Review: 1759: Siege of Quebec, Second Edition (solo game)

 

  

1759: Siege of Quebec (Worthington Publishing, 2022) was originally released in 2018. In 2022, a second edition of the game was released alongside two new additions to what is now Worthington’s Great Sieges series; 414BC: Siege of Syracuse (Worthington, 2022), and 1569: Siege of Malta (Worthington, 2022). Syracuse and Malta were each nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award (in the categories of Best Medieval Wargame and Best Gunpowder Wargame respectively). I wanted to review these in chronological order, and had fully intended to review Siege of Quebec much closer to the other two. For the three people who have been waiting for this, I apologise. For anyone else who is at all curious, my earlier reviews can be found at the links below:

414BC: Siege of Syracuse review

1569: Siege of Malta review

To my shame, I didn’t back the Kickstarter for the three games (in retrospect, not supporting this and not backing Worthington’s War of 1812 Campaigns trilogy (Worthington, 2019) were among my biggest KS-related regrets; I spent a lot more money trying to track these all down piecemeal, and I have yet to find a copy of War Along the Chesapeake at a price I’m willing to pay). I managed to acquire them the old-fashioned way, over the course of about a year. I bought Siege of Quebec first, and played it a lot. And lost a lot. I bought the other two on the strength of the satisfying experience Siege of Quebec delivered; Siege of Malta came next – at the time, Siege of Syracuse proved to be the most difficult to obtain, but I’m happy to report that since those dark days, all three games have been reprinted and, at time of writing, all three are still available from the publisher.

I should add that this review is based purely on my experience playing the game in its solo mode.  Even the first edition had a two-player mode, but I haven’t yet got around to trying it out on another human. When I do, I’ll write it up and post it here, but for now I’m happy to keep it a solitary pleasure.

Appearance

Siege of Quebec set the stylistic tone for Worthington’s the Great Sieges series. The board is a 17”x22” mounted map, and is an exercise in elegant simplicity. The main geographical elements relevant to the game featured, along with positions marked out for the generic blocks used for the British, French, and native forces. It also features a Morale ladder for tracking the state of the two sides’ morale, which is important. If one side’s moral falls to zero, that marks an automatic victory for the other side. While the colour pallet is muted generally, Quebec is still the most brightly-coloured of the three games’ boards. The red of the British blocks is duplicated in the template positions of the British troops on the board, while the pale blue of the first edition has given way to a soft white for the French units. The forests from which the farms and settlements were carved is represented by little silhouettes of trees in an appropriately forest-tone green, as are the three spaces designated for the Indian units. Coloured discs represent the British and French batteries, and blocks cut with a prow at one end mark the British naval detachment sent to support the British troops. The waterway of the St Lawrence River is represented in a duck-egg blue. The whole tableau, while quite schematic at first blush is pleasant and inviting, and clearly shows the game situation at a glance.

The gameboard, set up and two turns in.

Overall, the map is austere and practical; movement is conducted between preordained positions. As their forces are depleted, each side may transfer their units via a Move order, provided their plans are not frustrated by the enemy. Ship silhouettes appear at the lower and upper St Lawrence as well as place of safe anchorage further downstream. The British ships begin the game in the lower St Lawrence, and on a given command may traverse to the upper St Lawrence position, at which time troops may be moved (again by order, either chosen by the British player or as an event in the British deck if you’re playing the French) to the plain of Abraham to engage in the battle for Quebec.

The Morale Chart.

The playing pieces are simple elongated wooden blocks, painted in the primary colour of the related force, Red for the British and White for the French. One block from each side is used to keep tally on the Morale board. The game can be won or lost here. one or both sides will take a morale loss with each unit destroyed, and through some events or as the result of an order roll. 

British and French Order Books.

French Field Order Book, ready for play.

There are two Order Books (one each for the French and the British); these are bi-fold PACs with the seven orders you may choose from each turn. Each order has a choice of four tables to roll on for the order’s effectiveness depending on how the AI responds, which is printed on the representative non-player cards. The solitaire game is driven by a deck of cards, a deck each for the British or French bot-antagonist. All the information you need to play the game can be found either in the Order Book or on the cards. Two extra card decks are also included for the two-player version of the game. I won’t be addressing that mode of play here; I am keen to try this as a two-player game, so maybe some time in the future.

