Rebels Against Rebellion Overview | Board Wargames | Board Games | Flying Pig Games
Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Silver Blitz, and welcome. Today, we're going to do an overview of Rebels Against Rebellion, the upcoming game from Flying Pig Games, designed by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson. This game is coming to crowdfunding at the end of July, early August 2026. I'll put a link down below if you'd like to check out more information about the campaign. If you're not familiar with the story behind this game, in 1861, at the beginning of the American Civil War, Tennessee was the last state to secede from the Union. However, while central and western Tennessee largely aligned with Confederate causes, eastern Tennessee largely aligned with Union causes. One county in eastern Tennessee, Scott County, subsequently seceded from the Confederacy, and what followed was 2 years of raids and skirmishes and battles between the enclave and the residents of Scott County and surrounding Confederate forces.
This game has a fascinating historical guide that lets you read about this event, but it also, of course, in game format, lets you play it out. Let's jump in and take a look. So, I've got Rebels Against Rebellion spread out here in front of me. I'm in the middle of a solitaire game. Before we jump in and take a look at gameplay and some of the components, let's do a general overview. Uh one quick caveat, this is a prototype, so some things might change between what we're looking at here in the final version of the game. So, Rebels Against Rebellion is a one or two player game. Gameplay is relatively short, about 60 minutes to play a full game all the way through from start to finish. Turn length and historical length are somewhat abstract. I'd say, if I had to estimate, maybe turn length represents about a a month, and historical length it historically Scott County seceded from the Confederacy in the summer of 1861, and it wasn't until the summer of 1863 where Union troops came in in force and were able to reestablish Union presence in the county. So, we're looking at roughly a time period of 2 years that that his that this history played out. Now, units and scale are small. The map that we're looking at right here is just the map of Scott County and some outlying areas.
And the units often these interactions were skirmishes and raids with small amounts of troops, sometimes even just a handful of troops, although a couple of engagements did involve Confederate forces of a thousand troops or more. But for the most part, these are small-scale, local-scale events in a local-scale conflict. Before we start looking at the game-specific events, I wanted to talk about this historical companion book that comes with the game. This is awesome. It's 38 pages and it goes through in timeline fashion all of the history of this conflict. It includes records of the documents, photographs of the era, a lot of different quotes of the stories. This one here, Julia Markham, was a woman who got involved in a skirmish. She got a bayonet through the eye and then killed a Confederate soldier with an axe. I mean, there's just incredible stories and photographs of the region where some of these battles happened, quotes, a lot of different information. And this this particular aspect of the Civil War history I found really isn't covered to any great depth online. And so this is really a wonderful resource that comes with the book if you I with the game. If you like the combination of historical study and historical games, this is a fantastic supplement to the game. Let's jump in and take a look at the map and talk a little bit about gameplay as it centers on the map. First up, this is a 22-in by 34-in mounted map board that will come with the game. As a side note, I'll talk about this more when we look at the cards. I love the artwork and I in particular love the combination of the card artwork with the geography of the map out here. Now, what are we looking at? Well, as we mentioned, this
is a very local conflict. The color area the the more distinguished colored areas of the map here represent Scott County. So these are the historic locations in Scott County where this history played out. You'll also notice there are some points of location around the county. These represents really if you represent really if you would the areas from which Confederate forces came into Scott County. So, this is very much an enclave in the middle of Confederate held territory. So, Scott County is basically trying to survive against all these Confederate forces that keep coming into the area from all different directions. To add on to this, we can see that this is a point-to-point map. So, points are very are connected by these various lines and they have three different types of connections which are important to gameplay. The legend down here explains these, but the darker solid black lines are roads which allow the most movement and attack capacity. Then we have trails which allow the least.
Areas are also connected by rivers and creeks. These two allow for movement that are somewhere in between that are in between the trails and the roadways. And that takes us now to the idea of how do you win the game? Essentially, you win the game by controlling more of Scott County than your opponent. We can see that each of these locations has a number of stars on it ranging from one to Huntsville here which is the most with three. Uh these are essentially the victory points you get by controlling a region. And we also see these cubes here. These cubes represent your control of an area. Blue representing of course the Union and gray representing the Confederate. Now, in this solitaire game, the Confederate forces are coming in and starting to put the hurt on us here. We're still holding out in the center of the area of the county here. You'll also notice that some areas can be controlled by neither side. Now, you might be concluding that these cubes represent your units, but they actually don't.
control which is an abstract equalization to units, but you're not going to be moving cubes from one space to another. Rebels against Rebellion is very much a deck-building game and you're going to you're going to playing cards out of your hand to perform certain actions. So, both these while these cubes are somewhat of an abstract representation of force and control, they don't directly correlate with units. So, to understand more about how Rebels Against Rebellion works, we really have to understand the cards. So, let's take a look at those. There are two types of cards in Rebels Against Rebellion, location cards and unit cards. What we're looking at here are location cards. And the basic concepts behind location cards are that every location on the map has a corresponding location card. And if you control a location, you add that card to your deck. And then, say for example, if you control a location and that location gets attacked, you can play that card into your battle deck, into your battle cards, to help defend that location.
