Gettysburg

[JudgeDredd]

Now I've played more of this...there are 2 niggling little things

1. Counter stacks
Whilst you can only have a single fighting unit in a hex, the strength counters and breastwork counters and dismounted counters and routed counters can make a pile...and because of that
2. Terrain spotting
It's difficult to notice terrain and I'm having to do alot of moving of these stacks (one at a time cos you can never pick them all up) to see the terrain

But...mechanically, the game is sound.

[JudgeDredd]

This just in. Apparently Lee has looked at the battlefield in dismay.

It's 19:00hrs on 1st July.

He's discovered one of his commanders had been banging heads with the Union in Gettysburg (that's me by the way) when they should be heading for the objectives.

He's not a happy bunny and I've been relieved of my command

[JudgeDredd]

I have now packed this away. I didn't make the full 3 days...only up to the end of the first day.

It is a superb game. Really excellent and very easy to play...with a minor gripe.

The reason I stopped is because I kept thinking I had screwed up - for both sides.

I wasn't using the Union forces properly. I think I should've been pulling back (mostly) at the beginning...keeping distance between my forces and the Confederates, relying on defensive fire (which happens before offensive fire) to inflict damage and removing the chance for the Confederates to inflict damage.

For the Confederates, I wasn't concentrating on the right areas of the battlefield. I followed the Union into the edges of Gettysburg giving them a good defensive bonus. I should've been moving wide and heading for the VPs.

And on both sides, I was not using artillery well AT ALL. I was spending most of my time moving them and they ended up in a position where I couldn't use them because their forces were next to the Union forces.

So I got stuck in a rut of "Should I keep trying"...and decided not to...my options were restart or get Point Blank:V For Victory to the table which I had spent the last month reading the manual for.

I decided on the latter...but the game is superb.

Regarding my gripe...it really is minor and I'm not sure anything could've been done differently.

Obviously there's a TON of combat which included many, many die rolls.

First, rolling for offensive artillery fire followed by more die rolls for morale checks.
Then rolling for defensive fire with more die rolls for morale checks.
Then die rolls for offensive fire with even more die rolls for more morale checks.

I'm not sure the die rolling is the problem here though.
I actually like the combat sequence and it makes sense. I think the problem is all the chit moving you have to do.

You have to move the markers (of which there can be several) to see what strength a unit is before attacking. Then you have to move the defensive units (and often some other units) to check the terrain and specifically the levels of terrain.

Moving all those counters for those 3 combat phases was pretty time consuming.

But....superb. Great game. Highly recommend if you like Gettysburg games.

[bbmike]

Thanks for the playthrough/review, JD! I may eventually pick this one up at some point.

[JudgeDredd]

np. Great game.

I think it would've been possible to fix the issue of "counter moving"...you know to check values etc.

For example, if they made the ccounters showing strength values and all the other admin counters smaller (even just slightly) than the main combat unit counters, you've be able to pick up the army counter (and any admin counters on top of it like out of command, rout, dismounted, column, breastworks) without having to move them one at a time (I use tweezers to stop my fat fingers moving all the other counters around them).

Better still, make the combat value counters bigger than the combat unit counters (as the combat value counter sits at the bottom of the stack) and all the admin counters smaller than the combat unit counters (because they sit on top of the combat unit counters) so that you can either pick the whole lot up or pick up the combat unit counter and all admin counters, leaving the combat value counter behind, or pick up all the admin counters, leaving the combat value and combat unit counters behind.

Just a wee bit of thought to assist in counter movement. That would make it far less fiddly.

There was also an issue with the counters. Breastwork counters were meant to have a Building Breastworks side as well as a Breastworks side...they didn't. Both sides of the counters said Breastworks. So I had to use cubes to identify which units were "actively" building breastworks to differentiate them from ones that had breastworks already built.