John Mosby is one of the most intriguing figures of the American Civil War. He opposed slavery and considered the Southern Secession as a pro-slavery movement, but still fought for his native Virginia. He ran a very successful insurgent campaign in the northern counties of the state, ripping through Union supply lines and annoying general after general. After the war, he joined the party of Lincoln so he could help rehabilitate the South and even managed the Presidential campaign of General Grant.

Tilted Mill’s Mosby’s Confederacy turns his guerrilla war into a mostly compelling strategy game that starts slow but doles out rewards as the contest gets more difficult. You are Mosby, stuck in Not the Real Virginia and surrounded by targets of opportunity. You start in 1863 with a Union opponent that is not quite sure it is worth dying to protect munitions or horses, or even sleeping officers. As the war drags on, you get more powerful but your enemy is more determined to defend his turf. You will be outnumbered and have to use every bit of skill you have to survive the war.

The game has two phases. The planning phase lets you choose one mission from a pool options and select which soldiers will join you on that mission. You can only pick troops from towns that neighbor the assignment, but the more support you get the wider they will roam. You can spend munitions or reputation points to upgrade the towns, but you need to be careful with the munitions because there is only one way to get more – capture them.

Managing that resource is the core mechanic of Mosby’s Confederacy. You need munitions in order to carry out assignments – each soldier costs a fixed amount, though one attribute will let green troops sign on for free. But you can only hold so many munitions in your stockpile, and you might not be allowed to capture munitions on every turn. So do you take along five men or ten? Can you afford to take raw recruits into this mission? Throw in the scarcity of cavalry (you need to capture horses) and it becomes clear that the game is a lesson in managing the unpredictability of resources.

The second phase, the real time mission portion, is not as well developed or challenging. Your map shows you the location of your targets and you move your troops towards them, killing, capturing or side-stepping any Union troops that you come across. You can only select five soldiers at any one time, making the crawl across the maps a little tedious. I can find no good game play reason to limit your selection to such a small number.