Shiloh (SPI, 1975): the folio game, 50 years on
Shiloh is a two-player board wargame that SPI published in 1975, one of the four battles in the Blue & Gray quadrigame and later sold on its own in a folio. It is small, it is fast, and it has a structural problem reviewers have been pointing at for fifty years: the Confederate player probably cannot win. Whether that matters depends entirely on why you are putting it on the table.
What it actually is
The folio format invites confusion, so it is worth clearing up first. A folio game is not a book. It is a game packaged in a double LP-sized cardstock sleeve instead of a box: a map, a counter sheet, a rules folder, nothing else. SPI used the format through the 1970s to sell single battles cheaply, and the Blue & Gray folio run was one of the more successful.
Shiloh was designed by Kip Allen, Irad B. Hardy and Redmond A. Simonsen, with Simonsen also doing the graphic design. It covers the fighting of 6-7 April 1862 near Pittsburg Landing in southern Tennessee, where Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of the Mississippi hit Grant’s Army of the Tennessee without warning, drove it back with heavy losses, and then had to decide overnight whether to finish the job or rest. Johnston was killed during the first day, so that decision fell to P.G.T. Beauregard — and it is the hinge the whole game turns on.
How it plays
The system is adapted from SPI’s Napoleon at War and is deliberately plain: alternating I-Go-You-Go turns, one player moves and attacks, then the other. Thirteen turns in total — six for the first day, one for the night, six for the second. About 100 counters on a small map. Nobody in 1975 was claiming this was a detailed operational simulation, and people who bought folios were buying an afternoon, not a project.
Two rules do most of the work.
The first is Attack Effectiveness, introduced across the Blue & Gray games: an attacking unit that takes an “Attacker Retreat” result is finished attacking for the rest of that game day, though it defends normally. It is a cheap way to model an army spending itself, and it gives the Confederate first day a natural burn-out point instead of letting it run until the turn track ends.
The second is the Union movement restriction, and it is the controversial one. During the first two turns, every Union unit not adjacent to an enemy must move one hex north or northeast. You are not allowed to form a line; you are required to fall back, because that is what happened. It is a blunt instrument, and Jon Freeman said as much in The Complete Book of Wargames (1980): perhaps necessary for balance, but “tiresome”.
Victory conditions, and why they are the problem
Both sides score Victory Points for eliminating enemy units, and Pittsburg Landing is the ground that matters. The Confederate player wins with either twice the Union’s points, or by holding Pittsburg Landing with at least as many points as the Union. The Union player wins by holding Pittsburg Landing with more than half the Confederate total. Anything else is a draw.
Read those thresholds side by side and the asymmetry jumps out. The Union requirement is a fraction; the Confederate requirement is a multiple. The Confederate player has to take the ground and dominate the exchange, and has to do it before exhaustion and reinforcement close the window.
Reviewers noticed immediately. Harold Totten, writing strategy notes in Moves 23, pointed out that the Confederate player has near-total freedom of movement for the first three turns and then added, dryly, “you’re going to need it”; his conclusion was that the momentum of the opening offensive probably could not be sustained. Steve List in Moves 54 was blunter — “Basically, the Confederates are not likely to win” — and graded the game a C. Charles Vasey, in The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming (1977), came at it from the terrain instead, noting that Shiloh is fought in very rough ground and offers less room to maneuver than the other three battles in the box.
What that criticism does and does not mean
There is a defence, and it is not “you’re playing it wrong”. The historical Confederate attack also failed, and a game whose balanced outcome is a Confederate defeat is at least reproducing the thing it claims to reproduce. The complaint is really about what you are being asked to do for two hours. If the losing side’s job is to lose more slowly, the tension has to come from the margin rather than from the result.
That works better as a two-sitting exercise than as a competitive matchup. Play it once from each side and compare how far you got — that is the version of this game that holds up.
The Simulacrum 20 reviewers raised a different objection worth keeping in mind: Steve Newberg, Peter Bartlett and Luc Olivier thought that building an American Civil War game on a Napoleonic engine produced something simple and enjoyable that was not a simulation of Civil War operational combat. They are right, and it is the honest frame for the whole Blue & Gray set. These are introductory games wearing a historical coat.
Who it is for
Freeman’s 1980 summary is still the fairest thing written about it: simple rules “ideal for short playing times and for introducing newcomers to wargaming”, an overall evaluation of “Good”, and the verdict that it is “solid but unspectacular […] suitable for a casual afternoon of beer and pretzels”.
So: get it if you want a hex-and-counter game you can teach in fifteen minutes and finish in an afternoon, or if you are specifically interested in what SPI was doing with the folio format in the mid-seventies. Skip it if you want a Shiloh that rewards Confederate play, or a game that will tell you something about Civil War command that a good article will not.
Getting hold of one
There has been no English print run for a long time. The routes are second-hand copies of the 1975 SPI folio or the Blue & Gray box, the TSR reprint that followed TSR’s takeover of SPI in 1983, or the Japanese editions: Kokusai-Tsushin acquired the rights and published Blue & Gray in the November-December 2008 issue of Command magazine, and republished it in the October 2022 issue.
That last one is the practical tip. A magazine reissue from 2022 is far easier and cheaper to find in playable condition than a fifty-year-old folio whose counters somebody else already punched, and it is the same game.
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