I am a massive fan of Richard Berg’s Men of Iron system, but I bounced off Great Battles of the American Civil War (GBACW) pretty hard. This meant that I approached SPQR, the second volume in the Great Battles of History series, with both excitement and trepidation. Men of Iron and GBACW were originated by Berg, while in contrast Great Battles of History started as a Mark Herman design before it became a collaboration in subsequent volumes. I want to recognize that up front, because in this review I will probably be talking a lot about Richard Berg because it is his hex and counter designs that I am more familiar with – I know Herman’s card driven games better than his traditional hex and counter designs.
There is no denying the legacy of GBoH, I can see its legacy in many of the games I have played, including Men of Iron and Ben Hull’s Musket and Pike, and tracing that lineage as I was playing it was really interesting. This is a system with an impressive legacy to go with its significant heft in terms of scope and rules weight, I can see why it has more than a dozen volumes and a significant fanbase. In my case, I had an interesting time playing SPQR and I’m glad I’ve tried it, both for its influence on later designs and for aspects where I think it is still superior to those games, but at the end of the day I don’t think SPQR is a game for me. In this post I hope to explain what clicked with me and why ultimately I decided to pack it back into the box and pass it on to someone else.
I want to note at this point that this is not meant to be any kind of definitive review. Instead, this sits somewhere between initial impressions and a full review - partly because while I haven’t played anywhere near all the scenarios in SPQR I also don’t really want to play any more.
SPQR is a complicated game, there’s no denying it. It's nearly forty pages of rules are light in images but contain a decent number of extended examples to help you understand key rules. I was reading the 4th edition rules and I could see the impact that successive iterations had on making them easier to follow and to clarify key concepts. That said, it was still a lot to take on board. Many of the concepts in SPQR aren’t that complicated once you understand them, but gaining that understanding is a challenge. It doesn’t help that some sections feel a bit overwritten – making a concept seem more complex than it is. I was able to play a game after only one read through of the rules, though, so that is something of an achievement for a game this heavy. I can’t say that I got every rule correct but I believe my errors existed more in neglected tactical options that were available to me rather than failing to play the core system correctly, and I’m okay with that.
It also has an abundance of excellent design notes. I love seeing designers explain their thought processes throughout the rules document - even if I don’t agree with everything they write it shows the level of thought that has gone into the game.
In SPQR units are activated by generals and generals are activated in initiative order, starting with lowest initiative value and working your way up. Interestingly, generals are not linked to specific units but rather can activate almost any unit on the map. There are restrictions, for example Roman generals are often limited to activating units from just one legion (helpfully color coded) at a time and units can only be activated to move and fight so many times in a turn, but there is still a lot of flexibility on display. When activating a general you can choose activate a number of individual units or to issue a Line Command (if your general is able) which activates a lot of units but is restricted by their formation (in a line…duh). In the case of the former, a general activates a number of units equal to their initiative, which creates an interesting balance where low initiative generals go first but can’t consistently activate as many units. Low initiative also hinders a general’s chance to pass a Momentum check, which lets them activate multiple times in a row. So, low initiative is fast but in all other ways worse. Line commands let you activate huge swaths of your army all at once, but is restricted by the formation rules. This is fine early in a game when everyone is (hopefully) laid out in battle line but as the lines meet and clash they become increasingly disordered and it becomes harder to maximize on your line commands.
Maybe just don’t play like me and don’t let your lines become this much of a disaster.
I found this system to be both excellent and not too difficult to understand. There are some nuances around line commands that took me a bit to grasp, but the meaning is clear in play even if the wording of the rules can be a little confounding. This offers more depth than Men of Iron’s system of activating Battles and then attempting Continuation rolls and is easier to grasp strategically, although not quite as nuanced, as Musket and Pike’s system where leaders activate in an order based on the orders they are under. I think it hits a great balance between the two (acknowledging that both Men of Iron and Musket and Pike are in part derived from GBoH’s activation system) and made for interesting choices. If I were to find a downside with it I would note that the activations can be a bit predictable as generals will generally activate in a certain order every turn, but that is also partly down to scenario design. If both players have generals with the same initiative value, then they roll off to see who goes first, so a scenario with more instances of generals with the same initiative will produce a more unpredictable turn structure.
There are some further complexities in the rules around activating generals, such as superior generals who are so good they get another activation phase at the start of the turn and the potential for generals to Trump, which lets them insert themselves earlier into the activation order. There are also systems for potential interrupting an opponent’s Trump or their Momentum, both of which come with a risk but can potentially change up the activation order of a turn. All of these offer strategic depth but they also aren’t mandatory to play the game. They are a nice example of extra rules weight that expands the game space but that doesn’t act as a barrier to play because you can play an entire game without ever Trumping an activation, for example. I didn’t dig very deep into these systems because I was too busy learning everything else but I could already see how much deeper they can make the game space when players are ready to tackle them.
Movement is simple if there is no terrain but becomes more complicated when that terrain exists. I was pleased to see that there is quite a lot of terrain in SPQR’s scenarios, even if some are still fought on the traditional featureless plain common to many ancient and medieval wargames. The way terrain can inflict cohesion hits to units marching through it feels like a simpler and more holistic approach to the design than how Musket and Pike uses terrain to inflict formation hits, which are completely separate to unit strength. I understand why those differences exist, but for me I found how SPQR handles it to be far easier to intuit and understand in play. The immediate consequences of difficult terrain were more readily apparent and delivered in a vocabulary I found easier to understand.
