Reading Again

As usual of late, I haven't got much gaming done. There was a TSATF game at the club last Saturday that I missed. I might get something in during the Fourth of July weekend, if I can clear off my table:

Hey, at least it's full size now.

Been reading a lot instead. Just today, I received one of my Charles S. Grant books that has taken three trips across the Atlantic to reach me, an old classic:

I've only taken a quick glance through it, but there is plenty of food for thought. Two of my favorite scenarios, for one - Fontenoy and Sawmill Village. I hope to try them out at Das Krieg Haus one of these days. Sawmill Village and a couple others provide a choice of units to the player and the first, with about six units rather than the original four, would probably be enough for two players a side.

Several of the scenarios require map-moves - not quite mini-campaigns as they are over the course of a single day and lead up to a single battle. Others are for specific periods (mostly 20th-century, with airborne and one specifically Vietnam scenario), and there is at least one small-scale skirmish game, with a dozen guerrillas, 50 civilians, and a middling number of opposing troops. Charge! isn't quite designed for it, certainly not with my Wofuns, but there are enough minis in the club collection for a try. There are even a couple scenarios that would work in The Sword and the Flame. Rest assured I will take a closer look at this book and see what I can make of it. Playing the 52 scenarios at the rate of one a week is, while a tempting prospect, sadly not doable here.

A better choice for an "ongoing" project would be my 30 BEF plastics, of which I've still only assembled five, one of which I reassembled after its arms fell off. One a day, thus finishing them within the month, seems an achievable goal... though a plausible excuse for not finishing will be that I sprained a finger at work. Physical therapy is going well, but I suddenly wonder what the physiotherapist and gamer Donald Featherstone would have suggested for wargamers with injured hands... he seems to mostly have dealt with sports and dancing injuries, though (maybe he had early members of the Sealed Knot in to see him?).

Enough asides; what else have I been reading?

The Siege of Gibraltar, 1779-1782 by Tom Guffie - part of a "British Battles" series by Batsford. Fairly short, but comprehensive. I'm unfamiliar with the siege, but I've always wanted to visit the Rock and this scratches that itch. I'll look for more of this series.

The Boy Generals, by Adolfo Ovies - the first two volumes of a three-volume trilogy (the third appears to not yet be published) about George Custer and his rival Wesley Merritt during the American Civil War. The first volume covers events up to the end of Gettysburg, the second the beginning of Sheridan's Shenandoah campaign; the third will go to the end of the war. Merritt, who has been forgotten because, unlike Custer, he wasn't interested in publicity, was two years senior to Custer at West Point. They were both promoted to brigadier just before Gettysburg and emnity developed from there. While they're also absorbing biographies, the series is largely about the development of the cavalry from riders with swords (which Ovies characterizes as hussars), to mounted infantry with carbines (characterized as dragoons). Custer was basically the former sort and Merritt the latter, except that Custer seems to have used mounted action as a partner to Spencer carbines. Two of his regiments used firearms to pin the enemy while the other two got into position to charge. So while he was famous for his charges, he's shown to have more depth than is usually depicted.

Unsung Hero of Gettysburg, by Edward G. Longacre, is recommended by approving mentions of its subject in The Boy Generals. It's a biography of David McMurtrie Gregg, another Union cavalry general, which I haven't started yet but looks quite good. While he commanded Custer during Gettysburg, like Merritt he was unassuming and led an unrecognized if busy career. I look forward to reading it.

Queen Emma and the Vikings, by Harriet O'Brien - A biography of a Norman queen of Saxon England, betrothed to Aethelred the Unready and the mother of Edward the Confessor. Another period I'm not very familiar with, but looks very involved with a great deal of intrigue and interesting characters.

In "fantasy" news, my coworker who was going to GM Dungeons and Dragons at an August library event has had to beg off, which may put me on the spot. There is a meeting tomorrow to discuss plans which I hope to attend; at this point, while I am expecting to do a painting program in the background of the gaming, I don't yet know the space I'll have or the people who'll be backing me up. I like to think I've learned lessons from previous tries, so I will have plenty to say!

Thanks for reading. Until next time...

Alternate Histories

Achieved a couple things today. First, I finally got in a round of Junior General's Hampton Roads scenario at work.

There were fourteen fourth graders expecting an activity, and the children's librarian was busy. I checked with the teacher and she was amenable - though I presented it as "sea captains and pirates" to begin with.

I divided the kids by color of shirt - five black, nine blue - into teams. (Since Monitor has fewer guns, this is fairer than it sounds.) Then I just went person to person. Each turn, one kid would move a ship, and the rest would take turns "firing". Next turn, whoever was next in line would be "Captain" for the turn and the cycle continued. The firing mechanism is Fred T. Jane's original "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" routine, using the bamboo skewers seen in the above photo.

The photo is old, by the way, and I didn't have the storytime rug. Would've come in handy, actually, since the kids were naturally crowding each other; but in general they took turns and learned the procedures quickly. I was limited to the floor-carpet, but it is a blue-grey mix of angled shapes so still quite sea-like.

For presentation, I asked if they'd been studying black history, and they had. I explained that this was based on a real battle from 160 years ago, and that it might take a while or even be a tie because these ships were special. Among the first to be made of iron, cannonballs would usually bounce off! (There were "ooooh"s at this.) I taught them the ship names as well, though I used Merrimac just because it sounds funnier.

I misplaced the rules for casualties (D6 per penetrating hit), but there are other ways to win, by either hitting the waterline, the gunports or Monitor's pilot house. The Virginia took an early lead with a hit on Monitor's turret that knocked out one gun. That slowed return fire. There are two sheets of silhouettes - one short range, one long - and the Union players learned quickly to stay far away where their "crackerbox on a shingle" was too tiny to hit, and Virginia's lower speed and maneuverability made it harder to catch up. Monitor got lots of hits on its bigger target.

