The Little Engine That Almost Could

When a pop-up announces that this is Turn 1 of 500, you know you’re in trouble. But that’s not unusual in a John Tiller game. His games are heavy on research and light on anything that makes a battle go faster. Good scenario design can only get you so far before you realize that the American Civil War was probably shorter than a single Tiller campaign.
At its best, the Tiller engine can still amuse and enlighten. It shines in its representations of Napoleonic warfare, and the campaign in Jena-Auerstadt (3 stars) offers simple choices before you get down to the fighting. The scenarios range from a dozen turns to a few hundred, and this is where you will find most of the exciting combat moments. The AI opponent is competent, if not brilliant, but it certainly beats trying to take an epic-length battle to e-mail. The battlefield can be tight at times, increasing the tension. The battle itself poses the classic quality-versus-quantity debate, but there’s never quite enough quantity to overwhelm the player.
All the titles suffer somewhat from the central failing in the Tiller campaign design.  Both Minsk ’44 (2.5 stars) and Vicksburg (2.5 stars) have interesting scenarios in interesting settings, but both also take a long time to get going, especially in the campaigns. The grand battle in Minsk has hundreds of units by itself; the Soviet opening artillery barrage seems to go on forever. Then you need to move these units, one at a time. There isn’t a lot to distinguish Minsk from the other Panzer Campaigns games, either; one marshy plain in Eastern Europe is pretty much like another. Ironically, despite the size of the armies, you may experience a time crunch turnwise if you don’t want to send your Red Guard charging through a minefield.
Though similar in style to Jena-Auerstadt, the Vicksburg game requires a lot more patience, especially in the campaign. There is almost too much geography to cover, both in terms of space to traverse on the map and difficult terrain. You can easily lose sight of where you are, and the viewing options—in all the games—are too limited to help you make quick sense of the battle. The AI opponent is sometimes too willing to walk into an obvious trap or to abandon a strong defensive position. Fortunately, most of the Vicksburg scenarios are less than 50 turns, and the soundtrack of period music is better than the usual set of war tunes.
The fact that there is still an audience for this type of wargame says as much about the traditionalism of the grognard as it does about the traditionalism of the company. These titles are, in effect, tabletop cardboard wargames that you play on your computer, and they can take nearly as long to finish (though setup and clean-up are much easier.) An update to the interface and better unit management would be boons to those of us who want to get to the good stuff faster.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #196