Last Full Measure: The Battle of Gettysburg

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This is a preliminary evaluation based solely on the Rummel Farm training scenario / mini-game included with Gettysburg. I figured that it made sense to test this print-and-play system on a game that didn't take much printing before I started playing. So far, so good! It took just a few minutes to print the two 8.5x11 map sheets, the player aid sheets, and the one sheet each of units and markers. The designer's web site has instructions for easy assembly of the double sided pieces. I used an even simpler method, contact paper on old tablet backs with my miniaturist wife doing the alignment of the second side. Three cheers to the wife, the pieces were done in half an hour too. Another hour and I'd read the 8 page rules and was playing. This was WAY easier than I thought it was going to be.

The Rummel Farm mini-game makes a good training scenario as it plays out in an evening and lets you work through both cavalry charges and normal combat (both mounted and dismounted). All are easy, particularly with the detailed player aid sheets. Ditto for movement. I found the rules to be quite clear, although they're terse enough that it helps if you've played at least one other Civil War game on roughly this scale before, just for context.

I liked the system, it's simple, but captures the essence of Civil War era command-and-control well. The player order in the IGO-UGO turn sequence change from turn to turn, with superior Army commanders more often getting to go first. The major innovation in this series is the use of regimental pieces to act as a "cloud of steps" in a multi-hex brigade. This saves a load of paperwork and facing rules (MMP CWR and CWB series anyone?) while still letting brigades have facing by how they align their regiments across the map. Another simplification is than instead of tracking orders on paper with randomized order acceptance, you just go straight to the randomized command status. Units not in command can move, but can't (except for cavalry charges) fight. The combat systems for cavalry charges, artillery and normal combat all make sense in the period context and are easy to implement.

Last Full Measure doesn't break down into a regimental series, because the regiments of a brigade have to stay in physical contact with each other. Based on the wild cavalry clash at Rummel Farm, it seems to work. Update: I upped my rating half a point after playing the larger, corps-scale, Cross Key and Port Republic battles. The system really works at scale. Next winter, as the bleak weather sets in, Gettysburg and some of the other large games become quite tempting. I can see spending a morning chopping pieces with my paper cutter to save the $200 that a commercial game the size of Gettysburg or Shiloh would cost at this scale. Note: Plexiglas is a HUGE help if you're piecing the maps together 8.5x11 inches at a time. So is masking tape holding the map sections together from behind. Larger maps fold up nicely when taped in 11 by whatever strips. Everything goes in a manila folder and you've got yourself a "portfolio game".

Speaking of the maps, I was quite taken with the clean artwork and comfortably large hexes. Really first rate. The pieces are quite readable, despite their 1/2 inch. My only gripe is that some of the printing on the player aid cards is a bit small. I should have printed them on 11x17 rather than 8.5x11 paper.

As far as Rummel Farm goes as a mini-game, it's an interesting and fluid battle. The small map constrains maneuver a bit, but one could easily overcome that by printing more of the Gettysburg map from which it was taken.

Bottom line: Last Full Measure is a neat system for those wanting to take the paperwork and facing fiddling out of a brigade-scale Civil War game. Indeed, the flexibility that comes from being able to use a string of regiments as spline to fit to curving terrain feels a lot more right than the rigid linearity of more traditional facing-based approaches.

The first game in the Last Full Measure series