The road to Gettysburg

Like everybody else, I will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg with a game. Initially I thought I'd host a Fire & Fury game focusing on the Longstreet vs. Sickles fight in the Peach orchard / Wheatfield / Devil's Den / Round tops area but I got a bit greedy. I want to play the whole three days of the entire battle!

With the Fire and Fury rules, this would be simply impossible given the number of models needed as well as take too long to play. Fire & Fury shines when you have a Corps at most per side but starts to slow down after that. I need a faster, lighter set of rules and I think I've found what I'm looking for in Volley & Bayonet.

A quick comparison of brigade level Fire and Fury versus Volley and Bayonet:

Base unit:
    F&F: 1 infantry stand = 150/200 men. About 10 stands to a brigade.
    VnB: 1 infantry stand = 1000 - 2000 men. One stand to a brigade.
Groundscale:
    F&F: 1" = 45/60 yds
    VnB: 1" = 100 yds
Timescale:
    F&F: One turn = 30 minutes.
    VnB: One turn = 60 minutes.


So, Volley and Bayonet is more geared towards bigger battles and drops a lot of micromanagement in favor of faster flow. The rationale is that when you play the role of army commander, you focus on massing your forces in the right location and send them in at the right time instead of worrying whether a singular brigade is in single or double line. That's why the only brigade formations available are close order battle lines, march column and open order skirmishing. It makes sense for the scale.


The ACW supplement for VnB is getting difficult to find without paying an exorbitant amount, but I got mine from Old Glory 25's for the original price. Their shipping calculations are crazy for overseas orders but I managed to haggle it down to standard USPS fees by just asking them about it in e-mail. The booklet might run out any time as it's a 1995 print so be quick if you want yours! The supplement is for the first edition of the game whilst I have the second edition rulebook, but there isn't a lot you need to change.

I played a test game with my friend yesterday with a Corps of troops per side and played to a satisfactory ending (all enemy divisions exhausted) in three hours on a 6x4 foot table so its not bad at all considering it was our first game. My camera ran out of battery so no pictures for you unfortunately.


Modeling-wise, I changed the sabot basing scheme I introduced in an earlier post a bit. I opted not to have a white line at the bottom and instead of blu-tack I use painters tape to fix the models and the labels in place. Painters tape doesn't leave the stands ugly and is easy to remove.

The visual impact I'm going for is fairly obvious. There is one F&F sized stand of infantry per one strength point (500 men) of infantry and it should look a bit like a brigade in double line. The unit labels are from the Volley and Bayonet yahoo groups user gbitters, who has shared these fantastic labels in the files section. I think this is his blog. Give him a visit, he has some great 3mm VnB games there using half the recommended sizes.

As for figures, I don't have the complete OOB's worth of figures. I'll combine my models with a couple of friends' and for infantry we'll be 19 F&F stands of Union infantry short. These will all be with a Corps arriving on the field on the night of the second day so I'm sure there'll be enough volunteers in the dead pile. For artillery the situation is a bit more worrisome as we're 9 union artillery stands short. I'll have to make blue chits with an artillery symbol on them to compensate if it goes to that. Good players don't lose their artillery :)

I still need to make sabot bases for cavalry, artillery and leaders and paint a whole lot of mounted officers to get all the Union division commanders represented on the field but I think I'll manage. For terrain I'm pretty much set and all I'll have to do is make some optional eye candy to sweeten up the landscape. I already have all the hills, woods and such.

So, who else is doing an anniversary game?

Concept for using my 6mm Fire & Fury stands in Volley & Bayonet

I got the Volley and Bayonet rulebook a few months back as I'm looking for a grand tactical ruleset I could use to play entire ACW battles in reasonable space and time. The game uses three inch squares to represent brigades whereas my ACW is based for Fire & Fury with 1 inch * 3/4 inch stands.

Here's my quick and dirty sabot basing scheme:

I had some leftover MDF and I took some time with a table saw to make a hundred or so of these squares. Then I just sanded the edges, painted the base brown and glued on some terrain flock mix I used for my Normandy game. I then blu-tacked some  F&F stands on the base and there you go. The white slit is the space reserved for me to print out the unit data on. By placing down one stand per strength point I can give a visual difference between the small and the large brigades, which is an advantage over "static" 3" bases. The visuals suffer a bit but I think it'll work just fine. There's just one small problem:

The Blu-tack leaves an ugly mark once I remove the stand. If I don't use anything to make them stick, I think the units will be fiddly to move around. The small stands have a magnetic strip underneath so there is an obvious and attractive solution but metal bases cost a fortune, especially as I need a hundred of them to do a battle like Gettysburg.

Ideas? The solution should be cheap and quick to do.

New Baccus Greeks arrive

I finally got around to ordering those sweet new Baccus 6mm ancient Greeks I've been wanting. I bought 53 british pounds worth of figures, a sheet of shield transfers (barely enough for front rankers) and a bag of MDF bases. I got some hoplites, archers, peltasts, cavalry, generals and casualty figures.

The set was missing two strips of hoplite infantry and one general was broken. I sent e-mail to Baccus about it and got a reply not 10 minutes later from Peter Berry stating he'll send me replacements. Now that's customer service! It's just a pity to post mail from Britain to Finland just to deliver less than ten 6mm figures.

The figures look really nice, some of Baccus' best yet. The "attacking hoplites" with their dynamic looking formation are my favourite. As a downside, the spears look dreadfully thin and seem like they will break easily, but if I can keep them intact until painted and based, I think it'll be fine.

My plan was to use the figures with the Hail Caesar rules. I plan to just convert the inches of Hail Caesar to centimeters 1:1, so that a large 28mm game becomes a 6mm game on a small table. My plan initially was to make 6cm * 3cm blocks the size of the standard unit, but after heeding the advice of fellow gamers, I decided I would make the basing compatible with Warmaster Ancients also. This means the default block of 6*3 centimeters will give way to 2*4 centimeters. Here's what a phalanx formation will look like based with Warmaster standards:

I think it looks good and by making the standard unit 8 centimeters wide instead of 6, it looks much bigger. The bases are used with their short edge to the front by only a couple of units in Warmaster, including phalanxes. By using two stands side by side you get something like this with two or three ranks of figures: 

I think it will look quite nice. I'll have to do some more testing and deliberation, but I'm pretty sure this is the way to go.

By the way, my last post on ancient greek warfare spawned some interesting visit hits on this blog. To be precise, keywords such as "naked greek guys" have now been used to visit. Truly, my blog caters to all, even though I'm not sure the person tapping in those keywords was looking for wargaming stuff.

EDIT: Oh, nuts. Greek hoplites are not rated as Phalanxes in Warmaster, and as such, should be based with the normal sideways base. I'm pretty sure the "attacking" hoplite strips will not fit on the stands as such. More deliberation is needed (and hints appreciated).