Tag Archives: TBP

A(nother) Review of Cruel Morning: Shiloh 1862

Cruel Morning SPLASH

Another look at Tiny Battle’s ACW game ~

Jim Werbaneth, 27 July 2018

Cruel Morning Cover Color

Cruel Morning Cover

The Battle of Shiloh was a harbinger of the bloodbath to come in the Civil War.  It also marked a turning point in the leadership of both sides.  Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the most highly-regarded Confederate generals at the start of the conflict, was mortally wounded, rendering him a “what if” in a theater characterized by rebel generals who were mediocre at best; how could the war have progressed had Johnston remained alive and in charge, in place of Braxton Bragg, Leonidas Polk, John Bell Hood or Joseph Johnston? On the Union side, Ulysses S. Grant prepared poorly, and was caught off guard by the Confederate onslaught. However, he recovered, and his Army of the Tennessee did not just survive, but with the aid of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, went on the offensive on the second day of battle. Despite heavy criticism of the early stages of the battle, a temporary sidelining afterward, Grant and his career survived, and he went on to become the premier, even definitive, military leader of the Civil War.

Cruel Morning is a brigade-scale treatment of Shiloh, on a time scale of daily turns.  The footprint is small, with an eleven by seventeen-inch unmounted map.  From its small size and relatively low unit count, one would expect it to be a fast-playing, easily-accessible game.  However, the final project ends up as something different.

click images to enlarge

GrogHeads Reviews In The Trenches: Base Set II Doughboys

TBP promises to pack big fun into small packages.  How does their WWI series measure up? ~

Designed by John Gorkowski and published by Tiny Battles Publishing ~

Robert Ellis, 7 February 2018

In The Trenches is a series of games that depict platoon level tactical combat during WW1, and offers a good selection of scenarios and forces from many of the involved protagonists.

Each hex represents 100 yards and each turn 5 minutes.

The series so far consists of two base games (this being one of them) and four expansions, all of which require one of the base games to play.

‘Doughboys’, as you might expect from the title, is about US Army actions set in 1918, and has three scenarios that feature a mixture of US infantry and light tanks in both defensive and offensive battles.