Review: Hold the Line: The American Civil War

  

Recently I’ve been on something of an American Civil War kick in my gaming. This is mostly due to the recent release of Mark Hermans’s Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024) and the extra attention I've been giving Brothers at War, 1862 (Compass Games, 2022) of late. Both are remarkable games. and each rewards the time spent with them immensely.

All of this has got me harking back to my earliest ACW gaming experiences, the Blue and Gray series (Worthington Publishing, 2016), and Hold the Line: the American Civil War (Worthington Publishing, 2019), both released by Worthington. I backed this on Kickstarter when it was put up – I think my order was in the high double digits – and we played the hell out of this when it arrived. I’ll say up front; I love this game. It’s not a nuanced simulation of famous SCW battles, but it’s a relatively fast playing game that offers a pleasant and satisfying ACW-flavoured experience. Just as there’s room for both Caesar: Rome vs. Gaul (GMT Games, 2020) and Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes! (PSC, 2022), I’ve got space for in my collection for both the The U.S. Civil War (GMT Games, 2015), and this.

First, though, something of a confession. Hold the Line: the American Civil War has been out of print for at least a couple of years now, and the good folks at Worthington Publishing tend not to republish older titles, preferring to forge ahead with new games (though there have been exceptions to this). Reviewing an out-of-print game is something of a guilty pleasure, but at the same time it might encourage others who have a copy sitting on their shelf unplayed to dust it off and give it another play (or even to sell it on and let someone else enjoy what it has to offer).

 

Terrain lay-out for the Shiloh scenario. Just right of centre are the Peach Orchid,
Bloody Pond and the Hornet's Nest clustered together; centre-left, Shiloh Church.

Appearance

Anyone familiar with Worthington’s earlier Hold the Line games will recognise the essential configuration immediately. The mounted board is a blank hex-field, ## long by ## deep. The hexes are on the large side as they have to accommodate three or four blocks (multiple counters in the earliest iterations of the ruleset, Hold the Line (Worthington Games, 2008) and Hold the Line: Frederick’s War (Worthington Games, 2013).

Anyone with a general interest in historical wargaming will be struck by the similarities between Hold the Line: TACW and the Commands and Colors family. I’m addressing this here because the similarities are mostly cosmetic. Both games use a blank, oversized hex-grid board with interchangeable terrain tiles that overlay some of the hexes in a given scenario to better approximate the historical battlespace. The two games also use blocks (so far as I’m aware, Hold the Line: TACW is the only game in the family that does; the early iterations used counters, while the re-implementation of the Hold the Line: the American Revolution (Worthington, 2016) game and its French and Indian War (Worthington, 2016) expansion featured uniform miniatures, much like its spiritual second-cousins, Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 1999) and Memoir’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004).

Union Infantry and Artillery with their Commanding Officer, setting up a
delaying action in defence of Pittsburg Landing (Victory Point location). 

The blocks bring several qualities to the game experience. My first experience of a game that used stickered wooden blocks was Commands and Colors: Ancients (GMT Games, 2006) at a friend’s place. My first thought was, “This is like a poor man’s miniatures.” I still think of block games like this in those terms. I don’t mean it in a negative way, either; I’ve played a lot of miniatures games, and marvelled at how good they look on the table, but there’s no getting around the fact that they are expensive, time-consuming to prepare, and space-hogs for storage. Wooden blocks are durable, presentable (the colours and illustrations pop on a game-board) and they’re a lot easier to stow away than lead figurines when you’re done with them. And they offer the a similar tactility and verisimilitude in play; I’d argue as a player you get a greater sense of loss and growing desperation removing a block from a unit on the board that you do flipping a counter to drop a step. In short, the blocks were a solid choice for Hold the Line: TACW.

The art on the block stickers is simple but attractive and effective, the blocks themselves easily identified by their colour. There are only a handful of unit types in the game; Infantry (four blocks) Cavalry (two blocks), Artillery (two blocks), Leaders, and, for the Union, Gunboats (a single block each). What differentiates the infantry, cavalry and artillery units is the presence of a single “flag” block in the unit. Flag blocks identify (to the owning player only, at least until they get into combat) the morale rating of the unit with a coloured bar at the bottom; green for untested (“green”) troops, black for battle-tested troops, and gold for the exemplary fighters (like Gibbon’s Iron Brigade, though the scenarios don’t get down to this kind of granularity). The morale rating affects the chance of a unit having to retreat after combat (using a special die).

