Stuart Ellis-Gorman's Blog

I have a messy relationship with GMT’s Counter Insurgency (COIN) series. I have enjoyed my plays of COIN games, but I also rarely want to immediately jump back in and play a given game again. This is fine for my day-to-day life, where if I play two of these games in a year that’s a lot, but it is a challenge if I’m hoping to write a review of one. COIN games are fiercely asymmetric, so to get a fully rounded experience you should at least sample the various flavors of its factions. However, I often find more enjoyment in seeing how each entry adjusts the system’s core features to create a new experience than I do in revisiting the ones I have played before (with a few exceptions).

That said, I am on the lookout for COIN games that I can revisit more often because I do enjoy the core system. People Power came to my attention because it promised to be a faster playing COIN game. The British Way had reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the series in 2024 in part by delivering a COIN game in about 60 minutes (and in part thanks to designer Stephen Rangazas’ excellent research). However, that is only a two-player game and I was interested in seeing a similar shorter play time but with the classic multiplayer asymmetric dynamic that helped COIN make a big splash when it first appeared. I was also optimistic that the shorter play time would make it easier for me to play People Power at a normal board game meet up – the pitch for “hey, want to try this weird game about politics and insurgency?” is much easier if it’s a two-hour game versus an eight hour one.

GMT Games very kindly provided me with a review copy of People Power.

People Power is a three-player game – yes there are bots to simulate other players, but for me COIN is either a full player count or solo only experience. COIN has traditionally been a four-player game, but with All Bridges Burning, Vijayanagara (technically ICS, but come on), and People Power we are seeing it expand into the three-player space. This was my first experience with this player count, and three players is always an interesting space in game design (particularly with regard to kingmaking). I found that while it was definitely a three player game that People Power mimics some dynamics I’m familiar with from other traditional COIN games. While my personal favorite COING games, like A Distant Plain or Pendragon, have a sort of 2v2 dysfunctional teams format, but where one player can win, People Power reminded me more of the all vs. government format of early games like Andean Abyss. That’s not to say that People Power’s three player dynamics bring nothing new, but rather that I think the three player experience slots into existing COIN dynamics pretty well.

The initial set up for the shorter scenario, where we only play two election rounds. I’m the government player and, fair warning, I’m a terrible COIN government player.

In People Power one player is the Marcos regime in The Philippines while the other two players represent the peaceful reform movement and the more violent, and broadly communist aligned, armed resistance to the dictatorship. At the start this is a 2v1 game, where both resistance players must bring the Marcos regime – which starts almost at their victory threshold – to heel. If the two resistance players squabble at the start, the game will probably be a short one. Once it seems like Marcos has been quashed, they can bicker over who should be on top in the new era, but that can then create an opening for the government to claw its way back into power.

People Power comes with two scenarios, one is played to two elections (the victory check rounds), the other to three. For my first game we played the two-election game, and it had a pretty clear pattern. In the first half, it’s Marcos vs. the other two players. Then in the second, it’s a total free for all to claim victory before the end comes. This is a fun dynamic, and because each phase is approximately ten cards – the election is shuffled into the bottom 4 cards of each set of ten events – the game moves along at a good clip.

People Power makes several changes to the core COIN system to make it work better as a three player game. While no doubt some of these changes first appeared in the other three player games, this is my first time encountering them, so I’m going to discuss them here as if they are brand new. Overall, I liked these changes but some of them did have me missing the more traditional form of COIN.

One of the biggest differences is the addition of a “Limited Action, Stay Eligible” action space. For those not familiar with COIN, in these games when you take an action it usually forces you to skip your next turn. So, in a four-player game, you have two players taking actions on any given turn, often in alternating turns. Because People Power is for three, it has the option for a third player to always take an action on the turn, but their action is limited – meaning it can only affect one space on the board. I have no real problem with this change specifically, I think letting people play the game more is generally good (especially with this game being targeted as a potential good entry point into the system, see more on that below). However, it has a knock-on effect that I have mixed feelings about.

I managed to clear out Manila but things are looking bad in the countryside. My control was slipping very badly. It would get worse before it got better.

In traditional COIN is that you see the event card from the deck for this turn and for the next turn at the same time. This lets you plan a bit around what is coming down the pipeline and can encourage some players to pass this turn because they want to act on the next one. I really like this dynamic in COIN, but it is missing from People Power. This isn’t surprising. Because there are so many ways to stay eligible, the ability to know the next card would mess with the dynamic of play. The British Way and A Gest of Robin Hood also limit your knowledge to the current card for similar reasons. However, in a three-player game I find I miss the advance knowledge more than in a two-player game.

COIN has at times suffered from a player being stuck with worse actions because the initiatives on the cards being drawn are consistently punishing them. When you can see into the future by one turn it makes it easier to know whether you should take this mediocre event or operation, or if you should pass and do something better next turn. However, without knowing the future, a player can get stuck in a cycle of Limited Operations because they are waiting for an initiative card for their faction. In the two-player games, initiative is something that is separate from the cards, so if you are taking the limited you know you’re getting initiative next turn rather than hoping for a good draw. It would probably have added a bit of complexity, but I think I would have preferred initiative to be more divorced from the deck in People Power, but maybe that would have imbalanced the game in irreparable ways.

People Power is capable of some wild swings in fortune. As the Marcos player, I was down and almost out going into the first election, but in the second phase I managed to claw my way back to forcing the game to a tiebreaker over only a dozen cards. For fans of COIN’s more deliberate pacing, where progress is incremental and develops over the course of several hours of careful play, this might be incredibly frustrating. However, as someone who has more admiration than enthusiasm for traditional COIN pacing, I found this very enjoyable.

I think this radical swingy-ness is necessary given People Power’s shorter playtime – you have to let people stage massive come backs in the span of only a few cards because there isn’t time for them to build back more slowly. It also helps People Power as a new-player experience, because players will make mistakes and if the game is too punishing they may be dispirited and not want to come back to the game or the series. As a big fan of chaos in general, and in games especially, I really liked how much things could swing in People Power. I’m also very forgiving of chaos in a shorter game like this than I would be in, say, an eight-hour all-day experience.  

The first election round. See how far I have fallen, and we only barely managed to stop the communists from winning. This painted a big target on the back of that player, which was good for me.

I really enjoy the asymmetric victory conditions, a staple of the COIN series, in People Power. The Marcos government cares about control of the population and how much money they can steal from the state via patronage. Meanwhile, the two insurgent factions care about establishing bases on the map and getting the population to support their respective factions. These feed into the actions well, as the two insurgents will fight over population alignment while the Marcos regime only really wants population support to either limit what the other players can do or so they can cash it in to increase patronage. Meanwhile, the Marcos player is obsessed with controlling areas, while neither resistance player really cares about that unless it’s to stop Marcos.

The victory conditions tie in with the available actions, as the government needs to control the target area to take most of its actions while an area with support for the government can limit what actions other players can take (similarly, the presence of terror markers can influence or enable actions). All of this swirls together to create an evocative experience – you can really feel the different priorities and tactics of these powers through the gameplay. It doesn’t have to tell you what they represent, it shows you via the game.

Now, I got People Power in part to introduce COIN to new players (and, also, to hopefully play it a little more), so how did it perform? This was the first time I played COIN with non-wargamers since my first game of Andean Abyss many years ago. I think this is illustrative comparison, so I will be focusing on the benefits of People Power versus Andean Abyss (or, arguably, Cuba Libre, which I haven’t played but I understand is very similar) as an introductory game.

As an opening note, People Power has a little introduction to each faction, their relationship to the other factions, and what they’re trying to achieve written on the back of the player boards. While I’m generally not a fan of the cardstock player boards in COIN – I prefer all the pieces and spaces be on the board – this extra detail makes me like the player mats in this game a little bit more.

The greatest strength of People Power is its shorter play time and the immediate chaos of the available actions. It’s much easier to get people to try a game that will only take a few hours, and even a short game of Andean Abyss is a lengthy undertaking. However, one downside of the shorter playtime I found was that some players ended up repeating a lot of the same actions over and over, and maybe not exploring their full array of possibilities in the shorter timeframe. This can make the game feel more limited and you miss out on some of the depth – it’s not that People Power doesn’t have it, but rather that I found it slightly more susceptible to a “insurgent player just recruits most of the game” situation.

People Power’s asymmetry is a huge part of the appeal of the game, but it does make the teach a little harder. In Andean Abyss there is one huge layer of asymmetry, the government versus the insurgents, but there is significant overlap in the actions available to insurgent players so when I taught that I took the role of the government player and then I could teach almost the same game to the other three players. So, in some ways People Power sits in an awkward spot where it is a good length for new players, but it adds more nuance to make it more interesting for series veterans which in turn makes it a little less good for new players. That said, I would still recommend People Power as a good entry point into COIN. I would not say it is superior to all other options, but it is another one in the existing canon of good COIN games for new players.

Very near the end, I am beginning to claw my way back, but ultimately I will not succeed and lose on the tiebreaker.

I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to comment on Donal Hegarty’s graphic design for this game. I love the aesthetics of People Power. The map is only okay, but in a series where I have very mixed feelings about the maps, I think it stands perfectly well against its siblings. However, the card design is beautiful. While I’ve enjoyed many a card in a GMT game, I find the traditional GMT layout (boxed picture on mostly beige card with text) to be bland. The cards in People Power are gorgeous, and it helps to elevate the overall graphical package into something that is a delight to play and much easier to put in front of people who are used to the more polished graphical presentations of modern hobby board games.

While I have lots of positive things to say about People Power, at the end of the day I’m also not sure that I want to play it many more times. During my game, I often found myself wishing I was playing Gandhi (which also has non-violent factions that feel similar) instead, which has similar government, non-violent, and violent opposition factions and felt thematically the most similar to People Power, but which offered a little bit more in its experience. And I don’t even own Gandhi anymore, I moved that on because for COIN I often find myself either wanting a new experience or to revisit one of my established favorites (which, for my sins, includes Pendragon).

So, while I like People Power and I can see it being someone’s favorite COIN – and I really, really like that it plays in a short enough time that you could actually fit multiple games in to a single day – I don’t think I enjoy it enough for it to be a staple in my game collection. It sits in that awkward space between “I would happily play this again” and “I am prepared to take it down from the shelf to try and convince other people to play it with me.” Because I live in a tiny apartment, I tend to be quite ruthless about what I keep, and I’m not sure People Power will make the cut. However, I recommend anyone interested in COIN try it, because it delivers a satisfying COIN experience in only a few hours, and that’s nothing to sniff at.

(Hey, if you like what I do here, maybe consider making a donation on Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon so I can keep doing it.)

I have an obsession with the designs of one Richard Berg. Often fiddly and weird, I can’t give them all an unqualified recommendation, but I have always found Berg’s work interesting even when I don’t enjoy it. Within Berg’s prolific catalogue of designs, I have struggled with his Great Battles the most. Great Battles of the American Civil War (GBACW) is a system with a storied history, going back to Terrible Swift Sword from SPI in 1976. It was substantially redesigned into an almost new system, but carrying the same name, with Three Days of Gettysburg from GMT Games in 1995.

I have never played the original SPI version of GBACW (but I very much want to). My experience with the GMT-era of GBACW has been…fraught. I really disliked Into the Woods, and while I had a better time exploring Dead of Winter, I still would not classify myself as a fan of that game. However, I am almost always willing to give something a second try, especially if it’s a series that originated with Berg. So, when I heard that By Swords and Bayonets was meant to be a much better entry point to GBACW (something that Into the Woods very much was not) I was interested in giving it a try. Even if I didn’t expect to like it, because I think I’m just not a GBACW guy, I wanted to be certain.

GMT Games kindly provided me with a review copy of By Swords and Bayonets.

Let’s start at the beginning: what is By Swords and Bayonets? It covers four battles from the American Civil War, all of them relatively small engagements. You’ll only have a few dozen units on the map at most, and the maps are all half-size (22”x17”), so it makes for a compact package. For a series that’s probably best known for its huge battles across multiple maps, this is a deviation. It’s not a totally new thing, Valley of Death included multiple small battles, but it is unusual, especially in its commitment to being a manageable size. We will discuss this more later.

The totality of what is involved in Big Bethel, you can see a few Union reinforcements at the top of the map. It’s a cute little package!