However, they eventually learned to present their four-gun broadside, and the few hits they got were eventually crippling. The pilot house was hit once (twice and the captain is blinded and the ship must retreat) and after half an hour they knocked out the second gun. Monitor had to retreat.

Every hit resulted in cheers, and kids were even encouraging their opponents. I had to quiet them down and tell them to sit back and not interfere with each other, but their enthusiasm was infections. The target sheets, punctured in many places, will have to be replaced.

Civil Wars

More reading - two histories and a ruleset. I was hoping to go to a "MicroCon" that the club was running this weekend, but schedules and other commitments conspired to stop me at the last moment. So I'm even more P'O'd at present. My dad has offered to help me move to a larger apartment, and a game room of my own is tempting, but my job is difficult enough right now that I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

"...Afghans proudly thought of
their land as Yaghistan -- 
the land of rebellion."

It repeats in greater detail some of the character descriptions and events of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game. While it is more focused on Shah Shuja's story, it also details the Western intrigue that both helped and hindered him in his ambitions. The British prejudice (not in a racial sense) of the situation led them to support Shuja, who had been defeated already four times trying to regain his throne, rather than Dost Muhammad who held a much more commanding position. Their fear of Russian expansion in fact led the (previously disinterested) Russians to court Persia.

Worse were the British efforts to control Shuja and his government in order to prop him up. There are Catch-22 parallels here with South Vietnam; on the one hand, Shuja could not survive without British support - on the other, that very fact made him anathema and increased the interest in bringing him down. If all that your allies can do to help you is to literally take over and set you aside, what is the use of them? Like the presidents of South Vietnam, it was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position - and the US had the same problem in Afghanistan in the 2010s. They could raise a new, more effective and conventional Afghan military - but that in itself repulsed the more traditional population and made them more likely to resist the obvious usurpers. As in Vietnam, they could only be sure of the cities (barely even those) and whatever areas they controlled directly - the rest was a sea of dissent. The country was too poor to support itself, so millions of foreign aid were poured in to little effect. The parallels with 2001-2021 are starkly laid out - and a bit terrifying.

Hilariously, Shah Shuja, who the British had been undermining and ignoring ever since they arrived in Kabul, was the first and only man to respond quickly when the rebellion started. Yet, without control of his own government or army, he could do nothing. His most loyal followers, when they saw the tepid British response, practically had no choice but to go over to the rebels. The political and military leaders failed to respond to the uprising when it happened, and were practically quiescent throughout until the retreat. This only encouraged the Afghans, who noticed quickly that the soldiers were even forbidden by their own officers to fire on robbers in the streets. They lost the moral high ground when the political officer, MacNaghten, was murdered while trying to double-cross the Afghan leaders, who declared Jihad.

And then they marched out of the cantonments towards the high passes, despite all the warnings of the few friends they had left (including Shah Shuja himself, who despite their condescension still considered himself their ally). Shuja held out in the Bala Hisar fortress nearby, and would continue to do so for a year. The best the British could have done was to retreat to it, but it's obvious their leaders just wanted any excuse to go home - even if that meant abandoning virtually all their followers in the process.

As pointed out by the author and one of the more pragmatic survivors, there was betrayal in this, but also breathtaking stupidity. I am inclined to go back and read the first Flashman novel, now I've gotten the full details.

A fine sample of the farcical reasoning behind much of the fighting: Governor Ellenborough read a (fictional) report that the gates of Ghazni had been stolen from an Indian temple, so as revenge, he ordered them brought back to India in triumph to avenge this "insult". The officers who took the gates recognized the evidence of their original Islamic construction, and neither the Afghans nor the Hindustanis cared. A cutting quote:

"As the saying goes, real power does not need tawdry propaganda! A more lasting monument until today is the quantity of rotting corpses of the English troops that still block the highways..."

Dalrymple uses contemporary Afghan historians and epic narrative poetry to characterize how the Afghans felt about what was going on, using the latter frequently in place of a conventional narrative. Many of these writings, available for the first time in English, were published in the 1850s in India, possibly to incite the Mutiny (which, the author pointedly notes, first broke out among regiments whose officers had abandoned them during the disastrous retreat). Almost like fiction, it brings out the atmosphere of the place and time. Characterful sketches and paintings of the principal characters are included as well.

Compares and contrasts the lives and combat experience of William Oates of the 15th Alabama, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine. I had not considered Oates before, but he wrote just as well as Chamberlain despite a more desultory education. His early life was in the Wild West, but since this is antebellum, that means what is now the Deep South, and Texas, all of which were much more frontierish in the 1840s and '50s. A generation later and with different luck, Oates might have become a gunfighter. But despite his scrappy history, he worked his way up and, like Chamberlain, became a teacher.

Chamberlain, points out the author, did not have quite the heroic upbringing that hagiographers have ascribed to him. His father went bankrupt a couple times, and Chamberlain himself struggled against stuttering all his life. Though a brilliant junior professor at Bowdoin, he felt compelled to join the Army, going so far as to find a pretext - leave to study in Britain - to get away with it, and his coworkers were surprised and disgruntled. His feeling towards the war was more idealistic - Harriet Beecher Stowe was a neighbor, and Jeff Davis spoke at Bowdoin before the war.

