Stripped Down for Parts: Prairie Aflame: the Northwest Rebellion

  

  

In 1870, Canada was comprised of a handful of provinces set around the great lakes, the eastern Maritimes and British Columbia, stretching from the US border to the south up to the Alaskan Territory in the north, a great swarf of wilderness in-between, mostly owned by the Hudson River Company. In 1870, a portion of that wilderness was ceded to the Canadian national government, which had been established as a confederation only three years earlier. While the area west of Ontario was considered wilderness, it was far from uninhabited, with dozens of aboriginal tribes, a swelling number of white settlers and the Métis (white (mostly French)/native mixed race, who were by this time numerous enough to build their own communities and settlements).

Being essentially disenfranchised, their issues ignored by their national government, the people of what is now southern Manitoba gathered around a Métis leader named Louis Riel, who established a provisional government, the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia in 1869 after negotiatons with the existing Council of Assiniboia broke down. The Assembly then sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate with the federal government. The result of these negotiations was the creation of the Province of Manitoba. The Red River Expedition was then sent by the Canadian government to establish Canadian (read Imperial) dominion over the North-Western Territories and the newly formed Manitoba province. The expedition leader, Anglo-Irish Colonel Garnet Wolseley, sought to put down the rebellion that had erupted in the region, ignored the local authorities who had maintained law an order in the region since the 1820s, and tried to capture the traitor Riel, who fled across the border to the United States.

Fast forward to 1884, and the Métis and First Nations people of what would become Saskatchewan are being similarly ignored by the nation’s government. They invite Riel back to the territory to “once again lead the fight for recognition of the issues facing the Métis and their First Nations brethren.” The Canadian government ignored Riel’s letter writing campaign, but they could not ignore his provocation of a Métis provisional government created to seek terms with the Canadian authorities. Tensions ratcheted on both sides.

In March of 1885, a contingent of North-West Mounted Police was sent to the settlement of Duck Creek to confiscate any weapons found there. After they were rebuffed, the commander on the ground brought a combined force of NWMPs and local militia, only to be confronted with a similar number of armed Métis. Violence broke out and the NWMP commander withdrew after casualties nearing 25%. The Northwest Rebellion had begun.

Prairie Aflame! The Northwest Rebellion (Legion Wargames, 2020) is an operational-level game that recreates the conflict between the Canadian military, police and militia (Government) forces and the rebelling Métis and First Nations (Aboriginal) people. This is a conflict that I knew absolutely nothing about until my curiosity got the better of me and I purchased this game and subsequently went down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole. It all makes for interesting reading, but we’re here today to talk about the game. Prairie Aflame! was designed by Mark Woloshen and produced by Legion Wargames. It’s exactly a new game – it was released four years ago this year – But it’s new to me (I picked it up from a retailer one state over a few weeks before Christmas), and I suspect if you’re reading this that it will probably be new to you.

The box is the type of light-weight card box that anyone familiar with Legion games should be familiar with; fairly sturdy, and does the job, but don’t stack anything on top of it if you want it to stay a box. It’s about the same as the old SPI one-inch boxes in quality. But you don’t play the box, so quit your whining.

Legion games feature the most consistently cool covers in my opinion. As I understand it, Randy Lein, co-owner of Legion, does a lot of the graphical work for the games. He’s certainly credited on this one. The box-top features a painting of The Battle of Fish Creek by artist and militia member Fred Curzon.

The box back Gives us a taste of what’s inside, with a reproduction of the entire map and sample counters reproduced at roughly actual size. It also informs us that the Unit size is roughly fifty men to a Strength Point (company strength for the time, we’ll come back to this later), the map scale is eleven miles to a hex, and the turns represent one week of game time. The playing time stated on the box is “8+ hours.” After reading through the rules, I think this is misleading; I can see how a full twelve-turn campaign might run to over eight ours (maybe even probably, depending on how centralised or dispersed the Government player’s forces were disposed), but there are several scenarios recreating the historical situations of various battles from the rebellion, running as short as a single turn, I would guess that the shortest of these should be playable inside of an hour.

The Rulebook, like all the rulebooks I’ve seen from Legion Wargames, is simply and readably laid out in the company’s typical two-column format, on good quality, satin-finish stock 

9not full-gloss like, say, some GMT title rulebooks). The rules are presented in a sensible narrative format, with clear (and correct) numbered references to other sections when citing other rules sections. As a former editor, this is a bugbear of mine, and something that rules get wrong all too often. Kudos to Legion for putting the effort into getting these details right in their games.