Now, furthermore, there are improved locations for a lot of the locations on the map. You'll notice here that Huntsville has one defensive star right now. But, down below Huntsville, we have this improved location, which is Huntsville and Breastworks. So, this basically is the idea that you build up the fortifications around Huntsville and make it a much stronger and tougher location to take, thereby improving your deck and making it harder for your enemy to be able to take this location. Cuz you'll notice that the Breastworks here have a defense of three, compared to the unbuilt-up location of Huntsville, which has a location of one. So, one of the things you're trying to do in the game as you get control of locations is then to build these locations up and make them stronger and harder to take.
Buffalo indeed becomes this Julia Markham card, which represents her strength and fortitude as she was defending Buffalo. Some locations can't be upgraded. Buffalo Creek has no upgrade path. Chitwoods, here's their upgrade path here. So, again, one of the elements of deck building is improving locations. The second type of card in Rebels Against Rebellion are unit cards. We can see four Confederate cards on the left and four Union cards on the right. And again, just as an aside, I this artwork is amazing on these cards. I absolutely love the style and how it goes and blends with the the map here. These are just gorgeous cards. Now, um many of the locations on the map have units associated with them. And if you have a control of that location, when it's your turn, you can bolster and basically add that unit to your deck, which represents bringing this combat unit into your force, and then you'll be able to deploy it in combat later in the game and other places and other locations. So, the second way basically you're trying to improve your hand, improve your deck, is to add these units to the card. And indeed, many of the external Confederate locations allow you to bring these units into your deck. And some of these, as we can see with the 11th Tennessee Infantry, is very strong.
I mean, this has got five rifles on it and can take control. It's a a very strong card there as the the more at the top here, the better in terms of offensive and defensive capacity. Furthermore, as a further nuance, some of the units in the game, in addition to bringing them in, you can also upgrade them. So, here we have the Home Guard, which is a card you can get at Huntsville when you control Huntsville as the Union player. You can subsequently then improve the Home Guard by increasing its strength. You take this card out of the game, and you add Captain Bill Hamby to your Home Guard, which is the improved version of Home Guard. This allows you It gives a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more capacity to action by having Bill Hamby in your deck. So, the three ways basically that you can improve your deck is to improve to get control of and improve locations by adding units to your deck. And then sometimes, in some cases, improving a particular unit that's already in your deck. The last piece of the puzzle to understanding how all this comes together is food. Food are basically the resources that you get and then subsequently pay to do things like take control and bolster units and improve locations. They're also the timer in the game, so the game starts with 40 food in action. Here we can see about 35 of them.
And as you take food and then expend food, this supply becomes depleted. When you get down into these darker colored foods resources, which are the last ones you take, that's kind of the end game is approaching and the game can actually end at any moment. So, this is basically the resources or the fuel and the currency that you use to take a lot of the actions in the game and when this is depleted, the game is going to end. Now that we've seen the map and we've seen cards and we've seen food, we can actually talk about gameplay in the basic sense. So, at the end of your turn, you draw up to five cards and that is your hand size. Now, on your defensive part of your turn, you could be using some of these cards to defend locations against your opponent's actions, but let's say for the sake of simplicity that you're the you're the you're the Union player and you're starting your your turn with these five cards that are in your hand. Now, we if we look at these location cards here, for example, Buffalo Creek, we can see that they have some icons on the left. And these basically tell you what actions you can take by playing this location card. And there are only really a half dozen or so actions that occur in the game, so it's a very small set and we can walk through these in a simple sense to just show how gameplay works.
Now, say for example right now the Union player has no food and we talked about how food is important to doing a lot of things in the game. So, we could play Buffalo Creek for one food, which is what this icon indicates here. So, we might play our first card, Buffalo Creek, and we say now we've got one food. Now, what we could do next is we also have Huntsville in our hand here. We could play the Huntsville card and let's look at the actions on the left of Huntsville We have a move action. We'll talk about that later, but we have these bolster action, which means basically there are cards units attached to Huntsville and we can bring them into the game by paying their cost. Now, down here we have the Huntsville Home Guard, which costs two food. We only have one food. We could in turn play Buffalo to get a second food and that would give us enough money to play Huntsville to bolster and bring the Home Guard into our discard pile and then it would get into our deck later in the game.
The alternatively, we could play Huntsville for this improve location action. Improve location was where we talked about you could and this always costs one food to do this. So, we could spend one food. We would replace the Huntsville card and put it in the location supply, bring Breastworks into our hand and then indicate that we have improved the location here, we add a second control marker to Huntsville. So, that would be another option. Now, let's talk a little bit though about movement here. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity we're going to play Huntsville here for movement. Let's say we have two food and we're going to play it for movement. Now, there's a couple things we could do. Move is really divided up into two parts. The first is a take control and that applies to places that don't have enemy forces in there. So, we could move from Huntsville to Brimstone Creek by playing the Huntsville move card. We'll notice that it takes it's got two stars here. If you want to take of an empty location, you have to pay for the location with the food icon. So, we would pay two, they get discarded from the game and we would put a control marker in Brimstone Creek indicating now that we've dedicated Union resources and supplies and personnel to taking over Brimstone Creek.