The terrain tiles are one of the most beautiful features of the game. Well, most of them. Unlike Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) or Horse and Musket (Hollandspiele, 2017), which both take a bird’s-eye view of the terrain, the tiles in Hold the Line TACW are drawn at an elevate viewing angle which adds a certain charm to the groves. ploughed fields, towns and churches, and even the swamps. Sunken roads and rivers are still presented straight-down, which is makes sense, design-wise and removes any potential confusion, but the rest are a nice ascetic touch.

 

Starting set-up for the Shiloh scenario. On the edges are the Union Reinforcements,
river edge in turn 5, top edge in turn twelve. If the Confederates haven't taken
Pittsburg Landing by turn eleven, they're in for a tough time of it.

Play

Hold the Line: TACW is a fairly fast-playing game mechanically; players take turns taking actions until both have passed, then you being a new round. Sounds simple, right? What can slow it down is the choice of actions, coupled with the fact that you can never do everything you want to do.

The central functional aspect of Hold the Line: TACW is the allocation of Action Points. Action Points (AP) are the currency you spend to do things in the game; moving a unit or engaging the enemy in combat comes at a cost. Your AP allocation is a limited resource, and it’s partially randomised. Each scenario will tell you how many base AP you get each turn as the Union or CSA, usually ranging from three to five points, and more often than not, weighted slightly in favour of one or the other side.

Units are represented by blocks with a picture of their type on each, with one block carrying the flag, and identifying the unit’s morale strength. Infantry units are comprised of four blocks, cavalry and artillery two blocks each, and Leaders, of course, a single block. The Union also has gunboats in some scenarios; these are a represented by a single block.

The play is IGO-UGO; the players take turns – initiative holder first – rolling for their additional AP, then spend those points to move they units or to engage them in combat, or as many as they wish before passing to the next player. Most units move or engage in ranged combat for one AP (unlike C&C, a unit can engage in ranged combat with an adjacent enemy unit, and there are reasons this may be desirable). Cavalry units can move and fire for the cost of a single AP, but not the other way around. If a unit is already adjacent to an enemy, they can engage in close combat for a cost of two AP.

In both Ranged and Close Combat, only the attacker rolls for damage. In if the defender in Close Combat, receives a hit, they roll a special die for a retreat; the Retreat die has three green spots, two black and one gold, so untried units have a 50% chance of being forced to retreat, veteran units about 33% and elite units around 17%.

Some terrain features, like hills, woods and towns will give the defender a bump one level up in their morale for retreat rolls, e.g., green will roll as black if defending from a sunken road. If they stand their ground, they will get the opportunity to give back in kind I their next activation. Combat in Hold the Line: TACW can be bloody, especially in close combat, where rolls hit on a 4-6. Each hit in combat removes a block; this is representative of the loss of cohesion under fire - the number of rice rolled for the attacking unit remains the same.

The game comes with twelve scenarios, with some famous actions represented, like First Bull Run, Antietam, and Chickamauga. The scenarios are turn-limited, with a set of victory conditions for one side, while the opposition may have a target VP number, or can simply run down the clock on the aggressors. The longest games run to 20 turns, but a victory for one or the other side can often be attained before that. Looking at the available forces alone, some of the scenarios can appear somewhat unbalanced, but that hasn’t been my experience in play.

CSA forces preparing to advance on the Union screening positions.
Infantry units can move through or share a space with friendly Artillery.

Appraisal

Hold the Line: TACW is a relatively straight-forward and accessible game (the rules are articulately covered in just seven pages) that accomplishes what sets out to do. Using simple components and easy-to-grasp rules, it offers a way for novice players to tackle some of the pivotal battles of the American Civil War in a manageable and engrossing. It requires about as much mental effort as a Command and Colors game, but instead of the frustration of not being able to do exactly what you want because of a deficiency of the necessary cards in your hand, the frustration comes from the limited number of AP available each turn. Even if you add five or six points from a good roll, you’re unlikely to order every available unit or set up the perfect play for your next round. This would probably annoy the very same people who don’t like C&C, and for pretty much the same reason; the game mechanics portray the same battlefield confusion and the limits of command in control in nineteenth-century conflicts that discrete hand-sizes do in a CDG like Commands and Colors: Napoleonics.

In some measure, it’s more freeing as a player because it forces you to make provisional plans two or three rounds ahead, albeit without the security of knowing what resources you’ll have available over those future turns. It makes play incredibly dynamic, and it keeps both players fully engaged and on their toes.

While I don’t think it’s likely to happen at this stage, I’d really like to see a reprint of Hold the Line: TACW. It’s a shrewd, engrossing game, simple yet satisfyingly frustrative, that can play out very differently with successive plays. It brings a lot of Civil War flavour to the table in a fast-playing, intellectually and tactilely satisfying package. If you haven’t played it and you ever get the opportunity, please try it out.