ACW

Well, due to some bad weather, our group was unable to finish the Mexican/American battle we began. We had a decent snow storm last week. However, we should finish this Saturday night, I will give a final report.

I have titled this one ACW, for American Civil War. I plan on giving a little background on my interest in this period as it began several years ago. I attended a re-enactment and it somewhat gained my interest. Not enough to start gaming the period itself, but it peaked my curiosity. Not too long afterwards, one of our members painted up some 10mm figs for the ACW and we used Fire and Fury for the rules. Our group liked the way the game played, and we did a few games as a mini campaign. After that, the groups interest as well as mine, dropped off. I did continue to go to the local re-enactment's that were put on every September. Well, about 3-4 years ago, I regained my interest in this period. I began to paint up some figs and it slowly progressed. I have a large quantity of figs based into brigades for games. I purchased/painted mostly infantry as a start. I then added some cavalry as a compliment to the infantry. I purchased the Fire and Fury rules to conduct some games. I painted up figs as well as purchased numerous from EBay. Slowly my collection grew and we did a few games. Not too much after that, one of the founding members of the group decided a campaign would be much better than just playing out the battles.

He made up a map using one from the Iran/Iraq War from back in the 80's. Of course he changed the names of the towns, but it works well. I nominated myself to be the Confederate commander and one of the other guys opted to be the Union.

For the past 2 years, we have been conducting this campaign. We have our own strategic rules that are very simple to use. We began with Fire and Fury as the tactical rules. We weren't real satisfied with those, so one member took the time to create a very detailed set. But these were rather slow when conducting large battles. After a little searching around, I found the Warmaster version of the ACW rules. After some tweaking, these have become a very usable set of rules. Bloody, fast, and rather satisfying. We have fought some rather large battles in about 4hrs. I should point out, that when I began gaming, I was gung ho for accuracy. As time has gone by, I have subscribed to the theory that a faster set of rules is just as good. After all, these are games. Sure, some accuracy gets sacrificed, but we are just having fun. That IMO is what gaming is all about.

We just completed another strategic turn and I am awaiting the results to see if any contacts were made. I will post a report if a game/battle is at hand.