Few wargame systems have as much veneration from their fans as the Great Campaigns of the Civil War. However, despite its dedicated fans it still manages to feel somewhat obscure - a series that is often out of print and intimidating for new players to get into. For those in the know, this system has been a touchstone of the hobby since Stonewall Jackson’s Way was published by Avalon Hill in 1992. The series was originally designed by Joe Balkoski until 2001. When Avalon Hill’s catalog was bought up by Hasbro the series was taken up by Multi-Man Publishing (MMP) who worked with other designers (including Chris Withers and Ed Beach) to update the old Avalon Hill games into new editions with revised rules and graphics.
Since I started my dive into American Civil War gaming it was inevitable that I had to tackle this series at some stage. While the game I have on my shelf is Stonewall in the Valley, a 1995 release that hasn’t been redone by MMP, and I have pushed some counters around on that map solitaire, I chose the updated new edition of the first game, now called Stonewall Jackson’s Way II, as the first title I would sink my teeth into. What I found was an unorthodox and intriguing system that was far easier to get into and quicker to play than its reputation would have you think. However, it is also not without fault and after three games, including a play of the advanced campaign, I’m still on the fence about how I feel about the series in general.
The core is strong, there’s no denying it
The central loop in a turn of Great Campaigns of the Civil War (GCACW from here on) is incredibly satisfying and smooth, although describing it might make me sound like a lunatic. First, both players roll a d6 to determine initiative, highest wins, Confederates win ties (we’ll talk about that later). The winner can choose to activate some units, or they can pass, giving the chance to their opponent. If both players pass, the turn ends, we do some bookkeeping, and we start again.
If you choose to activate units you have essentially three options: you can activate one unit on its own, you can activate a leader and move any number of units under that leader’s command within his command range, or you can activate a leader and all the units in his hex to attack an adjacent hex. This latter choice is the only way to attack with more than one unit at a time, single unit attacks are resolved as part of movement. There is more nuance to this, including how attacking from multiple hexes is handled, but this is the core of the game.
Let’s say you chose to activate some units to move. You roll a d6 and this is how far your units will get to move this turn. You get +1 to the roll if you activated a leader and had him activate the unit, and you get +1 if you’re a Confederate (again, more on that later). If you happen to have activated cavalry, roll 2d6 instead. Now you get to move your units, it costs one movement point to move along roads (unless it’s raining) but the cost for moving off-road starts at 3 points and only goes up depending on the terrain, so you probably want to stick to the road.
Some people will balk at this level of randomness (and we’re not even covering how initiating assault combat with a leader requires more rolls). I, however, love chaos in my games and GCACW certainly injects a desirable amount of uncertainty, but it also creates interesting decisions and a whole hell of a lot of tension. See, I kind of skipped over the most important thing. Every time you activate a unit, that unit gains a Fatigue. If a unit has 4 Fatigue, it can’t activate anymore. If a unit exceeds certain Fatigue thresholds it will become exhausted and may also become disordered or suffer losses. And, lastly, you only refresh 3 Fatigue between turns, and you need to be below certain levels to restore disordered or exhausted units to fit and fighting shape again.
So yes, the game is roll and move, but it’s also a game of trying to figure out how much you need to push this unit right now. What are your chances of winning initiative next, and being able to go again? How much can you hedge your bets on having a series of activations before your opponent has any vs. going all out right now? It is tense and every moment of your turn is exciting. It is also incredibly quick and clean to resolve, you roll a die, pick some units, roll a die, move some units, repeat. Even combat, once you learn a few of its idiosyncrasies, resolves remarkably smoothly.
The only game I’ve played before that kind of reminded me of this system was Shakos Games’ Napoleon 1806. That game is very different from GCACW, it applies different solutions to similar ideas – your units’ movement is determined by the random drawing of a card and fatigue is as much a threat, if not more, to your armies as damage in battle. These games feel like two different approaches to the same design goals, and both are excellent implementations of those ideas.
I’m going to cover some things I like far less about GCACW in the sections below, but before we go there, I want to reiterate how much I like this core gameplay loop. I think it’s incredibly clever and something that more game designers should experiment with. When I was in the zone in a game of GCACW it was incredibly exciting, but sometimes I couldn’t help but be yanked out of that zone and then I found my feelings to be a bit messier.
