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.
