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

 

T and I met for a game on Monday night, as is our tradition of long standing. We’ve been doing this most weeks since the middle of 2010, when my wife was sick in hospital for a couple of months, and it started as a way for T & his lovely wife P to keep an eye on my wellbeing and make sure I got at least one home cooked meal a week. Just like income tax, what began as a temporary measure responding to an extreme situation went on to become a permanent fixture that nobody questions anymore.

At T’s request, we played Freeman’s Farm 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019) again this week, and I went to his house (which goes some way to explaining the poor lighting in a couple of the photographs). He requested the British again. T said he wants to keep playing the British until he wins with them. For a while it looked like the night might be his, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The opening play.

One of the joys of Freeman’s Farm for me is the short set-up time. It really doesn’t take a lot of effort; no reading tiny starting-hex numbers on chits or referring constantly to an order of battle card. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, by the time one of us gets to the other’s place it’s getting up to 9:00pm, so our options to what to play are limited to what we can get through in two hours or less. Freeman’s Farm fits this description admirably and offers a diverting experience into the bargain.

The British always make the first move, and T opened with his Hessian mercenaries, a formidable bunch that consistently seem to give better than they take. This game was no different. Their first order saw them moved into their third position and attack Nixon’s formation, taking a block and reducing his morale. Riedesel struck twice more from that position before moving to his second position, overlooking Freeman’s Farm. Various of the Continental Army fired on the Third position but were unable to affect a casualty to blocks or morale.

Three of the five Colonial losses here were own goals.

The Colonials were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Nearly all my losses were own goals; I developed a talent for rolling double-ones on as few as four dice. I think overall I dismissed one more of my own unit blocks than I did the enemy’s. My artillery fired on that of the British battery, under the command of Phillips, twice, and twice it cost me a representative disc along with one of his. At that rate of exchange I may have been able to destroy the Union’s artillery formation, but it didn’t feel like I’d even be able to maintain that much luck, so I demurred.

Both of us made better use of the Tactics cards throughout the game. I was able to prop up Poor’s flagging morale with a Resupply (+2 to the moral of the ordered unit, but they cannot do anything that turn), while Fraser brought a whopping eight dice to bear on my beleaguered Learned formation, already down to two blocks, for the kill, using I know not which card, as I was too dazed and saddened to comprehend.

Hamilton and Nixon broken; Learned to follow shortly.

The game ran for it’s full, brutal fifteen rounds. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a pretty intense fifteen rounds. In the end, I’d lost two units (Learned and Nixon, my two extreme flanks) to T’s one (Hamilton, who succumbed to a failed Morale roll). As neither side met the required three formations destroyed, the game defaulted to a victory for the Americans.

Even with the set-up/pack-up time and some unrelated conversation between rounds, the whole exercise was completed within ninety minutes. The fact that such a relatively simple (though nuanced) game can still deliver such a satisfying experience is a testimony to the design.

The plan is to get the final (number 6) game of Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2019) done next week. I’ve started putting some notes together for the review, but I don’t want to complete that until we’ve had one last run at it, but I’ll be aiming to put that up by the beginning of the following week.