It’s strange that it took me this long to try Washington’s War. Its predecessor, We the People, was my first ever historical wargame – an outlier in my journey, as I wouldn’t enter the hobby properly until decades later. Given my fondness for that game, I should have grabbed Washington’s War during one of my previous attempts to get into wargaming, but it took until the most recent reprint for me to finally get We the People 2.0 to the table. Unfortunately, that interlude was so long that I’ve now forgotten much of the nuance in the 1.0 version, so I cannot make any profound comparison between the two versions. Maybe further down the line I’ll open my battered copy of the original and give it a go, but for this review I will largely limit myself to the version that is currently available. That’s no bad thing, though, as Washington’s War is an excellent game that, while it shows its age in places, delivers a satisfying experience without losing itself in complexity. The genre-defining originator shows that sometimes old games can continue to remain relevant even after their systems have been adopted and updated by countless others.
GMT Games provided me with a complimentary copy of Washington’s War.
Most people probably already know this, but in case you don’t, We the People was the originator of what is now referred to as the Card-Drive Wargame (CDG). These games give players a hand of cards and they play those cards in alternating turns to take various actions. Cards either have a printed numerical value, called Ops, that can be spent on actions, or they have an Event. These events have some kind of special effect and are based on historical occurrences from the American Revolution – e.g. there are cards representing the publication of the Declaration of Independence and Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. In later CDGs it would become standard for cards to have both an Ops value and an Event, and players would choose which of the two to use, but in We the People, and in Washington’s War, the cards only have one or the other. Washington’s War is an updated version of We the People, but its core CDG system is functionally the same as it was in the original.
A selection of the kinds of cards available to players in Washington’s War.
The age of Washington’s War’s take on the CDG mechanism is something that is immediately apparent to anyone who is familiar with the genre. There is that separation between Ops and Events, of course, but also the Events are quite simple. They often place or remove political control (we’ll talk about that later), or give a bonus in combat, or adjust some other minor system. What I’m saying is that they’re not game shifting – some modern CDGs make their Events radical transformations of core game systems, but very situational in terms of how you use them. Washington’s War errs on the side of simplicity, and it feels older for it. However, that is not to say that it is bad! What is somewhat surprising is how tight and interesting the card play feels, even today. Events can be discarded instead of played to take a small political action or, interestingly, to give a bonus in combat. Adding the bonus in combat can be crucial, but it also will often cause you to have one fewer card than your opponent, potentially letting them have two turns in a row. There is surprising depth in the simplicity of the card play.
The deck can be a cruel overlord – the mix of Ops values, between one and three, and the fact that Events are restricted to one player or the other means that it is very possible to draw a terrible hand with very few options, or to have an amazing hand with the American eastern seaboard as your oyster. The luck of the draw certainly has the chance to skew a game of Washington’s War, but I would argue that it is no greater than the potential of a string of bad rolls to disrupt many other games. This game is about making the best out of what you have, and the imbalance in hands enhances some of the bluffing feel of the game. You are trying to infer from your opponent’s play if they’re being cagey this turn because their hand is bad, or if they’re sitting on three amazing cards and just trying to trick you into overextending yourself by playing all their bad cards first. It can get quite tense and mind-gamey, especially if you’re playing on the excellent Rally the Troops implementation and can’t even see your opponent’s face to try and get a read on them.
Washington’s War’s fickle deal of the cards also encourages you to play a long game – the averages will most likely work out if you give it enough time, so take it slow. That is, of course, if the game gives you that time. Washington’s War also includes a semi-random game end point. Throughout the deck are a series of cards that declare the fall of the British government, which ends the game. Each iteration of this card has a year, which corresponds to a turn in the game. At the end of each turn you check when the government is supposed to fall – if it is the current turn or before, the game ends, otherwise play continues. Each new iteration played replaces the one currently on the board, so even if a turn is supposed to be the end when you start playing it, that could change – especially as these cards are mandatory and cannot be discarded.
The fact that you can never know how long the game will last creates a satisfying tension – the long game probably favors the Americans overall as the British will run out of reinforcements, but you can’t gamble on having all the time in the world and with their early board presence it is even possible for American to win early if they’re aggressive and lucky. I love that the ending isn’t purely random. It’s not like you roll a die at the end of each turn and see if that was the last one – they are cards in the player’s hands. You could draw a card telling you that the game will end this turn and sit on it until the very end to drop it on your opponent as an unpleasant surprise. Or you could drop it early and gamble on the possibility that your opponent also has a game end card, and they will be forced to replace yours whether they want to or not. There is strategy to how you manage these cards. My only reservation is that if you are dealt multiple end game cards, your hand is complete trash – they can’t be used for anything else and must be played, so a hand full of them could basically ruin that turn for you in an incredibly unsatisfying way. I wish there was some system for moderating how punishing that can feel – more from a place of how boring it can be to have to effectively skip multiple turns rather than from a strict concern over game balance.