The narrative here is fairly bare-bones, even in the combat writing, and the few maps are not of much use. But then, the book is less a military history and more an exploration of character. Chamberlain's relationship with his independent-minded wife was particularly fraught - she was uninterested in being the First Lady of Maine, for example, and lost three children in infancy. While Oates, curiously enough, was one of the few Confederates who urged his government to arm slaves and offer them freedom to join the beleaguered rebel army, which like the more famous Patrick Cleburne retarded his career. This is the same man who defended one of his veterans from a charge of murdering a black man. Basically, both men were ambitious to the point of being willing to put other considerations aside - Chamberlain his wife's needs, Oates his distaste for the KKK and other overt signs of white supremacy. Both initially moderate in their views, they ended up on directly opposite sides of the aisle politically, because Chamberlain, to keep his office, leaned into the Radical Republican agenda which otherwise was not his style.

So while they were both successful, there was also a sort of unrecognized tragedy in their lives.

I haven't finished this one yet, but it's increasingly depressing. Chamberlain had a couple minor scandals in his leadership both of the state and Bowdoin, and as his career wound down, Oates' burst into flower. He went to Congress (in the process marrying a woman who had been born into the house where he recovered from wounds while he was staying there) by building and leading the Democratic political machine, grinding down the black man to do it, and learning to filibuster.

A smaller and shorter ruleset than I expected. I'm interested in the premise, but so far as I can tell, most of the available volumes are more pictures than "fluff." I'm torn between:

• using my SCW-ish figures on a small scale (changing inches for centimeters), which would allow me to use full-sized platoons and a few light vehicles on my small tables.
• or using some of my 54mms. Like the SCW, none of these are really for the period, but WWI Scots and Western Desert British will work, while Germans can be Fascist foreign legion and Japanese could suggest skirmishes in "the far pavilions". On my tables I'd only really be able to have ten men a side.

There is no fluff at all in the rules here, not even army lists. (A generic recommendation of a command section, three ten-man squads, and optional vehicles and a "special" squad is provided.) Clearly players are expected to add flavor themselves. Gradations of experience help here. Royalist regulars would be better trained, while the socialists of Manchester would be poorly equipped but have greater swings in morale.

The rules themselves are not that complex, but there are a lot of variables to keep track of. This is part and parcel of having a Spanish-Civil-War-esque feel, where the training, equipment and origin of troops must widely vary. Vehicles are the same way, as they can be commandeered civilian, hastily-militarized, or proper armoured cars and tanks (in varying types and with varying armament). Thankfully the damage chart is the same for all, albeit with modified rolls for different types. For less than 25 pages, this is pretty packed. I will need a Quick Reference Sheet, for sure.

The only portion that contains the atmosphere of the "period" in play is a list of Random Event cards on the back cover. Suggestions like "Bike has a flat tyre or phone lines cut - one unit out of communications", "Nice weather for ducks - a downpour reduces shooting range by 6", or "Ha ha, they forgot to fill it up - an enemy vehicle runs out of fuel and may not move." Except for the front cover and a cheerful man with colorful scarf, pipe and teacup (who seems to be the rules' mascot), the only illustrations are color photos of minis.

Overall, though, I am quite interested in the game and the theme. I think my next purchase will be the Concise Sourcebook, but it's clearly possible to play without it to begin with. I have the feeling Spanish Civil War rules can work in a pinch as well, as there is clearly that same heterogenous mix of political and religious views bouncing off each other - a little more chaotic than Spain, even.

Rambling and Reading

 I've had a long and mostly-not-working week - two sick days and then a three-day weekend for Columbus Day (which really should be First Nations Day, but I don't think our governor would go for that).

So I was hoping to get some gaming in. I did join in the Virtual Wargames Club meeting on Saturday, getting to see some of the group's recent collections and showing off some of my own pictures of Kodiak. At the same time was a round of De Bellis Antiquitatis at the club, which has made it somewhat busier; but I chose the option which meant I could stay home.

The first half of the Seven Days to the River Rhine game is now available on Youtube, thanks to Oriskany Jim:

I was then going to try a round of the solo game Battles of the English Civil War by Mike Lambo. I even gave up on cutting out half-sized Paperboys and enlarged the first scenario map instead to fit my Wofun plastics. But while I've read the rules over, I haven't had the gumption to break out the minis and start playing. (One issue that makes it easy to procrastinate is that the lighting in my apartment is such that there aren't many places to play where the lights are directly overhead, hence the poor photos.)

Instead, I've been reading.

This week it has been primarily the old classic Time-Life Civil War series. I love Time-Life books for their compact style and wealth of art and photos; I own most of the Aviation and WWII series, but the ACW series was one I never did manage to get hold of beyond the first volume. So instead I started reading it online, on archive.org. Each book is 175 pages long, but with crisp text and a high proportion of images, so in the past weekend alone I've flashed through about six volumes - I'm currently up to volume eight, The Coastal War: Chesapeake Bay to Rio Grande. And becoming more interested in running something from the Civil War at work - my Battery Wagner model has seen no use yet and (having been stacked in a crowded office) isn't in the best condition. Though I may be able to get away with claiming it's been bombarded?

Others I've been reading are The History of the Lord of the Rings (available on Scribd, just started volume three) and A History of Warfare by John Keegan, a fine writer but a somewhat eclectic work. It's good, but strictly speaking it's not quite a history, as it's not entirely in order. It is loosely separated into sections on Stone, Flesh, Iron and Fire, but (for example) the section on Stone Age warfare is interspersed with comments on psychology, archaeology and anthropological studies of the Yanomamo, Easter Island, and Maori peoples, and what we might learn of prehistorical warfare from them. It's more a sociological history than anything else - why and how do we go to war? One writer regularly mentioned is Victor Hanson, whose controversial claim in The Western Way of War is that "western" peoples fight more deliberately than the "primitives" who (like the tribes of New Guinea) tend towards ritualistic and largely bloodless posturing. Yet you see that in Western literature like the Trojan War, so...

