When Fort Sumter is at its best, these design decisions create a sense of brinksmanship and danger. The last curveball the game throws is the "Final Crisis" phase, where players simultaneously play cards they've saved over the course of the game in a last-ditch effort to control the board before end of game scoring. When players breach certain areas on this track, they may receive a bonus and/or trigger a bonus for their opponent-for example, entering the "tension" zone allows your opponent to place the peace commissioner, a token that can effectively lock down a space on the board. Another innovation is the "Crisis Track," a long line of cubes from which players draw their influence. For example, in addition to scoring majorities in "Crisis Dimensions," each player receives a simple secret objective each round (always a specific space to control), and fulfilling these will grant an additional point and a special action. The game introduces some smart wrinkles in its otherwise bare-bones area control foundation. This necessary compromise between historical depth and quick-playing accessibility is felt throughout Fort Sumter. While this doesn't necessarily imbalance the game, it makes drawing a handful of Secessionist cards when you're the Unionist player, well, boring-I really miss the tension that games like Twilight Struggle or 1960: The Making of the President generate by allowing events to trigger even when they're your opponent's. This makes for consistently interesting decisions, with one caveat: if a card doesn't match your player faction, you're stuck simply playing the card for its value. For example, the "Frederick Douglass" card only has a value of 1, but if you play it for the event you can add up to 3 tokens to a single "Public Opinion" space. This is usually a choice between flexibility or power-playing a card for its value allows you to place that number of cubes anywhere on the map, while playing a card for its event gives you a potent, but more specific, effect. As in other card-driven games, players will take turns playing a card for either its value or, if the card matches the player's faction, its event text. Both players will have a hand of cards drawn from a shared deck, with each card representing a historical personage or event. The players compete for control of like-colored "Crisis Dimensions" by spreading influence cubes on the board in an attempt to build unshakeable majorities that will score them points at the end of each round.Įverything in Fort Sumter is resolved through card play. The game plays out on an abstracted map with twelve spaces representing particular battlegrounds, either geographical (ex. And make no mistake, war is coming-you are simply jockeying for the best position when it erupts. In Fort Sumter, one player takes control of the Unionists and the other plays the Secessionists as they politically maneuver in the lead-up to the American Civil War. When compared with the day-eating sessions of its bigger brothers and sisters, this is nothing less than a miracle. Later games went even faster, and I have no doubt an experienced pair of players could blast through the game in 20 minutes or so. Even in my first game, when my opponent and I were still figuring out the finer details, teaching and playing took less than an hour. The box advertises a playtime of 20-40 minutes and, my god, it's not a lie. It looks altogether like a Very Serious Production.Īnd while the subject matter is very serious indeed (and is treated with considerable thoughtfulness and respect, both in-game and in the generous reference book), Fort Sumter's hook is its accessibility: it takes the card-driven game-a genre normally associated with lengthy historical deep-dives, like Twilight Struggle and Paths of Glory-and reduces it down to its most fundamental elements. The entire thing screams "grandfather's study " see it on a shelf and you might imagine it smells like scotch and polished hardwood, and that if you crack the box open a cloud of cigar smoke might leak out. This means the cover features minimal text framing a period lithograph depicting the bombing of Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter might have one of the most misleading boxes in recent memory. Because actually, the cover of a thing gives us a lot of useful information: what the publisher thinks of it, who the publisher thinks its audience is, and what this audience might expect to find inside. It's an old cliché that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and while this is technically true, it's also sort of not true.
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