However, while it is much smaller in scale, it is in no way smaller in rules. This is the full weight of GBACW, and arguably even a little more, as the technically optional fatigue and ammo rules are mandatory in By Swords and Bayonets. This is not an attempt to make a simpler on-boarding game in the same vein as, say, OCS Luzon, which stripped out a lot of core systems from the Operational Combat Series (OCS) series rules to make a simpler (and smaller) experience. By Swords and Bayonets is throwing you into the deep end, but the pool is a lot smaller, so while the depth may swallow you up at least you probably won’t get lost.

Reviewing a game like By Swords and Bayonets is a tricky thing, because it is partly a review of GBACW as a whole, since at least 90% of the rules are just the series rules to GBACW, but I am also trying to review this specific game because I’m by no means qualified to speak to GBACW as a full series.

In this review we will be spending a lot of time talking about GBACW as a system first, and then we will dive into By Sword and Bayonets, the specific game in this series.

Great Battles and Great (i.e. big) Rules!

Complexity in games can mean a lot of things. One type is where the game is hard to comprehend – it does something unusual or in some other way it is hard to move from rulebook to game. I associate this sort of complexity most with the designs of Volko Ruhnke – series like COIN and Levy and Campaign make a lot of sense once you know how to play them, but it only looks that way once you are on top of the hill after the initial steep climb that the rulebook presents. While I often bounce off these kinds of complex games the first time I try them, I do usually like them. GBACW is not this kind of complexity.

GBACW is the kind of complexity where it has so many rules. It is incredibly dense, and it’s dense in basically every direction. While something like Dean Essig’s OCS dumps much of its complexity into one area (supply) and leaves other areas (combat) very simple, GBACW is complex everywhere. No individual rule in GBACW is necessarily that complex on its own, but it often has several narrow exceptions to those rules, and each rule is built upon layers of other rules. The whole thing is a lot to digest.

You can see the legacy of this system in its rules, as more and more material has been added. Players have clearly found areas where earlier rules caused problems, and the system has been patched extensively to clear up any ambiguities, which helps ensure the system runs smoothly but does mean that there are yet more rules to remember. There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, but in GBACW it reaches a rather extreme form.

In contrast to By Swords and Bayonets, this is what the smaller scenarios from Dead of Winter look like - it’s a lot more.

Whenever I am playing GBACW, I have this sense in the back of my mind that there is a rule that would apply here, but I can’t quite remember what it is. Forgetting rules is a part of wargaming, and you can’t let that stop you from playing the game, so that’s not new. However, I struggle to even know where my mistakes are because GBACW is so expansive. I can’t just flip open the rulebook to the relevant page, because I’m not sure where in the 40+ pages of rules is the piece I’m overlooking – and I think that’s because the complexity is everywhere. For each unit activation I have to wonder if I’m missing something in the movement rules, the fire combat rules, the shock combat (if I’m doing one), or maybe I forgot a rule relating to chain of command or number of activations each unit can make. The only way to know would be to re-read the whole rulebook, again.

Some things could be improved to make this more manageable, especially in the play aids. The play aids are serviceable, they have the core information you need on them, but the layout is very bland and it could use more information. For example, there is no sequence of play on the player aid, and that’s pretty important! There are lot of steps involved in building the chit cup at the start of the turn, and things that can be overlooked in that process. Shock combat is a multi-stage process, and it’s easy to overlook one of those steps. The rulebook does try and point out rules you might forget, but as you’re absorbing pages and pages of rules it’s hard to remember the reminders and so having them on play aids would be a big help.

While I’m generally not a big fan of how Great Battles of History (GBoH) has two play aids per player, I think having a second play aid with more reminder-based information (sequence of play, detailed breakdowns of steps for shock combat, etc.) would really help new players with GBACW’s complexity. Seasoned veterans could safely ignore it, but people like me who can’t remember exactly how withdrawal before shock works would be reminded that it exists.

Getting rules wrong is part of wargaming, so it’s important to not panic when you get rules overload. These games are complex but they are often quite robust, meaning that getting one rule wrong rarely breaks the experience. You just fix things as you go and embrace the experience rather than getting it entirely right every step of the way. Even seasoned wargamers keep the rulebooks close by to look things up. However, writing reviews of games is a weird thing – I’ve played a lot of games and I feel like I’m pretty confident when it comes to knowing how to play a game. However, I’m also naturally concerned about playing a game wrong and then showing off my error to the wider community, which can make the experience of not knowing a rule frustrating – especially in a game that I find frustratingly complicated. That’s a me problem, but this is my review, so you’re going to hear about my problems.

The Good Battles of the american civil war

Now, amidst all this complexity there are things that I really like about GBACW. While I may think that overall, this system is too complex, and would maybe be improved by being more focused on a specific aspect of ACW combat, here are my favorite systems where I think the complexity works. They are: the chain of command, fatigue, efficiency and the chip pull system, and the orders.

Chain of command, efficiency, and orders are all very closely intertwined. In a game of GBACW you have your various officers represented as counters on the map and you need to make sure that your officers are within the command range of their direct superior. This will enable them to more easily change their orders at the start of a turn and to activate the maximum number of times they are allowed – out of command units will generally have one fewer activation in a turn, which can be a big deal, and some in command units may get extra activations if their superior officer is good enough.

GBACW is a chit pull system where you draw a chit from a cup and it tells you what division will be activating. You do this until the cup is empty, and then start a new turn. A pretty common system. In GBACW there is a little extra spice in that at the start of each turn you draw an efficiency chit from a pool determined by the scenario, and it tells you how many chits for each division you put into the cup. This adds a layer of randomness to the number of activations in a given turn, and I love randomness in my chit pull games. Properly you are supposed to hide your efficiency draw from the other player, so you don’t know how many activations each enemy brigade has, but I’ve never felt confident enough in GBACW to do this. For more advanced players I can see that being interesting, but for me I’m too much of a struggling little child to also do that.

When a division activates, each brigade in that division operates under one of four orders: attack, advance, march, or reserve (this last one isn’t technically one of the orders, but I feel like it kind of counts as one). Each has benefits and restrictions, and in an ideal world you would jump between these as you want (and some systems, like Blind Swords, basically let you), but in GBACW if you want to change orders during a turn you have to roll and your leaders may not do what you want. This helps to reinforce the idea in GBACW that you are the overall officer trying to give orders, and you have to work with the officers in the field that you have. You set the orders for the turn at the start, because that’s when your messengers are dispatched, and later changes rely on individual officer initiative. It’s thematic and interesting, and generally not too overwhelming to track.

The markers can get pretty involved - here we can see Attack Orders markers (Advance is considered default, and requires no marker), units have strength markers under them and one unit is Collapsed. On the right is the activation chit for the Union. Please ignore how I think I screwed up stacking in this scenario, I was struggling.

Fatigue is an optional system, except in By Swords and Bayonets, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in GBACW. If your units activate too many times in one turn, or engage in basically any sustained level of shock combat, they will gain fatigue and as they gain fatigue they will become worse. One problem I have with many ACW games is that the soldiers are kind of like robots – able to attack forever without ever facing the exhaustion of actual combat. Combat wasn’t an all day affair in the Civil War, you often only got one or two big attacks out of your units. GBACW’s fatigue system works to fix this common problem and while it’s maybe a little more fiddly than I would like, I think it adds a lot to the tempo of the system.

Great (?) Combat of the Civil War

If GBACW really locked in on these systems and was primarily a game about command and control, managing your orders and pushing your units without overly exhausting them, I would like it a lot more. However, there is just so much more in GBACW. In particular, the combat completely overwhelms me in a way that I do not enjoy. GBACW has 15 pages of combat rules, it has another wargame’s worth of rules just in combat. That’s a lot.

The shooting combat isn’t too bad, it’s pretty standard wargame stuff. Most of the complexity comes from the fact that there are so many different kinds of guns, each of which has its own dice roll modifiers (DRM) at different ranges, and then there is another long list of further DRMs, with maybe even more scenario specific ones. This isn’t mentally challenging, but it can be slow to resolve as I have to calculate all the different DRMs, and I don’t find that very interesting. Berg is notorious for his numerous DRMs, so I can’t really complain as a Berg fan, but I will anyway - this is too many. I like DRMs, but I have a limit. There is also some extra complexity when large units are involved and in relation to stacking units and trying to fire at multiple units from a single hex, which gives me a bit of a headache, but if you’re prepared to play kind of badly (and I am), you can kind of avoid these rules by just shooting from one unit to another.

Shock combat, however, has many steps and phases and there are some very important elements that are easy to overlook because of that complexity. I think shock combat has interesting elements, especially when you add in things like fatigue to the system. In particular, I really like how engaging in shock combat disorders all the involved units regardless of outcome, that creates great tempo challenges as a player. Add to that the fatigue penalty for a brigade that engages in shock combat more than once a turn and you get the idea that you should be doing this sparingly, even as it is a crucial tool in your toolbox. However, I find shock combat so involved that I kind of just don’t want to do it.

This is very much a matter of taste. The thing I love the most about hex and counter gaming is movement, the careful positioning and movement of pieces. What I don’t like is resolving long, multi-stage combats. This was my problem with Great Battles of History, and it’s just as true of Great Battles of the American Civil War. When I am playing GBACW I enjoy the part where the lines move towards each other, but then the scenario reaches a point where I’m just going to be resolving attacks for most of the rest of the game and I deflate like a large comical balloon. I can see through its many systems that there are decisions to be made, and some of them are probably interesting, but the ratio of decisions to resolution is out of whack for my personal taste.

Also, GBACW has like a page and a half of rules for cavalry charges, and I don’t see the need for that much in terms of rules. Please, we don’t need this.

The goal of broad-level simulation is clearly on display in GBACW, and for some people that will be enjoyable. If you like working your way through a game as a process, and if playing a game with the rulebook open on your lap sounds like a great time, then there is a lot to offer here. This system is a lot, and it also clearly has a lot of depth if you are prepared to dig through it, but for me… it is too much. I have enjoyed heavy hex and counter systems, but this kind of heavy simulation-ist in all directions stuff just does not work for me. It’s too broad, there’s too much, and for me the specifics of the argument or idea it is trying to discuss gets lost in the too much-ness of it all.

Now, on to By Swords and Bayonets.

By Swords and Bayonets is a smaller scale offering than most entries in the GBACW series. To adjust a system originally built to model Gettysburg to something on the scale of a Big Bethel requires some changes to the system – although thankfully By Swords and Bayonets keeps the changes to core rules relatively light. However, some of the battles include 4+ pages of specific rules, which is a little imposing, but I’m generally more forgiving of battle specific rules. While I think they could be simpler (why are the rules for when the rain stops in Mill Springs so long?), I was never baffled by any of them, so the extra chrome was generally welcome.

I love scenarios where the two armies start some distance apart and have to move closer, especially with a bit of harrying (in this scenario provided by skirmishers). This kind of set up is like catnip for me.

Very few rules were removed from the core of GBACW, which we’ll get to later, but one thing that was simplified was the chain of command. No corps commanders are present for these tiny battles, to say nothing of overall commanders. This means the chain of command is necessarily a lot simpler and plays a far less important role in these battles. In general, I support removing this layer to make the game’s simpler and better represent how these battles were managed by their respective armies. However, I like the chain of command system, and it being partially absent in this entry, while logical, makes it a little less fun for me.

With that said, I quite like the scenarios in By Swords and Bayonets. Big Bethel is maybe a little too simple to be particularly exciting, but as a first scenario this is forgivable. It’s got enough bits to make you practice some of GBACW’s core rules (and the walkthrough in the examples booklet helps a lot with this), and there is enough potential options in the scenario to make it worth replaying for the more competitive players (which I am not a part of, but y’know).

However, the later scenarios inject some more interesting options (at the cost of greater complexity) and create some interesting situations. I quite like the rain conditions in Mill Springs. They make it so fatigue never decreases, which makes the fatigue system very important and introduces a different puzzle into an already interesting map to create a very different experience from Big Bethel. The battles feel like more than just the same game on a different map, which is what I look for in games with multiple battles and I think is a hallmark of good design in the Berg-ian tradition.

The Union got lucky with its rolls to wake up and notice the approaching Confederates, but the rain still made their response very slow.

I was also impressed with the research on display in By Swords and Bayonets. One gripe I have with many ACW games is that they don’t include bibliographies or other reference materials showing the designer’s research. That is not the case here – each battle has its own list of sources and there is a lengthy set of design notes at the end of the battle book. I love to see it.

These are pretty obscure battles, ones that most players probably won’t know very much about, so including material for further reading in addition to the brief summary of the battle is a really nice touch. While on the one hand I think this kind of material should be a minimum for the hobby, currently it isn’t and so I want to praise it when it is here, so By Swords and Bayonets receives kudos from me.