Still plenty to think about.

Building Battery Wagner, Part Three

Technically, Battery Wagner itself is done. Maybe I'll lengthen the southwestern corner, but it's pretty much ready and doesn't have to be perfect. The next step is populating it. I'm too late to run the game this week, but I might (given how little interest I've raised among the teens) try it next week. Today's task was to assemble and label the troops that will face off on the tabletop. I did it in YouMedia, hoping to draw attention from the teens who were mostly doing art on tablets. (I pointed out that making art is worthy of experience points in-game.)

While my DnD materials gathered dust on one table...

I assembled some troops on the other.

These are Black Powder Epic figures. Heresy, I know, but under the circumstances I'm fine with just labeling regiments and allowing flags and base colors to tell them apart. I'm also using white glue to assemble them. After I played the charge scene from Glory, one of the students helped; we got into a good rhythm and had an assembly line going as I added glue and she stuck them on the bases. I also cut out flags from the sheets provided in the Black Powder box - annoyingly there was only one North Carolina flag, yet four Florida ones though the latter fielded far fewer troops!

As we worked, I regaled her with trivia about the Civil War and answered a few questions; she learned to identify regiments by their number and state abbreviation, the significance of the Juneteenth holiday, why the uniform colors were chosen, and why troops sickened and died in camps with bad hygiene. I also showed off my Merrimac and Monitor models and explained the basics of how ironclads worked. It kept us both interested. 

Six regiments, including the 54th Massachusetts.

Sometimes you just have to do what you can in this hobby; I'm not discouraged yet, and there's always the younger kids too (they had a craft project and a juggling act this afternoon, though). The hours I spent today were at least relaxing, and that's a good thing too. Enjoy your hobby.

Building Battery Wagner, Part Two

 My next step is to put the paper pieces of Wagner together.

Prospective field of battle. Sadly, I don't think the screen's
hooked up yet, or I could play scenes from Glory on it.

Subassemblies, tentatively arranged on a sheet of cardboard.

Final arrangement taped down, with six guns and
three regiments of Confederates.

The arrangement took a little work - I realized partway through that there wasn't enough room behind the walls to hold all the troops needed (six 60mm bases apiece), and moved everything forward on the card. Also, one of the units (31st North Carolina) had been recently paroled and was avoiding combat in a bombproof shelter; I'm thinking of placing a box in that position (on the right of the fort from this angle), and rolling to see if they come out. If not a box, I'll draw a rectangle. There will be a fourth regiment (32nd Georgia) as reinforcements if needed (though I doubt it). I may have to run the Rebs as GM, since I wouldn't blame my players for not wanting to run the bad guys, and it also wouldn't really be fair on one side given the carnage I expect. The Union will get six regiments, and possibly some bombardment assistance from the US Navy.

Next Monday is Juneteenth, as of last year a Federal holiday. If I can ready the troops and board fast enough I'll run it this week or next. Alternatively, I could run it next month near the July 18 anniversary of the battle.

Aside from this, I had a teen start building his first RPG character (to play Thursday if I don't run Wagner instead), and my library system is about to start a pilot program of circulating board games, which we received this week:

I also hope to visit the club this Saturday for some more DBA. So there's plenty to look forward to!

Building Battery Wagner, part one

Starting this week, I'll be running Dungeons and Dragons every week at work, and will also have a one-off basic miniature-painting class. The RPG is advertised as "Fantasy Adventure Gaming for Beginners" in part to avoid actually having to run DnD (too complex for my taste) and in part to allow for other types of game. I intend to also try wargaming, and if I call in sick other staff can provide board games or fill in as gamemaster.

One of the topics I've been itching to try at work - for years in fact - is the American Civil War. In particular, that part of it fought on the southern coasts, like where I happen to live. The patron population is overwhelmingly black, so the first thing that springs to mind is the 1989 film Glory, starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderick, et al. It's popular in the United States if only because a PG-13 nature makes it a go-to to show in high school history courses. Which means most of the kids who attend my games will have seen it. The 54th Massachusetts also participated in a significant battle in our state, Olustee in February 1864. (I'd like to run it in February, as that is Black History Month.)

So as July is coming up, the 159th anniversary of the 54th's assault on Battery Wagner, I am considering turning that into a scenario. Not a fair scenario, mind you, but the emphasis will be on "this is what they had to deal with; do you think you could do better?"

And the first step to playing such a scenario is that I actually have to build Battery Wagner. Though even if I don't run it, I'll still be able to use the pieces for other games.

Lucky the 18mm Paperboys include some earthworks. I couldn't find a 3d print on Thingiverse. If anyone has directions to either a full model or buildable period earthwork "parts," please let me know, but for now I'll try paper.

Here's the original. A complex shape, but maybe I can
stick to just the southern portion, as that was the direction
of the assault.

Center battery emplacement, yet unglued, with entrenchment
pieces used for a glacis in front.

I'm using regular paper, so this isn't very stable. Gluing the trench lengths is tricky; I may use tape instead. I've experimented with Peter Dennis' "edge-on" technique for assembling the figures, and it may work for assembling the fort. I may also need a large base for the entire fort.

Left: The usual way with larger Paperboys is to have an
accordion-folded "panel" to stick the figures to. 
Right: The method with smaller is to stick the feet directly
to the base, perhaps kinking or cutting out the legs to assist.