The cost of victory
Victory conditions are a crucial part of any design. They not only set the stakes and provide a clear target for players to achieve in the game, but they also say what the designer thinks the objectives of this historical event were. They set parameters for what the historical actors needed to achieve to be victorious – they are, in effect, a commentary on the history. For this reason, I have never been particularly fond of victory points in wargames. No historical actor thought in terms of abstract VPs when they were making their strategic decisions – they had clear goals in mind and those goals had tactical and strategic implications. Often, when playing games solo, I will cast off the victory points entirely and simply play the game with general goals in mind and then at the end judge how well each side performed. I find this far more satisfying than rounding out a nice evening of gaming with bookkeeping.
VPs at their best are simply an abstraction of these historical goals, a measure of how well the player did against the history with the potential for more granularity than “did the same or better as the historical event” or “failed to do the same as the historical event”. Since wargames live in counterfactual, these latter metrics would not be useful. Still, I prefer VPs (if they must be present) to be simple and with the parallels that can be easily drawn between what the VPs represent and the historical outcome that earning those VPs is meant to align with.
I bring this up because I hate the victory conditions in Stonewall Jackson’s Way II. The scenarios have many VP metrics to consider, often a dozen or more, and they are frustrating to keep track of and not always entirely intuitive. At first blush they are straightforward, such as a goal for the Confederate player to occupy Culpeper and have no enemy units adjacent to it. That’s simple, but that is two separate VP totals (one for occupying Culpeper with enemies adjacent, one for if no enemies are adjacent), and then there are VPs for casualties, number of enemy units routed, and other factors and at the end of the day the Confederate player (only the Confederate’s earn points in this game, the Union merely subtracts from the Confederate total) must achieve a certain number of points to win. On the final turn of my second scenario whenever my opponent passed, I found myself counting up the VPs to determine whether I could win the game if I simply passed now and ended the game. I don’t even like doing this kind of points counting in Eurogames, I really dislike it in wargames. Combined with the need to remember so many potential victory point sources to play effectively, this repeatedly pulled me out of GCACW’s excellent narrative flow much to my own frustration.
The Vassal modules do help with this by highlighting victory point areas - hexes in blue are worth the VPs written next to them, yellow circles are train depots that the Confederates can destroy for VPs. Very helpful, but not available when playing physically.
Now, I should say that the victory conditions seem to be very well balanced and maximally designed to suit a competitive play experience. These scenarios have clearly been tested many times and the final product is a game that will be a tense game for both players. However, I don’t really care much about balance, and I find the victory conditions soulless and tedious. Others with different taste will have other thoughts on the matter, which is fine.
Actually, it’s a dexterity game
My initial experience with GCACW was playing a scenario of Stonewall in the Valley solo on the little wargaming table I have in one corner of my sitting room. When it came time to play Stonewall Jackon’s Way II, I played it on Vassal with my friend and podcast co-conspirator Pierre. These experiences were very different. The Vassal modules for GCACW are incredible and remove a huge amount of bookkeeping from the play experience. They also eliminate one of GCACW’s most challenging mechanics: stacking.
The maps are gorgeous and the unit count blessedly small here, but each of these stacks could balloon to be quite large indeed over the course of a turn.
To understand what I mean, let’s talk a bit about how GCACW tracks unit status. Each unit has a counter, so far so standard. Each counter has a strength printed on it, but should they become disorganized or suffer damage they will need a separate strength counter to track their current effective strength. Units also gain Fatigue, which is tracked via counters. Units can also become demoralized, another counter, or dig breastworks/trenches, which is yet another tracker. On top of that, leaders must always move with units under their command, and you can have multiple levels of leaders (e.g. Corps and Army leaders). So, each unit counter will in practice be between 3 and 5 counters with the potential for 1-2 leaders in the same hex as well. On top of that, GCACW has no real limits on stacking – there is a movement penalty for entering spaces with units, but that’s a hindrance not a ban.
In our first game of Stonewall Jackson’s Way at the end of the scenario the Union had piled three units and a variety of commanders into Culpeper to stop the Confederates from taking it. They had two units, two leaders, and two entrenchment tokens. On Vassal, this was only 4 counters because the module tracks all the other statuses on the unit counters in clearly readable graphics. If we had been playing in person this stack would have been 14 counters high.
And here’s the kicker: you will need to frequently adjust these counters – swapping Fatigue in and out for example – and it is incredibly important that you not mix up which counters go with which units. We ran into this in our first game of the first learning scenario of one of the smaller and simpler entries into the system – I cannot stress how little I would want to play any of the bigger campaigns of the late war in person and deal with this upkeep.
