While arguably one of the most important battles of the American Civil War, the Seven Days Battles have not really ingrained themselves into our popular consciousness the same way battles like Chancellorsville or Gettysburg have. There are no doubt many factors that explain this, but I would hazard that one of them is that the Seven Days sits in an awkward middle between being more than one battle but not quite a full campaign. From a game perspective it also presents an interesting challenge to design for. The Seven Days, as the name suggests, was a series of battles covering a week of combat. During the Seven Days, Robert E. Lee, recently appointed to command of the Army of Northern Virginia, lead a series of aggressive attacks on the Union army of George McClellan which was stationed just outside of Richmond. Lee’s army suffered horrific casualties, but, thanks in part to McClellan’s own fears about Confederate military strength, it was able to drive the Union army back to the coast of Virginia. My initial expectation was that the battle would work best at an operational scale, which lead to me playing The Late Unpleasantness, which I found… underwhelming. Now I’m taking my second shot at the Seven Days Battles but this time as a hex and counter tactical game thanks to the latest entry in Worthington’s Civil War Brigade Battle Series.
The initial Union starting position, guarding Beaver Dam Creek. Every unit the Confederacy can get across this Creek will be worth victory points at the end of the game, but crossing it is easier said than done!
For more of my thoughts on the challenges of gaming the Seven Days and the Peninsula Campaign more broadly, I recommend listening to the episode of We Intend to Move on Your Works on The Late Unpleasantness:
Worthington Publishing provided me with a complimentary review copy of The Seven Days Battles
The Civil War Brigade Battle Series is a simple hex and counter game with only eight pages of rules, none of which are very complicated. Its titles cover several battles, including Antietam, Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, and the Seven Days, of course. Each game includes a few adjustments to the rules to fit the battle. The Seven Days notably includes rules covering Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s habit of falling asleep during the battles as well as instructions to ignore rules around building breastworks as well as a few other niche rules.
I have a history of being very annoyed by games that use a separate series and individual game rulebook. I dislike learning a bunch of rules that may not be relevant to the game I’m about to play. I also find it very frustrating to have two places to look up rules, especially if there is a chance that looking up a given rule in one book will give me a wrong answer because it has been significantly amended in the other. While I’m not going to say that Seven Days Battles made me see the error of my ways, I will say that it is on the more harmless end of the spectrum as far as these things go. For the most part the individual game rules just add a few more elements to consider, not more than one or two rules, and tell me to ignore one phase in the sequence of play. It’s small enough that I can easily keep it in my head, and if I do need to reference it the rules are largely confined to just one page of the scenario booklet.
The Confederates arrive! AP Hill attempts a flanking maneuver to the north while the rest of the army masses to the south to try and punch through the stretched Union lines. Slocum in the far east can only come to their support once the Confederates start crossing the river.
Enough about the rulebooks, though, let’s talk system! This is a system first and foremost built for attrition. Each turn you will feel like you are feeding soldiers into a meat grinder. Almost every CRT result will cause at least one step loss and units can have upward of thirty or more steps. While attrition is high, the elimination of units is comparatively rare – as mentioned they can have a lot of steps so while you will consistently be dealing damage there is also a lot of capacity to absorb that damage. Each step loss is also a victory point, so this attrition is in many ways the path to victory. One thing I really like about this system is that the CRT is effectively one sided, meaning that you will never experience a negative result when attacking. The worst that you can suffer is a “no result”. This is compensated for by the fact that in the combat phase the defender, i.e. the non-phasing player, gets to resolve an entire round of combat first, making every attack they can, before the attacker goes. So, you must face a withering barrage of enemy fire before launching your own attacks.
This enemy barrage is made significantly more worrying thanks to the game’s morale rules. Any time your opponent rolls a morale result on the CRT or, more frequently, any time a unit suffers a step loss you must test for morale. This is a relatively simple process, you roll a d10 and compare it to the unit’s morale status. Units can have morale values of 5, 7, or 9 and a friendly general can boost that morale by one to a maximum of 9 – a roll of a 10 is always a failure. A routed unit retreats three hexes and forces any friendly unit it passes over to make their own morale check, potentially causing a cascade effect. The morale values are high enough that most units will not flee when attacked, but when combat frequently inflicts step losses it is also likely that most units will rout at least once in a game. Thankfully rallying them is easy – at the end of your turn each routed unit makes another morale test and if they pass you remove the routed marker, and they can act normally next turn. This is relatively forgiving but also injects a much-needed element of chaos into the game. The board state is ever shifting and from turn to turn it is challenging to predict exactly what the map will look like.
