Dan Cicero

Tom DeFranco and I have played the Garners' Champion Hill a couple of times, face-to-face. This time, we used ADC2, the universal board game conversion utility from HPS Software, and the gameset available from The Gamers. The gameset contains the map and counters, allowing the players to see the game just as if they were playing face-to-face. Moves are transferred via email. We played the eighteen-turn Scenario 5.1, "The Battle of Champion Hill." Our game started on 21 May, 2000 and ended on 24 August, almost exactly three months later. We averaged about 5 days per turn or about one file transfer per day.

The CWB series lends itself to play by email. Each move requires six file transfers: 1) Union Command, Movement and Close Combat, 2) Confederate Defensive Fire, 3) Union Offensive Fire and Rally, 4) Confederate Command, Movement and Close Combat, 5) Union Defensive Fire and 6) Confederate Offensive Fire and Rally. The only interactivity in the turn sequence is Close Combat and Tom and I agreed that to let the phasing player roll all the dice during those bloody assaults.

The CWB command system actually helps in an email game. If the time delay between moves makes initial strategies hard to remember, a quick referral to the order log provides a reminder. The delay can also help inexperienced players. Can't remember the rules for Emergency Corps Retreat? Don't be embarrassed. Your opponent will never know you had to look it up. Always feeling a little uncomfortable playing experienced players who seem to know all the charts and tables by heart? Take all the time you need working out the die roll modifiers. To your opponent, it will all look instantaneous.

Tom and I were both committed to playing this game, so delays between moves were minimized. We both worked hard to complete our turns and return them as quickly as possible.

In some cases, we managed several transfers per day, which compensated for distractions like business travel that temporarily halted the game several times. Really, completing CWB moves takes little time. For a Defensive Fire Phase, for instance, there might be only a handful of die rolls. Some of these moves took only ten minutes or so. The importance of quick move turn-around is obvious. No one wants to wait a month for an opponent to complete a Defensive Fire Phase that couldn't take more than ten minutes.

Tom DeFranco

As Dan has already stated, we're both veterans of this battle a couple of times over. Prior to acquiring a copy of Champion Hill, by The Gamers (which I snapped up as soon as available in my local stores, knowing, by that time the quality of a Garners product), I already had a copy of a scenario module from an Australian computer gaming company named SSG (Strategic Studies Group). The resemblance between their version of the battle and those of the board game are actually quite uncanny. Both companies wisely chose to highlight the command problems of the nineteenth century as the crux of their game systems, thus lending a degree of uncertainty heretofore non existent in previous games in either venue (computer or board). Both systems feature brigades as the maneuver elements. Both companies are /were (I'm not sure if SSG is still in business) unafraid of producing scenarios of the occasional lopsided historical battle, which Champion Hill certainly was. I love studying and playing Gettysburg, Chickamauga and Antietam, but I believe that variety is the spice of life and the more games the better on battles like Champion Hill, Pea Ridge, Belmont and (yes, despite the sighs they might get) Missionary Ridge and Nashville. If nothing else, they can be tactical exercises of how to pull off an even bigger victory than historically, or to somehow, against the odds, stand longer than your historical counterpart.

More Two Hard Weeks

Introduction
Champion Hill Set Up
Champion Hill Strategy
The Armies Clash
After the Battle