I’ve seen some players use separate sheets to track things like fatigue, strength, etc. off the map. This is a reasonable solution to the problem, although it does make a large footprint game even larger, but I find it a bit frustrating that this is something left entirely to players. This is a design challenge and something that I would expect a still ongoing series with quite a few talented designers working on it to attempt to come up with their own solution. At the very least, I would expect that games that cost as much as GCACW does (more on that later) to include these kinds of unit tracking sheets for players rather than offloading it entirely to fans of the series.
The thing is, though, that on Vassal all of this is super clean. The Vassal modules are amazing and the best way to play. The end turn button even does all the upkeep for you in terms of removing Fatigue, switching units to exhausted or back, etc. It takes all the tedium out of the game. But then, that does raise a minor question: should this even be a board game? I honestly don’t know, and I’m sure some people with a far higher tolerance for manipulating stacks of counters with tweezers are happy with the game the way it is, but to me this is the element of GCACW that feels the most dated. This part of the design feels like something that predates the modern computer gaming industry and so was the best solution available to this design problem in the early ‘90s. It is also a huge barrier to me when it comes to wanting to buy into this series. I know several people who own multiple entries in GCACW and leave them in shrink on their shelves as they play exclusively on Vassal. I’m not judging those people for that decision, I arguably do the same thing with Levy and Campaign games, but I am kind of judging GCACW for making it such a good idea.
For many people, this won’t be a problem. In fact, for me in some ways it isn’t. When I play wargames against a human opponent 90% of the time I do it online, so the fact that the series is so amazing on Vassal is a huge bonus. However, I also really enjoy playing wargames solo and on paper GCACW is an amazing system to solo. It has buckets of randomness and while longer term planning is key to success it also throws enough wrenches into the works to force you to adapt and mix things up as you go. However, the tedium of the stacking and the constant bookkeeping with physical components does not really appeal to me. Maybe if I print off some status tracking sheets I could get over this, but again that’s me having to provide a fix for something that the game should have already addressed.
That Smooth Basic Flavor
I think GCACW has a reputation for being a particularly complicated wargame, and I’m not sure that it is entirely warranted. The Basic Game is fairly straightforward, I would categorize it as solidly mid-weight in terms of wargames. There are a few wrinkles to process, like the flanking and entrenching rules, but for the most part if you’ve played a few wargames then you should be able to pick up and play the basic scenarios of Stonewall Jackson’s Way II (or most GCACW titles).
I think the title “Basic Game” might be something of a disservice. GCACW titles include far more “Basic” scenarios than they do “Advanced”, another series might classify these as “Scenario” and “Campaign” options and avoid any stigma that might come from not playing the “Advanced” game. You can have a lot of fun playing the basic scenarios, and I don’t think there’s any shame in just playing the size of game that you’re interested in playing – if you just want to play Basic games that is a totally acceptable way to engage with GCACW. The barrier to entry is not nearly so high as it might appear. Many of the basic scenarios are even laid out such that they slowly introduce players to key concepts over several games, easing them into the rules as they play.
The Basic scenarios that I played were all very clean (excepting maybe the victory conditions, see above) and presented interesting puzzles to the players. These could be something like “the Confederates must take X hexes in Y turns” and the players have to manage their tempo (no small feat with GCACW’s random movement) and plan around the chaos the system throws at them. These were easily playable in an evening on Vassal, and I had good fun with them. We didn’t feel bogged down in rules complexity and only once hit a bump where we had to flick through rulebooks for a few minutes to figure out a rule.
The Cedar Mountain scenario is pretty simple, the Confederates have to get to Culpeper and the Union (who have reinforcements off the top of the screen) have to stop them. Very clean and quick to play.
At the same time, while I enjoyed playing these short scenarios I didn’t get particularly sucked into the narrative and I don’t know how eager I would be to play them multiple times. They are by their nature a snapshot of the campaign. I felt like I had turned on the TV and watched an action sequence to an exciting film but saw nothing that came before or after. The individual moments were exciting, but my emotional investment was low. For players who are more interested in a good puzzle that they can test their tactical acumen against this won’t be a problem, but for me it meant that I had fun but wasn’t in love.
Overall, I liked my time with the basic game of Stonewall Jackson’s Way II, but I also found that with every game I was less interested in playing another. I can’t see myself owning a copy and getting it out regularly to replay basic game scenarios.
