by Michael Eckenfels, 15 July 2021 ~ #UnboxingDay
I had a lot of fun playing the 2012 VPG version of In Magnificent Style, which was a solo game where you controlled the Southern troops charging the Union center during the infamous Pickett’s Charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 3, 1863). The original VPG game incorporated a lot of ‘push your luck’ elements where you balanced advancing with time, trying to gain the Union lines with as few casualties as possible – not a simple task.
click images to enlarge
This new version from Worthington looks to be a significant upgrade to the 2012 VPG version, in many ways, as I will showcase at a high level here. I’ll be doing a more thorough review of the game, which means I’ll be revisiting the older version as well, to best highlight how the game has grown and evolved.
Just from the back of the box of the new version, you can tell there’s a lot of good quality components here. Not that the 2012 version was bad – I think it was pretty good, considering it came in a much smaller box. How much smaller, you may ask?
On the right is my old copy; on the left, the copy generously sent over from Worthington Games. I like the art on the original well enough, but think the new art is a big improvement.
From the side, you can see the older version is not just smaller, but less thick as well. The newer version is the same size as a ‘normal’ sized board game.
Upon opening the box, you find the rules.
Upon first glance, it looks like there’s a lot more text to this, though there are color examples of components.
Further in, the text gets thicker (with a lack of illustrations/examples), but the structure looks well-organized. Despite there being a lot of text, it doesn’t look ‘dense’ and is perfectly readable (and my eyes aren’t the best, so that’s saying something).
Compared to the original game’s 2012 manual, it has more space to work with.
Inside the original manual, there’s more than a few illustrations, but the text is packed a lot tighter since there’s not a lot of room to begin with. I don’t have an issue with the original rule book, but do think the newer one, just from my initial examination here, is an improvement.
Here are the two component sheets for the game, and compared to the original, they’re huge. The original bits are a bit more fiddly since they’re so much smaller. I’ll get more into that in my full review.
From this close-up, you can see a great deal of detail in these Confederate units. I find it interesting that the state flag is used for these instead of a Confederate flag, but that goes without saying these days I suppose.
The original unit counters were nice and thick, but small, which you can especially see here when compared to their larger cousins.
The map is…just wow. It’s huge, it’s mounted, and it looks great.
Some VPG games from back in the day included a mounted version that fit together like a puzzle, and also a paper-type map that folds up. Both of these from the original game easily fit on the newer map!
To round things out is a pad of paper which looks like you can record each of your games’ details upon, a deck of cards (which I think was done as counters in the original game), 14 dice, a lot of baggies for storage, and a decent insert.
The style improvements alone make this quite interesting for me as I have nothing but good memories of playing the original – though it’s been a while. I’ll check out both and let you know soon how the new version performs on its own, and how it compares to the original.
Thanks for joining this month’s #UnboxingDay with the Armchair Dragoons and we hope you enjoyed our recon of our recent acquisitions.
You can always leave us your feedback in our #UnboxingDay thread, or in the comment area on this article, below.
The regiment also occasionally musters on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and occasionally at a convention near you, once we’re allowed to hold them again.
