ACW game, Battle for Sawmill Village

Last night we played a quick ACW game, using our house rules (see link to our ACW page if you want to see the rules).

I used scenario #41 from Charles Grant's Scenarios for Wargames as the setup. This is a fairly standard encounter battle, where two sides, evenly set up, both want to take control of the same village in the centre on the table. I didn't have much time setting up the table, so it was a bit on the minimal side w.r.t visuals.

A few things we observed:

• Battles that have both armies fighting for control of a relatively small area tend to become crowded and messy affairs. All units converge on the same area. The result is a lot of fiddling with frontages and facing, and sometimes outcomes of fights depend solely on the fact that you couldn't place your figures they way you wanted 3 turns ago. Even though we swore off the competitive aspect of wargaming many eons ago in favour of a more gentlemenlike apporach to the game, it still gave me some headaches.
• Our rules do not work that well when units are occupying single buildings, so we might have to work on that.
• Specific rulesets are usually designed with a specific type of scenario in mind: lots of cover, no cover, many units, fewer units, etc... Deviating from these hidden assumptions often stretches a particular ruleset to its limits.

Anyway, here are a few quick and dirty pictures. Not of too high quality, I'm afraid. I am still not used to taking photographs when wearing reading glasses ...

Game from the Union side. The casualties in the lower-right corner are casualty markers.
We use them to indicate when a unit needs to take a morale check.

Bart's giant moving hand picking up some Confederates.

Confederate Battery deployed on the hill.
Game -winning tactic, as it turned out several moves later.

Union Battery deployed on the wrong hill.
Smoke marker from Early War Miniatures.

Both sides try to take control of Sawmill Village.

More Confederate troop moving going on ...

Battle for the village in full swing.

Just to show off my Featherstone signature ... :-)

A Gentleman's wargame is not complete without some whisky or bourbon.
This time Jack Daniels Silver Select.

"To the friends of the Schild & Vriend Gentlemen's Wargaming Society!"