Battle Cry Game Review

This is the time of year that everyone is making New Years Resolutions playing with their cool, new Christmas presents!

I've been enjoying a very nice Christmas present of John Schindler's Fall of the Double Eagle, which looks at the military campaign at the opening of WWI that led to the fall of Austria-Hungary as an entity. I'm enjoying it immensely. Also, Mr. Schindler is a good person to follow on Twitter if you're into national security and foreign policy sort of things.

But I digress.  For this post, I'd like to link you to a video review of a good friend of mine who's playing with one of his Christmas presents. The game is "Battle Cry" and it's a Civil War approximation (not simulation). He make a good point in that this game finds a good middle ground between overly-complicated simulations and overly-simplistic board games.

One of the issues with this game is that you can't move all of your troops at once. This sort of makes sense when you think about how things go wrong in actual reality where orders get lost, delayed, or simply misconstrued. I think one word that my friend was looking for when describing the gameplay mirroring reality in that orders cannot be given to all of your units at once is the fog of war. If you like that idea, then you'll be okay with the gameplay.

There's also what looks like a Colt revolver on the table, but he doesn't go into how that factors into gameplay. In any event, if you're at all interested in Civil War games, this looks like a good one.