"Mosby's Raiders" from Victory Games

 "Mosby's Raiders" 

No Phone, No Pool, No Pets, the sterile humdrum life of an ascetic partisan ranger.

Unsurprisingly, Eric Lee Smith has come up twice now in the survey of solitaire games. He is credited as co-designer on “Ambush!” too.

“Mosby’s Raiders” is a solitaire wargame from Victory Games that came out in 1985.

I last played this a couple times in 2011 or so. Maybe 2010. I don’t recall having a particularly strong sentiment either for or against the game, but might recall thinking that it was a little too much fuss and bother for the payoff.

Again, for this game, I’ve largely avoided forums and discussions to minimize potential bias and so I don’t have a feeling for how “Mosby’s Raiders” is seen today by gamers. At some point, long ago, it was considered pretty hip, though. I wonder if there are imitators? Do people even still play it?

This game is a mixed bag and, I hate to admit, I can’t quite decide what I think of it. There are things I really appreciate and respect about the game, but oddly some of those same things might end up being net negatives in the overall experience. I’ll see if I can explain a little.

Oh! but before I do…

Boring pointless digression you can skip and just read on from the section below called “The Good Stuff.”

The story of how I got this game, by me.

Guy received “Mosby’s Raiders” as a present. Then guy gave it to another guy that then gave “Mosby’s Raiders” to me. The first guy said he didn’t get it or he didn’t think it worked, second guy said he didn’t like it, especially – and this was his biggest gripe – the box art. He found the revolvers depicted in the illustration on the game box cover deeply troubling and offensive. He couldn’t overlook them. They bothered him so much that he himself suggested that his intense dislike for the picture on the box cover was interfering with his ability to objectively appreciate the game. So he gave it to me.

But what was his problem with this picture? What was the big deal? 

Well, part of it was disgust with the Victory Games/Avalon Hill editors, but that’s another story. No, his main issue was with the depiction of the revolvers and how they’re gripped in the illustration. Because it’s all wrong.

Here’s why. 

 

Pictured above, a Leech & Rigdon .36 caliber revolver, probably fairly typical of something a confederate cavalryman might have had. And it looks like an attempt was made to illustrate a gun of this type on the box cover.

 

Now here’s how you grip a revolver. Notice the angle of the fingers and hands compared to the angle of the barrel. (I boasted there’d be drawing commentary here somewhere. This is it. If you’re ever drawing someone holding or firing a revolver, especially an old fashioned one, here are some of the tricky bits you need to know to get it right.)

 Pictured above is a fellow holding a revolver something like the Leech & Rigdon piece . . . 

 . . . and another fellow, note the angle between the grip and the barrel. See the relationship between the angle of the gripping hand and the direction the barrel is pointing.

Now here’s the cover illustration. Notice the position and placement of the hands “gripping” the revolvers. See how the grip and barrel are parallel? No angle. 

Now see below an actual historical revolver in situ.

Refer back to the guys gripping revolvers in the original illustration.

Clearly, the illustrated grips are incorrect. They’re in the wrong places at the wrong angles. The guns themselves are deformed as well. So, I get where guy was coming from here with not liking the box art. It is pretty bad.

Anyway…

The Good Stuff:

Heres’ what I like about “Mosby’s Raiders,” though. For one, you get high-end 80’s production values. Nice quality components, fully functional, have held up over time, even though subject to some neglect in storage.

Rules and rulebook are good.

Digestible. Sensible. Navigable. For me, no errata needed or sought. The rules do require a thorough reading, though. Special attention paid to Activations. Some special cases and differences between Operations and Rounds. (Similar to “Ambush!” in this way.) But it’s all coherent and cross-referenced reasonably well. (That said, I’ve found that I really don’t like examples of play as rules instruction. Used to illustrate a recently presented rule or rules in the main body of the text nearby, yes, but sometimes rules themselves are presented in examples of play and it bothers me.)

So, it’s very learnable and playable. The game can be approached, played, and completed in one (longish?) sitting.

As for gameplay itself, it starts slow, but can quickly get into some dicey and entertaining situations. Leading federals on a chase deep into the backwoods (and usually to their ultimate demise) was fun and, I found, a pretty good tactic for dispatching Union drones.

Every turn, the whole time, your chances for success are increasingly diminished by increasing Union awareness. Your activity rarely goes unnoticed. Around turn 5 things get interesting. You start juggling increasingly powerful, aggravated, federals who stir up more federals as time goes by. There's a push-your-luck element, but you can call it and end the turn as an action. This is a core feature of the system. 

Leading union troops on a wild goosechase into the back country. Good times!

It is a short game, 8 turns long. If you’re familiar with the rules, depending, games could be very short. Like many solo games, actions are limited by min/max optimizing and counting moves and odds. But it does work.