An imminent British victory.

The cards are where the game comes alive. Both decks are well laid out, each card containing a wealth of information relating to the game, as well as interesting historical notes relating to the card's action. As with the other games in the series, the cards are also illustrated with evocative artwork reflecting the era. 

Play

1759: Siege of Quebec is a simple game to play and easy to learn. That’s not to say it’s an easy game to play and simple to learn; The mechanisms that drive play are straight-forward enough to minimise confusion and allow the game an easy flow. The game revolves around the interaction between your chosen orders and the response from the newly presented bot card. In a game of regular-level difficulty, you will shuffle the 33-card deck for the opposing force, deal off 24 of these cards, and set out your order book. Each turn, you choose an order, which may involve attacking a particular location, or reinforcing your own locations (moving available troops), or, if you’re playing the British, getting your ships up to the upper St Lawrence River location to facilitate troop movement to the Plain of Abraham, where they can initiate battle with the French forces at Quebec. Then you will turn over the next card on the bot-deck. The card will have three lots of information; an Event, which will be resolved before anything else takes place (these can present a positive for the player, but they are more often potentially negative, or reliant on a particular situation or state to be in play. If the requirements for the event aren’t met, it is ignored. 

Hold order chosen. With the Counterattack counter order from the card drawn,
I'll need to roll high for a favourable result.

The next piece of information is the card’s counter-order; this is the response to the order you’ve chosen, and it will correspond to one of the tables below your chosen order. Then you roll a die to determine the result of our order, make the appropriate changes to the state of the board, and choose your next order. 

No ships in upper St Lawrence yet, so the event is ignored.

This description sounds very procedural – even to me, writing it down – but the short time scale of the game and the lack of any kind of bookkeeping means the procedural steps give way to a sense of pure narrative. When you get into the rhythm of game-play, the interplay of order and counter-order become a natural story unfolding on on the map before you. The events of the months of siege transpire in the space of an hour, leading to a definite win/lose conclusion. 

 

Appraisal

All the games in the Great Sieges series play very smoothly. They are quick to set up (after the first time or two), and you’ll have a result in an hour or so; I can usually get the box off the shelf, set it up, make a coffee, lose a game and come achingly close to winning another, and pack up again inside of two hours. The situation of the siege lends itself well to the shorter play, small footprint style of game that the Great Sieges series embodies. 

After playing through Siege of Quebec again a few times to refresh my thinking about the game,  I suspect that I've come back to this one being my favourite of the three. Both Syracuse and Malta have their charms, they each do some things differently and offer interesting situations, and are equally difficult to - I don't want to say "master," maybe conquer is a better word (mastery suggests there is a formula you can use to win most of the time; that is not the case here). It might be because the French and Indian War is of particular interest, or it may be because this was my introduction to the Great Sieges series. It's a very good introduction. I'd go as far as to say that this and the other Great Sieges games make for an excellent introduction to the more procedural style of solo wargames, especially for players less experienced in wargames generally. 

Things aren't going so well for the British...

Siege of Quebec is a tough gig for the British; in all the games I’ve played – well past three dozen by now – I’ve only won as the French, though I’ve come damn close a couple of times as the British. The French have the advantage to a point, as they only have to run down the clock until winter sets in (the end of the deck), and the British have to withdraw to their winter quarters. I should say, I've also lost as the French a lot more often than I've won. It’s this slim margin that makes it so enticing to have another run at the town as the British, the feeling that maybe this time we’ll get it over the line.

Whichever side you choose to champion, you are battling an implacable seemingly prescient foe. There is too much chance built into the bot, with a random selection from an oversize deck, and the shuffling of said deck, for any kind of programming to be at play, but with four possible counter-orders with each turn of a card, I swear there is a higher that 25% average for the counter order revealed to be the worst possible result for the order chosen, more in the order of 35% or more. Regular readers may have noticed that I'm prone to run down statistical rabbit-holes like this, so I’ll keep a record of my next half-dozen games and report back whether this feeling actually bears out.

Much of the appeal of this game, and the others in the series, is the time-frame; it seems we're all time-poor these days. But it's not simply that. Like Tawara 1943 (Worthington, 2021) the system packs so much game experience into such a short time-frame Oscar Wilde described a cigarette as the perfect kind of pleasure; “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” He could have been talking about Siege of Quebec.