event deck. It significantly exceeded my expectations.
A pair of Union sweeps drop themselves onto Mosby. One slight problem I found was that the rulebook had extra processes for these cards than the card text themselves did, which radically changed their impact on the game. I suppose this could be the result of the game’s time, but I’m used to cards having all their relevant rules on the cards themselves.
The action deck left me altogether less impressed. There are some great cards in it, but they were drowned out by overly situational cards or ones that just weren’t very interesting (I’m still not totally sure I understand the value of counterattack). What I wanted out of my hand of action cards was a set of tools that could radically alter my plans for that round. Cards like Cannon, which gives Mosby a bonus in battle but radically reduces his movement in Rounds, so you can fight better but running away from a fight is nearly impossible. This pushed me towards looking for easy fights I could win and praying not to flip over a strength 8 Union unit who would crush me despite my small complement of field artillery that I’d dragged along with me. Sadly, most of the cards are not this exciting. Plenty of cards let Mosby examine a space for free or possibly enter one without triggering Activation(s), but one card that does this isn’t enough to radically alter my plans that turn. The action cards weren’t terrible, but most didn’t do enough to push me towards trying different strategies and instead created a feeling of sameness to each of Mosby’s activations.
In conjunction with the event cards, these lackluster action cards began to generate an experience where I was more excited to see how the board state would shift each turn than I was in actually playing as Mosby. By the middle of my third game, I was kind of done being Mosby – I wanted to see how the Union counter response developed and I was far less interested in making a bunch of activation checks and hopefully blowing up a few railroads. There just weren’t quite enough interesting things for me to do with Mosby – it was all sneaking in, blowing up infrastructure, maybe fighting someone, and getting out. That was fun, but once I’d done it over fifteen times, I was kind of bored of it. Being Mosby wasn’t holding my attention.
In my second game, Mosby got straight up killed on the second turn. An inglorious (but deserved) outcome for the rebel.
Playing as Mosby is a weird experience. If you’re not familiar with the career of “The Grey Ghost”, it is worth considering it in brief. John Singleton Mosby was born in eastern Virginia but moved around the state quite a bit, spending a lot of his childhood in my hometown of Charlottesville, including a brief attendance at the University of Virginia. He was expelled after killing a man over a matter of honor, for which he was sent to prison but was eventually pardoned and then went on to become a lawyer. During the American Civil War, he served in the cavalry, but he made his reputation as a guerilla leader operating in the northern half of the Shenandoah Valley, which was known as “Mosby’s Confederacy” in recognition of the level of control he exerted over the region. Mosby’s band of guerillas was active from the start of 1863 and on to well into 1865. He stayed at large until the 17th of June 1865, more than two months after the surrender at Appomattox. Despite being one of the last Confederate holdouts, Mosby’s postwar career was defined by aligning himself with the Republican party, supporting Grant for the presidency, and even a brief stint as the American consul in Hong Kong. While he did not receive the same level of scorn as other “scalawags” like Longstreet or General Mahone, Mosby is among the few Confederates to actively support the Republicans in the post-war order. This makes him an interesting and complex figure when one considers portraying him in a game like this – his war record was deplorable, but he was better than your average Confederate after the dust was settled. Engaging with an individual with this kind of messy history can be challenging and leaves me wondering just what Mosby am I playing - the notorious Confederate or the man who will make some small effort to redeem himself later?
Mosby’s Raiders chooses to just focus on the early months of 1863, before Lee’s Gettysburg campaign. From a gameplay perspective this short timeframe makes sense – making a game about Mosby’s full career over the last two- and a-bit years of the war would be a mess, especially with the need to incorporate the times where he joined Lee’s army in various capacities. Potentially the most notorious, and absent from the game, was Mosby’s participation in the slave raiding that accompanied the Gettysburg campaign. Mosby’s guerillas joined sections of the Confederate cavalry in participating in vast raids across Pennsylvania, including rounding up black residents and taking them off to Virginia to be sold into slavery.
In fact, the game includes no elements representing slavery, which is a disappointing oversight. While the Shenandoah Valley did not have the dense slave populations of the plantation heavy tidewater region, it certainly was not without slaves. More importantly, the game opens soon after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the nature of how the Union army interacted with slavery. The game could have been made more interesting by engaging with the exodus of slaves searching for freedom behind Union lines as well as the fact that wherever the Union army went slaves were declared free. The game has Union soldiers venture beyond their lines and even includes events that expand the extent of Union control in the Valley. The ebb and flow of who controlled what territory had significant impacts on the fates of black Americans who were there – the arrival of U.S. troops promised freedom, but often only as long as those troops were there. Including events representing slaves running to U.S. lines and potentially providing intelligence on Mosby’s position would have been an acknowledgement of their presence and participation in the war.
The game also doesn’t say very much about the efforts to catch and capture Mosby, which is arguably the more interesting side of the story. How do you pin down a man like Mosby and his guerillas in a largely hostile population and stop him from cutting your supply lines? The focus on early 1863 means that the game charts Mosby’s rise from relative obscurity to being a figure of legend and scorn – but it ends well before the 1864 valley campaign and General Sheridan’s efforts to crush Mosby, which brought widespread destruction to the region. By making Mosby the hero of the piece we get a reasonably fun raiding game but lose a lot of what could be said about guerillas and the nature of controlling hostile territory during the American Civil War.
My third game ended up being a victory, but the Union had burned and/or expanded into much of Mosby’s “Confederacy”. The game including the destruction of the Valley is a nice nod to Sheridan’s controversial tactics, but they didn’t seem to have much of an impact on the gameplay.
Overall, I think the core system of Mosby’s Raiders is pretty cool and has aged quite well for being 40 years old. There are places it could use some more polish and would benefit from developments in game design over the past four decades, but it holds up well and I had fun. I was far less impressed with its ability to tell the history of Mosby and guerilla warfare in the American Civil War. Beyond just not being keen to play as a slaver shitbag, I don’t think I understand Mosby or his war any more than I did before playing the game. The mechanics feel better suited to a topic that is just about raiders rather than guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency. I would love to see someone take this system, give it a little more polish, and adapt it to a group of dedicated raiders. This would make a great system for a solitaire game about being a Viking is what I’m getting at. Until someone designs that new take on the system, though, I probably won’t revisit Mosby’s Raiders. I had more fun than I expected to, but it won’t hold my attention for more than a handful of plays.