There is a clear eye to scenario balance in the victory conditions for the battles. It reminded me most of the scenarios from Great Campaigns of the American Civil War, which I had kind of a mixed feeling about. I appreciate that for those who want a competitive experience, this is great, but for me, as someone who does not care very much about winning historical wargames, these just feel like more faff than I care about. Thankfully they are easily ignored by people like me, and they are there for people who want them. So I can’t really complain.

The graphical design, especially for the maps, is excellent. Charlie Kibler really knocked it out of the park with these maps – they are gorgeous and (especially for Mill Springs) they include some useful guides for play as well. The field of maps for ACW games is very competitive, there are some phenomenal maps, but for me Charlie Kibler is the best currently doing it, and By Swords and Bayonets is another excellent entry in his catalogue of work.

This is where it began to lose me - the lines have met and what remains is a lot of combat. Carefully planned combat, sure, but I feel more like a computer doing that than a player.

Beginner Battles of the American civil war

Now, let’s consider how well By Swords and Bayonets works as an introduction to GBACW. To put it simply, I think it does an okay job.

It doesn’t simplify GBACW at all, so you are learning the full rules to play it. That means it demands a lot of you before you can start pushing counters on that hex map. Still, it is a much smaller scale and offers a robust gaming experience for fans of this kind of system, especially for people (like me) who may not want to play one tiny section of a bigger battle. I would still very much prefer a game that streamlined some of GBACW’s elements (all battles without cavalry, so you can ignore all the cavalry rules, for example) than one that tosses you in deep.

That said, this is probably still the best place to learn GBACW, especially among the currently available options. It’s much easier to learn than Into the Woods, which has so much extra material in the battle book you might drown, and its much cheaper (and more in print) than Valley of Death.

If you were on the fence about GBACW and its staggering complexity, I don’t think that By Swords and Bayonets will be enough to change your mind. Spoilers for the conclusion of this review, but it didn’t really change mine. However, if you have always wanted to play GBACW and you like these kind of heavy as hell tactical systems, then this is absolutely a great place to start. You can play these battles in an evening, and that’s nothing to shake a stick at. For fans of the system, I think this is probably a great package, and for fans of this kind of thing the same is likely true. However, for skeptics or people who have struggled with earlier volumes in the series, this is still GBACW in all its hefty glory (and rules).

Great conclusions of the american civil war

I liked By Swords and Bayonets best of any of the GBACW games I have played, but at the end of the day I couldn’t say that I actually liked it. Every turn I took, I did things that I liked, but I also felt like I would be liking it more if it was a simpler and/or more streamlined system. Especially when the lines met and I had to spend activation after activation resolving combats, I yearned for a simpler system.

I am also not convinced that the greater complexity creates a more valuable or historically rigorous simulation for these games. I think they are for people who like processes and enjoy that nitty gritty detail. GBACW is certainly a system that would appeal to rivet counters, but I wouldn’t be so harsh as to say that it is only for rivet counters. I fully believe that many players see a detailed and evocative narrative in the systems and their many layers and exceptions, but for me I just see the rulebook and me scratching my head as I try to figure out whether I’m missing something or not.

GBACW is for someone, that much is clear. That person may be you. It isn’t me. I just don’t want this many systems in my games – when my games are complex, I want that complexity to be more focused and following a narrower thread. Where there is complexity in a system, I want it to be counterbalanced by simpler systems in other places. GBACW is complexity everywhere, including in places I do not want it to be, and that’s not for me. By Swords and Bayonets puts GBACW into a smaller, faster playing package but it simplifies nothing, so it remains just too much for me.

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Like many people I imagine, I first heard about Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno from a livestream on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel, where several prominent designers of card driven games (CDGs) highlighted it as one of their favorite games in the genre. However, many years, and a second appearance of the game on Homo Ludens, would pass before I played Verdun for myself. I long held off on buying it, for lack of anyone to play CDGs with (I, for one, don’t love soloing CDGs), but I was given a copy in a Secret Santa for Christmas 2024 and set myself a goal of playing it. I initially struggled and it sat neglected on my shelf, but I was finally saved by the addition of Verdun to the excellent website Rally the Troops.

I no longer had an excuse, so I set about learning and playing as many games of Verdun as I could over the winter break in 2025 (and in early 2026). Even with around half a dozen games under my belt now, I still feel like a novice. While not a complex game, there is clearly a lot of depth to Verdun, and I can feel my own lackluster skills every game I play.

On the whole, I am incredibly impressed with Verdun. It is an incredible piece of design and a beautiful game with some lovely touches in terms of how it represents the conflict. However, I’m not sure I love it. I believe it is capable of being among many people’s favorite CDGs, but I’m still trying to figure out if it could ever be one of mine.

it’s about the cards

Verdun is a relatively simple CDG – a genre of historical game where players have hands of cards that represent both historical events and generic operation points that can be spent to take actions. On your turn you must choose between playing a card for its event, possibly removing it from the game, or for the operation values printed on the card. In Verdun, the operations focus on moving your units on the map, refreshing exhausted troops, and building trenches. It is for performing the logistical work that underpins your campaign, while the events can give you bonuses or one-off powers. However, most of the decks are made up of barrage cards.

The barrage cards are really the heart of the game. You can only make attacks when you play a barrage card – or you could play two barrage cards together, to either increase the potency of your attack or to attack two places at once, but at the risk of not having cards to play later in the turn. You total up the value of your barrages, subtract any value played as counter barrage by your opponent, and you roll that many d6s. Every 4+ is a hit and you can re-roll any 6s to look for more hits, but every three 6s causes a hit to one of your own units due to friendly fire. Hits are reduced by enemy trenches and fortresses, and then are used to exhaust and ultimately maybe eliminate enemy units before you resolve your infantry assault. Infantry combat is entirely deterministic, with no die rolls or randomness at all.

Barrages come in different values, and the higher value the barrage the more action points it could be used for if you choose to not shoot those guns. Here we can also see the turns that these cards are available to the German player, with the highest value ones disappearing from the deck later on.

There is a lot of randomness in the barrage dice, but you will be rolling so many over the course of the game that you shouldn’t suffer from unfortunate strings of bad luck. You can also always predict how infantry combat will be resolved, so that gives you some reliability to consider when planning your attack. However, you shouldn’t put all your hopes in one attack and bad luck will happen, your plans need to be robust enough to absorb those bad turns of fortune.

The dice rolls can also be modified by your Air Superiority value. If your planes rule the sky, you can ignore hits to your own units on rolls of too many sixes and possibly re-roll a particularly bad barrage roll. With enough superiority you can hamper your opponent’s barrages as well. The cost is that to gain Air Superiority you have to play event cards that do nothing else but move the air superiority pawn one point closer to your side. That’s spending a whole action (and a valuable card) doing nothing else, but Air Superiority is so good you will want to do it whenever you can.

know when to hold ‘em

At the start of each turn, you search for a card in your deck to add to your hand before blind drawing the rest of your cards. So, if you need Air Superiority maybe you use this opportunity to dig out one of those cards to ensure you can shift air power in your direction. I was initially worried this searching mechanic was going to be clunky – lots of CDGs have huge decks of cards and asking players to identify what cards are the best ones right out of the gate (or at least, from the second turn, first turn hands are set in Verdun) is a big decision you must make with little information.

However, Verdun constantly changes the two sides’ decks to reflect the shifting campaign – with the Germans starting strong but losing momentum while the French deck grows in strength in the late game. One knock on effect is that the decks are rarely that big on any given turn, and a huge number of those cards are barrage cards, so the pool of events you are picking from is much more manageable than I had feared. It is not a rule that I think would work for every CDG, but in the wider structure of Verdun it adds a great bit of player agency to the randomness of the card draw.

Verdun sometime asks you to sacrifice tempo for events with longer term impact. I already mentioned Air Superiority, but there are other events that are played with minimal effect at the time but unlock key conditions for later. The French player has several events that need to be played, sometimes with negative effects, that then springboard and enable the play of powerful events later in the game that require those earlier cards be in play. I’m not entirely convinced by this system – I appreciate its effect in the big picture, but it feels a bit clunky. This idea of sequencing events is not new to Verdun, it exists in other CDGs, but in a game that feels very tight these just feel a little awkward here.

A full display of key French event cards, you can see the cards they combo with written on the cards and by late game they can enable some amazing French attacks.

I think it also stretches the abstraction of the CDGs. Many of these cards are personalities, but I’m not sure what that means in this context. For example, one of them is Field Marshal Haig, who was not at Verdun. He is connected to the Somme Offensive cards, because Haig ordered the Somme Offensive in part to remove pressure from Verdun, but I don’t know what playing him in the game represents. It’s one of several ways that events outside of Verdun, but which nevertheless impacted on the battle, are abstracted onto cards. I appreciate the wider narrative they add, but I’m not convinced by the abstraction.

Some of these events work really well – I think the one-two punch of submarine warfare and US intervention cards, where playing the former gives a bonus to the latter, works great – but others, mostly the ones where you roll a die to see if you get or lose VPs, don’t feel as tightly refined as the rest of the game. They are particularly subject to luck, because you won’t be playing them enough for the luck to necessarily even out over the course of a game, and they just aren’t all that interesting. Roll a d6, gain or lose VPs, just isn’t that interesting.

Don’t get isolated

Verdun has a punishing supply system, where units that are cut off from friendly lines can’t attack, so they can’t fight their way out, and will be eliminated in only a few short card plays. Because actual assaults are so unpredictable, it is far better to cut off exposed units than to kill them directly. This also makes it very hard for the attacking player (first the Germans then the French) to exploit a break in just one point in the enemy lines. You need to breach your enemy’s position in multiple points to guarantee success, because if you push down one narrow line you expose yourself to being cut off and losing all those units.

Verdun is a game of tempo first and foremost. The German player is on the offensive at the start and has to seize as much territory as possible. They start the game with more powerful barrage cards and with more troops on the map. They also get to decide where the attacks will happen and can keep the French player on their toes, trying to guess where the next assault will come. However, as the game progresses the German player will lose their best barrage cards from their deck and instead gain weaker No Event cards, often with evocative art and descriptions around things like resources being busy to bury the dead, while the French artillery will finally arrive and enable a major French counterattack.

This was my lone German victory, where I had pushed the French pretty far and stalled their counterattack. I love how messy the lines become over the course of a game.

Many wargames have used this structure many times. What makes Verdun stand out is how it uses reinforcements. Players can spend action points to bring on more units, but to do so they must also pay one victory point per unit that they bring up. They can bring almost infinite troops – limited only if all the wooden pieces are on the board already – as long as they are prepared to pay the cost. This gives players a lot of agency and makes the decision of how to push against and react to attacks far more interesting than in many other wargames. You can always throw more soldiers into the breach, but is it worth spending those victory points to bring in units so you can take this one hill? Is this fortress worth 3 VPs to you? It makes a decision out of something that many games treat as automatic – tradition is to have the arrival reinforcements exactly mirror what happened historically. Instead of doing that, Verdun sets out to evoke the decision space of the commanders, asking you if you can afford to pay the cost of defending or taking Verdun.

Reinforcements also directly feed into the game’s morale system. If your morale drops too low, due to suffering horrible casualties, you will lose the ability to make attacks or even play barrage cards. Bringing new soldiers onto the map will rebuild morale – these guys haven’t seen the horrors of war yet – but every time you do you are spending victory points, which feels awful. But if you can spend victory points to make the other guy spend victory points to bring even more troops on to deal with your troops, well then, they’re basically free!

Endgame is hard

While I’m no great Verdun player, I have found it to be much, much harder as the German player. You need to really obliterate the French in those opening turns to have a chance at winning once the French counterattack comes. Even if it feels like you are doing well around the mid-game, things can collapse very quickly. That said, you never feel all that comfortable as the French player, as the weight of that German offensive leaves you scrambling to patch up your lines. It made me feel stressed playing both sides, which is impressive.

While I admire how Verdun manages to make it feel like things are going badly as both players I’m not sure it always lands as a satisfying endgame. As the German player, it can become pretty apparent that you didn’t do enough to win several turns before the game ends, and turns in Verdun, while not eternal, aren’t exactly short. I can’t help but wonder if the game would be better with a mid-game victory check, to bring an early end if the game is all but decided by then. Of course this would deny the French player the experience of launching their own offensive, which might be underwhelming for them. This is certainly more of a personal taste thing, but it’s my review so you get my taste!

they all have lovely arts

This is an incredibly pretty game, which is obvious to anyone who has seen it. The card art was all done by the French comic artist Tardi, who has done several works on WWI before, and it really helps Verdun stand out. The cards also have excellent graphic design for usability, so it’s both functional and beautiful.