Another thing to consider is the scale of regiments. At six inches to a regiment, the unit barely fits in front of this four-gun emplacement, but:

I've been reading A Brave Black Regiment, the 1891 history of the 54th Massachusetts by Captain Luis F. Emilio. He states that the regiment was in two rows of companies all the way up the island, and compressed to three as it passed the swamp in the center. That basically means that the entire unit, in line, would have stretched across the face of Wagner. I don't know how large the fort model will be yet, but it looks like I'll need fairly large units to represent the regiments. I hope to use the kid-friendly Junior General rules, which use six bases per regiment.

The 60x20mm Black Powder bases would fit the bill. Can I get away with not painting them, just adding labels and flags? One of the reasons I like the Paperboys is that they are colorful and individual - in addition to the white troops there are black ones for the 54th and Zouaves for the 76th Pennsylvania which also participated.

A rough layout, which will require some conversion to match
the model seen above. But it does seem to fit across a four-foot table.

 

The Black Powder figures fit pretty well!

Questions, questions...

Junior Generals at the Library, take one

 I've been talking and thinking about it for ages, but I finally got there: two days ago I ran a tabletop wargame at work.

Not that I haven't before, but that was years before I started this blog. Hopefully this will be the first of many.

I was lucky to have, on the one hand, a captive audience of interns who needed something to do that could be argued to be relevant to library programming, and on the other, a couple adult staff with particular expertise in teen programming - mostly the technical sort, but non-electronic activities fall under their purview too, so this was a useful experiment.

I had a choice between running a simple role-playing game (which I mentioned during a recent teen advisory board as a summer-program possibility) and a wargame. I ran the wargame after one of the interns expressed interest in the plastic soldiers I'd brought - a handful of the Black Powder frames I've been assembling.

Here we see one advantage of painting -  if I'd done it
the sides would be easier to tell apart despite the bad photo.

Again, I used Sawmill Village as the inspiration - for the units at any rate. Each side has three regiments, two guns and two generals - the contents of two frames apiece. The rules were a subset of Junior General's horse-and-musket scenarios. I counted each infantry base as two, so that each regiment of three or four bases counted as six or eight for the purposes of combat, with Paperboys casualties used to indicate loss of odd hitpoints. This created confusion, and in hindsight two regiments of five bases each would have worked.

Infantry move 6" in line, 12" in column. Guns may move 12", but may not fire in the same turn. Commanders move 12". Guns have a max range of 24", musketry 12". Above, the Union open their advance on the open brown plain of Tabletop.

Another issue was that there were two players a side (and a fifth turned up midway thru the game - he appointed himself strategic overseer of the Union). With an odd number of units each side, play had to be cooperative, and when rolling dice in particular the players each rolled half (this was their own idea). Two regiments, one to each player, would have been preferable. Fewer units also would have helped us get thru the game faster, as we only had an hour to work with.

Anyway, above you see turn one, in which we simply spread the units around 24 inches apart. The Union are moving forward.

Here the Union column has charged a Confederate line.
The Union artillery are classically deployed in the center.

After a charge, before end of the combat.
The paper casualty markers indicate half-a-base worth
of casualties. The rebel general has also been eliminated.

A wider view; the Union column lost the action and retreated.
Union guns fire thru the gap to hit the right-hand rebels.

From the rebel side of the table this time. I think
the rebels are trying to flank a Union unit here.
A casualty box is visible.

In what became the last turn, a Union regiment (center)
lost combat to a rebel regiment (right) and has retreated
backwards into a second rebel unit (left). The Rebs aren't aligned
to hit the Yankees in the back, but I'd still say the Union's in trouble.

We stopped here due to closing, but the kids (and staff) were enthusiastic enough to declare the game a success, with tentative honors going to the bad guys in grey. There was still confusion over the rules so I had to gamemaster, and with more time I'd have gone over them beforehand with the players rather than taking them on as they came up. I also don't think I'd do this on a regular basis, but with more planning it would work for "special events" like Fourth of July, etc. Overall it worked as the playtest I intended; at least I know what not to do next time!

Speaking of which, I hope next week to run Hampton Roads (with a different Junior General ruleset) on its 160th anniversary. This will enable us to talk up the 3D printer, too. Wish us luck...

Black Powder Epic ACW

Via my gaming group's mailing list, I bought an ACW Epic starter set thru an estate sale. It's not Paperboys, but it does have Peter Dennis's artwork on the cover!

I've meant to buy Black Powder for a long time, though I doubt I'll play it; my group prefers other rulesets. The minis are nice, though. I won't paint them, but use them for my solo games and possibly at work.

I had hoped not to glue the model strips to their bases, but turns out they don't fit snugly into the holes. White glue seems to work, though I've used plastic glue on the cannon and commanders. I'd like to use them with Junior General rules, counting each base as two to save space and build larger armies, and pluck one strip from a base for odd casualties. The alternative is casualty figures - at least the paper ones are cheap. So far, I've clipped out and assembled two frames each of Union and Confederate - this will represent three regiments, one gun and a general each side, enough to run Sawmill Village as a demo.

Photo taken in daylight (but the shade). Any better?

I know I keep saying this and falling through, but I hope to try a small game at work next week and, if it works, plan something bigger.

Undecided for the next post. Three possibilities, all testing my new 2x4 folding table outside:

• Another 3x3 Portable WWII Wargame
• Test round of Sawmill Village with Junior General ACW rules
• Next round of my nearly forgotten '45 campaign

I wonder if I could get them all this weekend...

More miscellaneous and reading

Blogging has slowed way down lately. This is mostly because of work, which is increasingly busy and under construction. (I stayed two hours late yesterday because we couldn't close a new door, much less lock it.) Haven't gamed much at home lately.