That's pretty simple cuz there's nothing there. But, alas, let's say for example, instead of going to Brimstone Creek, we decide to go down the creek here to New River and we want to attack the Confederates. That's the second option with a move action if you want to move into a place where the enemy is. That doesn't initially cost any food, but what happens is we immediately go to an attack phase. And the way the attack phase works is players take turns alternating putting cards face down, and then you reveal the cards to see who has the greatest combat value in their force, and that side wins the attack. So, let's say now that as the Confederates, let's say they are going to play one card. Now, they can they can play two cards. You can as the defender, you can always play the location card if you have it in your hand, plus one other unit to a maximum of two cards.
As the attacker, your number of cards you can play in attack is limited to the route you take to attack. If it's a road, you can play up to as many as three cards. It's a river, it's two. And it's one of these dotted trails, it's only one. Supplies don't get down the trails very well. So, the Confederate player starts out and they're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to play one card to defend." Then the Union player goes, and we have a couple of cards that we can use. We have a couple of unit cards in our hand. So, the Union player says, "Yeah, we're going to play a card here, too." Now, the Confederate player could pass, but the Confederate player looks in his hand and says, "Oh, I have a unit card, too. I'm going to play that." The Union player, of course, doesn't know what these are yet. And the Union player says, "Well, I've got one last combat unit. I'm going to play this here." All the attacks are down because the attacker can't play more than two cuz it's going down a river. Defender can just play as many as two. And so, then we're going to flip all these over. And here we can see the results of this battle after flipping them over. The defense has one shield, so that's a factor of one. It has two rifles up here, so that's a factor of three. As the attacker, we have one rifle and one rifle, we have a total of two. These other icons are take control icons, which don't quite apply at this moment in time. So, Confederate force is a three, Union force is a two. The Confederates have repulsed our attack. Now, we don't have to pay for food when that happens, but we don't get to take control of the location and we don't wipe out the Confederate forces that are in this location. And so, with that, we've actually seen almost, you know, there are some subtleties and some differences and some different types of units and
some other little nuances to combat and movement and some of the card plays, but for the most part, those are the actions in the game and that's how you play Rebels Against Rebellion. Now, we would have played in this turn all five cards as the Union player, so we're going to draw back up to five cards. The Confederate player is going to go and we're going to go around until the food is depleted and then we see who has the most victory points in the game. Solo players, rejoice. Rebels Against Rebellion has a robust and easily executed solo system. This is the solo board that we're looking at. Now, to be clear, the solo system allows you only to play as the Scott County Union forces. You can't play as the Confederate forces. The Confederate forces use this solitaire board to execute all their actions. It's a very simple process. I'm not going to go into a detail here, but basically, you can see this action 1 2 3 and 4. And to start out the Confederate turn, they're going to flip over one of their location cards and they from their starting deck and then they use these priorities up here to execute the actions that are available at that given location. So, it's a pretty straightforward system.
They're going to look to see if they have enough food to do damage and move and attack. If not, they're going to bolster and prove control or they're going to take food. And you work through four actions basically for the Confederate turn and they can add units. There's rules for how they attack and defend. Very easy system. Sometimes you see a game where learning the solitaire system is just as hard as learning the game. This is something I think you can learn in about 5-10 minutes after you've learned the core game itself. Now, I've been playing the solitaire system to test it out. So far, my initial impressions are it's really, really tough to win. This is a tough bot and it gives you a good fight for your money. The last thing to take a brief look at is the rulebook here. Uh this is 24 pages and um you know, lots of graphics and big images here to help with the gameplay. So, in in the text is pretty big as well. So, it's not a very dense rulebook and there are a lot of examples on how to do things. So, generally it'll give you a definition of what the action is here. For example, improve control, give you a highlight, and then it's going to give you an example. And I would say a good chunk of the rulebook here, there's an extended example there's extended for Yeah, here's the extended example that takes up 1 and 1/2, 2 and 1/2. Yeah, about two pages.
Then from page 16, we get the solitaire rules. And again, as I mentioned, it's not super challenging to add the solitaire rules. It's really about two pages of rules and then you have an extended solitaire example for good examples on how to play the solitaire bot. Lastly, we have an icon summary. So, where does that leave us? Well, I think on a complexity scale, the wargame complexity scale, I'm going to go with a three out of 10. Uh pretty straightforward. There are a few subtleties and a few details to pay attention to in terms of scorekeeping and some of the actions, but overall, this is a very straightforward game. Shouldn't take you a long time to learn and I think after one quick learning game, you're going to be up and playing pretty well. Uh for solitaire, I'll give it a 10 out of 10. The bot system seems fairly robust. It's not doesn't feel tacked on. It feels like a legitimate opponent that a lot of thought has been put into.
And so, there we have it, a first look and an overview of Rebels Against Rebellion. Again, this game is coming to Kickstarter at the end of July, early August 2026. Links are down below in the video description if you'd like to explore that more. I'll be creating a gameplay video as well and I will be putting a link to that as soon as it's ready. Thanks for watching everybody.