I’m not going to bury the lede, I don’t like Rebel Fury. Nobody is more surprised about it than me. I really like Mark Herman’s Gettysburg, the originator of this system. It’s not my favorite game ever, but a hex and counter game that emphasizes movement and doesn’t overstay its welcome will always find a space on my shelf. While I shamefully haven’t played the follow-up on Waterloo, even though it’s on Rally the Troops so I have no excuse, I was excited to see what Rebel Fury brought to the table. My initial impressions were positive – it kept that core movement system that I liked but expanded the play space to encompass a set of large (and gorgeous) Charlie Kibler maps. The added chrome seemed fine and offered the tantalizing prospect of a little extra depth to the game, so from my initial pre-release preview I was feeling positive. Unfortunately, once I got my hands on it and started playing more my experience began to sour. The changes to the original system started to grate and certain scenarios exposed some of the core’s weaknesses in less flattering ways. If it wasn’t for a certain game that shall go unnamed, I would say this was my most disappointing experience this year.
GMT Games provided me with a complimentary review copy of Rebel Fury.
Let’s start with the good: the movement is excellent. While I’m not necessarily in love with how chess-like it can feel at times, the back and forth causes me to get lost in my own head when playing solo, the act of moving the pieces across the map is phenomenal. The movement values are consistent for all infantry and all cavalry which keeps the game easy to parse and the rules for terrain and road are generally simple (although I wish some aspects were clarified more in the rules so I didn’t have to rely on the summary on the play aid). The ability to repeatedly activate units and the simple switch from maneuver to battle formation (enhanced in this game by the beautiful counter art) is, dare I say it, elegant. The slow march as you move your forces into position, block your opponent’s units, and eventually lock each other into a battle line remains incredibly satisfying. As a game of maneuver, it is thoroughly enjoyable – probably not my favorite ever but certainly high in my estimation.
Seriously, look at these counters and maps! Some of the best in the business. I love how the different art on the Maneuver and Battle sides reflects the different formations and makes it easy to see at a glance what formation every unit is in. A phenomenal mix of art and functionality.
I have some small reservations – please bear with me as I obsess over the experience of passing. From a strategic and game balance perspective it makes sense to me, but as an experience it can be incredibly dull. If you pass your opponent gets d10 moves plus one for every unit not near an enemy unit (basically). There is a cap on the maximum number of moves, but it’s quite high. This can lead to situations where your opponent is making fourteen moves while you just sit and watch. This is particularly apparent in scenarios where one player is on the offensive and the other tasked with holding a line – the defender will run out of moves they want to make, and the best option is to limit the attacker’s available moves. As a strategic consideration, when to pass is interesting. I found myself weighing whether it made sense to try and get a few more decent moves in or if it was better to hopefully hamstring my opponent by limiting what he can do. However, as an experience sitting and watching my opponent make more than a dozen moves while I had nothing to do was incredibly dull. I think some of my problem is down to scenario design and some of it is the change of dice from d6 to d10 in transitioning Gettysburg to Rebel Fury, honestly there are a few places in the design (cough combat cough) where I miss the tighter range of the simple d6.
If this game was all movement, I think I would adore it. Not a top ten game, but one that I would routinely break out for some satisfying hex and counter passive aggression. The thing I love about hex and counter is the freedom of movement it allows, so any system that really leans into that will always have a place in my heart.
But it wouldn’t be much of a wargame without combat, would it? What I loved in the original Gettysburg was that combat didn’t get in the way of the movement – it was a bit random, but it was quick and never delayed you from getting back to the part where the game really shined. Combat in Gettysburg was essentially a dice off with a few die modifiers on either side, most notably whether artillery is used or not which is determined via a blind bid. The disparity between the two results produced the combat outcome – usually a retreat, a unit being blown and removed to the turn track, or eliminated outright. In Rebel Fury the combat has been almost completely rebuilt and I must confess that I hate the result, and it has put me off this game completely.
Rebel Fury keeps the core idea of the blind bid for artillery bonus, but changes almost everything else about combat. Players must first calculate the total combat value of their unit by adding together elements like the unit’s inherent troop quality (the number stars on its counter, if any), adjacency bonus for being next to unit from the same corps, an attacker bonus for another nearby friendly unit, any terrain modifiers, if artillery (and in some scenarios what kind) is being used, etc. This produces a number between one and ten (results greater than ten are capped). Players then each roll a d10 and find the row matching the die result under the column for their combat value. This will yield one of four results: Significant Disadvantage (SD), Disadvantage (D), Advantage (A), or Significant Advantage (SA). Players then compare their results on a matrix to find the combat result. If the combat result is a counter-attack, roll again but with the roles reversed and a bonus to the attacker. If a retreat is rolled and one of several circumstances were true for the combat then roll the needless custom die (it’s a 50-50 result, it could be a d6, or even a coin) to see if it’s really a retreat or if it is a blown result. If, like me, you can’t remember every little nuance to some of the combat results, then add time for looking it up in the rulebook as it’s not printed on the play aid.