However, I've just been switched from Children's to Adult/Teen Librarian at work, which might be handy, as the teens are actually actively interested in tabletop gaming. I hope to start a weekly tabletop period soon, which will be mostly roleplaying but with the chance of slipping in other things on occasion. We tried a round of the storytelling card game Once Upon a Time last week, which was hilarious. It's a fine icebreaker, and one of those games that leads to outsiders hearing weird out-of-context statements. The oddest one was where we ended up setting the story in a town populated entirely by stepmothers. A few others I hope to use are Fluxx, Munchkin and Apples to Apples - the last easy enough for young children.

I've been reading a lot, of course, and as usual have been influenced towards particular gaming periods in the process. For example, I read Wiley Sword's The Confederacy's Last Hurrah, about Hood's Tennessee campaign in late 1864, and am working on Paddy Griffith's Battle Tactics of the Civil War. That led to some ACW18 Paperboys construction - a few bases of Confederates and a few more of black troops. The Rebels will be opposed to my Glory:1861 force, and both groups will (she said, tentatively) take part in a wargame demo next week at work. I am thinking of running the Sawmill Village scenario again, which at this point will only require a couple cannon bases to ready.

I couldn't resist adding these to the display. Might
read the right-hand book later.

I was hoping to run Olustee this month instead, as a battle during February 1864 (same month as Black History Month) featuring black troops, and set in Florida, our own state. Not going to happen at this rate, if only because my boss would prefer me to plan, and more importantly promote, events well ahead of time. Another possibility for March is Hampton Roads, as I have 3D prints of Monitor and Merrimac and a simple ruleset that has worked well with kids before, and it's the 160th anniversary of the battle.

The Confederacy's Last Hurrah, while generally good and packed with first-hand reminisces of the battles of Nashville and Franklin, is let down a bit by a lack of maps. It's won some awards, though, and I may look for more of the author's work.

Battle Tactics of the Civil War is something I'd heard a lot about, as Griffith had a controversial thought about the war and its historiography - that it wasn't the first modern war and rifles didn't really change the equation as much as people think. His reasoning is that the rifles of the time were not used at such range and accuracy as would have caused greater casualties with Napoleonic tactics, but rather that the armies were poorly trained in actual tactics so that, coupled with the terrain, they tended to fight at very close ranges where accuracy and range weren't that important. Also doesn't have much in the way of illustrations, which is disappointing as I've heard there's a version with Peter Dennis as illustrator. Which got me making more Paperboys whilst reading. And I've just ordered a discounted copy of the ACW Epic Black Powder set from Warlord Games. Not sure that was a good idea, but at least I don't intend to paint it!

The other period I've been reading up on and thinking about is the 18th century. I recently finished Christopher Duffy's epic two-volume history of the Austrian Army in the Seven Years War. Dense but readable, an excellent history and even uses model soldiers in some of the photographs (to demonstrate formations) - I wonder where he got a thousand little musketeers. I ended up making a few of my own. Unfortunately, Paperboys in PDF are the devil to resize. I have access to several printers, and none of them have the same settings, so printing is always an experiment. The originals are A4, my paper is 8.5x11 inches, sometimes the printer resizes this to fit the page automatically and sometimes it doesn't. This would be okay if I was alright with 25-28mm figures, but since discovering 18mms I haven't really looked back. So resizing the originals which already were coming out wrong... I am on the verge of ordering the Wofun 18mm plexis of Dennis' 7-Year-War collection.

These chaps ended up on 25mm-wide bases;
I was aiming for 30mm.

At least I wouldn't buy the entire large, varied collection - I do have a battle in mind. The Leuthen scenario from Junior General would be my go-to, and since each regiment would be just three bases in size and I'd get twelve bases per 14.50 Euro in 18mm, this seems achievable. I'm hoping I could fit it in on my small table by reducing the ranges and moves, and the figures would still match, Imagi-nation-wise, with the rest of my 18th-century 18mms.

So that's what I've been up to in the last few weeks. Hoping for a couple 3x3 Portable Wargames tomorrow out in the sunlight!

Design for Glory: 4th Battalion, 19th US Infantry

 At the rate I'm snipping and gluing, it'll be a while before I have a paper regiment ready to play Glory:1861. But that needn't stop me from designing it. Glory:1861 is deliberately similar to roleplaying games in that the "character" of the regiment is paramount. Its background, skills and experience all must be determined both beforehand and in the course of play. And character creation is a key part of any RPG; it is in fact a lead-in to play, because the mere act of rolling dice and writing down the results feels like play to newbies.

I chose to build a (fictional) US regular battalion because I recently read two volumes about the Regulars in the Civil War. These were That Body of Brave Men, on the Regular Brigade in the West, and Sykes' Regular Infantry Division 1861-1864, on the Regular Division in the East. 

These were both formed from newly raised infantry regiments, the 11th through 19th, authorized in 1861 to, in theory, triple the size of the US Army. This was because, instead of the ten-company, single-battalion organization of the first ten US Infantry regiments and the militia which became the US Volunteers, they were composed of three eight-company battalions. In practice, not only were 27 battalions never raised, but the ones that were rarely got up to eight companies or even full strength. Both books spend considerable pages on the extreme difficulty of recruiting for the regular army:

• Volunteer regiments had lighter discipline, better promotion prospects, and a commonality of culture as troops were from the same state.
• Volunteer regiments paid more, particularly from mid-war as bounties appeared and the draft encouraged more to enlist.
• Officers had to leave the battalion for extended periods to raise troops, train them and transport them back to the battalion, leading to a paucity of leadership in the active elements of the unit.