The first Confederate assault meets with mixed results - several units are routed and the Union is attempting something of a flanking maneuver of their own. Up north AP Hill is getting bogged down in the woods.
One thing that really impressed me in my first two games of Seven Days Battles was how such a simple set of rules managed to evoke the broader narrative of these battles. To me this is the gold standard goal for any wargame: to conjure up the historical events with only a minimum of rules acting as guidance. In both of my games the Confederacy launched large, costly assaults on the Union position. Slowly, they gained ground, the Union falling back inch by inch as they were overwhelmed, but the Confederacy suffering far greater losses in the process. This roughly mirrored how these battles went – they were very costly for the Confederacy but thanks in part to their aggression and Union General McClellan’s own paranoia the Army of the Potomac slowly fell back to the Virginia coast, ending the Peninsula Campaign. While I only played the first two battle scenarios, I really felt this narrative in my games.
While the games unfolded in a manner very evocative of the Seven Days, I’m less certain about the overall win conditions. The first scenario, Beaver Dam Creek, was excellent. It was very close, only a few VPs separating the two sides. Had the Confederacy been able to get just a few more units across the creek before nightfall they would have won. The second battle, Gaines Mill, felt a little off to me, at least to my initial impression. The VPs available to the Confederacy for taking ground were not numerous and required them to overrun the Union position nearly completely. I still think the narrative of the game experience was very enjoyable, but that the game ended in a decisive Union victory while their position as in such terrible shape felt a little off. It may just be a result of the scale the game is at – the Confederacy winning a pyrrhic victory would make more sense as a defeat in a broader narrative including multiple battles than as just a single snapshot that I was playing. For this reason, I’m very curious to try the scenario that combines the two battles using the two boards the game comes with. I even wonder if it is possible to link all the scenarios together into an enormous four-day battle – Seven Days comes with two double sided boards so there is plenty of potential there. I’m not sure I could subject someone else to playing through that with me, but so far all of my games have been solitaire and I think it’s a good system for solitaire play. The chaos of the dice keeps things unpredictable and there is no hidden information.
The next Confederate assault achieved better results and they have secured a toe hold across the creek. General “slow-come” is living up to his nickname and while on the move likely won’t arrive in time to make a difference. The Confederates are lagging on attrition but making progress now, will it be enough?
It should be noted that this is not a particularly short game. I would estimate that the single board scenarios each take a couple of hours and the larger two map battles could easily take you an entire afternoon to finish. With a system this simple and games that long you can expect a certain level of repetition. Each turn sees a lot of combats and while they are thankfully quick to resolve some players may not enjoy all this dice rolling. I really enjoyed watching how the battles unfolded over the course of days, I just left the game set up and played a turn now and then when I had some free time, but I could see some people growing impatient with it after a couple of turns. This is a light system, but these are not quick scenarios, don’t expect a quick playing lunchtime game!
I must confess I’m also not entirely convinced by the “Stonewall” Jackson special rules. Jackson performed notoriously poorly during the Seven Days, frequently failing to attack, including on at least one occasion falling asleep instead of leading an attack. This is represented in the game with a simple die roll at the start of the turn that determines whether Jackson and his subordinates can move. His units can still engage in combat, assuming they are within range, but must remain in their current positions. This is simple, which I like, but also the entirely random element of die rolling makes it feel like it could really swing the outcome of a battle. In my play of Gaines Mill, Jackson spent most of the battle doing basically nothing, and it feels like that was probably the greatest contributing factor to the Union victory. I don’t mind things like this in a relatively short game, but if I’m playing for a few hours, I don’t quite like this level of total randomness. I would probably slightly prefer a more fixed randomness, such as a deck of cards, but I have also only played with it once (Jackson had not yet arrived for the events of the first scenario I played) so my opinion may change as I explore it more.
The final game state - the Confederates have managed to push several units across the Creek but it was not enough to overcome their staggering losses and they lose by only a handful of victory points. A very tight finish to an exciting game!
At its core this is a light system with a lot of dice rolling and a high potential for chaos. These are all things that I enjoy in my games but are very much not to everyone’s taste. I think I would like a little more complexity – not much but just a smidge – but as it is I have had plenty of fun with the Seven Days Battles and I intend to explore it more. I’m not sure if it will have a permanent spot on my shelf, and I am certain that I probably don’t need every game in the series, but I am already looking forward to getting it back to the table (as well as trying Antietam and Shiloh in the same series) so that’s a positive sign!