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Stonewall Jackson’s Way II (GCACW) by Joseph M. Balkoski, Ed Beach, Mike Belles, and Chris Withers

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Stonewall Jackson’s Way II (GCACW) by Joseph M. Balkoski, Ed Beach, Mike Belles, and Chris Withers

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.

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Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War Vol. 5 by Jonathan Sumption

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Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War Vol. 5 by Jonathan Sumption

First, a confession: I have not read volumes 2-4 of Jonathan Sumption’s staggering multi-volume history of the Hundred Years War. I read and reviewed volume one over a year ago but with the release of volume five last year I decided to skip straight to the end. Since I’m currently writing a book on the end of the Hundred Years War this was the volume most relevant to my current research and I wanted to get right to it. This is also the part of the war that has received the least coverage in English, so I was very excited when I heard it was finally coming out. Most English language histories of the Hundred Years War skip over the very end of the war with only the lightest of detail – everything that comes after Jeanne d’Arc is summarized in just a few pages. I was keen to read Sumption’s lengthier take on both la pucelle and what followed.

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Podcast: Shiloh: April Glory by Tom Dalgliesh and Grant Dalgliesh

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In the final episode of season one of We Intend to Move on Your Works, Pierre and I finish our journey through Shiloh’s woods by discussing Shiloh: April Glory from Columbia Games. This is another classic Columbia Block game, similar to their game Shenandoah that we covered on episode two of the podcast. How did we like it compared to Shenandoah and the other Shiloh games we played? Listen on to find out!

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Tanto Monta: A Story of Disappointment

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Tanto Monta: A Story of Disappointment

I think it is safe to say that Tanto Monta: The Rise of Ferdinand and Isabella by designer Carlos Diaz Narvaez was my most anticipated game of the year. I adore Here I Stand, and Tanto Monta took that core system and applied it to the years right before Here I Stand begins, which includes the Italian Wars, a topic I am fascinated by. It also decreased the player count from six to four. Getting six people together who are all willing to spend a day playing through the Protestant Reformation is probably the single greatest barrier to playing Here I Stand, so this was really promising. The back of the box promised the same complexity as Here I Stand and a play time of 3-7 hours, which we should always take with a grain of salt but still it looked good for this being an excellent way to get a dose of more Here I Stand more often. It also came out at the perfect time – my copy arrived just in time for a gathering of myself and my fellow We Intend to Move on Your Works partners in crime. The four of us convened in Pierre’s house for me to teach them all Tanto Monta, expecting a day of epic gaming with great friends. To quote a somewhat infamous review of Virgin Queen: it was a fucking disaster.

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Learning Musket and Pike by Ben Hull

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Learning Musket and Pike by Ben Hull

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the Musket and Pike Dual Pack by designer Ben Hull as part of the BoardGameGeek wargame Secret Santa this past Christmas and I am very excited to have it. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for this era of warfare and the GMT multipacks are a great way to get a big helping of a system for not too much investment in money or space (the former obviously wasn’t really a concern since this was a gift, but the latter always is). On top of that, the Dual Pack is a stunning production. The maps all have this lovely linen finish, and the counters have new art in a woodcut style that I adore. Also, there are double size counters and I love double size counters. It’s just a very nice object to hold and manipulate, always something I look for in a game.

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2023 in Review - Top 7 Favorite Books

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2023 in Review - Top 7 Favorite Books

Every year I set myself a target number of books that I want to read before the year is over. For the past few years, that target has been 50 books and with only one exception I’ve managed to exceed it. However, while I managed to meet my target in 2022, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how I did it. Reading 50 books didn’t leave much room for the kind of doorstopper reads that I enjoy from time to time. So, with that in mind, I decided to lower my target for 2023 to 40 books - and at the same time to be less stringent on what constituted a book for the purposes of recording my reading. I managed to read exactly 40 books, just barely making my target, but I also read some hefty tomes so I’m pretty happy with the result. Just like for 2022, I’ve decided to pull out some of my favorite fiction and non-fiction I read last year and discuss them, in brief, below.

