Victory and Glory: The American Civil War Review – Grant Me Some Leeway

Everyone is busy playing Doom Eternal or Animal Crossing, but when I play a game, I want something weird. Something obscure. Something nobody has ever heard of. Perhaps a game with like 4 Steam reviews and a passing mention on Rock Paper Shotgun. As I browsed Steam one evening, I found Victory and Glory: The American Civil War, which met all those criteria.

Victory and Glory: The American Civil War
Developer: Forced March Games, Electric Games
Price: $29.99
Platform: PC

Yes, I am your dad, and yes, we are going to have a great family vacation at Civil War battlefields and we are going to bond SO HARD so just quit complaining and put down that iPhone, kid. We gonna learn today.

What could be more fun than an obscure Civil War game? Victory and Glory: The American Civil War is actually based on an obscure Civil War board game called Victory and Glory: Napoleon (which already has an electronic version on Steam!). As far as I can tell, the Steam game is a pretty accurate translation of the board game: you move fleets and armies around a very nice gameboard-style play space (with a breakout area for the chunk of Virginia around Richmond, so exciting!). Tactical battles take place on a different style of game board, lining up various regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery across from each other on a terrain map, setting them up in fortifications, and then seeing who wins, who dies, and who got their goddamn general shot out from them again I swear to Christ these guys have a death wish.

It sounds complicated. Perhaps you’re dreading things like “the tutorial is a bunch of Youtube videos from the developer that take 30 minutes each and don’t even get to the actual game itself until the second video.” That is because you are weak, your crops will fail, and you will not survive the winter frost. Come on, kid, this is history, can’t we have a nice family vacation for once?!

It’s actually pretty simple. This is one of the areas where the designers use the power of the computer to handle all the weird dice rolls and modifiers for things like terrain, troop quality, troop firepower, and so forth and so on. Turns go something like this: You move your naval units around, you play event cards that can do everything from giving you new units to retiring enemy generals to giving you more money in the treasury, and then you see how many activation points you have to move your armies around. (Exactly when you get event cards and such varies by difficulty level, but the rhythm is the same). You also handle the recruitment of units like infantry, artillery, and cavalry, naval units, and even expanding your nation’s rail capacity.

It sounds as compelling as that trip I’m dragging you on to go see Antietam but it’s actually a lot of fun put that phone down and pay attention because you never have quite enough points to do what you want, so it’s essentially a game of managing your resources, planning, and swearing when things go awry. Unit movement and mobility pretty much depend on railroads to shuffle armies from theater to theater, but you never have enough rail activation points to do what you want. Likewise, if you want to move your armies on foot, attack, or retreat, you only have so many unit activation points, and everything costs activation points.

That’s right, it’s the most sexy game of all: logistics. You might be planning a big offensive in the East, but then the AI moves thousands of angry Yankees into middle Tennessee. You can carry on that big offensive and hope your meager forces can hold them while you smash the Army of the Potomac…or you can move that army to Tennessee and hope it’s not just a feint. This also includes things like new units: those two new artillery regiments that appeared in Texas would be mighty useful, but it’s going to take forever to get them to a railhead. On the other hand, your artillery got wiped out last fall at Petersburg…

This kind of balance between immediate returns and potentially longer long-term rewards drives every decision in the game. Building things to power your economy is a gamble when your army is weak but may make it stronger long-term. Expanding rail capacity will help move troops around, but what good is that when you don’t have troops to begin with? Buying things to help your economy will provide more money for troops in the long-term, but when the Rebs are advancing on Washington D.C., there may not be a long term.

I don’t care how your mother and JEFF do it, they aren’t here. We are having a nice, educational vacation here at scenic Vicksburg. Look at those cannons, wow! Can you imagine marching…hungry? WE JUST ATE THREE HOURS AGO! If you’re hungry, think about the poor guys stuck here eating…look, I think we have some granola bars in the car.

Battles take place on a map with little icons for wooded areas, cities, fortifications, and other terrain features. Both sides line up, assign generals to different flanks, and the battle begins. This is another area where playing the PC version beats the board game because it does take into account things like terrain modifiers, levels of cover, general quality, and even what your boys are armed with (smoothbore muskets? Rifled muskets? Repeating rifles?), but all you need to concern yourself with is how good the attack will be and how much damage you’ll do. I feel like it really does capture the feel of most Civil War battles since it tends to become feeding troops into the meat grinder and pushing forward until the enemy flank gives way, which leads to a pursuit phase where you can do more damage if your troops aren’t exhausted. There’s a lot of whirring and grinding in the background, but it’s pretty easy to figure out things like “Don’t charge exhausted cavalry against a fort filled with veteran troops,” even if you are unfamiliar with wargames.

The question for me for any wargame is “can this produce a recognizable simulation of the war in question?” In this case, yes. My very first campaign as the Confederacy–I suggest you start with the CSA as there are a lot fewer resources, which means you’ll lose, but you’ll get a grasp of the systems–I managed an aggressive stab that captured St. Louis. My strategy became to keep the Army in Virginia tying up the union defending Washington, and then use a stab up through Tennessee and into Kentucky as a great hinge, turning Virginia into an anvil with the Western forces as the hammer. A VERY recognizable strategy. The difference is this time Sterling Price was semi-competent and the CSA did pretty well. I managed to take Chicago and begin grinding forward from Tennesee, forcing the Union to shift troops to the west, which meant I could sally a small army from Richmond and annoy them in the east.

Of course, there are bugs and quality of life things that aren’t there in big-name titles. Some work could be done making units a little more visible or intuitive. Tooltips for immediate feedback would be nice. And it doesn’t have autosave, which means you should save every few turns, OLD SCHOOL STYLE.

But both sides play differently enough to change up the experience–the usual “the Confederacy has few resources but good troops and generals” vs. “the Union has a ton of resources but bumbling idiots prone to catching a bullet–and the AI plays a solid game without too much obvious cheating. Yes, there’s no multiplayer, just you and the computer going head to head in the Tennessee mountains, a vicious battle for control of the major rail pathways…

UGH FINE we can stop at Gamestop on the way back to the hotel if you just be quiet for a few minutes.

As I was saying, there’s no PBEM and no multiplayer. I didn’t even get a cheevo. I LOVED IT. Finally playing board games without having to deal with other people’s schedules, lives, kids, and not wanting to play obscure board games about the Civil War.

The Final Word
Surprisingly playable and fun for a reasonably complicated wargame.

– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great