State of Play: Dawn’s Early Light: the War of 1812

 

 

So, my 6x6 project has taken another hit of late. My wife’s mother was in hospital for a time, and has now changed her living arrangements. This has entailed a lot of people (immediate family, including yours truly) putting a lot of time and effort into ensuring as smooth a transition into this situational change as possible. This is the primary reason for the dearth of blog-posts from this end in the last week and some. She's doing a lot better now, I'm happy to report.

Added to this was T having to skip not one, but two Monday night games due to having just got back from a work trip to Europe, only to leave in a day or so for the States for another work-related conference. Good for the travel industry, but bad for my diminishing chances of actually completing even four of the six games I’d hoped to play six times each. I haven’t given up on this – I’m still going to try to finish the Napoleon 1806 and Fire and Stone cycles, and I’ll try to get at least another one to the table – but completing the challenge is going to prove too, er, challenging.

Anyway, for the first time in some weeks I have a relatively clear couple of days, and I have rather decided to make the most of them; I have a lot of gams I’ve been wanting to try out and my plan is to get at least one to the table every day this week. The key word here is “try”. No promises, but the times I do manage to get a game played, I’ll write something about it here. Don’t come looking for in-depth analysis; after one game or a couple of tutorial scenarios, you’ll just be getting my first impressions, but I’ll try to keep it interesting.

First cab off the rank was Dawn’s Early Light: the War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020). I’ve been fascinated by the War of 1812 since I read two books on the subject, back-to-back. I’ve been eyeing off the game for about a year. I hadn’t heard much in detail – most short reviews compare it favourably with For the People (GMT Games, 1998) and Washington’s War (GMT Games, 2010). What tipped me toward buying it was the ratings on BoardGameGeek; I’m inclined to take anything on BGG with a grain of salt, but of the folks who took the time to rate Dawn’s Early Light, nearly three-quarters rated it an eight or higher out of ten. So, I took the punt.

Dawn’s Early Light is a card-driven game (CDG), that plays out in a similar fashion to other CGDs, such as the aforementioned Washington’s War. The game is played out over eight full turns, with a truncated Prelude turn. In the Prelude turn, the twelve cards of the Prelude deck are dealt out to the play, who take turns, Americans first, to play a card for the Ops points (from one to four per card) or the Action. If the Action is solely usable by the other side, they will play the action out, but the active player gets to decide if their antagonist does their action before or after they’ve played their Ops-fed actions. So far, so familiar. But the interesting stuff happens out of the gate. IN a regular turn, each player will play through the eight cards in their hand. In the Prelude turn, only four of the six held cards are played. The other two cards are retained as the foundation of the players’ initial eight card hands, while the discarded cards are shuffled right back into the 1812 deck. At the end of the fourth round, the smaller 1814 deck is shuffled into the remaining draw deck, and play continues until the last card of both player’s hands have been played.

There is also a three-tier Social Discourse track, covering the Diplomatic and economic spheres of the conflict and the public opinion among the belligerents' civilian populations. working up the tracks offer some advantages through the course of the game. Various events allow you to increase your influence on one or more of the tracks, or to reduce the influence of your opponent.      

Dawn’s Early Light is a straight-up CDG. It walks, flies and quacks like a CDG. I that sense, there aren’t any surprises here. What makes the game interesting is the historical event it’s modelling. The War of 1812 – referred to at the time as Mr Madison’s War – was a protracted period of hostilities that, for the most part, was a fairly low-ley event compared to the continental conflicts of thirty years prior and fifty years after, but when it ran hot, it did spectacularly so.

Land combat is conducted simply and organically in Dawn’s Early Light, and is inevitably the result of other actions. If you conduct a move action and your guys happen to stop where the other player’s forces are already, they fight. The British player can also prevail upon the Indians to conduct raids against American towns, or simply to fight alongside their Regulars and militia.

Naval combat on the high seas is abstracted to Blockade and Privateering actions, and control of the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes are reduced to a series of control markers land combat resolution is a much simpler affair than in Washington’s War. But the biggest shift from other comparable CDGs is the use of area movement (similar to, of all things, COIN games, with regions and significant cities). State boundaries are marked on the map (as are longitudinal and latitudinal references on the map-edges, which I thought was a nice touch), but the areas are defined by and large by the boundaries of the peoples native to the region. This works well from a game-design point of view, while acknowledging the prominent part the local Indians took in the ongoing hostilities between the Americans and the British.

I like to play a new game once of twice on my own before I try to introduce it to somebody else, but I always struggle a little with CDGs. Part-way through this game I realised I was playing quite cautiously. I wasn’t taking the kinds of bold chances I might against another player. This didn’t prevent me from getting a good feel for the game, but it did leave me wanting to have a go at it with a human opponent.

So, there’s a snapshot of Dawn’s Early Light. I’ve only scratched the surface here. I’ll come back to this after I’ve played it a few times and write a full review. There’s a lot to unpack with this one.