""Big Battle" ACW Rules that include Regiments?" Topic

I've looked at several ACW rulesets over the years, such as Altar of Freedom, F&F, and A Firebell in the Night, and while I've found several good rulesets, something has been on my mind. A good summary of ACW fighting said that, "Civil War armies fought by regiment and moved by brigades," and this leads me to ask: are there any ACW rulesets that preserve the regiments in some form, while still allowing you game battles like Gettysburg or Chickamauga?

I like to play F&F regimental. I do not think that a big battle is physically possible. We have broken a big battle down into separate actions with casualties being carried over or assumed depending upon historical events before our scenario. Not much help I guess. H

KISR Publications has DBACW. I haven't played this, but I do play DBN which nominally uses 1 stand = 1 brigade but also works fine at 1 stand = 1 regiment. I suspect DBACW should work the same. The DBN system handles big battles very nicely and you can play them to completion.

The rules are available here:
dbnwargaming.co.uk

Visual overview of a Gettysburg game here:
YouTube link

Short answer: No

Long answer: There is no physical reason why you could not try to represent a battle such as Gettysburg on a regimental level. However, the number of discrete units that will have to be on the tabletop to make this a worthwhile exercise means it is impractical (IMHO).

For context, here is the number of stands that is needed to stage the entire Battle of Gettysburg, from the OOB in the back of the original Fire and Fury rulebook. Consider that this is to represent the battle at brigade level – not regimental level – with 1 stand representing 200 infantry/cavalry, a leader and his staff or 6-8 guns:

10 corps leader stands
29 division leader stands
69 artillery stands
14 cavalry stands
11 dismounted cavalry stands
582 infantry
…and an uncounted number of markers.

Each day of the battle is split into separate scenarios, each one (by the author's own estimate) lasting several hours. If you tried to represent them at regimental level, the game would probably need to run for several days, and I doubt if you could find enough players who could commit to that amount of time.

I suppose that if you were playing it solitaire, and so did not have to rely on other players' enthusiasm, it would be possible – I still do not see it as practical.

1862, you're reading my mind! I'm getting back into the ACW, and I, too, think that level of play is ideal for the period. I am enjoying Altar of Freedom, but it doesn't adapt well to solo play (Greg Wagman, the author, says so himself) and though I love some aspects of the game, the priority points bidding system is a bit 'gamey' for me.
If you come across the regiment-as-base Grail, please let us know…until then, it's brigade bases and incompetent generals!

All the best…Mark

Volley & Bayonet has a variant where each base represents a battalion, which corresponds to a civil War regiment, rather than a brigade. The mechanics are simple enough so that recreation of major battles might be possible. Still, it would be a major undertaking.

I'm with Consul Paulus. Consider the huge number of regiments you're talking about in a major battle and the differences in strength, which means either different size stands or multiple stands per regiment. Think of the smallest stand you can actually handle and let that represent 100 men. Now work out your ground and figure scale. What size table are you going to need? And how many castings?

But this doesn't mean nothing can be done. You just can't do it all at once. As an example, you can use the same basing for two different games. Four 10mm infantry on a 20mm square base could be 100 men in regimental-level Mr Lincoln's War and 300 men in brigade-level On to Richmond. You can do something similar with Johnny Reb basing and Across a Deadly Field. But I don't think there is any practical way to refuse the flank of the 20th Maine and command multiple corps at the same time.

1862, you're reading my mind! I'm getting back into the ACW, and I, too, think that level of play is ideal for the period. I am enjoying Altar of Freedom, but it doesn't adapt well to solo play (Greg Wagman, the author, says so himself) and though I love some aspects of the game, the priority points bidding system is a bit 'gamey' for me.
If you come across the regiment-as-base Grail, please let us know…until then, it's brigade bases and incompetent generals!

All the best…Mark

John Hill's rulesets Johnny Reb III and Across a Deadly Field followed this philosophy – JR3 seems to inspire either love or utter hatred (a bit like F&F, really), and Across a Deadly Field also seems to have a mixed reputation. Other than that, I can't say I've found very examples of this type of ACW game.

I recommend taking a look at Rank and File by Crusader Publishing and consider using it's highest man-to-figure ratio.

Still a challenge of extraordinary proportions as others have illustrated.

At least Rank and File will play about 10 x faster than Fire and Fury and probably about the same for Johnny Reb.

If you are set on regimental level action, the Johnny Reb II is pretty hard to beat. I switched to Rank and File because I wanted more focus on the fun and the miniatures and a lot less "noses in the rulebooks". Just focus on lower level action – you can get away with maybe a corps on the table but a divisional level game with multiple players will work out better. (Didn't stop me from collecting enough figures for an army for each side with supporting artillery and cavalry, though – not all painted yet, neither.)

