Our local club here in Central Illinois, the CITW (Central Illinois Tabletop Warriors) attempts to run a megagame each year. The first was a one day refight of the first day of the Battle of the Wilderness during the American Civil War, from which the generic term "WILDERNESS PROJECT" had come to mean in our club any large megagame. Since then we have run three more, two set in the ACW, and a Bathtub Refight of Tom Clancy's book "RED STORM RISING". The last was scaled down on a factor of 25 in the same manner as was done in the BATHTUB BARBAROSSA, and used COMBINED ARMS as its rule set. It was our largest WILDERNESS GAME, with 105 participants, and lasted all day. The purpose of the "WILDERNESS GAMES" is to combine a set of miniature rules with the problems of Command and Control. Brigade/Battalion commanders do the actual fighting, while senior officers attempt to co-ordinate things while limited in their ability to move around and see the action. We attempt to divide the game up and run it in several rooms at once, while preventing the senior officers from being everywhere. By the time a senior officer is allowed to visit his entire front in person, the information from several of the rooms is already out of date. Our megagames are run with four types of participants: THE DIRECTING STAFF: The Team of Judges responsible for running the game as a whole. THE ROOM JUDGES: The judges who keep things moving within each room. THE SENIOR COMMANDERS: Players who serve at a higher level, running Brigades/Divisions by giving orders to the junior commanders to be carried out, shifting reserves, and attempting to keep track of things. THE JUNIOR COMMANDERS: The players who actually get to fight things out and move their troops. MegaGame For a 100 person megagame, the breakdown of personnel would look like this: DIRECTING STAFF 5 10 ROOM JUDGES 10 15 SENIOR COMMANDERS 20 30 JUNIOR COMMANDERS 45 60 In looking for the basis of a game to use for "THE WILDERNESS PROJECT", the following areas need to be addressed: 1. The miniature rules need to be a set easily available, and with which the junior commanders are familiar, such as COMMAND DECISION. 2. The battle needs to be one where a non continuous front exists, so the battlefields can be broken up into separate rooms. 3. The action should be well known to the players so as to be interesting to them, but at the same time if the players know exactly what went wrong the first time this can lead to additional problems as they attempt to "correct" history. 4. The game should be interesting to the players as a game. Now, the possibility exists of doing for the next "WILDERNESS GAME" the famous MARKET GARDEN operation to Arnhem in 1944. It falls into line with the points listed above, and offers an interesting chance to replay history on historical grounds! And if I have managed to puzzle you with the last statement, read on as I attempt to explain: Back to Table of Contents -- Command Post Newsletter #1 To Command Post Quarterly List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1990 by Greg Novak. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com