Move On Your Works

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Initial Impressions - Seven Days Battles by Grant Wylie

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Initial Impressions - Seven Days Battles by Grant Wylie

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.

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Podcast: Seven Pines; or, Fair Oaks by Amabel Holland

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Podcast: Seven Pines; or, Fair Oaks by Amabel Holland

For episode four of ongoing podcast series We Intend to Move on Your Works, I am once again joined by Alexandre and Pierre as we discuss Amabel Holland’s interesting hex and counter take on the battle alternatively known as Seven Pines or Fair Oaks Station. This was a great discussion and well worth your time!

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Review - Seven Pines or Fair Oaks by Amabel Holland

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Review - Seven Pines or Fair Oaks by Amabel Holland

My ongoing exploration of American Civil War games brought me back to hex and counter after a run of operational games and I was pretty excited to be here. I love operational games, but there is something just so satisfying about a tactical hex and counter game even as someone who generally doesn’t find battles to be the most interesting lens through which to view military history. I was also excited to be playing another Amabel Holland game. She is always an interesting designer even as I’ve not always loved her games. However, I adored Great Heathen Army, so more hex and counter from her was clearly something to look forward to.

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The Confederate Battle Flag by John Coski

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The Confederate Battle Flag by John Coski

I want to be positive to begin with, because I will say some unkind things in this review. This was a deeply frustrating book to read and at times a labor just to get to the very end. However, I learned a lot about the history of the Confederate flag from reading it. I feel much more informed about its history and better qualified to examine its role in American society than I was before I read it. In that regard this book was an unqualified success - I got out of the experience what I most hoped to when I started reading it. However, getting there was something of a chore. I don’t mean in terms of the writing, which is largely fine even if it can drag at times with the inclusion of too many case studies with too much superfluous detail. Instead, it is in Coski’s analysis of the history of the flag that the problems begin to arise.

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Half of a Review of The Late Unpleasantness by Steve Ruwe

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Half of a Review of The Late Unpleasantness by Steve Ruwe

I want to open with two confessions straight out of the gate. The first is that I have only played half of Steve Ruwe’s The Late Unpleasantness: Two Campaigns to Take Richmond. As the sub-title implies, there are two games in this box and I have only played one of them. The two campaigns are If It Takes All Summer, on Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign, and The Gates of Richmond, on the Seven Days Battles in 1862. I have only played the latter, but I feel like my experience with it is sufficient to review that part of the game even if this is not a review of the whole box. My second confession is this: I didn’t really enjoy The Gates of Richmond. Usually games I don’t enjoy I don’t write about, because expressing my lack of enjoyment isn’t very much fun for me and this blog is first and foremost a hobby. However, in this case I had what I felt were sufficient thoughts on the game and its representation of history that it would be worth writing about it, even if in the end I don’t think the game itself is very interesting to play.

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Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule

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Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule

“History is dangerous.”

This refrain repeats throughout Ty Seidule’s autobiographical history of the Lost Cause and it is a fitting chorus. The Lost Cause is testament to how dangerous history, or in this case the distortion and denial thereof, can be. The Lost Cause has long since collapsed within the halls of academia but it continues to hold significant sway in popular memory and there’s plenty of work to be done still to fight against its sway in politics and wider American society. While plenty of authors have broken down the specifics of the distortions and horrors of the Lost Cause, what Dr. Seidule does in this book is a more personal account of neo-Confederate mythmaking. I found this to be a highly valuable approach, but I have to acknowledge that it may not work for everyone. Still, I think this is a valuable addition to the corpus of literature combating the Lost Cause in the 21st century.

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

I am a scion of the Great Commonwealth of Virginia, the Old Dominion, and the son of an avowed Civil War buff so you can probably imagine that my childhood featured a lot of information about the American Civil War. In School I didn’t learn any history after 1865 until I was fourteen. The period between Jamestown and the end of the Civil War was the high point of Virginian hegemony and the school system was perfectly happy to dwell within that temporal space for as long as possible. During my childhood I was frequently taken to battlefields to play - I’ve been to Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Gettysburg, and many smaller sites more times than I can count. I even have a favourite obscure American Civil War site (it’s the Confederate Breastworks in West Augusta County, Virginia - although more for its scenic views and lovely hiking trail than its historical importance). Few historical events loomed as large in my life as the American Civil War and this has given me a complicated relationship with it.

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First Impressions: Shenandoah: Jackson's Valley Campaign by Tom Dalgliesh and Gary Selkirk

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First Impressions: Shenandoah: Jackson's Valley Campaign by Tom Dalgliesh and Gary Selkirk

I love block games. Someday I will maybe be able to fully articulate why the simple fog of war and tactile satisfaction of blocks make my brain so happy, but today isn’t that day. Let’s just start from a position that I love them. However, I do not love them all equally and there are even some block games that I don’t like very much. I have previously written about card driven Columbia block games, most of which I really enjoyed and continue to enjoy, but I had never played a game from Columbia that used any other activation system. I must confess that I didn’t even know how such a thing might work. When I set out to make a study of American Civil War games I knew I had to include a block game and I also wanted to play something on Jackson’s Valley Campaign, so Shenandoah seemed like a perfect fit for the project. It also served as an ideal palette cleanser for myself and Pierre after our lengthy game of Manassas - we loved that game, but playing something that could be finished in a couple of hours had a great attraction after that marathon of a game. I didn’t expect a whole lot from Shenandoah, I was just looking for something light and easy to play, but I was really impressed with the experience it offered. I think people have been sleeping on this one, this is a great little block game!

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Review - Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

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Review - Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

The historiography of the American Civil War is challenging, to put it lightly. A major event like a civil war, especially one on this scale, is almost always a recipe for a complex and controversial historical memory as the violent reckoning echoes through subsequent generations. The history of the American Civil War is even more fraught than most and perhaps the single greatest rebuttal to the notion “History is Written by the Victors”. For a century after the war’s conclusion in 1865 the history of the war was primarily written by the losers - ex-Confederates and their sympathisers crafted a narrative known as The Lost Cause that largely shaped the public understanding of the conflict. Flying in the face of basic fact this narrative discarded vast amounts of evidence in favour of a story that made the Confederacy sympathetic, a nation suffering for its freedoms against an oppressive industrialist neighbour. The Lost Cause had counternarratives that pushed back against it but it really took until the mid-20th century for its status to start cracking. Even still, though, it is still hanging on with surprising tenacity. Attending school in central Virginia in the early 2000s I was taught Lost Cause myths as history, although thankfully a better teacher later undid that work.

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Searching for Black Confederates by Kevin M. Levin

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Searching for Black Confederates by Kevin M. Levin

I had heard good things about Kevin Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates from people whose knowledge of the American Civil War and its legacy I hold in high regard, so I was very excited this past December to finally read it. I grew up in central Virginia and the memory of the Civil War was never particularly far away. I remember being taught Lost Cause myths about the Civil War’s origins in school (and then later, thankfully, being un-taught them by a better teacher). I even remember coming across the Black Confederates myth a few times on the Internet in my 20s. That said, while I have strong cultural association with the American Civil War and have picked up a lot of details about it through my childhood and early adulthood, I am not very well read in terms of books on the subject. I read Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant a few years ago and probably read one or two entry level histories in school years ago, but I would not consider myself an expert. In particular, one area I’m hoping to learn more about is the Lost Cause myth and its structure. I know the broad outline, but I’d like to fill in the details and that’s where books like Searching for Black Confederates come in.