"Look at all the little men", cried Simon, as he gazed down on my new set up. I had just laid out my 6mm ACW armies on the Simon Ping-Pong table, after several years developing the concept, making master figures, casting the figures, painting the figures, etc. I was looking for accolades and got Simon instead. What was different about this game was the scale, one to one. A single figure represents a single man, a gun is a gun, a tree a tree, a house a house, etc. My unit organizations are based on the order of battle for Gettysburg. If the First Pennsylvania had 500 men in 10 companies at Gettysburg, then my unit has 10 stands with 50 figures per stand, including officer and drummer. The figures are in two ranks and there is a separate stand for the regimental colors and colonel. Artillery batteries are fully equipped with guns, crews, limbers and caissons. I have even made separate stands for skirmishers. The 6mm scale is perfect for one to one gaming, one millimeter equating nicely to one foot. Musket range of 100 yards works out to about 15 inches, standard "game" range. The effect is terrific, very linear. You really get a better idea of battlefield scale, size and distances. If my terrain were better, it would look like a diorama full of little people running about. Generals Simon, Haub and Hurst played a test game that very day. I wanted to see if the concept worked. I had some rules rather sketchily sketched out. I placed a farm in the middle of the table (Stray Dog Farm), consisting of a house surrounded by out buildings, and then threw out bunches of woods here and there. Simon was the Union man, with 5 regiments or 30 companies of infantry and one battery of 6 twelve pounders. Hurst marched on as the South, and had 4 regiments or 32 companies of infantry and one battery of 4 twelve pounders. Their mission, kill and wreak havoc (and test my rules). I wanted to really bring out the "individual man" aspect of the game, so the company or gun crew was the basic game element. Every gun and company had a roster to track people and ammunition. After some testing, the roster wound up looking like this: 17th U.S. Infantry Company A B C D E F G men ammo men ammo men ammo men ammo men ammo men ammo men ammo 40 50 44 50 43 50 38 50 44 50 41 50 44 50 As you play, you just subtract from the number left. The ammo is considered 50 volleys for the entire company. The roster is interesting but a little slow to use. Wally and Bob were always stopping to mark off casualties and bullets. But it did help create the effect of commanding thousands of people. For scale and sequence, every turn is equal to about 5 minutes of real time. The sequence is the basic "you go/I go". I wanted a simple sequence so that I could spend time on other aspects of the game, i.e., maintaining rosters, moving troops, fire calculations, etc. (a turn can only last so long before you lose player interest). Each turn, a side gets 5 actions worth of movement and fire to be played in any combination. So you could shoot for 5 actions, or move for 2 and fire for 3, etc. For movement distances, infantry moves 3 inches per increment, limbered artillery moves 4 inches, and cavalry 5 inches. Basic "game movement" rules apply, such as when infantry wheels you measure from the "outside" end of the stand. A company of infantry can deploy into skirmish formation. The company stand is removed and replaced by an equal number of generic skirmishers, skinny stands of 5 or 10 figures each. it makes counting up the appropriate number of skirmishers faster. Turn One Turn one, Simon and Hurst advance towards each other, converging on Stray Dog farm. Simon leads with his artillery, artillery that can fire all over the table mind you. Hurst gets the first volley in on Simon's weak right flank. Musket fire is calculated per company/stand. You start with the number of men firing, take the tens digit of that number, and roll a ten sided die. If the die comes up at or below the tens digit number, then that's the number of hits inflicted. As an example, your company has 44 men and your firing one volley. You take the tens digit, a 4, and roll a ten sided die. If the die comes up 4 or less, you score that number of hits. So if a 3 was rolled, the target unit would take 3 hits and mark 3 guys off its roster. If a 5 is rolled, then you've rolled over the 4 and missed altogether. It's a simple formula, but it took us a while to get comfortable with it. Now, every infantry unit can fire twice per action (2 rounds a minute), so a single company can throw up to 10 dice. The average hits are usually about half the maximum possible, and with the units mostly under 50 men, the average hits per volley is usually around 1 or 2. But, there is also quite a swing possible, which I like, where a unit can really clobber another with some lucky throws, or miss disastrously. And did one of Simon's units get smashed! Bob threw a series of "maximum hits", and one of Wally's companies went down with a big groan. I wondered for a minute there if the firing rules made infantry too powerful, but that type of massive WHOMP only occurred once during the game. The rest of the time the fire was pretty average. But was Simon unhappy! "Revenge", he shouted, and unlimbered his entire battery in front of Stray Dog farm, where Bob had ensconced a regiment of troops. But before the big blast, we had a melee to fight (should we use the term "melee" in a set of ACW rules, one of those effete French words? Shouldn't it be something more 'murican like fight, stomp, smash, socko, crunch?). What made this tricky was that I had no melee rules to start with. So the three of us spent a good hour plus hammering out the following procedure. Melee is similar to firing. First, the attacker determines where the center of the melee will occur. Then he rolls percentage dice to determine the melee radius and therefore define the number of stands involved in the fight either physically or morally. The results are: 01-33 34-66 67-100 3 inch radius 5 inch radius 7 inch radius Both sides then calculate one volley of fire for every stand in contact, and causalities are assessed. The victor is determined by a pair of Simon equations. Each side calculates the following: Survivors Involved + Causalities Inflicted = Total People Tens digit of Total People X 1D10 = Melee Sum The side with the larger Melee Sum is the victor and the loser falls back in an uncontrolled status. If the victor's Melee Sum is twice that of the loser or more, then the loser routs. As an example, Bob is the attacker, chooses where the center of the melee will occur (where his troops are in contact with Wallys) and he throws percentage dice to determine the melee radius. He tosses a 49, which translates into a 5 inch melee radius. Both sides count up which units fall within the radius and which are in contact. Bob has 179 troops and Wally 104. Then a volley of fire is calculated to assess losses. Bob inflicts 12 and Wally 9. Now, who won the melee? Bob: 170 Survivors + 12 inflicted = 182 Total People Wally: 92 Survivors + 9 inflicted = 101 Total People Bob: Tens digit of 18 X die roll of 7 = 126 Melee Sum Wally: Tens digit of 10 X die roll of 9 = 90 Melee Sum Comparing Bob's Melee Sum of 126 and Wally's Melee Sum of 90, shows that Bob's sum is the largest and therefore he is the winner. All of Wally's troops involved must fall back. Since Bob's Melee Sum wasn't twice that of Wallys, Wally's troops just fall back rather than rout. What about Simon's big artillery blast? By the time we finished haggling out the melee rules, it was dinner time and we were sick of looking at the damned game, so we decided to quit. I know, I led you this far promising the fascinating results of Simon's big kaboom, but since it never happened, let me make you groan more by giving you the artillery firing procedures. Guns fire like infantry, with a range of fifty inches for solid shot and fifteen for canister. Each gun can fire 2 rounds per action. For solid shot, roll 1D10 per round per gun. A result of 1-5 is that number of causalities (just like infantry). For canister, also roll 1D10 per round per gun. The number shown on the die are the causalities inflicted. Subtract 1/2 from each die for soft cover and 1/4 for hard cover. Those are the skeleton rules for my 6mm "one to one" game. It is fairly fast paced with a tolerable amount of book keeping, and the visual effect is super. I'll provide updates as I flesh out this set some more. Back to PW Review January 1997 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 Wally Simon 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