I will confess a bit of personal stupidity here - I cannot keep all these numbers in my head. Adding up DRMs and things is fine and I don’t struggle to calculate combat strength at all, but remembering my combat strength, die result, my opponents strength, and their die result, and referencing them to get a result is just too much for my poor brain. I inevitably forget a number and have to check it again and the whole process takes far longer than it should. If you wanted to design a “simple” combat system but still include maximum confusion for me, you could not do much better than Rebel Fury.
I am slightly annoyed by this combat system because of how significantly it favors the defender – it is almost trivial for defenders to reach the 9 or 10 space on the combat table which means that the only hope of uprooting them is to attack repeatedly and hope they roll badly. I’ve seen Mark Herman argue in a few places that this is essentially the main feature of the design – the way it requires sustained assaults to make any progress. I generally agree with the notion that in the America Civil War the defender had the natural advantage – it was often better to be the one who was being attacked than the attacker, and this is far from the first game on this topic that I’ve played that favors the defender.
Where I think this doesn’t click together for me is the combat outcomes – in particular the fact that if you get more than two Blown results in one turn subsequent units are eliminated instead. Add to that the fact that eliminated units are victory points and suddenly the idea of making repeated sustained attacks because incredibly unappealing. And your opponent picks which units are eliminated, so if you launch sustained assaults, you might find that your two worst units are returning to battle fine in two turns but all of your elite units have suddenly been completely eliminated. It’s narratively weird and makes me hyper aware that I am playing a game.
My main problem with this combat, though, is that it is tedious to resolve and takes more time than it should. As mentioned above it is very easy for defenders to hit the upper limit of the combat table, which reduces combat to who can roll better on a d10. The thing is, that was already kind of what Gettysburg’s combat was, it just had the decency to embrace that. Instead, Rebel Fury has me cross referencing multiple tables for every combat only to then ask me and my opponent to basically roll off to see if it works or not. It’s not that the combat in Rebel Fury is incredibly complicated, I’ve played games with far more complex combat systems, but even after four games I still found myself repeatedly cross-referencing the different tables with the rulebook and never getting to the point where I can look at the two die results and just know what the result is.
That is frustrating, what sinks this combat for me is that the longer combat resolution skews the game balance – not competitively but rather experientially. I want to be playing the maneuver side of this game, then I want to plug in some combats, get results, and get back to the movement. Ideally this game would be at least 50-50 movement combat and preferably more like 70% movement and 30% combat resolution. Rebel Fury causes the combat section to bloat and take up far more time and mental energy than it needs without producing a satisfying experience on its own. Every time the movement phase ends my desire to keep playing Rebel Fury plummets, making the game into a rollercoaster of fun and tedium.
At its core, this is an abstract system. Gettysburg was highly abstract, so there’s nothing radical about that, but I think Rebel Fury’s extra layer of complexity and attempt to expand that core system to a wider range of battles has just made me more aware of it. Without Charlie Kibler’s beautiful maps I’m not sure I would recognize this as a game about the American Civil War. At times this is fine – the movement puzzle is enjoyable enough that I don’t mind its abstractions, even if I do frequently end up with my army in some truly bizarre formation – but at other times it just yanks me out of whatever narrative I might be forming in my game. The victory conditions, especially the strategic ones, I find hard to envision mid-game (trace a line of 40 hexes across the map without entering into any enemy ZoIs - not a hope) and difficult to map onto my expectations for what I want to do in the battle. This is me nitpicking, the kind of thing that if I loved everything else about the game I would probably look beyond, but in a game that I’m already finding abrasive these are elements that push me further away from it.
Seriously, these maps are great, Charlie Kibler did amazing work. I give this an official "The Wilderness Fanboy" seal of approval.
Consider the way Rebel Fury represents artillery. Before resolving a combat both players do a blind bid to determine whether they are committing artillery to the combat for a strength bonus, +3 for Attacker or +4 for the Defender. Each side has a starting number of artillery points – in Gettysburg it was asymmetric between the two sides but in Rebel Fury Herman has decided to give both sides an equal number which apparently represents the maximum he believes an army could carry with them on the march. Artillery, for me, seems like an example of either too much or not enough abstraction.
The abstraction is readily apparent, there are no artillery counters on the map and there is no limitation to when artillery is effective. Using your artillery to support an attack in the middle of the Virginia wilderness is equally as effective as using it when attacking in the open. Artillery on the whole is incredibly powerful and a crucial factor for successful combats – the fact that detachments and cavalry can’t use it is a significant weakness for them. The thesis of this system seems to be that artillery barrages were a fundamental aspect of attacking and defending positions and the loss of artillery support could cripple a unit’s effectiveness, but then I’ve also read Mark Herman saying the exact opposite thing and this creates a cognitive dissonance in me about what the game seems to say and what the designer says about the game. I would be generally of the opinion that artillery was useful but far from decisive - see something like Pickett’s Charge and the enormous artillery bombardment that preceded it and did basically nothing to prevent that disaster.
