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| Set up for solitaire play |
About three months ago I was surfing the online listings of
the United States Naval Academy gift shop just to see what they had to
offer. I’m not sure what I was
expecting, but I was disappointed to find that their games section consisted of
a kid’s nautical knot-tying game and offerings like “Midnopoly” (a USNA version
of Monopoly, apparently). I did see what looked like one real wargame,
however, although I had never heard of the game or its production company
before---The Shores of Tripoli, by
Fort Circle Games (2020). The cover design
was beautiful, and the topic was right in my bailiwick (give me any US naval
wargame between the Quasi-War and the Cold War and you can count me in) so I
immediately went to the Geek to find its page and see what it was about.
I was...underwhelmed.
It looked like a beautiful piece of production, but it did not come
across as a game on the level I look for, either in terms of gameplay or
intricacy. In fact, it had just about everything that I usually avoid: it is a
strategy game (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a tactician,
not a strategist!”); it is card-driven, a class of games which I find in
general take too much control out of the hands of the player; it is
highly-abstracted, especially in terms of combat resolution, and it uses
brightly-colored wooden blocks and ship-silhouettes rather than detailed
counters on a game board that is more Risk
than Rifle & Saber. At the time, I decided to pass on it.
Recently, however, I had the opportunity to play the game,
and I am glad I did. On the face of it,
there is absolutely no reason other than the topic that I should like this
game, yet to my complete surprise I find that I do; SoT is a very successful game, in my final opinion; it is challenging
to play, and a bit more sophisticated than it may look on the surface.
As I mentioned above, with The Shores of Tripoli Fort Circle has produced a high-quality,
old-school-styled product that looks beautiful: mounted board, painted wooden
pieces, a whole bag of colored dice, and game-cards that have the linen feel
and coated smoothness you get from a deck of Bicycles. Add to that the slick-printed Rules, a
similar book of historical background and designer’s notes, a nice sim of a
historical document that ties in with the game, and a sturdy box, and you have
a product that is worth the price charged, in my opinion.
There is no question that the game is highly abstracted in
its gameplay, and to be frank the level of abstraction in the game was
problematical to me at first. Combat,
for example, is as simple as it gets, determined wholly by die-roll. To Hit and Damage are the same roll, with a
Six being a Hit---no DRMs, no CRTs. Just
a die roll. (The one concession to actual
combat is an abstraction of ‘broadside weight’; Frigates get to roll two dice
for Hit/Damage, whereas smaller craft like Gunboats and Corsairs only get one.) This holds for Ship-to-Ship Combat,
Interceptions, or Shore Bombardment. The
only possible modifications to Combat rolls come through playing one of the
possible Battle Cards, which can affect the outcome in various ways. The same holds true for Ground
Combat---resolution comes down to a straight-up die roll, with the only modifications
coming from using Battle Cards when available.
The Movement of your forces (i.e. sailing and marching) is
also done abstractly. Your ships can be
in one of three places: in a Friendly Port, in a Patrol Zone outside a Hostile Port,
or attacking a Hostile Port. Movement
between them doesn’t involve logistics, time & distance, or the cooperation
of the weather, just playing a card that allows movement or ‘buying’ movement
by discarding any card in your hand (which can be a major strategic gamble,
depending on the card you trade for Movements).
If you expect The
Shores of Tripoli to be a detailed wargame of naval/land warfare in the
early Nineteenth century, you will be disappointed; on the spectrum between
“Game” and “Sim,” it is very firmly on the Game side, and is a
light-to-moderate one in complexity. That,
however, is not a bad thing. In his designer’s
notes, Kevin Bertram states that one of his primary goals was to create a
historical wargame that was approachable by a wide audience (and he tested this
by having a list of playtesters a page-and-a-half long). One of my thoughts upon completing my first
play-through was that this would be an excellent “gateway game” for people
whose usual gaming sessions involve triple-word scores or the prices of hotels
on Park Place, and who would find the average hex-and-counter wargame
intimidating. The game has a minimum of
components, is easy to set up, and runs smoothly once underway; even on my
first game, Setup took less than ten minutes, with the game itself running
about an hour. The Rules were easy to
follow and well-written for both Two-Player and Solitaire.
Approachable though it may be, SoT is not just a roll the dice/move the pieces board game,
however; this is a game that forces you to think strategically in the face of
challenges that the historical parties involved faced. The main engine of the game is a card system
that works very well, both in two-player and in solo mode. I’m not a fan of
card-driven games at the tactical or operational level, but I admit they work well
enough when the emphasis is on strategy and when they are well-designed. My four play-throughs prior to writing this were
all solitaire games, and the card system operates as a very effective SI Bertram
calls “T-bot.” With the solitaire setup,
I found that T-bot makes 'decisions' which are both logical and true to the
historical Tripolitan goals and actions of the conflict.
One of my core beliefs about wargaming is that, by its very
nature, a wargame is educational, and one of the things I look at when I play a
game is whether-or-not the game has taught me---or given me insight into---
something about the conflict it presents.
The First Barbary War has been gamed before, but always as individual tactical
Scenarios in board-based or miniatures naval wargames; to my knowledge, this is
the first full-game treatment of the subject in its entirety as a military,
political, and economic conflict. The
game does a good job of communicating the challenges (and subsequent
frustration) of countering an enemy who is waging guerre de course while you try to counter him with inadequate
resources, inexperienced officers (they really screwed up in not taking Truxtun
back…), bad political decisions and weak, feckless allies. The game is not particularly dark in tone,
however, and won't drive away players looking for a lighter game which still
keeps its historical integrity. The game
also succeeds (by the designer’s intention) in framing the conflict as a war
between states. The North African
states were not just pirate strongholds, like Port Royal in the 17th
century; they were Ottoman-allied nations with dynastic rulers with a
centuries-long tradition of extortion-as-state-policy, and they had to be
treated with as such. The young and
unsure United States was ill-prepared to start and maintain a protracted war, and the game does a
good job of reflecting the weakness and lack of preparation of the US position,
in my opinion. While The Shores of
Tripoli does make a few deviations from history, Bertram is upfront about
it and shares his thinking behind it, and I find his reasoning sound. The First Barbary War was a complex and
difficult situation to resolve, and gaming it in its various facets is not the
easiest task to undertake. Most wargame
designers make some concessions to playability, and SoT makes no more than most.
Although The Shores of
Tripoli---with its high level of abstraction---is not for everybody, I
consider it a success and an impressive effort for a first game design on a
less-well-known topic. Although a
lighter game, Bertram doesn't "dumb down" the history, and the game
still plays like a strategic-level
wargame, even with its simplified elements.
It is well done, and well worth playing.
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