As solitaire wargames go, it’ solid. Feels like a real game. Some type of tactics and strategy employable, or feels like it, anyway.

The Not So Good Stuff: It’s bland.

Let’s cut to the chase: it lands flat and plays dry. Not sure exactly why, likely a combination of factors together, but it’s just not very entertaining. It’s shallow or gamey. Lacks a narrative feel of any kind, really.  It’s impersonal with a distinct lack of personality and for a game about an outstanding personality . . .

All the mechanisms for different actions are the same except combat. Want to probe? Activation check. How about blow something up? Activation checks for that too. And that’s about it. Except Kidnap. But I’ve played this game four times, I think, and I’ve never once had the opportunity to Kidnap.

Often decision space and options are quite constrained. Interesting moments do emerge in that narrow window where you could use some more performance points but the union awareness is getting high. Do you quit while ahead and disband, or blow that section of rail line? Those are the good moments, but that’s your game in a nutshell. And there aren’t many of those moments. By the time the the tension starts to mount, the game ends. Or can. Something premature in the rhythm and climax here.

It's a skirmish game at arm’s length, seen from a zoomed-out bird’s-eye-view operational vantage point.

So there’s no sense of a tangible relationship between the rules and the specifics of Mosby’s operations. It’s hard to explain. You’re planning to blow up a supply depot deep in enemy territory, but it never feels like you’re planning to blow up a supply depot deep in enemy territory. You count up nearby bad guy combat strengths, consider the odds of an activation and try it or not. It’s very generic, I guess, is what I’m saying, even with the Optional Rules included, that do try to make the demolition actions have some distinctions from one another. It’s all still just a bit hollow.

For a situation so full of potential for action, adventure, bravado, drama and intrigue, the game has none of it. You do two thing that require a die roll. That’s the game for you. And draw some cards that essentially take away the die roll and give you the equivalent automatic result. And so, to me, it really seems like something’s missing. The action and event cards, I assume, are intended to flesh out the more narrative and other pertinent elements not modeled in the game that might impact Mosby and co., but with dull drab cards, a limited menu of special effects, and the rather blunted effects of those effects, they don’t really add much to the theme or atmosphere, drama, etc. Seems like they should, but they don’t. 

 

The final showdown. Mosby blows a bridge while dodging angry federals in hot pursuit.

 

I don’t usually have much to say about game graphics unless they interfere with gameplay, but something is wrong here with the graphics on this game. Not functionally, not mechanically, the game components are top-notch in terms of utility and and convenience, it's just that the graphics are very grade school classroom in style. The map looks like it came out of a 1970’s social studies textbook. Bright completely logical conventional colors and white. Big white spaces on the cards and counters. It completely fails to evoke any sense or feeling of covert confederate guerilla actions.

I will say, though, that “Mosby’s Raiders” isn’t too random, which is a common issue in solitaire games. The random elements are weighted sensibly and placed appropriately. There is a skill or knowledge of some kind involved in playing well, I think, but stripped of its relatively thin veneer of theme, and of it’s adequate, but rather unexciting, Union bot system, “Mosby’s Raiders” is just basic and bland.

There is an obvious conscious and particular emphasis in the design on streamlined brisk play. While an admirable and worthy pursuit, in this case, the actual effect of this emphasis in practice contributes markedly to the detached superficial quality of the game. I feel the game could have provided a little more crunch and grit for the player. The managing of Union forces is simple enough that it doesn’t overwhelm play, leaving an uncluttered space for the player. Something like a mechanism that would allow the player to spend or risk Mosby’s resources for some possible advantage would make a big difference.

Conclusion:

But I’d still have to say it’s a pretty good game. Especially for a solitaire effort. If you like this sort of thing to begin with, you’ll probably get something out of it. It definitely works. It might work well. There’s something to push against apart from dice and fate. And it definitely has its moments, but really isn’t outstanding in any way. It doesn’t, for instance, even do any one thing really well. The play is thin in places. And it’s not totally evocative of the theme. Still, it feels like an actual game which is more than can be said about a lot of the solitaire designs out there.

Also, I feel like there’s an optimal sort of codebreaker strategy one could find there somewhere, so it may be “solvable” to a degree.

I suspect using the Optional Rules may give you more of the intended game experience.

And even though the action picked up around turn 5 and became more interesting, it still had this superficial gamey feel.

It’s weird and I wish I could explain it, but it’s like “Mosby’s Raiders” should be a better game than it is.

In closing, as a topical aside, as of this writing, Mosby is seemingly one of the few historic Confederate figures to avoid the recent purge of public Confederate tributes. As far I know, Mosby country is still healthy and extant in Piedmont Virginia, though I haven’t visited the area recently.