At the same time, linking the artillery numbers just to a notion of how much ammo an army could carry is to me a lack of abstraction. The artillery values should reflect an argument from the designer on the relative effectiveness of the artillery corps of the two sides at that battle. This would be a more interesting argument and making the two sides have asymmetric starting artillery numbers makes the game more interesting – in many of my games my opponent and I spent artillery points at an exactly equal rate which then made it barely a decision and completely uninteresting. I had assumed that in Gettysburg the Union had more artillery points because historically at Gettysburg they had better artillery.
I do want to stress that abstraction is not a bad thing! All wargames are abstractions, some aspects of history must be abstracted and simplified for playability and to make the games fun. What a given designer chooses to abstract forms a core part of the game’s argument - e.g. something like Nevsky abstracts away a lot of combat but keeps multiple transport types to emphasize the challenges of logistics in the medieval Baltic. Rebel Fury abstracts many aspects of American Civil War combat but I struggle to see what its core argument is - the abstractions, to me, seem to fit the purpose of making the game more of a game. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that Rebel Fury has not grabbed my interest the way a messier but more argumentative game might have. Other people will absolutely prefer this abstraction, though, and that’s fine!
Because I am me, I also cannot help but note a few odd choices in how the game represents history. The Confederate troops seem to universally be superior to the Union – this was particularly obvious at Chancellorsville where Confederate units and generals vastly outshine the Union opposition in terms of quality. Hooker is strictly inferior to Lee in every sense at that battle and, possibly even more cruelly, is given identical stats to Sedgwick. This once again is very reminiscent of the myth of superior Confederate soldiers which always rubs me the wrong way. Also, as a general rule I prefer to let the gameplay decide which units perform better on the day – let player tactics and dice decide which units we remember after the fact rather than insisting that because a unit did well historically they must do so every time.
The designer notes also unfortunately repeat a popular and widely refuted Lost Cause talking point by referencing the idea that Longstreet was ordered to make a dawn attack on the second day of Gettysburg – a fact wholly invented by General William Pendleton after the war to smear Longstreet’s reputation because the general had joined the Republican party. This fact was openly disputed by Longstreet during his lifetime and has long been known to be false, so it is disappointing to see it repeated here. The inclusion of such a simple falsehood in the background material, along with the lack of a bibliography, doesn’t inspire confidence in the historical rigor of the design. That said, the game is very abstract, so maybe in expecting significant historical rigor is unreasonable of me, and perhaps I am merely comparing the game to what I wish it was instead of evaluating it on the merits of what the design is: an abstract game with a dose of Civil War flavor.
I have highlighted the passage in question from the designer notes. The designer notes have a lot more to say about the design of Gettysburg than they do about Rebel Fury and while I found the information on Gettysburg interesting, I did find that very strange.
I’m disappointed that I don’t like Rebel Fury because there are aspects that I think this system gets very right. I loved the time scale of Gettysburg when I first played it, and I’ve only grown to appreciate it more as I’ve played more games on the American Civil War. Most games I’ve played struggled with the fact that many Civil War battles had significant lulls in the fighting. In most games, rather than getting tired my regiments or brigades are unstoppable robots that can attack and attack and attack hour after hour without ever tiring. Instead of being long days of movement punctuated by short, sharp fights, most games on big multi-day battles like Gettysburg or Chancellorsville have near constant fighting from dawn until dusk. This is something that initially impressed me about Gettysburg and remains largely true in Rebel Fury – you do all your movement before any combats are resolved, and since turns are each half a day in length, it means that the games more easily capture a sense of generals coordinating a grand multi-pronged assault and then seeing how it resolves before planning another set of assaults. Since in a given combat phase you can keep making attacks with each unit, rather than being one and done, it also captures that sense that you’re exploiting a breakthrough (or trying to, anyway). This staggering of movement and combat into completely different sections of the turn may be the most interesting thing this system does, and I wish I liked the second half more in Rebel Fury, but ultimately it doesn’t click together for me as tightly as it did in Gettysburg.
I’m sure Rebel Fury will have its fans – certainly many of my objections derive primarily from what I find enjoyable and interesting in wargaming. For me, though, Rebel Fury added more to its core system and ended up with less as a result. The more I played Rebel Fury the less I liked it so after four games I’m throwing in the towel. The second volume in the series will have to accept my terms of unconditional surrender, as I don’t expect I’ll be revisiting it in the future. I hope its fans enjoy it, but if you’re looking for me, I’ll be playing Manassas instead.