At this point you would be forgiven for thinking that Washington’s War is a card game, and that’s my fault, I haven’t even mentioned what the rest of the game looks like. Washington’s War takes inspiration from an unusual source, for a wargame at least, in that it replicates elements of Go. Players win by controlling American colonies, in this case including Canada, and control is done by placing political control markers on the map by spending Ops points. Each state has a number of locations, and whoever controls the majority in a state controls that state. If Britain can secure six colonies by game end, they win, otherwise they lose. This does have the odd effect that small states like Delaware or Rhode Island are weirdly important, since you only need to control one space and they’re worth as much for victory as a large state like Virginia or New York, but at least from a game play perspective it does introduce some interesting wrinkles to the strategy.
The game also benefits somewhat from a familiarity with the borders of Eastern US states. Each state’s locations are color coded, which provides some help, but it can be tricky to parse especially when it fills up with pieces.
I mentioned Go, though, and this is where things get a little spicy. If your control markers are ever isolated, meaning they are completely surrounded by enemy control markers, and there is no friendly military unit in that area, all of your pieces in that area are taken off the board. In practice, the requirements for isolation are quite generous and you won’t be removing that many pieces in most games, but understanding and using it is nevertheless essential to good play and impactful on your decisions. Because empty spaces prevent your pieces from being isolated, it is often desirable for players to not completely fill every space on the map, but then because you are playing an area control game leaving spaces blank is making it harder for you to establish control. Since Britain can also trace back to ports to prevent isolation, there is a nice bit of asymmetry where their control pieces are often harder to remove once they have set in, but at the same time the Americans usually have more freedom in where they can place pieces, making it easier for them to isolate pieces away from the coasts. Like much of the game’s asymmetry, this is minor but immensely impactful on how the two sides play and the differing strategies that you must employ if you want to win.
The changes to combat in Washington’s War are one of the few differences from We the People that even I can notice, with my hazy memory of the latter. Where We the People had a card game within the game that players used to resolve battles, Washington’s War offers a much simpler dice-based combat with a few modifiers. Part of me misses the old card combat, but since I haven’t played it in so long it may just be nostalgia, and there’s no denying that the dice combat is much faster. There are a few quirks to combat that I quite like.
Generals can only carry 5 units with them on the march, so the strength of an attacking army is somewhat predictable. This prevents a situation where one huge army can cruise around the map crushing all opposition. You can create a huge defensive stack, but if you want to go on the offensive, you’ll only be so strong. While that unit cap gives some predictability, it is somewhat undermined by the random roll that all generals must make before combat to see whether they use all or half of their combat value. This approximately represents how well they manage to organize their forces on the day of battle, and it injects a valuable sense of uncertainty into the combat math, making the combat more than just a dice off between two nearly identical armies.
That said, the combat remains quite tight, so battle cards and the discarding of enemy Event cards for a bonus remains incredibly valuable if you want to emerge victorious on the field – but maybe you don’t even care that much about winning fights. The game is not decided by who wins the most battles, but by territorial control, so while some fighting is inevitable this is more a game of movement and control than it is of pure combat. Which makes sense, since historically the side that lost the most battles ultimately won the war, so it would make no sense to link victory directly to battlefield performance.
Washington’s War is a simple game that takes a very birds-eye view of the American Revolution, so it is understandably not the most detailed simulation of the revolution. At the same time, it doesn’t need to be. It’s a big picture game that will give a decent impression of the ins and outs of the war without getting too lost in the weeds. While part of me would have liked a slightly deeper political layer, I must recognize that in even having one We the People stood out, and adding more would probably have mucked up such a smooth design. As someone who grew up in Thomas Jefferson’s hometown this history was drilled into me from a young age, so it is fun to see cards and generals that I recognize while playing. It’s not a game that is going to teach you the ins and outs of how the Continental Congress interacted with the Continental Army, but as a simulation of the decisions facing Washington and his generals vs. the British generals, I think it works perfectly well.
Washington’s War fully deserves to be called a classic of the wargame genre. While it clearly shows its age in places, that does nothing to diminish the joy that can be found within this box. Later iterations on the CDG mechanism have taken it in new and deeper directions, but Washington’s War shows that sometimes the simplicity of the original can be just as, if not more, satisfying that some of its successors. Plus, it’s on Rally the Troops in an amazing implementation, so it has never been easier to play. This is an all-timer, you should try it.
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