On the other hand, they had greater esprit de corps and experience based on their prewar officer and NCO corps, and (unlike most volunteer regiments) actively recruited and reinforced so that rookie troops were backed by stolid veterans. This made them somewhat more reliable than volunteers.

While normally regiments start off as green, there is an option to make regulars "competent" rather than poor or inexperienced. This appears to require nine months experience and five training bonuses. Initial upgrades may apply to the entire regiment, but future ones are purchased by company.

A battalion has eight companies, at four points per company. The field officers cost two points, and the standard bearer and drummer will cost two more, for a total of 36 points spent and 14 left over, which I'll spend on training bonuses and other characteristics, including rerolls. This will also come out to thirty-three eight-man bases (one of them a command base), and two individual officer bases. There is a free band available at helion.com, so I might build one and count it as the musician and the command base as the standard bearer.

Basically I'm losing two companies and one field officer (the battalion would not have a colonel), in exchange for better quality. The field officers (let's call them Lt. Col. Smith and Major Jones) begin with the following characteristics:

Command range of 18", Initiative of 4, and Combat Experience of 2. Since I only have the two officers, I'm going to roll to improve their command range. Smith's increases to 27". (Given my small figure scale and table, I'll probably reduce distances - perhaps to cm rather than inches.)

Each also receives one random characteristic on a D66 chart. I roll 45 for Smith and 15 for Jones. Smith is Humanitarian, meaning that no company may be Unrestrained, and Jones is Wheezy, meaning he must rest for one turn in every five. He must be pretty old, or maybe he got shot in the chest with an arrow during the Seminole Wars.

The battalion has eight companies, A through H, and of course eight Captains to command them. Each rolls on a quality table.

• A - Captain Able (Useless Slow)
• B - Captain Baker (Slow Overeager)
• C - Captain Carle (Overeager)
• D - Captain Doggett (Useless Heroic)
• E - Captain Easy (Useless Slow)
• F - Captain Fox (Tolerated)
• G - Captain Goff (Tolerated)
• H - Captain Howell (Tolerated)

Useless means a 1/3 chance of orders being ignored. Slow means an extra turn for orders to be followed. Tolerated means no bonus or detriment, and Overeager means that a unit taking a morale test may advance 2d6". Out of eight dice, I rolled a four or better once. I'll pay two points for four rerolls: 2, 6, 4 and 2. That upgrades Able and Easy to Slow, Baker to Overeager and Doggett becomes the only competent CO in the battalion, with a +1 to morale throws.

Next, I need to characterize the companies. Cowardly companies have -2 to morale throws, Reluctant ones require a field officer nearby to advance, Resolute has no effect, and Unrestrained, like Overeager, provides a chance of advancing further. As my CO is Humanitarian, I reroll Unrestrained. I also rerolled D Company's result, leaving me with ten points; out of twenty dice so far, I've rolled a single 5.

• A - Reluctant
• B - Unrestrained Resolute
• C - Resolute
• D - Cowardly Resolute
• E - Reluctant
• F - Reluctant
• G - Resolute
• H - Unrestrained Cowardly Fired Up

Now to training upgrades. Initial ones may apply to the entire regiment; after the first game they apply only to individual companies. So best use them now. Based on the sample regiments provided, I'll choose:

• Move - units always move at least 3" per die.
• Rally - unit can attempt to rally in one phase.
• Load - reloading takes one phase.
• Fire - bonus on firing modifier.
• Fix/remove bayonet - Unit can ... fix or remove bayonets.
• Skirmish Order - Unit can skirmish.
• Close Order - Unit can ... move in close order.

Out of points now.

The regiment, being US Regulars, is one of the only types that can choose rifled muskets, so gets the 1855 Springfield:

This provides greater range.

Beyond the Session Zero "character creation" phase, I've cut out twenty-one bases today to attach the paper figures to. Still inching forward... Even at 30mm wide, 32 bases will stretch the limits of my five-foot table. Need to think about increasing my table space.

Brawner's Farm, Fields of Honor, and remote gaming

 I had the opportunity today to play a remote ACW game, representing the action of Brawner's Farm, August 28, 1862. It was against Ivan Edwards, and presented by Jon Freitag of the Palouse Wargaming Journal. 

I was particularly eager to try this for two reasons. 1) As a librarian, I want to learn about remote gaming, as live programming is off-limits at my workplace for the foreseeable future. 2) I got to play the Iron Brigade, which I am building in paper for a try at Glory: 1861. (They'll represent a US Regular battalion, being in the same uniform.) In between rolls, I was cutting out more strips; I seem to like doing something with my hands while conversing on Zoom.

In both cases, I was fully satisfied.

The American Civil War was the genesis of my interest in history; I visited Gettysburg at the age of six and bought my first copy (of three!) of the Golden Book History of the Civil War, which had these awesome maps in it:

I agree with another blogger that this is the most influential
book on the Civil War, and for the same reason.

But while I became an amateur authority on the Civil War in first grade, Brawner's Farm, a sort of prequel to Second Bull Run, was never on my radar. The first I learned about it was from A Brotherhood of Valor by Jeffry D. Wert, which I read last year and is a parallel history of the Stonewall and Iron Brigades. Brawner's Farm was the latter's baptism of fire.

It was also my baptism of fire into wargaming online, and the ruleset Fields of Honor, as ably gamemastered by Jon Freitag. I've been following Jon both on his own blog and on Wargaming for Grownups, where he also participates in remote games as well as running his own. He was concerned about this particular game because the figures are only 10mm, so this was a bit of an experiment for him as well as for us.

The field of battle.

