My ongoing exploration of American Civil War games has once again brought me back to hex and counter after a run of operational games and I am pretty excited to be here. I love operational games, but there is something satisfying about a tactical hex and counter game, and I say this as someone who generally doesn’t find battles to be the most interesting lens through which to view military history. I think it’s because I love kinetic movement in my games and hex and counter is so good at that. I was also excited to be playing another Amabel Holland game. She is always an interesting designer and I adored Great Heathen Army, another hex and counter design from her, so I was excited to see what she brought to a more modern conflict.
Seven Pines; or, Fair Oaks (Seven Pines from now) is a game in the (now pretty much defunct) Shot and Shell Battle Series which covers battles from the mid-nineteenth century. It is a brigade level tactical hex and counter game with scenarios covering both days of the battle as well as a few alternative history scenarios. It plays relatively quickly, you could finish a game in under two hours if you know what you’re doing, and it’s not particularly complex. That said I did struggle with the rules in places and there was a lot of little pieces to remember that tripped me up from time to time. I would put some blame for this on the rulebook, which I found useful for getting the overall idea of how the game is played but frustrating when I was trying to find specific rules during play.
Overall, I’m not a fan of games that use a series rulebook as well as a second game specific rulebook that outlines the rules you need to know for this volume. I have two main grievances against this all too common practice. The first is that I have to learn a bunch of rules that end up being wrong or irrelevant. For example, in learning Seven Pines I read quite a few rules about how cavalry functioned only to discover that Seven Pines had no cavalry so that wouldn’t come up. Similarly, I learned that roads use half a movement point, except that in all of Seven Pines scenarios the roads are considered Muddy and cost a full movement point. A single rulebook that described the game I am about to play would be preferable. I also find them extremely frustrating to reference, because if I look a rule up in the main rulebook I also need to check the game specific rules to make sure it actually works that way in this game. Despite playing a lot of wargames I don’t actually enjoy flicking through rulebooks that much. I can understand why series rules can be a boon to game publishers, but as a consumer I do not care for them. That said, Seven Pines is far from the worst offender in this category and I appreciate that my dislike is not going to stop publishers from doing this.
Our first game at a little past the midway point in terms of gameplay if slightly beyond it in terms of absolute turns. While not an overwhelming number of counters, there is still a lot to keep track of here in terms of status, added effects like entrenchment or Elan, the special rules governing one division that required swapping counters or the rules limiting when Sedgwick could arrive. It’s far from a complex wargame, but it is one with a lot of little elements that are pretty key to the experience and so I found myself flicking through the rules a fair bit.
Rules layout nitpicks aside, Seven Pines is a very interesting game built on a fairly simple set of core rules. Movement is determined by unit type and the terrain modifiers are easy to remember which makes moving across the map quick and eliminates any need for a terrain chart. Combat is resolved by calculating the strength of the attacker, a sum of several factors, and then subtracting from that the sum of a die roll plus the defending unit’s strength. the defender rolling a die (or two) and adding their strength to that. The result is then referenced against a CRT based on what type of combat it was. While it’s a small thing it is interesting to have the die roll be totally in the hands of the defender - the attacker’s strength is entirely non-random, only the defense is unpredictable. I’m not sure I’ve played a game that does this and it caused a subtle shift in how we perceived combat. It was pretty cool.
The most interesting aspect of the design, though, is the activation system. There is a chart on the play aid made up of nine boxes (numbered zero to eight) divided into three main sections - red, yellow, and green. The on map brigades are grouped under a counter representing their overall commanders which is located on this chart. On your turn you choose a commander to activate, flip their counter over to indicate that they have activated this turn, and then move them one box down on the activation chart. You then take actions with all of their respective units and play passes to the other player. You do this in sequence until each division has either been activated or you have passed, nudging any un-activated divisions one space back up the chart. If your division commanders reach the zero box you will have to rally them before they can be activated again, and if they are there at game end your opponent receives a pile of VPs.
The opening turns of my Vassal playthrough, this is a fairly manageable array of counters and you can see at the board edges where reinforcements will come from - although it will be quite a few turns before they show up.
This system creates an immediate pressure as you want to activate every division each turn but each activation pushes them closer to being useless, or even a liability. Losing brigades will also push you further down the track and there are limits on your ability to move between color bands, as well as restrictions imposed on cooperation combat modifiers based on what band you are in. This system is really interesting and makes for some great decisions and tension about when you need to keep pushing your activations and when are safe enough to pass. There is also an element of gambling, as when you activate a commander in the number one box you roll a d6 to determine if they can activate. On a result of one you fail to activate and the division falls into the zero box, but any other result lets them activate and doesn’t move their counter at all. The tension on whether to keep pushing your luck or play it safe is really interesting. That said, we did find it to be a little extreme as the penalty can be very harsh and the chance a bit low. I know Amabel tends to like these harsher designs, but to my unrefined palate I would have liked a little more malleability to this roll - possibly it increases in risk each time you succeed or something. I would also like to see it show up in more places, maybe each time you cross a color band there’s a similar roll. But perhaps these ideas would dilute the mechanic and take the excitement from it.
