State of Play: Freeman’s Farm 1777 (first two-player game)

  

So, last week I was running late to T’s place after helping run a public lecture; this week T was running late coming here because of something work-related, so I thought better of trying to cram in our last game of Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2019) and maybe not enjoying it as much, and opted or a game I knew would take a shorter time to work through. Having just played it only a couple of days earlier and wanting to reinforce the learnings from that experience, I set up Freeman’s Farm 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019), A recent acquisition that already written about as a solo experience. I was curious to see how T approached it. Freeman’s Farm is not your father’s wargame. It’s novel without sliding into novelty, but if you’ve been raised on a diet of hex-and-counter games, it might be a shock to the system.

Initial set-up, British view.

I needn’t have worried. Five years ago, T might have struggled with the foreignness of the game, but he took to it quickly. After a couple of halting rounds, we were scooting through it. I didn’t note when we started, but I think, with the explanatory notes ahead of play, we were still done in about an hour-twenty. Fast play isn’t the only criteria I judge games by, but needs must.

In my innocence, I thought the two-player version of Freeman’s Farm would be a little less brutal. In the two player format, just as in the solo-mode, you roll a handful of dice, as directed by the orders card for that particular unit. The difference is, when playing solo, a single six will be a hit on your target, a four or a five will cost them a morale point, and a single rolled one is an own-goal; you’ll say goodbye to one of your blocks. In the two-player version, the rolls are the same, but you’re looking for doubles. It sounds hard – how often are doubles going to come up on four or five dice, right? Well, I haven’t done the math on this, but more often than I would have expected.

Bad rolls happen.

I’m aware I keep comparing Freeman's Farm to Chancellorsville 1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2020), but it bares mentioning; in regard to combat, Chancellorsville is a slow grind, with corps butting up against each other and taking their licks. You have to spend your activations jockeying to engage the enemy in a favourable circumstance, then engage and pray for rain.  For all that, the game plays out quite quickly, about an hour-and-a-half for a solo game. In Freeman’s Farm, there’s less jockeying; the game puts you at the front of the action and hands you two ways to lose your units; by having you opponent hammer you repeatedly until you have no blocks left to represent your intact unit on the board, or to have your opponent hammer you repeatedly until you fail a morale test and your troops stalk off in disgust over your poor leadership and resource-husbanding skills.

One thing I left out of our game, at first accidentally, then on purpose, was the use of Momentum points to buy off Morale losses. It slipped my mind when I was briefly explaining the game mechanics. I remembered about eight activations in, but I decided not to complicate things further at that point. We did both use our generals to try to rescue units from Morale-roll failures, sometimes even successfully. We both bought a lot of tactics cards. T was better at using them at the opportune moment than me; I finished the game with maybe half a dozen unused Tactics cards staring up at me, although I did manage to save a unit in the last third of the game with a card that allowed me to change the face of one die after the opponent’s roll, turning a five into a one and costing Fraser a block. With more game-time I think we’ll both get better at using these.

Poor's regiment in the crucible.

At the end of the game – when both our orders decks had been exhausted – I had to revisit the victory conditions.  Either side wins a sudden death victory if three of the opponent’s formations are cleared from the board through block attrition and/or morale check failure. Technically, I had won the game two rounds earlier, with Hamilton’s unit’s breaking under the heat of battle (with his morale down to three points, it may have gone either way). I didn’t get off unscathed; Riedesel was a killing machine, and if he’d moved to his third position instead of trying to support Hamilton, then turned on Glover or Nixon, things may have gone differently.

At the end of a Monday night game, T and I will usually exchange a few words about the play of the game of a particularly good move or bad roll. The first thing T said at game’s completion was, “Can we play this again next week? I can see wat I did wrong and I want another go at it.” Which is pretty much what I’ve thought at the end of my first run at any Maurice Suckling game.