Look at these cards! Just look at them!

Instead of specific counters or pieces to represent specific historical units, Verdun uses generic wooden blocks to represent all units. While it removes some of the historical flavor you usually get in wargames, I think it is an inspired choice. It makes the game look distinct and gives it a lovely tactility (I love blocks in games), but it also allows it to tell a its story better.

As we can see in the reinforcements system, Verdun splits itself from a narrow representation of the history and instead shows the faceless violence of the battle. It lets you think about the battle in a bigger picture and zooms you out to the perspective of a higher-level commander who doesn’t know the individual soldiers, rather than locking you into a retelling of historical facts. The generic blocks are faceless units you are sending to their death and the game really puts you in the shoes of someone who is responsible for these people’s lives but doesn’t know who they are.

I also think the board is both really pretty and very usable. It’s a great presentation overall.

To Conclude

I have had a complex relationship with CDGs over the years. My first historical game was the original CDG, We the People, but I have also really bounced off some of the genre’s entry – most recently Tanto Monta but also more venerable games like Wilderness War. Verdun hits CDGs at exactly the level of complexity that I love and makes excellent use of this genre’s titular mechanism. This is an amazing entry in the CDG genre.

All that having been said, I don’t know that I love Verdun, and I think a lot of it comes down to the game’s tempo. The game is just a little too long for me for that back-and-forth to land for me. The fact that it’s so hard to be the Germans means that the second half of the game often fails to deliver a satisfying experience. The game can be taught to anyone, but it takes several games to really open up and you have to be prepared to dig into the game’s trenches to get the best experience. Even with quite a few games logged, I feel like I’m still not there yet.

Maybe I have to confess to being a bit of a loser dabbler rather than a hardcore devotee, but I think Verdun asks of me more than I can give it. While I admire it, and I will probably play it again, I don’t know if Verdun will ever make my list of favorite CDGs. Still, if you are a fan of the genre, you absolutely should play Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno. Maybe it will be your new favorite game, and even if it’s not, at least you will have experienced a fascinating game, and what more can anyone ask from this hobby?

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I’m not sure exactly when I first became obsessed with Film Noir. It may have been when I took an Introduction to Film Studies course in second year of university, but I had seen several noir classics even before then. My family watched quite a lot of black and white movies when I was growing up. These were more often traditional westerns rather than noirs, a product of several months spent in Arizona where we checked out basically every western the local university library had, but by age 18 I had seen at least Key Largo and The Big Sleep and probably a few others.

Despite being a big fan of noir as a genre, I had only seen the genre’s most famous members. I had tried to dive deeper over the years, but it was surprisingly hard to find noirs to watch – they are not readily available on most streaming platforms and DVD collections usually just have the same famous ones every time. Two factors came together last year to change that: the first was the discovery that there are a lot of old noir films on the Internet Archive and the second was my partner becoming very interested in noir as well. Together, we watched 117 noirs between September and the end of 2025, and we’re not planning on stopping in 2026. The end of the year makes a great time to reflect on noir and how my relationship with it has changed as I’ve watched way, way more films, so I decided to write a little something about it.

Film Noir: A Primer

The whole genre of Film Noir is a post-facto identity created by film critics (mostly French ones) looking back at American cinema from the 1940s and 1950s. It’s basically a genre born in books and written film criticism. That means that a lot has been written about what makes a film a noir, and what doesn’t. I have not read these books, for I have only dabbled in the scholarship of Film Noir. So, what I’m going to give below is my general notion of what makes a film a noir. These are open to debate and conversation; this is not an academic definition but rather the version of how I would explain this genre to a friend over a pint.

As I mentioned above, Film Noir was a genre that was identified after the fact. People making these movies did not consciously think they were working within a shared genre – they probably had some awareness of how their film was similar to others that would become the noir canon, but nobody was sitting down and deciding to make a noir. The exact parameters of noir have been debated, but I accept the general definition that they began in 1940 and ended in 1959 – with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil often being credited as the last noir (debatable, but a satisfying end point).

Exactly what makes a film a noir as opposed to, say, a melodrama or simply a crime film is open to discussion (because of course it is). For me, noir has several key elements, which are:

They are a gritty depiction of life. These films are often, but not always, incredibly bleak visions of the world, and even the most optimistic are only finding joy in a grim world of crime, pain, and inequality. We often follow protagonists who are either investigating this grim world (detectives, insurance men, cops, newspaper reporters) or who are trying to survive in it (boxers, criminals, people who are down on their luck), which helps to emphasize the darker aspects of society.

As an addendum to the above, my partner feels that in a noir we should always be made to doubt the system. She rejects from the genre any movie that at its core says “trust the system and its agents, they will save us and make the world right”.

They look like noirs. Noirs have a clear influence from silent-era German Expressionist films – many of those German filmmakers, like Fritz Lang, went on to make noirs after they fled Nazi Germany – and they use light and shadow in stark contrasts to create a world of unreality. For this reason, I think noir works best as a black and white genre, and while I’m not so extreme as to exclude all color films from the genre, I remain skeptical of them.

There’s always a little nihilism. The film’s overall perspective doesn’t have to be nihilist, but you can see that exhaustion with the world and sense that nothing an individual does can ultimately fix it run throughout noir. When the protagonists are victorious, the victories are small and/or temporary. We’re not superheroes saving the world here.

The Femme Fatal – an evil woman who tempts the protagonist (usually in a sexy way) into committing crimes and otherwise making terrible decisions, often before betraying him. Not every noir must have a femme fatal, but they are one of the main tropes of the genre and something that you usually don’t see outside of it. While sometimes described as sexist, in many ways the femme fatal is a better expression of female independence and desire (one that often excludes the desires of men or fulfilling a traditional feminized role) than we see in many movies to this day.

An important element in classic Film Noir is the role of the Hays Code. The Hays Code was the semi-informal censorship that governed Hollywood films during the Golden Age (1929-1960). It was not a legal requirement, but it was enforced within the Hollywood system by Hollywood studios. It set many strict rules for decency in movies, but the most important ones for noir were that the villains could not win – evil must be punished. How this was applied could vary, though. Individual villains are always defeated, but greater social evils could endure. This one criminal will be punished for their crimes, but the syndicate can survive.

The thing that is fascinating about the Hays Code is that filmmakers were determined to work around it, so there are a lot of interesting subtexts in these movies that censors missed. My partner is frequently pointing out that often the queer representation is better in some of these movies than in modern Hollywood, it feels more authentic even if it can never be explicit. I’m by no means pro-censorship, and the Hays Code had many vile requirements (such as no interracial romance, ever), but it is interesting how the explicit censorship of the past created so many interesting moments and characters that seem to be absent from the hyper-capitalist incentives of modern Hollywood.

The Best Noirs (so far)

So, I watched 117 Noirs last year, and maybe you’re wondering: what were the best ones? Worry not! I am here to provide a breakdown of my favorites from last year. Most of the movies I watched were good and I even enjoyed most of the bad ones, but I can’t just post a list of 117 movies. A decision must be made somewhere to reduce this list to being almost manageable. If you want to see my full list, my partner and I made a spreadsheet with all the movies we watched, whether it was good, whether it was weird, and a short description to remind us of what movie it was amidst the sea of others. You can read it here. The list below is a more curated selection of my favorites – not necessarily the “best”, but the ones I enjoyed most.

The Classics

I had seen these movies before, but my partner had not, so we watched them together last year. Because they weren’t new to me, and because if you’ve clicked on an article about Film Noir you’ve probably seen them too, I decided to group them together.

Double Indemnity (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), and Sunset Boulevard (1950) are among the best noirs, and maybe among the best movies, ever made. These have been written about ad nauseum, and I don’t have much to add. They are masterpieces, if you haven’t seen them, you should. I don’t want to focus on them here, though. Instead, I want to dive a little deeper and focus on movies you may not have heard of.

The Lady from Shanghai, dir. Orson Welles (1947)

This was the first of Orson Welles’ noirs that we watched, and it remains my favorite. It’s weird, and Orson Welles’ is Irish in it for some reason (the accent is a little ehhh but everything he says is perfect), but Orson could shoot the hell out of a picture. It just comes together so well while also being completely insane. I think all of his noirs (Journey into Fear and Touch of Evil especially) are worth your time, but for my money this is his best one. Forget finding the lost ending to The Magnificent Ambersons, give me the full cut of the funhouse ending from The Lady from Shanghai.

If you know one thing about The Lady from Shanghai it’s that it invented the shoot out in a hall of mirrors trope, and man it delivers on that. I wish the weird funhouse climax was longer, to be honest.

The Killers, dir. Robert Siodmark (1946)

The opening of this movie adapts an Ernest Hemingway short story, but from there the movie explores beyond the limits of its inspiration to find an answer to questions Hemingway left hanging. The picture resembles Citizen Kane in ways, with an insurance investigator interviewing people who knew a recently dead man, and I think it lives up to that comparison. It has some great performances, especially by the titular killers, and a wonderfully convoluted noir plot. This is a great movie.

Pick Up on South Street, dir. Samuel Fuller (1953)

Richard Widmark (a noir favorite) plays a pickpocket who steals a wallet that unbeknownst to him contains microfilm of important secrets that someone is planning to sell to the Soviets. This film combines a police procedural of trying to track down the thief with Cold War era espionage. It has some great criminals, including a top tier stool pigeon, and is a great marriage of noir, crime, and espionage.

This Gun for Hire, dir. Frank Tuttle (1942)

Professional hitman Raven, played by Alan Ladd, kills a guy and recovers some documents from him but is then betrayed by his employer and decides to get his revenge. Meanwhile, Veronica Lake plays a singing magician who gets wrapped up in his mission by accidentally sitting next to Raven on a train and then helps him elude her police officer partner, who is played by Preston Brooks who would become famous as Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man. The climax is pretty wild, including a faked chemical attack on a factory with everyone in gas masks, and the whole thing is just a wondrously woven plot of crossing threads. And the main guy is named Raven!

Come for the gritty conspiracy filled hitman focused noir, stay for Veronica Lake as a singing magician.

Laura, dir. Otto Preminger (1944)

Preminger made a lot of great noirs (and other films, Anatomy of a Murder being particularly noteworthy), but of his prolific output Laura remains my favorite. It starts out relatively simple: a woman named Laura has been found murdered and the detective must solve the case. He has several curious and suspicious characters to investigate and narrow down his list of suspects from, including a young Vincent Price. However, the film takes a dramatic twist at about the midway point that elevates it above its initial premise and delivers one of the most engaging whodunnit noirs I’ve seen.

DOA, dir Rudolph Maté (1950)

Our main character, played by noir-staple Edmond O’Brien, has been poisoned with “luminous toxin”, which the movie insists is a real thing even though it isn’t, and will die in only a few days. He then sets about solving his own murder as quickly as possible, retracing his steps from the previous night and trying to figure out why anyone would want to kill a nobody from a small town like him. It’s a great premise, and the movie delivers on it. What more could you ask?

Kansas City Confidential, dir. Phil Karlson (1952)

A florist gets the blame for a robbery he had nothing to do with, and so he does the next logical thing: he tracks down and infiltrates the gang who did it so as to identify them and bring them to justice while also clearing his name. You know, just some classic noir stuff. This eventually takes him to Mexico where he’s in a resort with the thieves but must identify them, and they must figure out whether he’s really a co-conspirator or not (they never saw each other’s faces during the crime). It’s got a great hook, a fun (if not too surprising) twist, and is just a great movie all around.

The robbers in their creepy ass masks. Bring back these kind of masks for bank robbers!

Sweet Smell of Success, dir. Alexander Mackendrick (1957)

Tony Curtis plays a kind of dickhead press agent who has been hired by an even bigger dickhead newspaper columnist (imagine, a time when having a newspaper column made you incredibly powerful) to break up said columnist’s sister and her jazz guitar playing boyfriend. He doesn’t do a great job, and things kind of spiral for him. It has some of the best one-liners in all of noir (not an official criterion for the genre, but one of my favorite elements) and some great performances and energy.

