SMALL STUFF A pal and I have been playing some 28mm games over the past few months, alternating between Old West and ACW. This is pretty unusual for me- I don't often play in 28mm, as I'm a Big Boy! No, not that, what I mean is that I game in 54mm! The joy of this arrangement is that the other fella, Calvin Roberts, does all the work. And I mean all - he provides the figures, play sheets, scenarios and even builds any special terrain needed. What a sweet deal -all I do is turn up and play. Sure I feel guilty, but not guilty enough not to let him do it! Actually I do have some 28mm Bushwackers and Red Legs and we have used them for some games. But all the other figures have been Calvin's, and very nice they are too. Mostly Foundry, but more and more Redoubt etc are creeping in because of the relative costs. Our ACW games have been a refight of the Jackson's Valley Campaign actions from a set of rules called The Road North, produced by the Hull Wargames club here in the UK. They are very nicely done, but very complex. The problem is that we don't know them and don't use them enough to really get to know them. Calvin's son Andrew plays with us and is better at sorting out the many and various tables and cross-references etc, but they still seem to make for slow games. The first battle we fought, Kernstown, we had to do over 2 Saturdays, about 8-9 hours playing time - which to me is far too long for one quite small [in terms of the size of forces] game. Actually we played the game twice too, to get a better grip on the rules and the scenario. We tackled Front Royal next [out of sequence for reasons I didn't quite follow but Calvin decides] but as Andrew was ill we decided to try some rules I'd found in MWAN. These were Stonewall Brigade [SB] by Robert Piepenbrink. They were billed as Fast Play, and looking at them and the 4 pages they took up when reprinted on A4 paper, that seemed likely to be true. By contrast The Road North [TRN] go on and on for pages and pages! PRE-GAME PREPARATION We translated the SB Troop Types to line up with those in TRN and used the Roster Sheets from the latter. We also decided to keep the ammo limitations from TRN [which go on the Roster Sheet]. Pre-game we also settled on the variables in SB: Artillery were to be represented by 2 guns per battery, the crews purely decorative Commanders were single mounted figures not on stands of 2, as all the figures we had were mounted this way. Movement would be Simultaneous [and the sequence would be Move, Fire, Melee, Morale] Formation change penalties would be decided. I had suggested we might use the Troop Type to provide different penalties for different types ie X move for Veterans; Y move for seasoned; Z move for Green [or even a whole move], but we decided to keep it simple for our first time. Calvin had made the terrain for the scenario from TRN and very good it looked too. I was Union commander Colonel Kenly [not my preferred role, but Calvin always wants to play Confederate, and as he provides everything I can't really argue!], and Calvin took the mighty mantle of Jackson, and off we went. There was a 12 game move limit to the game, and some reinforcements come on GM 3 and 5. Well, a pitiful handful of Yankees appear whilst hordes of Rebs appear all over the place - but it was historically accurate so I had to keep quiet. THE GAME I won't give a blow-by-blow report. Suffice it to say we played the game through to a conclusion in 4 hours! The simplicity of the rules were a shock after the complexities Ltable after table to consult, and then casualties coming off in dribs and drabs, and having to be tracked on the Roster sheet] of TRN. OK - when the first Confederate volleys blew away 4 stands of 4 figures from a battalion of 20 figures I was more than a little shaken [and so were the survivors!]. My initial, overhasty, reaction was, of course, that the rules were far to severe in firing effect and would need changing - but as the game rolled on the unusual nature of these first volleys became apparent. Calvin had thrown some dang good dice and benefited accordingly - but Lady Luck's fickle favours soon abandoned him [they never even seemed to get to me] and actually the rules worked fine. What happened was that the actual effectiveness of firing was much less than it had seemed from the first of the Reb's dice throws, and it was much harder to inflict serious casualties than it had seemed. The Charge to Contact Morale checks worked out OK too, and getting to hand-to-hand was not easy. Even the very simple Morale Rules worked fine. I lost one badly shot up Yankee unit which Routed off the table, but was able to rally another. The conclusion we reached was that the rules worked fine for us, giving us a result in the playing time we have available. We will certainly want to use them again - but whether we will convince Andrew remains to be seen. What the contrast between the 2 rules sets seems to point up to me is the Process verses Outcome schools of thought. TRN rules are all about Process - lots of painstaking thought has gone into producing a set of rules which cover every nuance and variable in ACW warfare. This is all reflected in a process which is, inevitably, lengthy and complicated. The playing time is adversely impacted as a result [I accept, of course, that as familiarity grows so playing time would reduce - but I just don't get to play that often]. SB are aimed at an Outcome - a result to a game in a reasonable time. The rules are simple, not every subtlety of battle in the ACW is covered, but the game is easy to understand, control and play. You pays your money and takes your choice!  Back to MWAN # 128 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com