The first scenario does a great job of easing you into the game by slowly adding more divisions as they arrive at the battle which gives the game an interesting tempo. You spend the first half of the game with only a handful of counters on the map before escalating to a much larger fight for the climactic finish. One thing I really like about American Civil War games is this system of reinforcements trickling as the battle escalates. In contrast I found the scenario of the second day overwhelming. I was playing the second day solitaire and having every unit on the map and within attacking distance of an enemy unit caused my brain to short circuit. I think in a solitaire game I prefer a slightly narrower range of options when it comes to deciding what to activate and lots of decisions around what to do with those activated units. In this scenario it felt like the opposite - all the decision space was in who and when to activate with the actions largely being Attack or Run Away. This surprised me as when I was playing my first game I thought this would be a great solitaire system but then when I tried it didn’t click with me at all.
In comparison to scenario one above, here is the set up for the battle’s second day which I played solitaire. Everyone is already on the map and the positions are very close to begin with. I found this a little overwhelming as a solitaire experience and a bit more of a grind when I was playing it.
The CRT is really interesting (do I say this a lot?). Shooting combat from infantry is very effective at causing disruption but rarely inflicts a step loss, while in contrast artillery are far more likely to do step losses at range but only sometimes disrupts. This may seem like an obvious bonus for artillery, but there are some interesting wrinkles the game adds to this. To move adjacent to enemy artillery you must charge them and charge attacks are first met by defensive fire. If the attacker is disrupted by defensive fire they cannot make an attack. However, taking significant losses does not stop an attack. This means that a charge against infantry is more likely to fail because you’re more likely to become disrupted but while charging artillery will be costly you are more likely to make an attack and potentially succeed in taking the position. This is a really interesting difference that isn’t obvious when first reading the rules. I love these kinds of things because you discover them as you play and it’s like the game letting you in on a secret.
I also quite like how Seven Pines handles unit steps. The game comes with an abundance of generic Step Counters which you pile beneath your units to represent their strength. When you take a step loss instead of flipping the counter or substituting another counter of the same unit you remove one of those counters from the stack. As I’ve been playing more hex and counter I’ve been interested in ways to model more than two states for each counter (i.e. a normal side vs. a disrupted/disordered side) and this is a fun system that is enhanced by the thickness of the counters that Hollandspiele uses.
You can easily see the relative strengths of the units at just a glance as the ones with more steps tower over the others. It’s a pretty cool effect and I liked this aesthetic - although with thinner counters I could see it being pretty frustrating.
Overall I had fun playing Seven Pines but I also don’t think it is a game I particularly want to revisit. There are elements of the system that my enthusiasm for faded as I played and there are ways that it models history that make me a lot less likely to want to play it again.
My main issue with Seven Pines is that it just felt a little too game-y. I admit that this is entirely a factor of my own desire to engage with games like this as historical arguments rather than purely games, but that is who I am so I found it frustrating. The activation system is very interesting but I don’t really understand what it is meant to model in the history of the battle and so it felt more like a game mechanism than something that gave me insight into how the historical actors made their decisions. I also found the choices of which brigades were assigned elite status, and how that elite status worked, to be kind of strange. The elite units were interesting mechanically but a little baffling historically.
What bothered me the most, however, was the lack of command control and the absence of generals. At the scale the game is on the units are lumped in with the brigades and brigades can all operate entirely separately within a division. This allows for an unrealistic level of independent movement on behalf of each counter and the creation of some very unusual battlefield positions. There are no leaders on the map that have to issue orders to their units so there is no need to keep units close together except that it is easier to get a combat bonus by working with units in the same division. It didn’t capture the chaos or confusion of these battles. The lack of leaders on the map is also strange given that the most famous result of this battle is the wounding of Confederate General Joe Johnston, which allowed for Robert E. Lee to take command and caused pretty significantly changed the Virginia theatre as a result. I found the fact that Johnston and McClellan are not really present in the game disappointing.
The combat also began to drag on me a bit. I think it’s interesting and in my first game I really enjoyed it. Where I struggled was when I tried to play Seven Pines solitaire. I’ll confess to not being great at math, and I struggled to do the calculations on my own. In combat you add up the attacker’s strength, which starts with step counters plus the star rating of the unit and then a series of modifiers based on various special rules, context, etc. From this you then subtract a die roll, either one or two d6 based on context, to which is added the defender’s step counters. I struggle to keep the two numbers in my head simultaneously, by the time I finished calculating the second number I’d forgotten the first, and so even though this calculation is not nearly as complex as, say, 1914 Nach Paris, I probably struggled with it more. Maybe I should have done like I did in 1914 and used my phone to track the values. This wasn’t as much of a problem in a two player game where we each tracked our own unit’s strength, but with a game like this if I can’t enjoy playing it solitaire it is going to severely limit its shelf life.
My second game quickly found me in this situation - lots of potential attacks to grind out a slow win for one side or the other. This ended up feeling rather tedious. Some of this was the result of the scenario design - I much preferred the first one - but I think it also reflected a waning enthusiasm for the game itself on my part.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Seven Pines but I won’t be rushing to unpack it again. I found my excitement diminishing as I played it more, which isn’t a great sign. It’s a fascinating bit of game design and I’m really happy I played it - and I did genuinely enjoy my first game of it. It has a lot going for it and if you like hex and counter American Civil War games it is probably worth your time to try it once - I’m just not sure it is worth more of your time than that.