Time for another column. Sure is easy to get distracted and miss my self-imposed deadline. This time I got waylaid on the ACW battle of Fredricksburg. Not the most popular battle, especially if you like playing the Union. After spending the better part of two years gaming Napoleonic Peninsular battles it was definitely time for a change of periods. Maybe the three trouncings that I took in recent battles had something to do with that! Anyway, it was time to get back to my favorite period. The trouble with being an "old" Wargamer is that when you are looking for a new battle you find yourself having played almost everything once or twice before. I wanted a larger action so I could try some new rule ideas and Fredricksburg peeked my interest. When I mentioned that this would be my next battle, I got puzzled looks and point blank questions as to why that battle. The lop-sided nature of the battle seems to turn a lot of people off. In actuality, with the way wargame rules are written, a re-fight Fredricksburg on the wargame table might be very interesting. Our wargame rules do not reflect the true nature of Civil War fire power and certainly would not be much fun to play if they did. A quick look at the Civil War battlefield shows that for the most part frontal assaults were easily turned back and that success on the battlefield was usually gained through the ability to maneuver to the flanks or rear of your opponents. Our rules allow a much better chance for frontal assaults to succeed than historically happened. They do however provide a reasonable motivation for playing such games. I also saw Fredricksburg as a modeling challenge. It was fought in the winter which makes that battlefield a challenge to create and look good. Also the town of Fredricksburg would be a challenge to create. My initial plan for the town was to buy various commercial buildings, but this idea came to a screeching halt when I tried to locate the buildings. I always down scale my buildings for my terrain. As I game in 25mm, the buildings I use are for the most part 20mm. It seems that they just fit on the battlefield better, not taking up near the space that "true scale" buildings would. This allows me to get more buildings into a set area and gives a better look to the game. For Fredricksburg I wanted a large number of one and two story brick building with multiple chimneys. Musket Miniatures has a great line of 20mm ACW buildings, but they did not have any brick houses. Wood and stone houses were available but nothing in brick. I started looking in other places but could not come up with moderately priced brick houses or any source with a good variety of houses. The last thing I wanted to do was to scratch build the town of Fredricksburg, but that was my only choice if I was going to have the type and number of buildings that I wanted. The town is now done . It consists of 20 houses and buildings with twelve scratched built. I did come up with an easy method to make buildings and will do a how to article on them in a future column. The other day I picked up a nice Redoubt ACW ambulance from Doug Carroccio at the Miniature Service Center. In my rules I use various train vehicles as markers within the game. For example, I have ammunition rules for my artillery. The number of train vehicles represents the number of re-supply moves that a player has for his artillery. It is a great way to keep track of things and gives a great excuse to paint up, collect and use various army support vehicles. The ambulance is a one axle cart. It comes with cart and horse but the out rider comes in the medical figures set. Detail is great. The only thing I did not like was the size. It is a large piece and does not fit in well with some of my other vehicles. I am sure that it is in scale with the rest of the Redoubt line, but to my liking it could have been 10% to 15% smaller. The other day I got a gift from Tom Barkalow. He knew that I had some Bussler figures in my ACW collection and that I was looking for the artillery limber that is being hit by a shell. This was a collectors piece that had a limber, 12 LB Napoleon and 6 horses all crashing to the ground after being hit by a exploding shell. It also comes with a mounted officer and guidon bearer both whose horses are falling to the ground. At first I was going to make up the piece as a name plate for work but figures are figures and they deserve to be played on the table. I had extra Bussler timbers and cannons so I decided to make a Bussler artillery battalion. My friend Mike Walkner was over the other day testing some new rules. Mike has really been kicking my butt lately, having beaten me pretty badly in the last three Napoleonic battles that we played. So I thought it best to show him the new artillery battalion that he would have for our next battle. His reaction; "Say Orv, everything is dead or dying in this unit." Ya! "This is not a proper gaming unit". Rolls dice like any other unit Mike. "Bad luck if you ask me". Hope so! Well the figures might look a little strange on the table top but should work great for some photos. Thanks Tom. I have continued to acquire 25mm figures from various manufactures to fill out my ACW collection. Probably 35 different manufactures are represented in my brigades at this time with new figures coming out on a regular basis. There is still one manufacture's figures that I am trying to round up. These were made by Garrison in the 70's. These figures are a small 25mm, with a small 3/16"xl/4" base. The bottom of the base has a copyright symbol and very small lettering of Gren. A number of years back I did an article on collecting ACW figures and was looking for the Grenadiers figures at that time. Paul Suijoal of Belleville, Michigan was nice enough to sent me 12 figures he found in his "junk figure" box. Maybe some of the "old timers" might check their unpainted lead to see if they have some hidden away. I need to find 16-24 additional figures to finish my Grenadier brigade. Any help would be appreciated. My last article dealt with building a vignette for use on the wargame table. Here is one that was put together using Redoubt's Generals having a war conference at a church. The figures were modeled after a ACW photo taken by Timothy O'Sullivan on May 21, 1864 at Massaponas Church. The original photo was taken from a second story window of the church. It showed a council of war between Grant, Meade and their staffs. The Redoubt Generals come in two sets of four with one each of Union and Confederate. I painted the sets as Union generals. Very nice figures that can add a lot of color to ones battlefield. Since 1995 I have had an ongoing rules writing project. It started with the simple premise. I was not going to worry about what other gainers wanted in a rule set but would produce rules for myself and the periods that I game in. The rules would be simple, fast playing and the mechanics the same for both the ACW version and the Napoleonic version. The ACW rules were put together with little problems and little rewriting. On the other hand the Napoleonic version has given me fits. If I had a dollar for every rules change that I have made, I could be retired now! For one of the Napoleonic tests I tried two vastly different versions of the rules with interesting results. For my test I used the Napoleonic battle of Corunna, January 16, 1809. The battle and scenario left the player few options with a choice of attacking right, center or left. This was fine as I wanted a test without player strategy being too great of a factor. The first test was with the rules as originally written. They were very conventional, having set turns, alternate moves and simultaneous fire, morale and combat. The second version used a card deck to control how much and what a player could do during his move. There were no set turns with real time being game time. For both games I was the British General. While the rules played very differently, the results were identical. This got me thinking-how important are the rules we use for a great wargame. Wargamers are forever in search of the perfect rule set. While rules can play very differently, they for the most part, get us to the same place and with the same results. When we come away from a game with the attitude that the rules were great, maybe what we played was a great scenario. All the time and money spent on rules development might get better results if it was spent on scenario development. As I looked at my Corunna battles, they were OK battles, but not great battles. What was missing had nothing to do with the rules but with a scenario that did not allow for any brilliance on the part of the "generals". Back to MWAN #114 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum 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