State of Play: The French and Indian War (1-6)

 

 

With T returning to Adelaide, and spending the following week recovering from jet-lag and return-to-work shock, we finally caught up again for a game on Monday night. I wanted to mix it up a bit – and show a little more progress on my 6x6 list in the next Quarterly Progress Report, so I brought along French and Indian War 1757-1759 (Worthington Publishing, 2020). This is a game I wanted to back on Kickstarter, but begged off due to other demands. I finally managed to grab a copy about eighteen months ago, and I’d pulled it out before and pushed some blocks around but this was my first live-fire exercise with the game.

French and Indian War 1757-1759 is a concealed-information block game of three year-long rounds of eleven or twelve rounds each. Movement is point-to-point between the French and British forts and settlements around the Great Lakes region. It's a relatively simple game to grasp and play, but nonetheless presents a deep strategic puzzle. The British have superior numbers, particularly in regular units (and higher reinforcement levels in the second and third years of the conflict), but the onus is on them to win the game by scoring ten more victory points than their counterparts by the end of the third year, or victory defaults to the French. Combat can be a slow grind, but it does capture some of the nuance of the war-making of the period.

Initial historical set-up. Guidelines are included for free set-up.

In our first outing with French and Indian War, we were both still finding our feet. I gave T the British (he instinctively gravitates to the French in Commands and Colors: Napoleonics – Napoleon complex?) being the superior force. We exchanged blows and jockeyed for advantage, but the terrain and supply limitations proved too much of a hinderance for either side to make a decisive push. By 1759, best hope as the French was to run down the clock, and we called it four turns before the end of the game when we agreed there was no way for the British, who were ahead in points, could close the gap for a ten-point supremacy. Marginal French victory.

Militia (crossed muskets) and Irregular (crossed tomahawks) units.

Then we noticed that it was half-past-eleven, and we’d been slugging it out for two-and-a-half hours and neither of us had noticed, so focussed were we on the game. If that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.