Fort Night - Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis AAR

Like I said in the recent Sekigahara post, I've been on a bit of a tear recently in regards to board games. While they haven't replaced my miniature wargaming hobby, they're a great supplement, offering experiences unlike those of pushing little toy soldiers across the table. 

GMT Games has been my focus recently, since they offer a wide variety of themes and designers that cater to a vast swathe of player types - everything from dense, multi-hour games that cover entire wars, to short, intense games that can be enjoyed in just a half hour.

The newly released Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis falls in the later category. Sam and I managed to play our first game in about an hour, but that was mostly due to having to explain the game rules and a mid-game break to talk to a few drop-ins. I'm sure that playing time will decrease drastically when we break it out again.

Fort Sumter is, as the box shows, a card-driven game in which two players take the roles of the Unionists and Secessionists in the last few moment of peace before the outbreak of the Civil War. Both sides wish to control various aspects of the United States - Secessionist, Political, Public, and Armaments - without escalating too quickly and creating public sympathy for the other side.

You can check out the game's BoardGameGeek page for better reviews than I can offer.

However, I do have to mention the rulebook and playbook for the game. The rulebook is concise - only 8 pages long, and one of those pages is the cover and table of contents - but it's colorful and easy to read.

The playbook, on the other hand, is fantastic. It presents the first round of the game in a step-by-step instructional guide, with little boxes offering reasoning for each action taken, and then also covers the "Final Crisis" round, which differs in structure to the preceding three rounds, but is as vital, if not more so, for victory.

It then presents a short history of the Secession Crisis, along with citations of events, people, and places to each of the 48 strategy cards. These strategy cards are then covered in depth. Finally, the playbook ends with design notes and strategy tips.

I should note that Sekigahara also has a Historical and Design Notes section of its rulebook, although it's not as in depth. If this is the norm for games from GMT (again, these are my only two experiences with their products), then I look forward to buying and learning more! It goes a long way in adding to the theme of the game.

The board at the start of the game begins nice and orderly, with neither playing having any Political Capital tokens on the table. As each round progresses, however, more tokens are removed from the Crisis Track, and the friction between the Unionists and Secessionists escalates.

Doing so is detrimental, as it allows the player who hasn't breached further into the Crisis Track to either influence the board with the Peace Commissoner token (who prevents the addition or removal of tokens from the space on the board where it has been placed) or even the loss of a Victory Point for reaching the Final Crisis stage too early.

For our first game, Sam chose to play as the Secessionists, while I was the Unionists.

Interestingly, the deck of Strategy Cards is actually asymmetrical. Both sides have equal opportunities to take the Political and Armaments spaces; however, the Secessionists are weighted towards the Secessions spaces (duh) and the Unionists are weighted towards the Public Opinion spaces. Control isn't guaranteed, but it's an uphill fight to control these spaces without the proper events on cards.

While I had intended to take pictures after the end of each round, the game was so quick-paced that I only remembered at the end of the third round, so I held off until the end of the game instead.

I took an early lead in the first round by controlling the Political Crisis Dimension and completing my objective, but I'll attribute that to the fact that I had read the rules, and Sam had only my explanation before starting the game to go off of. The second round was more evenly matched, and Sam prevented me from scoring my objective in the third round.

Neither of us broke into the Final Crisis area of the Crisis Track, and we solidified our control of the Crisis Dimensions we could influence. Sam controlled the Secession and Armaments dimensions, scoring 3 points for the additional possession of Fort Sumter. I controlled the Political and Public Opinion dimensions, and scored 3 points as well, as I had a bonus point for ending the game with three or more tokens in my Token Pool than in Sam's.

The final score was 9-8, with the Unionists eking out a victory, representing the Union starting with a slight advantage in the upcoming conflict.

Like Sekigahara, this was a fun, flavorful game with the added bonus of being quick. I plan to bring it to the upcoming South Jersey Gamers Association meeting and hopefully get another game or two in.

The concept of fast playing, card-driven games of influence placement to represent rising tensions could work in so many other places, so I'm hoping to see GMT's stable of Lunchtime Games grow. The next title looks to be Flashpoint: South China Sea, which pits the United States against China's incursions into the global shipping lanes in the aforementioned area. I'm tempted to get in on the P500.

Block Warfare - Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan AAR

With the unfortunate closing of Half Day Studio's store, my chance to play miniature wargames has been drastically reduced. The store provided an excellent location for hobbyists to gather and play both spontaneously and planend games. 

Luckily, the local library has a room that the public can rent for free, which lets some of us still get together and game during the week. 

Sam and I have been focusing more on hex-and-counter and board wargames, which are easier to transport than miniature wargames - everything fits in a conveniently sized box, rather than having to transport foam trays of miniatures, boxes of terrain, rulebooks, tokens, etc. 

This past week's game was GMT's Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan, in which two players take the roles of leaders of the Western and Eastern armies, lead by Ishida Mitsunari and Tokugawa Ieyasu respectively. 

While our forces are hidden from each other (players can see the relative strength of an army in how many blocks are at a location, but not the specific makeup), the game begins with certain armies in specific locations. This, however, is complicated by random draws from the player's reinforcement bags.

The goals are rather simple - if either of the armies' leaders is killed in combat, or if the regent in Kyoto is captured, then the game ends. Otherwise, players count up victory points for how many castles and resource points (large cities and capitals) they control at the end of seven weeks.

As Sam and I played, we began to notice and understand some of the game mechanics.

For example, our hands of cards consistently grew larger with each turn. Since units enter combat by playing cards of matching symbols, this meant battles started as small skirmishes, but then grew to larger and deadlier outright fights. However, it can be difficult to plan attacks, since half your hand is discarded at the end of each week, and you draw five more cards from the deck. So that carefully crafted hand of cards can shift from week to week.

Inversely, as our hands grew, our armies shrank. Apart from the blocks that start on the table, and the four randomly drawn blocks that begin in the reinforcement area, players only draw nine more blocks over the course of the game. As we fought, Sam and I realized that our reserves were rapidly dwindling.

As for the game itself, it seemed for a time that Sam had the upper hand (as the Ishida player). While I, the Tokugawa player, won the initiative for most of the game, a single week with Sam holding the initiative almost led to his victory. An ill-planned attack by the Maeda on a Western army saw the Tokugawa-aligned clan almost wiped out and their leader vulnerable to an overrun. The Date, who had been holding Shirakawa for most of the game, was attacked and shattered as I had no cards to ge.

(The above photo is modern Sekigahara, which I visited in 2017 during Geek Nation Tours' trip.)

However, I was able to claim victory just before Sam's remaining numbers could overwhelm my forces. During an attack, Sam revealed that Ishida was leading an army out of Kyoto to Kuwana, which had been the sight of constant battles between the two sides. Though Sam forced my army out of Kuwana, a follow up attack against Fukushima at Kiyosu ended poorly, leaving Ishida vulnerable. Tokugawa, who had been taking resource points along the Nakasendō Road, quickly marched his army to end up behind Ishida at Kyoto. Fukushima launched a counter attack, generating enough impact to beat Sam's force and cause two casualties, eliminating Ishida and ending the game.

Hopefully this gets out on the table often, as there's plenty of variation for a game with no dice. We noticed that there were still unit blocks left unused in our bags, so our forces in the next game could look much different than what we were working with.

I should also mention how fantastic this game looks. The map is beautiful, the art on the cards is eye-catching, and the blocks are easy to read from a quick glance.

We had a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to playing again.