Out of the Past, dir. Jacques Tourneur (1947)

Out of the Past, starring noir staple Robert Mitchum, has an incredibly convoluted plot. It’s kind of about a retired PI remembering the time he had to find a mobster’s girlfriend after she shot said mobster and stole money from him, but it’s told across two timeframes and with some characters who, if I’m honest, look a little too similar for me to consistently remember who they are. Still, it is a great time with some fun mystery, a great PI character who’s a bit smarter than his opponents (but not by a lot), and some truly stellar dialogue.

They Drive by Night, dir. Raoul Walsh (1940)

Technically more of a proto-noir, They Drive by Night starts out as a story of two brothers trying to make it as truck drivers before pivoting to being a very noir-ish crime plot after Ida Lupino’s character does an ol’ husband murder (and develops a crippling fear of automatic doors). It is often pointed to, along with Rebecca (1940) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), as one of the three candidates for “First Noir”. While I think Stranger on the Third Floor is maybe the purest example of early noir, They Drive by Night is my favorite of the three.

Deadline U.S.A., dir. Richard Brooks (1952)

There are a lot of noirs about guys running newspapers or reporters working for them, usually caught up in a fight with some kind of organized crime outfit. While I’m a big fan of High Tide, I think Humphrey Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. is my favorite newspaper vs. mobster movie. It has a fun ensemble cast, and I just love seeing the big newspaper printing rooms. I don’t know if this is the best one in terms of plot, but noir is a lot about vibes and performance. Bogart is among the best to ever do it, and he delivers here.

Bogart is really pro-newspaper in this, but he’s also the man publishing the newspaper. Conflict of interest Bogie!

Panic in the Streets, dir. Elia Kazan (1950)

Some criminals have snuck into New Orleans but, unfortunately for everyone, one of them has pneumonic plague and is incredibly contagious. Richard Widmark plays a doctor who must track down the source of the plague and stop its spread while treating people before they get too sick and die. However, because they’re criminals, they don’t want to be discovered. It’s a great multi-layered investigation that was actually filmed in New Orleans, using some of its locals in great character bits.

I will note that because this one has an element of “trust the system”, my partner doesn’t think it should count as a noir. I think it has enough crime and Widmark’s character faces enough opposition for it to count, but it is open to debate.

Bodyguard, dir. Richard Fleischer (1948)

Our main character gets suspended from the LAPD and then hired to be a bodyguard for an incredibly suspicious rich family, who, surprise, surprise, are doing some crimes. The MVP of this movie, though, is his girlfriend who is a 10/10 assistant that really does most of the work in the case. This one isn’t particularly special, but it’s a well-executed mystery/detective story that clocks in at 62 minutes. I love this genre.

The Naked City, dir. Jules Dassin (1948)

An Irish aul fella police detective solves the murder of a clothing model, plus some other murders that spiral out from there, in New York City. The lead performance is phenomenal and beyond that it’s just an amazingly well executed bit of detective fiction. I can see how it inspired a TV show (with different actors) that investigated further cases. It’s not doing anything weird or fancy, but you gotta respect the craft in executing a classic plot well.

I would watch this wee aul Irish lad solve many a murder.

The Web, dir. Michael Gordon (1947)

A young Vincent Price plays the worst guy, who is kinda murdering his way to wealth through his co-conspirators while pinning his crimes on some poor schmuck lawyer who for some reason took a job as a bodyguard. MVP of this one is noir staple William Bendix playing a dumb looking but actually really clever police detective, and Vincent Price just being the evilest dude.

The Set-Up, dir. Robert Wise (1949)

There are surprising number of noirs that are about boxers and the horrors of being a boxer in the 1940s and 1950s. This feels like a weird fit, until you know that boxing was tied up with organized crime at the time and these movies are closely connected to other films that are about gambling and the criminal syndicates that ran them.

There are a lot of great ensemble shots and moments, with characters in various phases of being prepared for and recovering from fights. You really get an idea for who these people are, it has a lot of humanity, which to me is a big part of noir.

Almost all the boxing noirs I’ve seen have been great (special mention for The Harder They Fall, featuring my man Bogart, which is a blast), but my favorite is The Set-Up. The premise is simple, a manager for an aging boxer has taken money from the mob to get the boxer to throw his fight but decides not to tell the boxer so he can keep the money for himself. He’s betting that the guy will lose the fight anyway, so why bother to cut him in on the deal? You can see where this goes. In a beautiful touch, the movie is played in real time as we see the other boxers get ready for their fights and come back to the lockers after they are finished, following the relationships between these men as they do their job of hitting other men in the face. It’s an incredibly human story and it has you cheering for its protagonist by the end even as it maintains that grim nihilism that makes noir what it is.

The Man with My Face, dir. Edward Montagne (1951)

You have to have some respect for the B-picture: the second, lower budget movie that ran after the headlining film in classic cinemas. This one is a bit schlocky in all the right ways. A guy comes home to find someone with his exact face living there, and nobody recognizes him! Not his wife, not his dog, nobody. At the same time, some evil dude is doing murders with a killer attack dog. For some reason it’s all set in Puerto Rico. If that premise sounds good, let me tell you that the movie delivers on it. If it sounds too absurd, well I don’t know what to say. Maybe we can’t be friends.

The man has his face! The same face you guys!

The Big Clock, dir. Jonathan Latimer (1948)

The main character of this movie is editor-in-chief of a magazine and the plot hinges around a major media mogul, but it’s not really a newspaper noir because instead of fighting against corruption or organized crime, it’s about a murder and a character simultaneously trying to find the killer and not be blamed for it himself; a classic noir set up. It also, and this is important, features a really big clock. The characters are all a lot of fun, and the film packs a good balance of whimsy and melodrama into its story. Plus, the villain is completely insane in exactly the right way (obsessed with time), and even if the protagonist is a bit of heel, you still root for him over the bad guy.

Night and the City, dir. Jules Dassin (1950)

Another great Richard Widmark role, this time as a hustler who is just one scheme away from finally making it as he spirals wildly out of control in London’s underworld. This one has an almost Greek Tragedy (and also a big Greek wrestler) feeling as a man’s hubris and quest for success, and those who go along with him, ultimately ends in complete disaster for him (and maybe the others). It has some great performances, and some truly dreadful characters. It’s classic nihilistic noir that builds to a fever pitch before releasing a sigh of cathartic disaster.

What are your favorite noirs? I am always on the lookout for recommendations. There are, by some estimates, over 700 noirs so it’s easy for me to miss some classic I’ve never heard of!

(Please note that the management will not be accepting the submission of neo-noirs at this time.)

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I did a terrible job at predicting what games would come out in 2025. In my defense, I didn’t see the tariffs and trade war between the US and China coming, which caused massive disruption to the tabletop games industry and delayed lots of games. Of the 11 games on my list last year, only 4 actually came out in 2025. Of those four, I own two of them and have played zero (but I set up one of them on my table!). That’s pretty embarrassing, but the silver lining is that it should make it easy for me to do better next year.

Last year I recapped, in brief, the games from my list that I had played, but since this year I played literally none of them there’s no point in doing so!

This year I am returning to a traditional Top 10, rather than my previous Top 11, assuming I haven’t forgotten one (like I did two years ago, triggering the Top 11 in the first place). These games are ranked in approximately how confident I am that they will come out in 2026, rather than in hierarchy of how excited I am about them. So, please don’t read too much into the order.

That’s enough caveats, let’s get to the list!

My Most Anticipated Games of 2026: Purgatorio: Men of Iron Vol. 6 by Ralph Shelton (GMT Games)

I’m a card carrying Men of Iron super fan, so obviously I’m excited about the latest entry in the series coming out this year. While Norman Conquests was not my favorite, a title still held by Arquebus, I still enjoyed it and I will never refuse more Men of Iron. Here’s hoping that Purgatorio is another great entry in the series.

Infernal Machine: Dawn of Submarine Warfare by Jeremy White (GMT Games)

I have, to my shame, never played a Jeremy White game despite hearing their praises sung on many occasions. I have also dabbled some in Civil War solitaire games, so the combination of White and ACW should be enough to finally push me over the edge. I’m not sure what to expect from this one, if I’m honest, but I’m certainly intrigued.

Baltic Empires: The Northern Wars of 1558-1721 by Brian Berg Asklev Hanson (GMT Games)

I can’t say no to Nils Johansson art, and Brian Berg Asklev has done some great designs, most recently 1812: Napoleon’s Fateful March. The buzz I’ve heard about Baltic Empires from people who have played near-final versions has been positive, and I love a big multiplayer game. I can’t wait to fight over fish with other nerds in Northern Europe.

Just look at Nils’ work on this. My god.

The Guerilla Generation by Stephen Ranganzas (GMT Games)

Stephen Ranganzas’ The British Way is probably the most impressive COIN game I’ve played, and maybe top of my list of games I’m embarrassed to have not written a review of yet. I’m obviously very excited for his next take on COIN, which promises to be a fascinating companion to The British Way, and probably full of interesting discussion about the nature of guerilla warfare. The way he combines a specific scholarly argument with these multipacks of games is some of the best wargame design going, if you ask me.

Queen of Spies by Liz Davidson and David Thompson (Salt and Pepper Games)

While I’m not the most dedicated solitaire gamer, I like Liz Davidson and David Thompson and I’m curious to try out their first (published) co-design. I’m also a fan of espionage as a topic, and Salt and Pepper Games’ small box form factors suit my tiny apartment perfectly. It’s honestly a little embarrassing that I haven’t played any of their games yet. I backed this one on Gamefound (a rarity for me, I’m a habitual non-backer), and I’m looking forward to inevitably getting my spies killed due to my incompetence.

Cuius Regio by Francisco Gradaille (GMT Games)

The Thirty Years War seems to be having a bit of a moment - GMT, Vuca, and NAC all have games on it in the works. I was hugely impressed by Francisco Gradaille’s Plantagenet and my playtest of the introductory scenario of Cuius Regio was very promising, so it sits top of the pile for me at the moment. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get this to the table next year, it looks pretty hefty as gaming experiences go, but my initial impression is that this will be an interesting and gorgeous take on the Thirty Years War.

Seriously, look at this map!

Brandywine, 1777 – A Time for Heroes by Yves Roig (Les 3 Zuaves)

Maurice Suckling’s Chancellorsville, 1863 is a game I have long wanted to play and for some reason it just has never happened. I was also interested in the follow up, Gettysburg: A Time for Heroes, which uses the same system but is by different designers. Brandywine, 1777 is a new game from one of Gettysburg’s designers, from a different publisher, but using that same core system. While I would say that the American Civil War is probably more to my interest than the American Revolution, this looks like a great production and might finally be the one I manage to play, if for no other reason than it looks like I might be able to play it on Vassal.

Tankschlacht: The Battle of Cambrai, 1917 by Kerry Anderson (Revolution Games)

I’m generally impressed by Revolution Games, they make nice games that aren’t too big and have clearly been tested and developed (not a guarantee in this hobby). I don’t know much about World War I, but I am interested in learning more, and a small hex and counter game from Revolution feels like a great place to start. Also, I love tanks, and especially love early, clunky, weird tanks.

Battles of Napoleon: Volume II – Quatre Bras 1815 by Uwe Walentin (Sound of Drums)

While I can see the appeal in the promise of Sound of Drums’ Eylau as a playable monster game, I’m not much for Napoleonics and that just looked way too big even for me. However, I’ve heard good things about the game (after the rulebook got fixed), and volume II looks to be a much smaller experience so I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about in a more playable form. Probably I’ll do what I always do with Napoleonic games: think really hard about it but then never play. But maybe this one will be different and I’ll actually play it. Who knows.

The Halls of Montezuma by Kevin Bertram and Gilberto Lopez (Fort Circle Games)

I love Kevin Bertram’s Shores of Tripoli, it was the first game I ever reviewed (and I wish I’d done a better job), and it’s one I’ve played just so many times. This sequel to the system on a subject that doesn’t get enough coverage in games (or in American history in general) looks rad. I’m really hoping that 2026 is the year that Fort Circle’s production and shipping woes finally end and we get a string of great games from them.

Top 5 Most Anticipated games I already own

It is important to resist becoming too drawn into the Cult of the New. On my shelves are many excellent games that I have not yet played, and I should be ashamed of that. As a form of accountability, and also to encourage us all to revisit our current collections even as we obsess about the upcoming releases, every year I pick five games that I own and have never played that I am excited to (hopefully) play for the first time this year.