Advanced Union & Rebels
I only played the shorter of Stonewall Jackson’s Way II’s advanced scenarios, which lasts for eight turns. This entry has probably the simplest “Advanced” game of any entry in the series – it adds less than a dozen pages of rules to the game many of which are pretty straightforward. If I’m honest, an experienced wargamer could probably just skip straight to the Advanced scenario – although in doing so they would miss out on how the Basic scenarios can help to teach the system’s quirks before the campaign is played. The main additions the “Advanced” game adds are longer scenarios, random events, supply, and a few bits of chrome like railroad movement, detaching small forces from units, and rules for random turn end and Confederate leader death. Of these, we kind of ignored the detachment/attachment rules - I’m sure they offer a lot to expert players, but I didn’t miss them here - but we did use pretty much everything else.
Of these extra rules, the most impactful was the greater length of the game. GCACW is an experience that is defined by tempo, and having more time to explore and adjust your tempo really opens up the decision space. Eight turns is not very long – Stonewall in the Valley has basic scenarios that are longer than that – but even still I could feel the difference having those turns made when compared to a two or three turn scenario. GCACW demands that you think several turns in advance, and so the more turns you have the more room there is for making plans and, importantly, for changing those plans when the dice gods punish you for your insolence. I can definitely see the appeal in those big 20+ turn campaigns, even if the time required to play them is very intimidating. Let us not even contemplate the campaigns that approach 100 turns, magisterial and terrifying.
Advanced Game, Turn 3: I somewhat foolishly let myself get stuck in this pocket, and then rain and a turn ending early made it nearly impossible for me to get out of it. A mistake I would hopefully not make on a subsequent play.
The rules I thought would have the greatest impact, but which ultimately didn’t, were the Supply rules. Don’t get me wrong, these definitely have an impact on the game, but I guess I imagined that supply would be incredibly punishing. Instead, Supply is only checked on certain turns – just once in the 8 turn scenario – and it mostly forces your units that are out of supply to become disorganized (weakening their combat value) and to stay that way. There are ways around it for both sides and ultimately while it seems like something that you really should consider, this is not one of those systems where you will be calculating supply every turn and thinking of it as a strategy defining element of the game. I expect in the longer campaigns included in other GCACW titles it is more important, but still, you shouldn’t expect OCS level supply rules in this series.
The random event table also proved to be quite interesting – or at least the rain proved to be interesting. We rolled rain twice at exactly the worst times for my Confederates. Rain stopped my divisions from crossing the rivers at key fords, hindered their ability to fight, and slowed them to a crawl along the muddy roads they were on. In hindsight, I should have planned for it better. You can’t know exactly when it will rain, but the rain turns absolutely redefined how we played the game with relatively little in the way of extra rules. The other events, which sped up or delayed reinforcements, were less impactful but still interesting. The event table uses 2d6 so there is an interesting probability distribution to consider. Overall, very cool. It’s the kind of thing that I would almost like to see just included in the basic game except that I imagine it ruins the carefully tuned scenario balance.
The remaining rules were interesting but didn’t have a defining impact on our game. The random chance for a turn to end was really interesting, and completely screwed me at one point, but I can’t say it felt like a major change to how the game played. Rail movement is interesting as well, but in the eight-turn scenario it didn’t come up because the campaign ends before the Union reinforcements arrive outside Washington. I believe in bigger and longer campaigns it could be a defining aspect of the experience.
I eventually got Jackson around the Union position but it was too little too late - without Lee he couldn’t do enough to secure victory and he was badly out of supply.
Overall, the Advanced game of Stonewall Jackson’s Way II is not very much more Advanced than the Basic game and it was very easy to adapt to it but it certainly offers a deeper experience. While I am not overly eager to revisit any of the basic scenarios we played, I could see myself trying new strategies in the campaign over a few games. Honestly, the greatest hindrance to my replaying the Advanced scenario is simply that I don’t find the Northern Virginia Campaign to be all that interesting so I don’t know how much time I would really want to devote to replaying it before I got bored.
We cannae take much more, sir!
Before I get on to talking about the elephant in the room, I want to consider the... I don’t know, longhorn bull in the room: the cost of these games. A lot has been written about whether reviewers ought to factor in the cost of games in their reviews. Dan Thurot has written a very thoughtful piece on the matter, and I agree with many of his points. However, sometimes I cannot ignore it. GCACW games are very expensive, and the physical game material you get for that cost is kind of low. Stonewall Jackson’s Way II retailed for $120, and for that price you got a rulebook, a large playbook, two maps, three counter sheets, a handful of charts, and two tiny dice that I (personally) hate. I put that in past tense, because Stonewall Jackson’s Way II sold out some time ago and copies on the secondhand market easily run for $200+. That’s not a lot of physical game for your dollar.