I played the Union, which is why this view has them at the "bottom." The Iron Brigade (Gibbon's) is to the right, Doubleday's to the left, one battery in the center and three more to the right off-camera. It took a while before I got used to taking screenshots, and I'm sure Jon's own report will have much better pictures. He was taking closeups, and while he had a "floating" webcam for closeups we never actually used it. Which suggests that the overhead system worked well. Even at the small figure scale, the Union units are easily identifiable.

Union right flank, first turn,

Here the Iron Brigade has moved off the road (but still sheltered by the woods, which turned out to have the same light-cover designation as the fence lines). Artillery is also visible, and exchanging fire as the Rebels started with only artillery on the board. The small base behind an infantry regiment represents the brigade commander, while the guns have limbers. Each gun base represents a section of two cannon, with three making a battery with appropriate bonuses to rolls. The Rebels got bonuses for having two batteries in the same hex, as their standard size was four guns rather than six.

Doubleday's brigade on the left also moves off the road.

After turn two, the flank Rebel guns are eliminated,
but infantry reinforcements are coming on table.

Units are rated by weapon type (muskets, rifles, smoothbore or rifled guns, howitzers) and morale rating. This last provides bonuses to D10 rolls and saves. I had a Union-blue sparkly ten-sider (picked up at Supercon a couple weeks ago) which I ended up rolling for most everything and was remarkably lucky at shooting and saving throws, to the point that I wouldn't have blamed my opponent or the GM for being suspicious. It should be noted, however, that the "standard" throw in these rules is 5+, and the Iron Brigade all got +1.

"Rebels, Sir! Thousands of 'em!"

By turn three, I'd moved the Iron Brigade into the defensible position of the trees, and advanced Gibbons up the table, but my left-hand artillery were still out of position. I am easily torn by dilemmas, which can be frustrating for my opponents as I take forever to choose. Here I could leave my guns in the open, but masked by Gibbon's infantry. Or I could move them slowly into the woods, where they would be in cover but even less able to contribute.

The center holds, as an attack on Brawner's Farm develops.

As it turned out, it was possible for them to move through the woods and unlimber in a turn, so I moved them that way. It also turned out they were howitzers and could fire on the now-occupied farm, even though it was beyond the "military crest." Negatives to the roll, of course. As the two farms were the game objectives, and my guns held the one on the right, my intent was to bombard Brawner's, take it with infantry, and hold it against all comers.

Unfortunately, the Rebels had more troops, and they were closer to the farm than I was.

"Up and onward o'er the slope
Comrades lie around me slain"
-- Alasdair MacDonald

I also tried sending a regiment after the last guns on my right:

If it weren't for my lucky Union die, this would have been suicidal.

This turned out to be the Second Wisconsin, about to write a fictional page in history no less incredible than the one they actually wrote on the day.

They charged down the guns, and on the way took a charge of canister and the shared volleys of no less than five Confederate regiments. With their commander, they had a good saving throw - but they had to make around fifteen saves.

It helped that, in these rules, the firing side must effectively be behind its target to enfilade it. (Jon will change this for the next go-around.) The Second didn't make every save - but they didn't fail any either until the very last volley.

Gibbon's Brigade at this time was trying desperately to take Brawner's farm in the center-left. Both combats went on for another two phases, and still failed to dislodge the Rebels. In the end, I was driven back.

Charges on both flanks ultimately failed.

My Union-blue die was lucky only so long as I was rolling for firing and saves from firing. In melee, it choked every time.

I can't really blame the dice. I really did overextend myself. The end result:

My center is okay, but I hold nothing else save the farm.
And what's that to the upper right?...

We gave up at this point. The Rebs can be seen sweeping around my left. My right is still free, but the fresh Rebel brigade in the corner is in marching column. They will probably reach their second, winning, objective (my guns in the right-hand farm) before my battered Iron Brigade can get there. My gambles had failed.

I was way outnumbered, of course!

The game was a fine test of the rules, and of remotely playing a game on this scale. I certainly learned a bit. From my own perspective, hoping to GM games like this myself, I have greater understanding of what it takes to present the game to the players. By the end even my slow mind was internalizing the rules, but Jon's GMing practically made that unnecessary. He provided options and provided the targets for rolling. He also did some of the rolling himself; I might use something like rolldicewithfriends.com for a game like this. In an educational sense, this game worked because the players didn't need to think about the mechanisms, and could focus on our maneuvers.

Ivan commented that it felt more like a boardgame than a wargame, and I'm inclined to agree. This is mostly, I think, because of the top-down view and the fact we rarely used closeups; the units (each of three elements) look more like blocks than like groups of figures. Gamewise this is not a bad thing, but it's a bit cautionary for me; if I try something like this it will be with Paperboys, which I suspect from overhead will be virtually unidentifiable. A lower angle, something like my earlier FKR game may be better, especially because the figures are what I hope will most interest and attract my newbie players.

Closeups:

Iron Brigade at the fence.

The Confederate view.

It also felt like the divisional game it was, because from the player's view we couldn't identify our regiments - their names and stats were visible to Jon but not us. We saw them as brigades, and the simple game mechanisms supported this. At this scale, the commander cares less about his units' formation, range, cover, etc and more about the overall effect - Did I win or lose? How well or badly? (This is the same way I run simple roleplaying games - it works just as well on a small scale!) Paddy Griffith discusses this in his book Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun, which notably uses the same four elements to represent a regiment, brigade or division, and decreases the battle resolution as games grow "larger."

A good, fun game that wound up in around three hours. Well done to Jon, and congratulations to my opponent, Ivan! Jon gave the impression he will run this again with some modifications; maybe I'll try it again and see if I can do better. See you then.