51 - "Almost a Miracle!"
When asked about it, years after it ended, George Washington said that the American victory was "little short of a standing miracle."
"Almost a Miracle!" uses our successful "Tarleton's Quarter!" as a game engine starting point to bring the Northern "half" of the American Revolution into play.
Will the British be able to impose "the King's Peace" on the northern colonies or will the revolution survive to birth a new nation?
The map and victory conditions for "Almost a Miracle!" show players why battles took place in key areas but also lets players explore those seemingly odd tertiary campaigns, like Halifax, Fort Pitt, and Quebec.
Designer David Jones forces both sides to deal with their own challenges. The British consistently failed to "live off the land" and had to buy or ship food to sustain their armies, while the Continentals struggled with purchasing power and transportation.
The game handles battles in both large and small scale, as both were critical to the War's outcome, with a system that models 18th Century combat and how it differed from later times, where morale, readiness, leadership, and mere chance all could be "the" critical factor at one time or another, and disease and desertion could be an army's biggest killer.
Special rules cover the short enlistments of the Continentals, the uncertainty of French support and entry, prisoner exchanges, and the variable support of Loyalists and Native Americans.
Both sides faced challenges they did not expect, and both sides contributed nearly as much to their own failures as they achieved in victory.
The game will provide insights into how narrowly the Americans succeeded and how close the British came to their own victory.
"Almost a Miracle!" and issue #51 of ATO:
Map - One full color 22" x 51" set of area mapsheets.
Counters - 280 full color 1/2" die-cut pieces
Rules length - 16 pages
Charts and tables - 2 pages
Complexity - Medium
Playing time - Up to 8 hours
How challenging is it solitaire? - Average
Design - David Jones
Development - Lembit Tohver
Graphic Design - Mark Mahaffey (after Craig Grando)
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