Last year I managed to play 3 out of the 5 games on my list. I played A Greater Victory early in the year and really enjoyed it. I am, as of writing, still playing Give Us Victories (finally) on Vassal and really enjoying it – look for future coverage of that game on this website. Rally the Troops bailed me out on one of my picks by adding Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno, which meant that I managed to get quite a few games of it in before the end of the year. Sadly, I was unable to play Joe Balkoski’s The Korean War, because I got a little too caught up in playing OCS Korea, and I also failed to table Joe Miranda’s Bulge 20 (I’ll blame that one on the fact that I own the Japanese edition).

This year’s games are:

Damn, that’s a good pile of games

The Korean War: June 1950-May 1951 by Joe Balkoski (Victory Games)

I am probably leaving Korea in 2026, and I want to have played all of my (current) Korean War games before I go. That gives me a hard deadline to motivate me. It also means that Balkoski’s game goes back on the list again this year!

Korea: The Fight Across the 38th by Trevor Bender (RBM Studios)

Another Korean War game! This one only came into my possession in December, 2025 so it’s less shameful that I haven’t played it, but I’m still hoping to get it to the table before I leave Korea in mid-2026.

Fighting Formations: US 29th Infantry Division by Chad Jensen (GMT Games)

I have never played a Chad Jensen game (shameful, I know), and some friends of mine insist that Fighting Formations is an underappreciated entry in his design catalog. I have the latest entry punched, sorted, and clipped and I want to finally get it to the table (either physically or virtually). It looks very cool!

Le Dauphin & l’Épée by Frédéric Bey (Ludifolie Editions)

I’m a huge medieval nerd, and I have played so, so much Men of Iron, but I also want to explore other takes on medieval warfare. As a result, I have long had an interest in arguably the other big medieval wargaming system: Frédéric Bey’s Au Fil de l'Épée. I own Le Dauphin & l’Epée and Swords of Sovereignty, so if I get either to the table I will count this as a win. I just want to learn and try this system and see how it compares to my medieval fave.

Warriors of England by Yasutaka Ikeda (Multi-Man Publishing)

My other favorite medieval game is Warriors of God, and back in 2024 MMP released a War of the Roses sequel to that game. I even wrote a historical introduction for the magazine it came in. However, my copy was stuck at my parent’s house due to some shipping issues, and I was only reunited with it this summer right before my job took away all my free time. So 2026 will be the year I finally play it.

What games are you looking forward to in 2026? What games from your shelf are you finally hoping to play? Let me know!

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My goal for 2025 was to read 35 books, a significant drop from the 50 I had set in previous years, but one that allows me to dive deeper into longer books, which I did this year. I plan on keeping my goal at 35 in 2026 because I’ve got some hefty doorstoppers on my shelf to dig into this year, and I don’t want these reading goals to be stressful. I’m also trying to avoid buying too many books this year, as I will probably be moving back to Ireland in July and weight limits are a concern, so my goal for this year is to read all the unread books currently on my shelf. Wish me luck.

Per tradition, I have chosen my eight favorite books I read this past year, split evenly between fiction and non-fiction.

Non-Fiction

I read a lot of books on games, both on the history of RPGs and on gaming more generally, and while I wouldn’t say they were all great two of them did manage to make this list. I also ventured out more into other historical subjects, reading fewer books on medieval Europe or the American Civil War (but not none!) and instead dipping my toes into new topics. Overall, I was very happy with my non-fiction reading last year, and picking my top 4 was a challenge.

The Korean War by Bruce Cummings

I had previously read The Coldest Winter, and while that is a more engaging history of the Korean War, it was Bruce Cummings’ history that made me see Korea in an entirely new light. This is a brutal history that tears apart the layers of myth that surround the war to reveal the barren, horrible truth. It is excellent, everyone should read it.

Cardboard Ghosts by Amabel Holland

My review of Cardboard Ghosts is available in the magazine Wyrd Science #7, but to summarize, I read a lot of books about games over the past two years, and this one is probably the best. It is argumentative in all the right ways, wonderfully written, and smart enough to not overstay its welcome. Expensive (because academic publishing), but absolutely worth your time.

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

Basically, an entire semester long history class in a book. Inventing the Renaissance is written in an engaging and often humorous way that appreciates that most of us don’t know who all these fucking guys are and goes out of its way to remind us. Genuinely, the best pop history book I’ve read in…maybe ever.

Playing at the World 2e Vol. 2 by Jon Peterson

I’ve always been a big Playing at the World nerd, and unsurprisingly I loved volume 2. It is incredibly dense and it took me a long time to read, but man I loved this nerd shit. Probably not for everyone, most people will be satisfied with volume 1, but if you are interested in this stuff you should read it.

Fiction

I tried to read more fiction this year, and while I’m happy I did it, I’m sorry to report that many of these were on the underwhelming side. That said, there were at least four books that stood out at year’s end.

Human Acts by Han Kang

Last year on my birthday my family took a trip to Gwangju, in southwest Korea, and I took that as an opportunity to read Han Kang’s book that partly takes place and is largely about the Gwangju Uprising. Kang recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so unsurprisingly this is an amazingly well written book. It manages to be wondrously tragic without feeling exploitative or gross at any point. It is a tremendous work of literature that reinvigorated me after a series of underwhelming books.

The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

I’ve long had a fondness for Winnie the Pooh and company, and last year I read The House at Pooh Corner to my daughter for the first time. It was wonderful to revisit, and I loved sharing it with her.

Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

I’m a huge Trekkie, and I think Lower Decks is among the best Trek has ever been. This choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel is a tremendous experience that manages to be clever, engaging, funny, and feels like an episode of the titular show. I heartily recommend it to Trek fans.

No Rules Tonight by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada

My partner found this one in the local secondhand bookshop, from the author of Banned Book Club, and it captures a specific moment in Korean history and what it was like to live through it. It’s engaging, funny, and full of memorable characters but also teaches you a lot about Korean culture on the cusp of democracy. We have the other two books in the series and I am looking forward to reading them this year.

What were your favorite books last year? What should I read in 2026?

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Normally I start these posts with a rundown on my year in gaming and life, but not much happened in 2025 so there’s not much to report, especially compared to 2024 when I moved to a new continent and started a new project. I am still living in South Korea and enjoying it, so no news there. I started a new job in the spring, which ended up eating up quite a lot of my free time, especially in the autumn, so I didn’t learn nearly as many new wargames this year as I would have liked.

We Intend to Move on Your Works didn’t go into a total hiatus, but we also didn’t get very many episodes out this year, which I’m a little disappointed by. My project to play more Korean War games progressed by playing a longer campaign of OCS Korea, but I did not manage to try out Joe Balkoski’s classic Korean War game. Overall, it was a much better year for Eurogames, especially those published by Playte Games in Korea, than it was for wargames.

I also got to interview David Thompson on his upcoming game Rebels Against Rebellion, his first every ACW game, which I’m pretty proud of.

My Top 7 Games of 2025

Tradition must continue, though, and every year I write about my favorite games that I played for the first time that year. These are usually not games that actually came out in that year, but rather ones that were new to me. You can read previous entries in this series here, here, and here.

I will confess that, for me at least, this wasn’t a particularly strong year in new experiences in wargaming. My best gaming experiences were with games I had already played before – which is no bad thing – but in terms of newer games there were few that really captivated me. Overall, this has resulted in a list that, compared to previous years, is heavier on games that I liked but didn’t necessarily love or designs that I found more interesting than great. That’s not to say these games are bad, I have not stooped so low as to pad out the list with games that left me underwhelmed or annoyed, but rather that this is a much more tentative list. There are some great games on this list, but I’m not sure how many will live forever on my shelves.

The number of games included is entirely arbitrary based on the number of games I felt stood out. The ranking of these is also very much a gut decision and were I to make the list again (possibly after playing these games more) it is very likely that the order would be different.

Ambon: Burning Sun and Little Seagull by Marc Figueras

Any game with art by Nils Johansson is worth a second, or even third, look, and the small package games from SNAFU pack a lot of game into a little ziploc. I only played this game once solo, or else perhaps it would rank higher, but I found it to be an engaging little hex and counter experience on a part of WWII I’d never heard of before. I’m very keen to revisit this one, especially opposite a real flesh and blood opponent.

Look at that art though!

Give Us Victories by Sergio Schiavi

I am currently playing my first game of Give Us Victories, which perhaps unfairly hinders its overall ranking, as I am reluctant to place it higher without a completed game under my belt. However, my initial impression is very positive. This grand tactical scale approach to the Battle of Chancellorsville is proving to be incredibly satisfying. While I have some qualms about the combat resolution mechanic, the activation system is a delight and the map is gorgeous. It also hits at a complexity level I really enjoy. Look for this one appearing on a podcast near you in the new year.

The Army of the Heartland by Jon Prados

A leading contender in the “more interesting than good” category. I think Army of the Heartland has quite a few problems, but I can’t help but be fascinated by it. It’s clunky and overwrought in a lot of places, but it tries to present an intriguing version of operational warfare in the American Civil War. I also really enjoyed playing and discussing it with Pierre and Alexandre. I don’t know how much I want to play it again, but I think about it at least once a month.

The army display sheets are both a core part of the game, and maybe a little bit too much.

A Greater Victory: South Mountain by Steve Carey

Another great entry in the Blind Swords system. I love a game with a good approach to battle and A Greater Victory absolutely delivers on that. While it definitely lies on the upper end in terms of size and length for what I want a Blind Swords game to be, it is still within my tolerances and is an incredibly satisfying gaming experience. Just a great entry in a great series.

Hunt for Blackbeard by Volko Ruhnke

My most played game this year, and it technically hasn’t even been released yet. Thanks to the magic of Rally the Troops (who we’ll be hearing from again), I blasted through well over a dozen plays of Volko Ruhnke’s new game of hidden movement and pirate hunting. There’s just something so more-ish about Hunt for Blackbeard that I kept starting a new game as soon as my previous one was finished. While certainly not for everyone, I can’t help but keep on snacking away at it.

Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno by Walter Vejdovsky

I first heard about Verdun some time ago on a Homo Ludens livestream about CDGs and I have been curious to try it ever since. I was gifted a copy in a Secret Santa last year but struggled to find someone to play it with in person. Thankfully, Rally the Troops came to my rescue. I am still deciding exactly how I feel about the game – I am absolutely impressed with the design, but still unsure on how much I like it. While I don’t know if it will earn a place in my top five favorite CDGs, I think every fan of the genre should play it because it is an incredibly clever take on the genre.

Honorable Mention: Korea: the Forgotten War by Dean Essig and Rod Miller

My best gaming experience this year, bar none, was playing an extended game of Korea: The Forgotten War, aka OCS Korea, with my ACW podcast co-host and local heavy hex and counter fiend Alexandre. We didn’t play the full campaign, we’re still working our way towards that, but we played the opening months of the war up to about the beginning of the Pusan Perimeter. This took us a long time, squeezing in one to two hours of gaming every week, but it was incredibly satisfying to experience OCS on a longer timescale. I’m very much looking forward to diving back into this system this year.

Honorable Mention: Playte Games

My other great gaming experience this year was digging deeper into the catalogue of Korean publisher Playte. They republish many classic Eurogames in shiny new packages with lovely art, and I’ve enjoyed many of their games immensely. You can read my tier list to learn more, but at time of writing here are my favorites:

Sardegna by Stefan Dorra

The Rose King by Dirk Henn

Pueblo by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling

Big Shot by Alex Randolph

Linko by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling

Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle

In a running theme this year, it remains to be seen exactly where my feelings on Molly House will fall. I have played it twice, and I really need to play it a few more times before I am confident enough of my opinions to finally write a full review. It is undeniably fascinating and I love how it brings an often overlooked period of history, and historical experience, to a wider audience. It is gorgeously presented, and plays in a way that is both somewhat familiar but also largely alien to my previous gaming experiences.

I am low-key fascinated by the experience of teaching it to new people but I am not sure if this is the kind of game I would regularly play. On the one hand, I can see how playing with seasoned veterans would improve the experience as a game, but I may actually enjoy it more as an unusual experience that I share with a new table of people every time. I’m not sure. Molly House probably won’t end up being my favorite game in 2-3 years’ time, but it is one I am thinking about a lot right now and for that reason it gets the top spot.

It’s really very pretty.

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This is a difficult book to review. I did not particularly like it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t succeed. Games of History is meant to be an introductory text to the methodology of using historical games to explore the societies that made them. It is not a history of games or game design, but rather a guide to how historians can better use games as evidence for understanding historical cultures. Spanos argues that this source material is often neglected by historians, and outside of a few very famous examples I would say he has a point. The history of games is often siloed off and does not intermix with other histories as much as it ought.

As an introductory text for students and scholars, I’m afraid that I think Games of History is kind of a failure. Its problem is fundamental: the book is just not very well written. It is incredibly dense, the kind of academic writing I associate with Oxford Dons of yesteryear. The opening chapters deal extensively with different theoretical frameworks for analyzing games as sources, which when combined with the dense writing makes for a periodically impenetrable and universally unenjoyable reading experience. I have read books this dense and found them valuable before, and there is information in Games of History that I found useful, but it hurts this volume’s hopes of being an introduction. If I struggled to make my way through the book, I can only imagine how a first-year university student would feel.

The book’s strongest points are when it uses examples. Spanos’ explanations of more abstract concepts were a struggle, but when he is writing about specific examples many of the disparate threads come together much more clearly. The final three chapters of the book are case studies, and they are among the book’s best. If he focused more on the specific, and spent less time on the abstract, I think his arguments would be easier to follow.

Somewhat surprisingly, the best chapter is probably the one on games and metaphysics. I certainly expected the combination of the already abstract and frequently dense field of metaphysics with Spanos’ writing to be difficult to follow, but this chapter is focused and an engaging account of games as tools of mysticism and the relationship between religious institutions and games across different periods. It combines historical examples with theory into an enjoyable and interesting read. If only the rest of the book was up to this standard.

I want to emphasize, that I’m not criticizing Spanos actual arguments very much here. I’m sure specialists could nit-pick some of his points, but the book is meant to introduce readers to the field and in that regard, it is hard for it to go too wrong. It should challenge you to think differently, and to some extent it succeeds at that. Unfortunately, it is just a chore to read, which hurts its practical usability as a textbook.

On the plus side, it was published Open Access, so anyone can grab a copy and easily take sections that are most useful. For those who are interested in this area, I would recommend the chapter on metaphysics and the final three case studies, and only after those would I plum the remaining depths.

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I have made no secret of my affection for Jon Peterson’s study of the origins of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), both in its original single volume form and in the new two-volume second edition from MIT Press. I reviewed the revised first volume at the end of last year, and having now completed the second volume I have a greater appreciation of why it was split in two. I am one of the self-confessed sickos who really liked how in the original Playing at the World you were somewhat unceremoniously dumped into extended chapters on the history of fantasy and early wargaming after a brief introduction to D&D, before the story returned to the main arc of D&D’s creation. In the new second edition, all these chapters have been split away from the core narrative of the more personal story of Gygax and Arneson’s gaming histories and the collaboration that led to the creation of D&D. This creates a cleaner first volume, and that is probably the book that most people should read, while volume two is essentially three books (or Pillars, as Peterson calls them) stitched together. The first “Pillar” covers the development of fantasy literature, particularly those works that influenced D&D; the second examines the history of wargames from Chess variants through kriegsspiel and up to the state of the hobby in the early 1970s; and the final one studies how the idea of players role-playing a single character came to be, primarily through the Science Fiction and Fantasy fandoms of the mid-twentieth century but also through wargames campaigns and other interesting avenues. The final product is a massive tome that took me probably two months to read, and it’s not something that is for everyone, but for weirdos like me who are interested in this stuff I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If there is a group I would be a little hesitant about pointing towards volume two, it would be those who are just interested in the history of fantasy section. As Peterson himself notes in the opening pages, a lot of excellent work has been done on the history of fantasy literature over the past decade or two. Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy is a particular favorite of mine, and Peterson name drops it among others in the opening of this pillar. My point being, if you are only interested in the history of fantasy literature there are more focused works on those topics that will probably serve you better. However, if you are interested in the specific origins of a strand of sword and sorcery fantasy and its impact on the creation of D&D, then you are the kind of person that this pillar is for. By picking his niche Peterson manages to add more information to an increasingly rich area of scholarship, but it is a niche. I particularly enjoyed all the moments where a magical effect from a story is directly linked to a spell from early D&D – that’s the deep nerd shit that I come to Playing at the World for.

As someone who routinely writes about wargames and history, few things are more directly attuned to my dork brain than a history of wargames. I’ve read some abridged histories of the hobby over the past few years, usually in the opening sections of a book on studying contemporary wargames, but there is no denying that this is by far the most thorough I’ve yet encountered. It starts with early Chess variants and then explores simultaneously the history of German (and then English) kriegspiel alongside the development of miniatures wargames, before moving on to how they came to create the concepts that would arrive in D&D. It is arguably a little light on information about Avalon Hill and its competitors, favoring instead the earlier history before the rise of commercial wargaming, but then much of that information was already in the first volume as it had a more direct impact on the gaming scene that Gygax and Arneson were participating in. This is maybe the one chapter where I wish this information wasn’t split between the two volumes, but I can still appreciate that I’m a minority audience. Really, I just want a Playing at the World (or maybe Game Wizards) level study of the history of Avalon Hill and SPI. Wishes aside, this is a great deep dive into a thorny history that has is easily overlooked despite its wide reaching impact on our culture and history.

The final pillar is in some ways the least well defined but also the most interesting. In this section Peterson examines how the idea of role-playing as a character came to be, from early psychoanalytic techniques, through experimental theater, and finally to RAND political games and the SFF fandoms of the mid-20th century. What is most striking is all the near misses; things that were almost D&D but not quite there. Most prominent among these is the Midgard phenomenon, a play by mail campaign that looks a lot like an RPG but didn’t quite have that special sauce to attract a wide audience. Peterson does an excellent job arguing that while the idea of the role-playing game was probably inevitable, there was something in the air at that time that meant many people were experimenting with similar ideas, the exact combination in D&D was distinct from its competitors. In a way this is the book’s thesis at its core: that D&D is the product of many different influences, which we can identify through careful study, but also that D&D is more than the sum of its parts and it took that combination to create the phenomenon that is the TTRPG. That’s not to say that had Gygax and Arneson not created D&D there would be no RPGs, someone else surely would have done it in their stead, but also that finding an earlier example that has part of the D&D formula is not the same as finding the real First RPG. It’s a precise argumentative line to walk, and Peterson does an excellent job walking it.  

I must pay some tribute as well to the appendix, in which Peterson writes an extended essay about sources. Playing at the World is not particularly dense in terms of references, but it has a mammoth bibliography, and this appendix essay goes a long way to helping the reader understand what sources were used and many of the challenges involved in working with them. I love history and I love it when historians explain the weird sources they must work with, so Peterson describing the challenges of working with fanzines was right up my alley. My greatest joy, though, came with the extended aside on the challenges of oral history. D&D is recent enough that many individuals involved in its creation are still alive, and even more were when Peterson first began this project many years ago. He has spoken to many key figures and read their oral histories published in various volumes over the years, and in this section, he explains why he doesn’t rely on them very much. This is very much a historiographical argument for those who like discussing history as a process, and I was so here for it. Great stuff.

While I would happily recommend Playing at the World, 2e Volume 1 to pretty much anyone with an interest in D&D, I’m not sure I can do the same with volume two. I probably enjoyed them both equally, but volume two is targeted more at the niche weirdo audience that I am a member of rather than wider D&D fans. I think that Peterson would probably agree, although maybe not in exactly those words. This is one of those reviews where if the book I described above piques your interest, you should go read it, I swear it lives up to that potential. However, if the prospect of nearly three hundred pages on the history of wargames, including details on multiple generations of nineteenth-century Prussian military officers, sounds like an unpleasant way to spend a week then you may be better served reading something else. Couldn’t be me, though, I loved it.

I didn’t quite click with Mark Herman’s SPQR, the second volume in the Great Battles of History (GBoH) series that he co-designed with Richard Berg, but I’m nothing if not willing to give a series a second shot. With the recent reprint of Hoplite, volume 15 and the most recent entry in the series, I decided to give it another shot. I was drawn to a few things about Hoplite that I hoped might fix elements that hadn’t quite worked with me in SPQR. Firstly, this is a Richard Berg design and I’m nothing if not a Berg fan. I have had bad experiences with Berg games, but even when I don’t like them, I am generally fascinated by Berg’s takes on history and game design. While I have enjoyed several of Mark Herman’s games in the past, my taste and his are not exactly aligned. The second thing that drew me to Hoplite was that it promised to be a little simpler than earlier entries in the series – stripping out some of the complexity that Berg felt didn’t apply to ancient Greek warfare – and that it was now a chit-pull game. Something I admire about GBoH is how it seems to change significantly between volumes – taking the core but adapting it to each new topic. For that reason, I felt it warranted a second shot. I’m happy to report that I have enjoyed Hoplite quite a bit more than my first dalliance with SPQR, but I’m also still not entirely sure I’m a fan of the series yet.

Hoplite simplifies and changes several elements from previous GBoH games, something that Berg is up front about in the rulebook. As an aside, I love how these games all have their own rulebook rather than a series rules and a game-specific rules. I hate series rulebooks. I would love to give you, the reader, a comprehensive list of differences in Hoplite, but I don’t have nearly the level of mastery of GBoH I would need to be able to spot all the differences. There are, however, a few changes that I did notice and really appreciate. Berg is quick to note that for the most part these changes are to adapt the rules to the ancient Greek world, often discarding rules that might have made sense in Rome but not Greece, rather than a complete redesign of the system, but there are a few rules that can be applied backwards to earlier entries should you so desire. There were two changes that stood out to me as the most impactful: the change to TQ checks before combat and the choice to use chit pull activation.

GBoH is also chock full of markers, so expect to spend a fair bit of time updating them on each unit.

One of the things I found most tedious in SPQR was resolving the endless TQ checks when two lines of infantry clashed. TQ, short for Troop Quality, represents how good your units are and also how many cohesion hits they can take before they rout. In SPQR, and I believe other entries as well, before resolving combat you had to resolve a TQ check for each unit that was involved in the fight. This meant rolling a d10 and if the die roll was higher than the unit’s TQ, printed on the counter, you added a cohesion hit for every point of difference. This took forever, especially at the huge scale of some of those battles, and while I could appreciate that to some degree it was trying to represent the impact of differing troop quality on combat at the time, it was tedious to resolve and not very interesting in its result.

In Hoplite things work a little differently. In a clash of lines, when one side has advanced a section of their army adjacent to their opponent, the attacker doesn’t have to make these TQ checks, only the defender does. This really incentivizes you to be the aggressor, at least for the final stretch between the two armies, which creates some interesting decisions about how to position your armies. It also ties in really well with the movement rules for hoplite units (more on that later). The only time the attacker has to make a TQ check is if they already start adjacent to an enemy unit and not already Engaged (a marker that indicates that these two units fought last turn but neither side routed), then they need to make a TQ check to see if they can actually attack or not. Most of the time only one side in a combat will be making TQ checks before resolving Shock Combat, which already halves the amount of TQ checks you need to make. It also creates more interesting choices since it introduces a little asymmetry. If you are behind a good defensive position, you may want to stay there, but if you advance out at the last minute you could force TQ checks on your opponent and avoid them yourself, but lose that position in the process. I like this change a lot.

 As someone who mostly plays these heavy hex and counter games solo, I appreciate the change to chit pull. It also adds that little extra dose of randomness that I love to see in my historical games. In SPQR you could mostly know the order that commanders would activate in, with some potential for unpredictability and the all-important Trump rules being crucial (although I never really mastered how to optimally use them). Trumping is still here in Hoplite, but to my mind it is a bit simpler in how it works. The chit pull itself is pretty basic, each wing of your army has a chit and activates when it is pulled from the cup. The most interesting element is the addition of the Momentum chit. When you pull your Momentum chit you pick one of your commanders and roll a d10, if the roll is less than that commander’s Initiative stat then the wing under their command gets to activate. This is in addition to their activation from their standard chit, so you could potentially get two activations in one turn. This reminds me a bit of the Continuation mechanism from Berg’s Men of Iron, and it has a similar tension to that. I think the Momentum chit is a brilliant addition, bringing that little more unpredictability and worry into the game. It also ties into the Trump mechanic, because if you fail your one Trump attempt this turn your opponent gets to put their Momentum counter back into the cup, potentially giving them even more activations (but not guaranteeing it). All of this feels like peak Berg in terms of including just the right amount of unpredictability in the system.

There are some other elements to Hoplite that have endeared it to me. One of these is that the battles are, generally, quite a bit smaller. There is Plataea, which is a two map beast of a thing, if you want your ancients battles to be huge – and I will admit that the terrain and scale of that does tempt me a little. However, for a system with this much going on I prefer it to be a bit smaller. I don’t really want to be playing a GBoH scenario for 4+ hours, if I’m honest, and I appreciate that with Hoplite I could set up and play a scenario in an evening. It’s a much more manageable scale and as the parent of a small child I appreciate that.

