To Make Georgia Howl!

Original operational system that give an important role to command and reaction moves. IMHO needs thorough plays.

Original operational system that give an important role to command and reaction moves. IMHO needs thorough plays.

Love the artwork on this series of games.

One of the better Rob Markham's design. He has designed many many games but they fall short in my book. His rule writing style is fiddling. He needs a good developer for his games actually. In "To Make Georgia Howl!", again there are a lot of small deatils on tactical level in an operational level game. They drag you on when you play. It makes the game somehow higher in realism level. But overall, they make the game slow to progress too. The map is excellent though, giving due regards to the period map. I like maps. This one really impresses me.

An impressive game in an unassuming package. Slightly less drab than Lee Invades the North, this is another installment in what is, out of the box (or envelope), probably the best operational ACW system out there, barring Hampton Newsome's grand tactical effort in At All Hazards. Much better than GCACW in terms of feeling and battles, much simpler and easier to digest rules than the Clash of Arms offerings. The command point system works very well at providing uncertainty about movement rates, the reaction mechanism keeps both players on their toes, and combat incorporates some effective detail without taking a lot of time. There are two caveats: First, it is possible to get anywhere from 0 to 4 command points for your army commander, and unlike Lee Invades the North, here the armies are smaller and tied more strongly to the railway line, and there is a great disparity in numbers. In any scenario, if the Confederates start things by rolling badly twice in a row, they are likely to be toast and you may just as well start again. Second, the Union has a massive superiority in cavalry, and as in Clash's Marching through Georgia, there is no rule here to keep them from streaming into the Confederate rear to cut the LOC and cause attrition in a way that they historically did not do. Fortunately, they cannot grab VP hexes, so they're not likely to to decide a scenario, but they are going to be a bigger pain than their historical counterparts.

I don't understand the comments on overly complex tactical decisions; choosing a combat option has been with us since AH's Caesar's Legions or longer and hardly qualifies as requiring major effort. (Also, there is only one joint combat round per turn, something that really makes sense at this scale and one would have expected more designers to follow it, so a bit of chrome in the combat is not a bad thing.)

The single-digit-turn scenarios are playable in a couple of hours, so quite playable, too. And there are a lot of them, so even if you don't progress to the campaign, you get a lot in this harmless-looking envelope.