Once the lines meet it is of course time to resolve some combats. I didn’t find SPQR’s combat to be uninteresting, but I did find it to be a bit tedious after a while. Combat is essentially a series of consulting several tables: the first compares the unit types to determine a column on the CRT and then there are combat ratios to shift columns as well as a chart (and other rules) for determining if one side has Superiority, which could double or triple the hits one side takes. Then roll a d10, find that row on the CRT, and assign cohesion hits. Inevitably both sides will take cohesion hits out of a combat, which means it is more about coming out ahead in the mounting strain of warfare than delivering one decisive blow. You may even be going into the combat at a disadvantage because when a unit moves adjacent to another unit before resolving the combat everyone must roll to see what cohesion damage the lines take from colliding with each other. This is easy to resolve, you roll a d10 and take hits for every point above your Troop Quality (TQ) you may have rolled. This is a simple and engaging system but if you used a Line Command to move an entire line of units adjacent to another line it can take a long time to resolve all of these checks.
Resolving all of these elephant combats took quite a while.
And that is probably my core problem with the combat in SPQR: I find it slightly too tedious to resolve. Lots of chart checking and dice rolling, combined with swapping cohesion counters in and out for each unit, to slowly increase the strain on individual units until someone Routs. It is an interesting simulation of ancient warfare and I like how it goes hard on representing the degrading quality of troops under combat, but it doesn’t get my blood pumping. This apathy is further enhanced by the scale of many of the battles in SPQR – these things are huge. The massive size means that I could be resolving a lot of combats each turn and it was during that process that I found my enthusiasm waning. Part of my problem is that the CRT itself is not very exciting. The results are just cohesion hits. The only difference between results is how many hits the attacker receives vs. the defenders. Many individual columns only have a range of three different results, which could potentially make the CRT easier to learn off with experience, but for me just made it a lot harder to care about what result I got. Inflicting one more hit than I received is just not the most exciting result and doing that half a dozen times in a row is wearying.
When a unit receives cohesion hits equal to their Troop Quality they Rout (with some caveats around when both sides in a combat reach this threshold at the same time). I’m a big fan of how Routing works in SPQR. The routed unit first retreats two hexes and the victor in combat must advance into the vacated hex. Then at the end of every turn, unless they are rallied, the Routed unit will move its full movement towards its friendly map edge. Rallying is an action generals can take and requires a dice roll, success allows the unit to turn around but flips them to their depleted side while failure causes the unit to Rout immediately. One of the things I like least about Men of Iron is how abstract the Retired result is in combat; I really like the chaos of a battle with units fleeing through friendly lines as their morale collapses. This system in SPQR is easy to understand and resolve but still generates interesting game states.
Unfortunately, there is more tedium to be found in SPQR than just repetitive combat results. There are status counters. So many status counters. Of course, the aforementioned cohesion damage is tracked via counters for each unit – never my favorite system – but there are also counters for units that Routed, counters for ones that Rallied this turn, counters for units that moved, counters for units that are low on ammunition, counters for units that are out of ammunition, etc. You get the idea. Not all of these are strictly necessary, I for one didn’t use counters to track who moved this turn, but they collectively represent a lot of different elements of the game that you need to track either mentally or with cardboard. This is far from the most cluttered game I have played, but there were definitely times were I felt like I spent more time swapping cohesion counters than I did actually playing the game and that balance didn’t sit quite right with me.
However, probably the single greatest blow to my ability to enjoy SPQR is that I just don’t care about ancient Roman warfare. Don’t get me wrong, I like the history of the ancient world. I studied ancient philosophy at university, I like reading Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus more than I probably should, but I have never managed to muster enthusiasm for Roman tactical combat. I don’t care how legions were deployed, how they moved, or what weapons they used. This meant that I was playing SPQR exclusively for the Great Battles of History system and not really for its subject matter. While I found a lot to like in GBoH, I did not find enough to surmount my preexisting apathy towards the tactical combat it represents. People who enjoy this stuff more than I do will inevitably find a lot more to like in SPQR than I did, but for me this would probably have to have been an all-time favorite system for me to have played through all the battles in the box (to be fair, there are a lot of battles in this box). Wargames are more than just games, they are representations of historical argument and recreation, and if I don’t care about that history it is hard to get fully invested in the game.
Before we get to the conclusion, here are a few miscellaneous thoughts on SPQR I couldn’t quite fit anywhere else:
Elephant rampages are fun and provide a satisfying sense of chaos in a game where formations can be quite rigid.
I like how victory is achieved by one side’s position collapsing so far that they flee the field. While overall I prefer how Men of Iron handles this idea, I loved seeing an earlier version of it here.
While overall GBoH, and SPQR specifically, are very complex games I found that the various mechanisms lock together very well and the result is a game that is far more intuitive and easier to play than its weight of rules would lead you to believe. That alone is an incredible achievement.
I am aware of the existence of Simple Great Battles of History but I have not tried it. I would be interested in playing it at some stage to see if I like it more, particularly as it is apparently more of a Berg design and I do tend to like his hex and counter work, but that will have to be a future project.
There’s a lot to like in this system but I don’t think it sits in quite the right place for me. The activation system is very cool and the movement nice and clean, but the combat is too much and overall the game is just that bit heavier and slower than I want out of my hex and counter experience. When combined with my apathy for the subject matter, I just can’t really see myself enjoying SPQR in the long term. That said, I may dip my toe back into GBoH at some point in the future with a different volume that is on a subject that I find more interesting. I’ve got my eye on Chariots of Fire in part just to see what they do with chariots. There is certainly a lot of elements to love in GBoH, and I can see why the system has so many fans, but I don’t know if in the end it will be for me.