TDG: Gettysburg Solitaire (Board Game)

0:04 Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the discriminating gamer. Say if anyone ever asks you to spell part backwards, don't do it. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to go ahead and take a look at Gettysburg Solitaire, the board game from Warthington Publishing.

1:05 Gettysburg Solitaire, the board game from Warthingington Publishing, is essentially a riff on the earlier book war game Gettysburg Solitaire, which I have reviewed on the uh channel. Now, you've got a game board that is a map of Gettysburg on day one and day two of the battle. You'll also have a board that will tell you what your actions are on the appropriate day and also what the Union responses will be on the appropriate day. You'll have a number of counters, a number of markers that will be the names of the generals that you will also be using on each day. Either brown for day one or gray for day two. Now again, this plays just like the book war game. Essentially, on your turn, you activate one of your commanders. You have different choices of who is going to attack who, the various units you have on the board. They kind of have pre-selected targets. They can choose one of a couple of targets on the board.

2:02 Uh you can also have some offmap artillery. And you're rolling the dice and you're consulting a chart. Now, you want to roll low. If you roll a one, you can actually do damage to the enemy. uh pretty much a two through four, you're both going to take damage. A five, you're going to the attacker will take a little damage and six, you'll take a lot of damage, two damage, and you're just removing the the counters from the board here. But before you actually can do your attack, you just select your target. You actually roll for the bot, the Union bot. And then the Union bot may do all sorts of things. There's even a tactics thing you roll on again to find out exactly what the the event the tactics are. And so you have a lot of different possible attacks that may go on or they may give certain formations kind of a a plus one to their defense. So there's a lot of different things that may play out here. On day one, you have it Steinwear and he's got um some fortifications that may increase and you know you want to try to take him out too.

2:59 But you go ahead, you do the uh the event or the bot action and then you go ahead and you roll your attack. And then again, depending on that formula, that dice formula, you'll see whether they take hits, you both take hits, or just you take hits. And in this way, you're going back and forth uh every round. Now, critically, when you're activating generals on the board, you can never activate the same general twice in a row. And if ever you run out of counters for a specific general, you can bring in Lee or Long Street and you can use them to activate those specific generals. There's also a coordinated attack. You can play the coordinated attack uh you get three of them in a battle. You can play the coordinated attack icon on the board, uh, token on the board. And then you can actually take two generals that are adjacent to each other and place them to essentially designate one as your primary who will get a plus one advantage or a minus one advantage on their attack. So you do that every round. You essentially activate your general, you roll for the bot, you resolve the bot's action, then you roll for your attack, you resolve your attack, and then you move forward to the next round. So in this way, you keep doing it over and over again. there's a number of turns and by the end of the turn you want to complete your objectives. Now generally speaking you want to destroy your enemy uh formations before they can destroy your formations.

4:20 Depending on the day that will give you a number of formations you need to destroy and if you can succeed in meeting your objectives then you win Gettysburg Solitaire. We'll get back to the review in just a moment. I want to take a minute to ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson PhD where we talk about history books on history, military history. I even post some of my uh lectures for my classes on there. Please check that out. Please subscribe to that channel. And now back to the review. All right, so I played this a while back as the book War Game and I really enjoyed the book War Games from uh Warthingington, but it's kind of fun when a little while later they actually come out with a boxed board game edition. We saw this with Sync the Bismar, which is a great game, and Waterlue Solitaire, which was a great game. Um, so it's fun when they do that.

5:06 Now, right off the bat, I noticed something a little bit different about the production of this game. Usually with these Worthington Solitire games, they have blocks. They have little wooden blocks that represent the different um formations on the board and the different, you know, strength of the formation. And I always really like that. That's something I look forward to. This game does not have the wooden blocks. It has cardboard counters. Now, it's not a big deal. I like the artwork. It's just a simple Union and Confederate formation with a flag on it. It's fine, but but I like it. It worked for me. I would have preferred the wooden cubes, but I didn't worry too much. I I like that. I imagine there's probably some kind of a cost and price reason for that. But in any event, it was fine. I I I like I prefer the wood, but I really didn't miss it in this game. Also, too, the tray. They usually have a pretty standard kind of tray. they they they use in these games and this game did not have that kind of standard tray that we have seen. Now all told here I really enjoyed this one. I like the book game a lot and I like the board game version of it a lot too. This is a really fun interactive game that is not hard to learn, not hard to play. I mean honestly you can play a game in 20 30 minutes. They are super quick but they tell great stories. these these solitary games just tell these wonderful stories of the battle and you know it's very luck heavy. I mean obviously the die rolls are all over the place and so there's a lot of luck but it's fun to see within that short amount

6:37 of time that story play out. Now if this game were over an hour if I was playing a game like this and it was an hour, hour and a half or something I probably wouldn't like it. I think it was too luck heavy. But where it's only about 20 to 30 minutes it's really a lot of fun. You know I I've won this game I've lost this game. It can go either way. Um, but you always feel like you've got these important choices about where you are attacking or if you want to make that coordinated attack or if you want to bring in Lee and Long Street to help you out with a formation you need to to get moving again. Um, so there's a lot here to like, a lot here to love. Now, if you already have the the book game, I mean, I don't know that you need the box game unless you you prefer playing with it. And I will say this, I think all things being equal, I still prefer the Waterlue uh game, which is a very similar uh kind of play here, but I don't know. I like the Waterlue game. In the water game, you can play Wellington or Napoleon, which I like. And that's one of the things I didn't like about the book the book game and this version of the game.

7:33 And I say I didn't like it. It's not a huge problem. I would have liked to the option to have played the union and and be able to go back and forth. That would have been fun. In this game, you're you're just the Confederacy. And there is another point, too, I'd like to make. The game board has um the Confederate units kind of with their names facing you or more or less facing you. And the unions, the names are facing away from you. Where it is a solitary game, I think all of the names should be facing you. It's just easier. It's not like you're going to lose track easily or anything as it is, but it just I I I prefer to be able to see where everything is like that in a solitary game. So, that was a minor gripe. I enjoyed this game. It's a lot of fun. If if this is something you're looking into, you want a quick, fun, solitire game with with a lot of dice rolls, uh you'll check this out. I think you'll you'll really appreciate it. On the Cody scale, I'm going to go ahead and give this a seven out of 10. It is a lot of fun. Thank you once again for joining us today on the Discriminating Gamer. As always, we'd ask you to please leave a comment for us here on YouTube, on Board GameGeeek, on our various social media.

8:39 And we would ask you please to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Also, if you do like what you see here, I would ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson PhD where we talk about history, military history, books on history, fun things like that. I even post some of my lectures up there. It would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to that channel as well. And of course, if you do like what you see here, I would humbly ask you to click on the super thanks button and leave a tip. I just got myself a pet termite. I named him Clint. Clint eats wood. Somebody

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