I hear fans repeatedly say that if you evaluate it based on how much gameplay you could get out of that box then the price per hour of game is very good, but that has never held much water with me honestly. Wargames are not made by full time development teams working 9-5 salaried jobs with benefits that the company has to pay, meaning that the company has to recoup extensive development costs for the games. I don’t want to undervalue the design and development work that went into these games, but unless MMP is paying a far higher share of the game price as royalties than most in the industry I can’t imagine the extra cost is explained by the development time. There’s not much more physical game in GCACW than there is in many similar games on the market right now that cost far less. If you compare the costs of something like On to Richmond II with the latest Library of Napoleonic Battles game from OSG (hardly a cheap title from a small publisher) the contrast in cost vs. what is in the box is stark. If you compare it to something like the Men of Iron Tri-Pack from GMT Games the disparity is mind blowing.
I want to emphasize that I’m not accusing MMP Games or the designers of anything untoward, I don’t think this is some evil scheme to rob wargamers of their precious money. I’m sure they did their price analysis for printing costs, print run sizes, and warehouse storage and this is where they landed. Nobody is making billions in the wargaming industry, but I am also allowed to voice my own opinions on the matter just as they are to justify their decisions. What I’m saying is that I’m not convinced that it’s very good value for anyone who isn’t a huge fan of the series – especially if you consider my earlier experience that says that playing these games on Vassal is better anyway. I don’t see the value in spending hundreds of Euro to put games on my shelf so I can play them on Vassal.
The high cost of each entry in the series makes it very daunting to experiment. You cannot dabble in GCACW unless you have a lot of disposable income. If GCACW titles were $60-$90 each I would be tempted to grab a few to try them out until I found one that hit the right balance point for me, but I’m not likely to find it because I’m not buying three GCACW titles to hope that there’s one there for me – it would cost my gaming budget for the next few years! I suppose I could just play them on Vassal until I find one I like, but that almost feels like it defeats the purpose of these being physical games in the first place.
On the whole, I think GCACW is a series that could have a much wider appeal but its high price point and the frequency with which titles are out of print serve to erect a significant barrier for anyone who might be interested. These are pretty hardcore wargames more from how accessible they are to physically acquire than from anything in their rules or mechanisms, and I find that a little disappointing.
We have to talk about the Rebs
If there is one element of GCACW that leaves a sour taste in my mouth it is the decision to make the Confederates so powerful, particularly as a core game mechanic. I want to stress from the outset that my objection here is not one of game balance, these games seem meticulously balanced. Rather, my objection is based on what the game implicitly says about the Confederates with its design choices. I have a lot of respect for how games can say things beyond just what they have written in their rules – the feel of a game can convey a message, whether intended or not, and that message carries weight. To me, the systems of GCACW embrace a flawed sense that the armies and commanders of the Confederate States of America were in nearly all cases superior to their Union opponents. This is dangerously close to ever popular neo-Confederate notion that the CSA was the superior fighting force and was only defeated due to lack of numbers and industrial capacity – a popular but erroneous narrative of the war. The Union won the war in the field of battle, and they did so thanks to the bravery of their soldiers and the competency of their commanders. With my cards on the table, below are the mechanics in GCACW that I find objectionable.
The one that I mind the least is the fact that by default Confederates win ties for initiative. In Stonewall Jackson’s Way II this is always true, but in some of the games set in the western theater there is a more complex set of rules that will sometimes allow the Union to win ties. I’m not fundamentally opposed to this – someone has to win ties and picking one side for consistency helps speed the game along. Still, I wish this was on a game to game or scenario to scenario basis and not a core rule. That would also allow for more nuance in the scenario design, I think.
The second rule is more objectionable, and that is that the CSA gets +1 to all their movement rolls. There is a slight exception to this in the form of the All Green Alike scenarios, but besides that it’s pretty much true for every game. I don’t understand this one. Plus one movement is incredibly strong and it makes the CSA feel so much better. Playing as the CSA with this rule you just feel more competent and powerful than the Union – you can run circles around them, especially since you win initiative more often than they do. I could see an argument for this rule in certain campaigns – I didn’t hate it when I first encountered it because in Stonewall in the Valley it kind of makes sense to have Stonewall’s “foot cavalry” be faster. But the fact that this is a series wide rule is a bit gross.
