BelloLudi American Civil War

By Mitch Reed

The gaming community is full of games that re-fight the American Civil War and new games are hitting the market all the time, American Civil War is just the latest game to enter the fray and I think it is worth a look for many reasons. Based out of Holland, Peter Van Dop, the man behind BelloLudi’s games has a fresh outlook on what gaming can do and how to grow the hobby which is meshed into the DNA of his games.The game itself is part of series of games BelloLudi has developed that cover conflicts such as World War Two, The Great War, Franco-Prussian War, ancients combat and the Napoleonic period. The games all share the same basic concept, that the rules are easy to learn and are no more than a dozen or so pages. Another constant in these games is that sometimes bad things happen and are beyond your control.
The game uses a unique 20-sided die that you roll when you wish to send orders to your units. Get a 1,2 or 3 and your order goes through, and you unit can move that many times. Get a 0, your order fails to get to the unit, and they do nothing. If you roll a “B”, a blunder has occurred, and you need to roll on the Blunder table to see what happened. The unit may be forced to fall back or even worse charge into contact on its own. I like this wrinkle in the game system, players need to realize that sometimes bad things happen besides your dice going cold. In most miniatures games, 100% assured command and control is assured for the most part, and the units act you want them too. This is not how it works in real life, and this game mechanic helps you see the fog and friction of combat.

The flow of the game is very basic, you make a plan, roll for initiative, move, shoot and if close enough engage in hand-to-hand combat. You may notice that the rules mention “make a plan.” I will get to that later. While the game focuses on the leaders and the decisions they make, but the game also has the standard infantry, artillery and cavalry which can be played at the designed 28mm or can be adjusted to use smaller scale miniatures.
The game uses a d6 for combat, with a 5 or 6 scoring a hit, this of course is adjusted by range, terrain and unit status. When the unit accumulates 4 hits it becomes Shaken and further hits will break the unit and they can flee the table. Advanced rules add twists to the game such as elite troops or using the Rebel Yell in combat.

Cover to cover the rules are 18 pages long and despite their translation from Dutch they are intuitive and easy to understand. Veteran grogs will quickly comment after reading the rules that they “have seen this before” and “too basic for me”, and while they are correct, they would be missing the point behind this game and all the games in the series.

The first time I heard of Peter or BelloLudi was when he made a post of Facebook of some women playing a historical miniatures wargame which is something you hardly ever see (which is a problem). I started to chat with him online and he explained how his approach was to use his games to provide companies with team building events. At this point I was hooked and wanted to learn more about his approach and what he has seen during his games.

While games can be fun, many gamers do not realize how the act of playing a game, especially in groups is part of the experiment itself. Watching a team form, storm, norm and perform when playing a game is itself very interesting to watch. Who takes the lead? Who has great ideas but is being ignored? Is the group all focused on same thing? You can tell a lot about a group just by watching them play a game.

By bringing in a game into a workplace for a team building event, managers and supervisors can see a lot about how well their teams work both collectively and individually. They can also see how they work through a problem and come up with a solution. Now we come back to the step in the game that is labeled “make a plan”, this step is not defined anywhere in the game rules but serves to illustrate the main point behind the entire BelloLudi game engine, it is an easy to play game that causes players to develop and execute a game plan in real time. By using a set of rules that is easy to understand, players can quickly get into the game, and you can see how well they perform as a team in no time.

I did try out the game as I was painting up my mountain of ACW epic models and even at the smaller scale the game flows smoothly and is a lot of fun. I can see running this set of rules for people who want to see what miniature gaming is about. I have talked about the need for “gateway games” to grow our hobby and these rules are perfect for just that.

BelloLudi also has developed cards for their games that spice up the action and gives the players a new set of problems to deal with or a benefit which you can exploit.

I think Peter and BelloLudi is on to something, not just in developing game rules but also ways in which games can be used. I think you should check them out