The initial set up for Marathon. All that pretty terrain, none of it going to be relevant as we fight in the one big open space available.

I also really like the rules for moving hoplites. Naturally in a game titled Hoplite the hoplites take center stage. The most fun of these are the phalanxes which (excepting the comically large Theban one that is used in one scenario) are two hexes wide. I love counters that are wider than one hex, and the irritating movement challenges they inevitably cause. There’s something wonderful about the constraints that they introduce that just fills me with joy. Turning these unwieldy formations causes cohesion hits, so you have to debate whether you really want to risk wheeling this unit to try and flank the enemy because there are times when doing so could cause the phalanx to break and rout. If I have one minor criticism here, it’s that there are two different types of turning movement for phalanxes, one is more punishing than the other, and it feels a little too fiddly and at times confusing. It’s not the most complicated thing, and I can see the logic behind it (it’s generally harder to turn the formation when near an enemy) but it is an example of GBoH pushing a little beyond the level of complexity that I’d like.  

The hoplites quickly fall out of formation, while the Persians await their approach.

What I really love, though, is determining the hoplite movement rate. When you first move your hoplites towards the enemy, usually on the first turn, you have to roll to see how fast they move. Normally they will advance at a trot, moving four hexes forward each turn. But maybe they’re slower, and they walk at a rate of three hexes, or maybe they are running at five hexes a turn and earning a DRM bonus to combat when they reach the enemy but potentially suffering cohesion hits along the way. Once they start moving these units must move their maximum movement allowance each turn, so you can’t choose to slow the faster units down. Across a wide open plain between armies your hoplites will quickly fall out of order and no longer be the neat line you had hoped for. It also makes it hard to control when they will reach the enemy lines, which is important when you remember that being the side that advances into that initial combat will spare you having to make TQ checks and instead force them on your opponent. But your opponent can’t exactly calculate the right distance to stay away from your hoplites because they don’t know what order units will activate in. This is a case where the actual rules aren’t too complicated, but the implications of these rules are really interesting.

With all that having been said, I’m still not entirely sold on Hoplite. The combat still feels just a bit too tedious for me to ever love it. Combat in Hoplite isn’t incredibly complicated, but it sure isn’t simple. My main complaint is that it has too many steps. In ranged combat, the simpler of the two types, each weapon type has a value based on the range, e.g. composite bows at one hex are six and at two are four. At its simplest, roll a d10 and if the number is equal to or lower than the value you deal one cohesion hit. However, make sure you also check the table that compares weapon system to unit type to get the die roll modifier (DRM) to the ranged weapon roll.

This is basically the core experience of combat in GBoH: checking multiple tables. In Shock Combat you first must check if one side has superiority, first positional superiority (e.g. is someone flanking or being flanked) and if that’s not relevant then you check the table that determines weapon superiority. Having superiority will double or triple the number of cohesion hits inflicted in the combat, so it’s important. After that, you compare the attacking and defending unit types on another table to determine which column on the combat results table (CRT) you will be using. Having more attackers or defenders in the combat can cause shifts in which column you use. You roll the d10, find that row (including any DRMs, of which there are only a few) and find the crossover point between that row and the column and that will tell you how many cohesion hits the attacker and the defender receive. These hits are distributed among all participating units, so if you have more units in a given combat, you can spread the hits around more widely. This allows many weaker units to hold their own against one strong unit better than you would expect, unless someone achieves superiority because those doubled or tripled hits will add up quickly.

If you’re prepared to just go through it step by step every time it isn’t very complicated to resolve. No individual step is that complex, it’s just that there’s a lot of them. I imagine this will be a point of disagreement among players based on their taste, but where I am generally happy to factor in a lot of DRMs in a combat (say, for example, in Berg’s Men of Iron system) I find this jumping from table to table to be incredibly tedious. Because Hoplite doesn’t have a huge variation in unit types I slowly learned the table in a way I struggled with in SPQR, but I still never loved this combat. I just feel like I’m spending too much time resolving a process and not enough playing a game.

It doesn’t help that the combat results themselves contain no real decisions. All the combat results are just numbers of cohesion hits, and the only decision is how to distribute those hits – something that is usually trivial and isn’t even a free choice as the rules restrict you (not without reason, though). My favorite combat systems are like those in the Operational Combat Series (OCS), which are quick to resolve and generate multiple interesting decisions as a result. I spend so much time resolving combats in GBoH and I never feel like I’m doing something fun or interesting in the process.

A little bit of terrain honestly goes a long way to making these battles more exciting. Yes it adds a bit more to the rules, but sometimes it’s the spice that I feel like the combat is otherwise missing.

I appreciate, to a degree, what the game is trying to model with this combat. It captures a grinding and slow style of warfare. I really love that units suffer damage to their cohesion, not to their health or strength. These units usually aren’t suffering casualties; they are instead getting tired, losing morale, and falling out of their tight formation that is necessary to their function. The deciding moment is when they ultimately flee the battle, and it is when one side breaks and runs that the battle is decided. This is a great representation of how pre-modern battles often went, with most of the casualties happening after one side fled rather than in the fighting proper (I speak more for medieval rather than ancient, as that’s my area of expertise, but I believe they shared this to a degree). However, that doesn’t make this fun to play as a game, and it can’t help but make me wish that it tried something more interesting.

The combat system feels like it’s core to the argument that GBoH in general makes about historical warfare. It highlights two threads as the most important to warfare: troop quality and weapons systems. I have to confess that I am somewhat skeptical of this analysis. Before digging in deeper, I want to note that one of the reasons why I enjoy Berg so much as a designer is that he generally lays out an argument in his games and he makes this very explicit. These are the Berg interpretations of what he has read and what he thinks about it. I rarely feel like Berg is trying to give me some kind of “objective history” take. Even when I think his version of history is weird, I can appreciate that he is making an argument and it is an argument that is interesting to engage with. Now, I’m no certified expert in ancient warfare, but I do specialize in pre-modern warfare and the history of military technology so I feel at least qualified enough to ramble about the topic in a blog post like this.

Troop quality is a tricky thing. I think in terms of making an interesting game it helps to have a way to differentiate different units from each other. Some games manage to make functionally identical armies interesting, but it’s challenging. It is generally more interesting if there is some asymmetry between units and armies. However, evaluating the quality of soldiers from thousands of years ago is basically impossible. None of these people were professionals – no, not even the Spartans. The Spartan elite didn’t do a job other than fighting, but they didn’t actually train for combat (no formation drills every morning, for example). Sometimes troop quality can be connected to something we can kind of measure, like how in the Battle of Marathon scenario the center line of Greek hoplites have a slightly lower Troop Quality because Herodotus says that the line was thinner there – so the lower quality reflects fewer troops. Things get more difficult when you try to assign one type of unit as more elite than another. Sometimes ancient sources will tell us that X unit were veterans, or were more elite, but what do they really mean by that? We bring with us a lot of baggage around what an elite unit looks like in a modern army, and that’s not necessarily the same as what it meant in the ancient world.

Now, I don’t think Hoplite makes a bunch of egregious errors in this regard. However, as a core argument for a series this does still make me a little wary because it’s very easy to take things too far and start making value judgements on the different qualities of troops across regions. In particular to ancient Greek warfare, in popular media there is a lot of borderline (and sometimes not borderline) orientalism in the portrayal of Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars. You can see notions of Strong Manly Western Greeks vs. Effeminate and Sneaky Eastern Orientals in many depictions of this period. I think Hoplite flirts with this idea, and the inclusion of Victor Davis Hanson in the bibliography nudges things in this direction I believe, but I also don’t think Berg completely buys in, which helps keep the game interesting.

Berg’s frequent insertions of little design and play notes, often tongue-in-cheek, also does a lot to endear me to his arguments. He is clearly having fun and knows the limitations of his medium and our own ability to understand history.

As someone who spent way too long studying medieval weaponry, I have so many opinions on how we understand the history of military technology. I believe that we are far too obsessed with the idea of new weapons replacing old ones, and the notion of one weapon “system” being superior to another in an elaborate rock, paper, scissors relationship. It can be tempting to try and seek out an “objective” way of measuring historical strategy. A core problem with trying to understand pre-modern warfare is that we often just don’t have that much material that describes the battles, and what we have is often frustratingly vague. For a modern battle we can often study exact troop movements and the fighting at specific positions, for ancient and medieval battles we do not have the luxury of this specificity.

This is something that historians, both popular and academic, have tried to find ways around, and an obsession with technology offers a potential solution. If we can create a hierarchy, or a complex relationship, between different “weapons systems” we can make arguments about what probably happened when people using these systems fought against each other even if we don’t have a description of that engagement. I am sympathetic to this goal, but I am also suspicious of it. It is far too easy to link together a chain of suppositions and “this probably happened” to create what feels like a logical conclusion, but which has no foundation in the historical record. History is also incredibly messy, and for every example that supports a position there is generally at least one that confounds it as well. On some level the past cannot be understood. None of us have ever fought as part of an ancient Greek phalanx, and we never will, and that experience will be forever alien and unknowable to us.

A problem I often see coming out of this process is the question “well why didn’t X just use Y weapon system, since it was obviously better? Were they just dumb?” This is an extreme case, but I also think it is a pretty natural question when you are being presented with a situation where a system seems to be objectively better than the others available at that time. It loses the nuance of history. People in the past were as rational as we are now, and they had more expertise in the warfare of their time than we ever will. If they were using a type of weapon, then there was a reason behind it. That’s not to say it was a good reason, even now we know that our society doesn’t always make good decisions. These factors can be lost when we distill a complex political and military culture down to just what weapon they happen to be using.

However, one of the challenges that game designers face that historians don’t is that they do kind of need to achieve a level of specificity that a historian can hand wave away. These hex and counter games demand a certain granularity to be playable as games, so the designer must make decisions about what happened, or was likely to have happened, without the ambiguity allowed to a book or article. They are also not the best system for examining wider cultural and political systems that might have a major impact on why a given army looked the way it did. But that doesn’t mean we should just hand wave away the arguments it might be making just because it is a game. These are worth taking seriously, and no work of art is exempt from analysis and criticism just because it is also meant to be fun.

I don’t really have a neat conclusion where I can say “GBoH good” or “GBoH bad”. It has its take on history and what was important in ancient battles. It is a position I am certainly skeptical of, and it doesn’t necessarily convince me that it is correct. It is not a fringe perspective, though, and I’m not prepared to say that it is invalid nor do I feel like I should criticize a ten year old game because it doesn’t incorporate the latest scholarship into the most nuanced picture imaginable of the ancient world. At the same time, I do want to flag that it is but one take and there are reasons to doubt that it is the best way to represent this period. I sometimes encounter the viewpoint that the more complex games are better representations of history, and GBoH, as one of the most complex ancient warfare games, must to some seem to be the most accurate. I think this is a fallacy and that we should hold the same skepticism that this is the best example of history as we would if this was a simple dudes-on-a-map dice chucker. I think even Berg would agree, maybe not that his interpretation could be wrong but that we must be prepared to see the flaws in the works of all designers no matter their prestige.

I am still not convinced that GBoH is a system where the juice is worth the squeeze. There are a lot of rules in this box and there is a lot to keep track of. When I play a wargame I’m looking for a good balance between playing the game and resolving the systems, and for me GBoH has too much resolving the system and not enough playing the game. Hoplite is a step in the right direction in terms of this balance, at least compared to SPQR (I can’t speak to the other thirteen volumes), but I’m not sure it’s a big enough step. I still spent lots of time in the rulebook, and even if I got faster and better at playing Hoplite it was never that fast. It has made me interested in giving Simple GBoH a shot, though. I have heard that this is an even more Berg take on the core system and pushes it closer to something like Men of Iron, my personal favorite Berg system. It is possible that Simple GBoH is the game that better strikes that balance for me, and I’m planning to try it next.

So, for the moment I don’t know how eagerly I will revisit GBoH, original flavor. I enjoyed my time with Hoplite, and I think if you are GBoH curious this is a great place to start. The slightly simpler rules and the smaller scale of the battles makes this about as approachable a game as a system this heavy will have. At the same time, when I look at the games on my shelf this is not going to be one that I am eager to pull out again – at least in its original form. There are just so many other games that I enjoy more and that are closer to my ideal ratio of systems to game. It is possible that Simple-GBoH will change my mind, stay tuned to find out, but for the moment I think I might be done with this set of rules at least.

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