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Preview: Rebel Fury by Mark Herman

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I was lucky enough to be invited by Fred Serval to be his opponent for an early preview of the final version of Mark Herman’s latest American Civil War game: Rebel Fury. We played the Chickamauga scenario, which Mark recommends as the best starting point in terms of length and complexity. Rebel Fury expands on his game Gettysburg, originally published in C3i Magazine, but has a few neat changes. The combat system has been pretty substantially overhauled, with more factors to consider around unit positioning and support between units, but the change I liked most was how headquarters now have to postures they can assume, one which benefits them in battle but limits their command range and one that allows for a wider range of movement but cannot add a DRM in battle. This is a promising looking system and I’m keen to try more. You can see our full play through of the first two turns (just under half a full game) of Chickamauga here:

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Most Anticipated Games: 2024 Edition

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Most Anticipated Games: 2024 Edition

I have been hesitant in the past to write about my excitement for upcoming games, partly out of a fear of getting absorbed into the Cult of the New but more so because it can be very hard to know when a given game might come out. The publication pipeline is at best vague and there is always the risk of delays or unexpected interruptions to production. I find it easier to not get too excited about games until I can grab them with my spindly hands. Still, I am not immune to hype and this year I thought I’d indulge myself a little and write about the ten games I’m most looking forward to that should be coming out in 2024. As an addendum, to show that I’m not all about that new cardboard smell, I’ve also added a list of the five games I already own that I am the most excited to hopefully get to the table this year.

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Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz

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Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz

A common refrain I have found when reading recent books on the Lost Cause, and in particular ones with a personal relationship to the subject, is the choice to highlight two events from the past decade as marking a key turning point in our relationship with the memory of the American Civil War. These are the murder of nine churchgoers in South Carolina at the hands of an avowed white supremacist and the murder of Heather Heyer and injury of many other people during the violence around the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Sometimes the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police is also added into this mix as well.

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We Intend to Move on Your Works Ep. 7: Shiloh 1862 by Worthington

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It is once again April 1862 and Pierre and Stuart are lost in the woods near Shiloh Church. This time it is with the far less complex Shiloh 1862 from Worthington Publishing. How will they fair with naught but eight pages of rules to guide them? Will Stuart get extremely angry about the woods again? Was Albert Sidney Johnston's death a turning point in the war? Listen to find out as the deep dive into the Battle of Shiloh continues!

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

I’ve now been running this blog for two whole years, but somehow it feels a lot longer. I’ve been very pleased with how it has grown over the past year and I’m hoping to continue that growth going into 2024. I received several review copies of games this year which was really gratifying and allowed me to cover games that would otherwise have probably been beyond my budget - wargame blogging is not particularly lucrative. To mark the end of the year I want to reflect a bit on how I feel the last two years have gone and then, of course, provide my top ten games of the year. As per last year’s list, these will be games that I played for the first time in 2023 not necessarily games that were released in 2023 (although unlike last year this year’s list does is that were released during the year).

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We Intend to Move on Your Works Episode 6: Longstreet Attacks

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Apologies for the delay - we started playing Longstreet Attacks back in July to mark the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which is why this game breaks our chronology, but the game took longer than expected and then the editing took even longer than that. Thankfully this episode is a good one, so hopefully that makes up for the delay, and we aim to have the next one with you much sooner!

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

Before he passed away in 2014, my grandpa wrote down a few short pieces about some of his memories from the years 1941-51. These were written for a cousin of mine as a way to record and share some of his stories. For most of my life he had been relatively quiet about these topics, but as he passed through his 80s and into his 90s, he opened up a bit more about it. One thing that struck me, though, was how when remembering Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into WWII what stuck in his mind 60 years later was not FDR’s speech or the horror of an attack on America. It was what America did to its own people. The stories below reflect the specific circumstances of growing up in relatively diverse rural communities in central California, and how what happened there shaped his memory of December 1941.

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Le Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil, trans. Craig Taylor and Jane Taylor

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Le Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil, trans. Craig Taylor and Jane Taylor

Le Jouvencel is an interesting work and a great example of the complexities of medieval literature. It is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction written for, and with input by, one of the greatest commanders of the end of the Hundred Years War. Jean de Bueil, who is credited as the author although it seems he at a minimum had help writing it and may in fact have only provided feedback on the writing of others, wished for a text to teach a new generation the art of war and to encourage fellow members of the nobility to pursue a life of combat rather than one of courtly or purely political life.