I also could not find a single reference to slaves or contraband (the Union code word, of sorts, for runaway slaves) in the GCACW rules or in the selection of Advances Game rules I looked at. I found only brief references in the “The Game as History” sections as well. In a game system that gives a +1 bonus to the Confederate mobility and often imposes penalties on the Union when the extended march it is a bit hard to swallow this absence. The Confederate army ran on the backs of slave labor, often literally. Teamsters, cooks, and general labor were all performed by impressed slaves. That the system effectively rewards the Confederates for this exploitation but does not comment upon it is not a good look. I don’t know that the game needed a whole system for slavery, but it should be putting this fact front and center.
Runaway slaves (or Contraband as they were known) also posed a significant logistical and political challenge for the Union on numerous campaigns - particularly on McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign - and I think some rules to incorporate that would not have gone amiss. Slaves fled Confederate lines and the Union had to find ways to accommodate them - with individual generals differing significantly on the degree to which they made an effort. This was a war about slavery, and it seems weird for one of the flagship games on the topic to seemingly not have any rules covering the role slavery played in the war - especially at an operational scale.
The final part of this CSA trifecta is the combat bonus that certain Confederate leaders receive when initiating an Assault. In the core rules, “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet (but only in late war games for some reason) both receive a +1 combat bonus when they initiate an Assault while Lee grants a passive +1 to any Assault beginning from the hex he is currently in – although he does lose this during his campaigns outside of Virginia. Game specific rules for some entries include further bonuses for Confederate leaders. While some Union leaders do get combat bonuses, none are included in the base series rules and the number who do in game specific rules are vastly outnumbered by their Confederate opponents. A +1 modifier in combat might not seem like much, but I would stress that the bonus you receive for outnumbering your opponent’s army 2:1 is also only +1. What this tacitly says about men like Lee or Jackson is that they effectively double the strength of the soldiers they command merely by their presence. While there is no denying that these men had their moments of tactical brilliance, they also made tremendous mistakes in their careers and ultimately lost the war they were fighting.
Jackson and similar Confederate commanders also tend to have amazing command stats that make them far more likely to succeed when rolling for an Assault. If the game wanted to reflect the capacity for men like Jackson to effectively coordinate and initial a major attack with the men under their command, then this stat achieves that. There is no need, or I believe justification, for also making their assaults somehow universally more effective than anything their opponents can achieve.
As the final layer on top of everything else, I couldn’t shake the feeling of that old fashioned Confederate worship that praised these men for their military brilliance while downplaying or outright ignoring their repugnant politics and the ultimate outcome of their rebellion. I’m not saying that GCACW is neo-Confederate propaganda or that the designers are hanging rebel flags in their basement and drinking to John Wilkes Booth, but these elements of the design feel like they are uncritically taking on an older version of the American Civil War that was deeply infected with Lost Cause romanticism to the detriment of the stories they tell. For all that I enjoy GCACW’s mechanisms, these rules and the way they make the Confederates feel so powerful and superior really put me off the series in my core – I’m not sure I can ever love a game series that contains this version of history.
Concluding thoughts
I have to confess that I’m still not entirely sure where I sit with GCACW – I know that must be a little frustrating to read if you made it this far in this probably too long review. The core mechanisms are phenomenal and when the game sings it is pure platinum record stuff. When I’m in the zone with GCACW it is a gaming experience unlike any other and one that I would heartily recommend people experience. At the same time, the high cost of these games, frequency with which they aren’t available, the frustrations of its physical design, and the unsettling ghost of Lost Cause-ism present in some of its rules really prevent me from embracing the series with my whole being. For the time being, I am still on the fence about GCACW. It intrigues me enough that I really want to play some more of it – and I absolutely intend to do just that – but at the same time I won’t be rushing off to fill my shelves with multiple entries. Maybe GCACW is just too much of a lifestyle game and I don’t have the lifestyle to accommodate it, I don’t know. Further experimentation is required.
In the end, I would recommend Stonewall Jackon’s Way II as a way to learn the series, and I would encourage people to not be intimidated by its legendarium – you can learn to play this, I promise. However, this is not a game that I personally would be interested in owning and I don’t know if I will ever return to this entry in the series. I live in hope that like with Blind Swords, I may not have loved the first entry I played but I may eventually find a title (or two) that I truly adore. We shall see.