One scenario, playable from either side. Every battle runs five minutes on the clock against a Green, Regular or Veteran enemy: the attacker has to break the line before nightfall, the defender has to hold.
Fort Donelson
Free · opens Grant's Campaigns
February 15, 1862 · 2 p.m.
As the Union, storm the outer works and pen the garrison in. That morning the Confederates broke out and drove McClernand back along the Forge Road, then went back into their trenches. Send C. F. Smith's division, the 2nd Iowa of Lauman's brigade leading and Birge's Western Sharpshooters beside it, against the thinly held works on the left, while Lew Wallace's brigades retake the ground on the right.
As the Confederacy, hold the works and the fort. Buckner's division is racing back to the right, where Smith's Federals are forming, with Hanson's 2nd Kentucky, Brown's and Heiman's Tennesseans and the batteries of Graves, Maney and Porter. If the line breaks today, the whole garrison will be prisoners by morning.
The battle
Forts Henry and Donelson guarded the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, the highways into the heart of the Confederacy. After Fort Henry fell to Navy gunboats on February 6, Grant marched his army overland to Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland near the town of Dover.
On February 15 the garrison under Floyd, Pillow and Buckner attacked and opened the road to Nashville, then lost its nerve and went back. Grant rode the line telling his men to fill their cartridge boxes. Smith's division carried the outer works on the Confederate right and Lew Wallace retook the lost ground. That night Floyd and Pillow escaped by steamboat and Forrest led his cavalry out through the flooded backwater.
Buckner asked for terms. Grant answered that no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender could be accepted, and more than 12,000 Confederates surrendered: the first great Union victory of the war. It opened Nashville and most of Tennessee to the Union. Grant took a lesson from that morning he used for the rest of the war: in every battle comes a moment when both sides are shaken, and it goes to the general who attacks first.
Free or paid
Free. Fort Donelson is the opening battle of Grant's Campaigns and is free to every player. The other six battles of the campaign, from Champion Hill to Appomattox, are a one-time purchase. It is played on the 1862 sketch of Fort Donelson and its outworks by Lieutenants Jenney and Kossack, engineers, from the National Archives.
Thirteen battles, the Drill Field and the Field Manual are free. The Historical Campaigns, Grant's Campaigns and The Western Campaigns are optional one-time purchases that restore on every device signed in to the same Apple ID.