American Revolution

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First Impressions: Imperial Struggle by Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta

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First Impressions: Imperial Struggle by Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta

Imperial Struggle is a behemoth of a game. It’s sprawling board dominates the table but it still overflows onto to two individual player mats and a separate board for each of the game’s four wars - only one of which will be in play at a time thankfully. It is also a game that takes many hours to play - I played it by email using the game’s Vassal module (no table I own is large enough to fit the whole game in physical space) and let’s just say that we were playing for a while. In person I would expect a game to be a full day affair. This scale is more understandable given that the game covers nearly a century of Anglo-French rivalry and conflict, from 1697 to 1789. Beyond its sheer scope, it is both one of the most interesting and frustrating games I have played so far this year. Sometimes I think I love it while other times I’m so annoyed I swear I won’t take another turn. Still, inexorably, I was dragged through the full game despite my periodic protests. I’m going to try and put my conflicted thoughts down and hopefully that will exorcise me of their constant hassling in my head.

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First Impressions: Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777

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First Impressions: Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777

It definitely says something about me that I got very excited the first time I heard the title “Supply Lines of the American Revolution”. Growing up in Central Virginia, within spitting distance of the houses of many Founding Fathers and ex-Presidents, the history of the American Revolution played a central role in my early education and as someone interested in history it was impossible not to absorb some of the mythmaking that went with that education. Separately, as a military historian I’m always interested in the logistical challenges of warfare and the lengths commanders (and the institutions that backed them) went to wage effective war. A game that combines both of these interests was bound to be get me excited. It actually genuinely didn’t occur to me that the title might come across as painfully dorky until I showed it to my partner. Let’s be honest, though, if you’re reading this then you are probably of a similar persuasion to myself and the idea of pushing cubes of supplies around a map of the American Colonies fills you with excitement! So, what did I think of my first experience playing Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777?

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We the People by Mark Herman: A Personal Retrospective

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We the People by Mark Herman: A Personal Retrospective

It seems more than a little absurd given the trajectory my life has taken, but when I was twelve years old I was really struggling to find anything to enjoy about studying history. My teacher at the time was the tragically named Ms. Aufil, and while she wasn’t quite awful, she certainly wasn’t inspiring, and I was having a hard time studying Virginia colonial history for what must have been the fifth time. A quirk of the Charlottesville public school curriculum of the time was that we spent the first six years of school only studying the period from the settling of Jamestown to the American Civil War – otherwise known as the period in United States history when Virginia was Kind Of A Big Deal. I was nearly fourteen years old before I learned anything from the twentieth century in a classroom setting. It was during this difficult period in my childhood that Mark Herman’s seminal game We the People entered my life.