The rules run to about 16 of the book’s 24 pages. Another five pages cover the games seven scenarios (yes; seven!). Four of these cover individual battles from the rebellion, each lasting one or two rounds. The other three are campaign scenarios; the first recreates the initial historical situation and the sequence of arrival of Government reinforcements, while the second and third are variations on a theme, with the Aboriginal forces behaving more aggressively than they did historically, or with the Government having a keener idea of the situation on the ground going in. Player Notes fill another page and some, with some designer’s notes and a detailed Sequence of Play on the back cover rounding out the page-count.

Some of the battle scenarios.

The rules are leavened with a combination of Historical and Design Notes, explaining this or that direction or decision, and Player’s Notes and examples, offering advice on how a rule would play out or how to treat a given situation. These are reinforced in the Player Notes section, after the scenario selection, dividing the game into three acts and suggesting courses of action for both sides.

The game map is where the action happens. All the action. The map covers regions of the Districts of Assiniboine, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, with major and minor rivers and a rail line running from Regina in the east, through Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat, to Calgary in the West. The Government player fan use the railway for a strategic movement option, but only after he’s garrisoned the railroad. The map also contains the turn track, Reinforcement and Hostage track (I’ll come back to this), the Blackfoot Unrest Track (this is a crucial part of the game; either side can win a sudden death victory if they can manage to raise (Aboriginals) or lower (Government) the level of Blackfoot unrest to the required degree, and there are a handful of ways this may be effected). Finally, the map also presents a Battle Board upon which combat is enacted – not a new concept but always interesting – and holding boxes for the troops attached to each side’s five leaders, so you don’t have to deal with huge, teetering piles of counters during movement.

The counters and markers are all printed on one-and-a-half sheets of white-core card stock. They aer well=printed and die-cut, with good registration. The unit counters look good and are fine to push around the board, though I haven’t tried stacking them yet. Each unit boasts three values, Strength (usually 1 but I’ll come back to that), Movement Points, and Morale value. Morale is something that gets tested a lot in this game, and those tests can be pivotal to the immediate and overall outcomes.

Sample units (from top): 10th Royal Grenadiers, battalion and company markers;
Winnipeg Infantry Bttn, battalion and company markers;
Militia (green) and discrete Govt Units (white);
Aboriginal units under chiefs Poundmaker (beige),
Big Bear (grey/green), and the Métis (blue).

In something of a departure in my experience, the counters – all the counters – are single-sided; no step reductions. Instead, the Government player has the option to keep the Battalions together (a single counter) or having them broken down into individual companies (anything from three to eight). There are advantages and disadvantages with either state. to both, with the cohesive battalions have a one-point higher Morale value (safety in numbers) but are unwieldy and lose a point in Movement compare to the individual units. Being irregular troops, the Aboriginal units don’t have the option of forming up into larger units, but there are no limits to stacking for either side.

Three PACs (only one of each, so you have to share).

There are three Player’s Aid Cards. They are all single sided, but dual- or multi-purpose. One offers the Terrain Effects Chart and a guide to reading the counters (I always expect to find counter-deciphering details in the rules, but this seems to be standard practice for Legion, and I suppose it makes sense to have it to hand for the players n a PAC rather than having to rifle through the rulebook). Another covers the reinforcement schedule for the Government player, turn by turn, with their arrival hexes, as well as a detailed list of the actions and occurrences that add to or subtract from the Blackfoot Unrest Track. The third presents the Combat Results Table, Ambush tables (both sides have the option of trying an ambush before an attack – essentially a free combat round), Forage table (out of supply units can attempt to forage to avoid out-of-supply penalties), and Leader Capture and Hostage tables (Aboriginal units can take civilian hostages, one of the things that will push up the Blackfoot Unrest Track). Omce you get the hang of the game and how the rules interact, I think you should be able to pretty much run it off the PACs.

As always, the game comes with an adequate number of baggies (but the game’s counters should all fit into a single counter-tray if you’re that way disposed. The die accompanying the game is the standard type you get with Legion’s games. It’s a little smaller than I prefer -maybe 10mm to the edge – but easily readable and perfectly adequate. It will get a lot of use.

There was a short not included, from the designer. A small detail was left out of the Historical Campaign scenario – three towns should have been identified as having garrisons at the start of the game. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t even going to slow me down. I’ve slipped the not (half page) into the rulebook at the page spelling out the historical campaign set-up. I could just pencil the detail into the column. I’m not of the camp that says no game should have errata. I know how hard it is to pick up every detail like that. I used to do it for a living. I was good at it, and even with half a dozen other people reading a long document as well, sometimes something would slip through. It’s a win when you don’t have page thirteen duplicated four times, then page seventeen*. Legion Wargames are one of the best outfits for getting this stuff right; they get a pass on an oversight like this.

Well, that’s my hot take on Prairie Aflame! It looks like a solid game that covers a relatively small but quite significant piece of Canadian history, both an education and a diversion. Honestly, I don’t know when I’m going to get to play this against an actual person – My schedule is already starting to fill up a month or more out, but I am looking forward to it.