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.
My original copy of We The People - the box is a little worse for the wear over the years but it’s still holding together!
My memory of receiving We the People is both very strong and utterly lacking in detail. I don’t know what day it was, nor month, not even the season. I knew I was still in school, so it can’t have been the summer, but beyond that I’m not sure. My parents bought it for me and gave it to me with little ceremony. This might seem like a perfectly ordinary experience, but some context is useful. My hobbies increasingly tended towards the obscure as I got older and my parents often struggled to find gifts that suited my interests – this could make birthdays and Christmas a little fraught at times. Despite these general troubles, when they purchased that copy of We the People for me they reached the highest achievement you can when giving a gift: they gave me something I absolutely loved, but never would have even known that I wanted. To this day We the People is one of my most treasured gifts I’ve ever been given.
The insides of the box of We The People - including tokens, two decks, an assortment of standees, and the rulebooks.
My father had a history with classic Avalon Hill Games dating back a good few years, so he was destined to be my opponent once I cracked the box open. I read the rules and taught the game to both of us – taking command of the British in my first game. I was feeling a bit contrary about my endlessly American focused education I suspect and wanted to work out some of my frustration with constantly being taught about Famous Virginians by crushing a few of them beneath General Howe’s polished boots. I can happily report that in those early games the British were reasonably successful in this operation.
My board has developed this weird ridge along the fold - tragically making my hometown almost impossible to place tokens on. Still working out how best to fix that.
For those not familiar, We the People is a game designed by Mark Herman and published by Avalon Hill Games in 1993. It is generally credited with being the first Card Driven Game (CDG), a highly influential and popular genre of wargame. In a CDG players have a hand of cards that have a combination of action points (often called Ops) and/or historical events that have a specific effect on the game. On a player’s turn, they can play a card for its special event or for the action points. Action points can then be spent on a range of actions, such as moving armies or recruiting units. To give an example, Benedict Arnold begins the game as an American general but in the deck is a card that when played causes him to betray the Americans and leave play no matter what he is currently doing. As the American player, you can use Benedict Arnold as one of your generals, and he’s quite useful, but you have to know that somewhere in the deck is the potential that he will betray you at the worst possible moment. Players draw from a shared deck, so the American player might end up with Benedict Arnold Treason! in their hand, which lets them control when he betrays them to some degree, but also means they have to give up a turn playing an opposition event. The thing about We the People, though, is that you won’t play every card in a game - so maybe Arnold never betrays you, or maybe he betrays you on the second turn of the game!
Some sample Strategy Cards from the deck. This game is how I learned about Baron von Steuben, who has gone on to be one of my favourite figures of the American Revolution.
Victory in We the People is achieved primarily through area control – by seizing territory on the map of the Thirteen Colonies – rather than by destroying enemy armies. That said, it’s still a wargame so the Continental and British armies inevitably must clash from time to time. Combat was handled by a separate deck of combat cards. In a fight the two players drew a hand of cards based on the competence of their generals involved in the fight and then played a relatively simple card game to determine the victor – an interesting but very time consuming system that was cut from the implementation of We the People, GMT Games’ Washington’s War. I have very fond memories of this combat system, and I understand similar systems were implemented in later CDGs so it hasn’t entirely disappeared from the wargaming scene, but I can also appreciate that it took a lot longer to resolve than rolling a few dice and consulting some tables!
The Battle Deck and some sample cards - I wish I could say these brought back vivid memories of how the combat played but honestly I all it stirred was vague memories of really liking the Double Envelopment card…
I knew nothing about We the People’s illustrious legacy when I first learned to play it and I wouldn’t play another CDG for at least a decade. All I knew is that I liked playing We the People with my father. We would set it up on the dining room table and play it over several nights. I don’t know how many times we played it but I definitely became a little obsessed with it. I spent evenings flicking through the deck of combat cards, learning the odds of certain hands, and developing the rudimentary card counting skills necessary to optimise my strategy. My father did not show the same devotion to the game’s combat, which tilted things in my favour and only encouraged me to do it more. I even started designing my own cards – adding little bits of American Revolutionary history to the game as I saw fit - often with little to no regard for petty matters like game balance or rules coherence.
We The People even inspired my first documented attempts at game design. Mark Herman is more than welcome to incorporate any of these cards into the next printing of Washington’s War should he wish to do so.
I stopped playing We the People sometime during high school – I was too busy studying and trying to maintain some kind of social life for multi-hour-long wargames. I left it behind when I went to college – I travelled across the Atlantic for my university education and complex wargames were hardly top of the packing list. Still, years later when my mother was clearing out some old games and asked me if there was anything I wanted to keep I didn’t hesitate to tell her she could give away anything she wanted – so long as it wasn’t We the People. I was a little disheartened on my next trip home when despite my warning to keep it, I couldn’t find my copy anywhere. I had no memory of where I’d last put it, and things often got misplaced in the house over the years. I’ll admit I was a little despondent.
This past Christmas I visited my parents for the first time in nearly three years, the pandemic having caused a much longer than desired interruption. Imagine my joy when I saw the beaten-up box of We the People sitting atop a pile of old games in the spare room my family was taking over for the trip. I immediately knew that bag weight limits be damned I was going to bring it back home with me – I wasn’t prepared to risk letting it get out of my sight again!
I would love to say that over Christmas I cracked open We the People again and my father and I played a game for old time’s sake - hashing out the American Revolution over several evenings while trying to prevent my toddler from disturbing the board during the day. Unfortunately, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2020 and his capacity for things like complex wargames is nowhere near what it once was. This has cast something of a pall over my personal rediscovery of historical wargaming – I had always imagined that in his retirement we would find time to play these kinds of games together again during my intermittent visits home (I live a continent away, so it was hard enough traveling back to Virginia even before the global pandemic). Realistically, that will never happen now and instead I’ll have to look for games that we can play jointly rather than against each other – keeping track of lots of small rules and edge-cases is just beyond his memory now. While I may not be playing We the People anytime soon, and even though the game was later retooled as Washington’s War and published by GMT Games in a nice new package, I’ll be keeping my box ready. Hopefully in a decade’s time I’ll be able to coax my daughter into learning a little bit about both American and wargaming history.