Playtesting "A Grand Endeavour" - Shiloh 1862

[jaytee]

We had an excellent playtest game of “A Grand Endeavour”, which is a set of grand-tactical historical rules (1700 – 1900) coming in 2024.

This was a re-fight of the ACW battle of Shiloh. Actually, the second refight of it in a week, with a different Confederate player but me playing the Union again.

In the first battle, my opponent hit a high watermark halfway to Pittsburg Landing after I managed to rally many of the retreating Union brigades and form an ad hoc line. This game lasted four turns, or six hours using the scale in the game of one turn to 90 minutes.

So, in the first refight, the Confederates failed completely to even threaten the union armies line of retreat and reinforcement.

The second game, with a different friend playing the Confederates, was completely different.

He attacked far more aggressively, ignoring merely reaching engagement range, and instead pushing to closely engage at every opportunity.

The union brigades were simply overwhelmed along the first line, and broken brigades streamed through the supports, which with some bad dice rolling saw them streaming back in retreat. At one point, there were eight Union brigades in retreat towards the rear.

I managed to stabilise the line somewhat, but the Rebs just kept on coming. In truth, I could see after the first turn (90 minutes with two pulses of combat) that I was going to struggle to ever hold the line this time.

At the end of turn two, each turn having two pulses of combat in it, representing three hours, three relatively fresh Confederate brigades had broken through the Union left flank and cut the road to the landing.

That took just 90 minutes of game time to resolve. Completely different to the first game, and for me, a real vindication of the game system in being able to manage medium-sized historical battles simply and very quickly, and producing very different experiences each time.

Lots more playtesting to come, and if you want to catch up with more details of development over the next few months then you can by joining the Facebook group for A Grand Endeavour.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1364875660745517

[Freddy]

Wow, what a great looking game! Interesting choice to model regiments together with their skirmisher cover, but in some game scales it makes a lot of sense and makes playing much quicker.

[vtsaogames]

How long does a turn representing 90 minutes take to play in real time?

[Frostie]

Looks very good and interesting basing, could you explain please?

[fred]

A very interesting looking game - always good to see big battle games.

A couple of small suggestions - the roads look enormous- I know with this scale of games roads can be a bit hard to model, as they would be almost pieces of string if in scale. But these distort the look greatly between the brigade bases and the terrain.

The coloured counters - perhaps some more subdued colours for these - they do stand out a lot.