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Grand Havoc by Jeff Grossman

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Grand Havoc by Jeff Grossman

Blind Swords is quickly climbing the ranks to be among my favorite hex and counter systems. The chaos of the chit draw, the unpredictability of the CRTs, the manageable footprint, and the elegant presentation from Revolution Games have all wormed their way into my heart. Longstreet Attacks showed me the potential of the system, but in a form that didn’t totally agree with me. The Day Was Ours showed me that it could do approach to battle and the chaos of First Bull Run. After playing that I was pretty sure that I would prefer Blind Swords as a single counter sheet experience – low counter density leaving me plenty of room to explore the map. It was with some trepidation that I punched the two counter sheets of Jeff Grossman’s Grand Havoc. Would this cement my love for Blind Swords, or would it be another Longstreet Attacks, an almost hit that doesn’t quite land? I’m delighted to report that it was the former – Grand Havoc delivers a larger scale Blind Swords experience and seems to resolve pretty much all my misgivings about Longstreet Attacks. This is a great game, and I’m excited to talk about why.

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Agincourt: The Triumph of Archery over Armor by Jim Dunnigan

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Agincourt: The Triumph of Archery over Armor by Jim Dunnigan

When I read the subtitle “The Triumph of Archery over Armor” I knew I had to play this game. That sentence is like red to my bullish need to overshare the history of archery with anyone and everyone. That it was also a classic game from Jim Dunnigan, published by SPI, and thus a piece of gaming history made it all the more interesting. Luckily, I was able to secure an in-shrink copy from avid collector and all-around good guy Nils Johansson. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this game, I had never played a Dunnigan or SPI game before, and I was pleased to find some very intriguing design ideas in this box.

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Race and Reunion by David Blight

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Race and Reunion by David Blight

Every so often I read a book that so overwhelms me with its breadth and depth of information that I wish I had already read it twice in the hope of clinging to just a little bit more of its knowledge. Race and Reunion is such a book. David Blight documents the aftermath of the American Civil War, when two previously warring factions had to come to terms with still being part of the same country and make sense of the bloody years that had just passed. Conflicting ideologies competed to interpret the events of the Civil War, sometimes with violent outcomes, and in the end they created a vile system of white supremacy and oppression alongside unfulfilled potential. How emancipation transitioned to Jim Crow isn’t the core focus of the book, it is far more expansive than that, but it would do as a pithy summary.

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The Worthington Civil War Brigade Battle Series

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The Worthington Civil War Brigade Battle Series

Worthington Publishing’s Civil War Brigade Battle Series by designer Grant Wylie is a rules light hex and counter system on, you guessed it, American Civil War battles at the brigade scale. It also should not be confused with The Civil War Brigade Series (CWBS) from The Gamers, which is also a brigade level hex and counter system but is far more complex and also much older, with its first published entry from 1988 as opposed to Worthington’s system which began in 2019. It’s a little confusing. Worthington’s system currently spans four games, three by Grant Wylie and published by Worthington and one game by Pascal Toupy and published in French wargame magazine Vae Victis. There are already plans for quite a few more entries as well. These are rules light games, the system rules are eight pages long with each game adding at most one page of extra game specific rules on top of that. They also generally play in two to four hours. These are fun games for fans of hex and counter Civil War gaming and are also a great entry point into hex and counter gaming for anyone who has always wanted to try them but has been hesitant to do so. They are probably not going to blow your mind, these aren’t radical designs the likes of which you’ve never seen before, but I’ve had a lot of fun playing them and if simple hex and counter is your cup of tea then I think you’ll enjoy them too. But you probably didn’t come here for the tl;dr, you came here for some nitty gritty detail, so lets get to it!

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A Tale of Two Crécy

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A Tale of Two Crécy

Crécy is a battle I am both fascinated by and terrified of. I have read so much about this battle, and yet I still feel like I have only the most tenuous grasp on what happened that day in Ponthieu. It is one of the most famous and best recorded medieval battles, but the abundance of sources has produced such a confusing mess of contradiction and myth that untangling it could be the work of a lifetime. Many historians have offered their opinions on what happened, but there is still significant disagreement on elements of the chronology, the array of both armies, and even the battle’s location. Still, for all the hair pulling that thinking about Crécy causes me, I can’t help but be fascinated by it and the attempt to understand what happened at what might be the Hundred Years War’s most important battle (potentially rivaled only by Poitiers a decade later, really). If the English lost Crécy it is likely that they would not have been able to afford to keep the war going, but their dramatic victory, while it yielded only moderate success in its immediate aftermath, did much to sustain the war and encouraged Edward III to continue pursuing his claim to the French throne. With that fascination in mind, I decided to play a couple of games on Crécy that I had sitting on my shelf. Below are my general thoughts on both. As a note, I’m going to try and keep this brief because my options are really to skip over this topic lightly or to lose myself to it for months, and as much fun as the latter could be I simply haven’t the time.