And, in my "highly vaunted" opinion, F&F is really wonky.

At 15mm regimental scale, you're looking at a brigade to a divsion sized game unless you've got a really big table and multiple payers. As mentioned, John Hill's Across a Deadly Field (Osprey Games, 2014) increases that to a corps sized battle using two base regiments…but has gotten mixed reviews as noted in other posts. If I was going to try a larger ACW battle with units at regimental scale, I'd probably look at V&B or one of the DBA civil war conversions with the idea that one base equals one regiment, and 4-5 bases equals a brigade.

But generally, I keep my games at brigade or division level with each player running a brigade of several 5-10 stand regiments using Rally Round the Flag from the 80s. I can get a division aside on a 5x8 table (and more if brought on as reinforcements) with each brigade getting a frontage of 2-3 feet to fight in.

"If you come across the regiment-as-base Grail, please let us know…"

Certainly not the Grail, and not too "serious", but "On to Richmond" represents regiments as single bases, while the maneuvering unit is the brigade or division. Using 6mm some quite large actions can be gamed.

OTR is a stand = 300 men.

I have had "Johnny Reb 2" games with multiple corps per side. Four to eight players to a side. We did Antietam and the 1st and 2nd days of Gettysburg. It helps if everyone knows the rules and if you have enough figs, able to keep the game set up so you can play over several days and have a really large table. It can be done with 15mm figures.

Lately we have been using "Mr. Lincolns War" which is a regimental scale rules, all with 15mm figs. We did Antietam. We couldn't fit the Sunken Road or Burnsides' Bridge onto the table, so we did them in separate games. We had three players per side. It took about ten hours over two days.

link

Regimental just seems to feel more like a proper Civil War battle. I don't get that feeling with brigade games.

You might have a look at Et Sans Resultat, which is a Napoleonic game. It represents individual battalions organized in to divisions. A division has an objective and moves full speed toward it until stopped. Because the action is at the division level, there are no fiddly bits. A battalion is just a single base.

It is almost ground scale agnostic. Just set your ground scale and convert how big your regiments are. Best of all, it is at a high enough level it works just fine if every regiment is, say a 30x15mm stand.

But yes, that's a lot of stands. McClellan had 191 regiments at Antietam. That is a LOT of stands for just one side! Possible in 6mm maybe….

Hi Old,
I recognize the summary you're talking about… :)

Anyway, don't let these NAYSAYERS dissuade you from the undertaking. And when you do put on a Gettysburg game with regiments you let me know because I'd like to play.

But to do so you'll need a ruleset that plays fast and easy. I'd think about using Rank and File (which I have played and like). maybe even Black powder. basically rules where a unit is anything you want it to be.

Another ruleset that I recently heard about that could warrant consideration is Gettysburg Soldiers. I've read the rules and they are pretty simple (so simple that sometimes I think I am missing something) because they are aimed at putting on large convention style games (I believe). It uses regiments but one could control an awful lot of them easily. I have not played them yet though so can't really give a full description.

good luck!

-Stewart

ACW boardgames depicting large battles whereby each counter represents one regiment such as "Terrible Swift Sword: Battle of Gettysburg" are often referred to as "monsters". This is due to the amount of space and the length of time required to play. I don't know about the time requirement for a miniatures version but the space requirement would be substantial.

A reasonable solution might be to fight different parts of the battle using regimental rules and combine the results into a sort of mini-campaign. Antietam would be particularly suitable due to the piecemeal nature of the Union assault.

Another possibility is using really small figures. 6mm figures might still be too large but 2mm/3mm figures, creatively based, might work.

Please let us know how you progress.

On To Richmond has single stands as a regiment/battalion, and as noted a scale of 300 men to a stand. Which pretty much is the size of most regiments/battalions in the ACW (or even less men) during most of the war other than at the very beginning or if newly recruited and at its first battle or two.

I use OTR and just add another stand to a large regiment (or even another stand) as most large regiments would sub-divide themselves on the battlefield into "battalions" for reasons of command control.

As someone else noted, the Et Sans Resultats rules fit the bill.

Individual battalions are represented on the table top, each one stand.

Those individual stands operate together in divisions.

The rules are for Napoleonic, but the representation you're looking for is there.

There are some things "board games" can do better.

Tbh, I just think of the individual stands in something like Fire and Fury or Bloody Big Battles as 'regiments', even if they are manoeuvring as brigades or divisions.

The Carnage and Glory ACW system allows you to scale both the unit size and ground scale while still retaining the regiment as the basic maneuver element…if you want to fight a large ACW battle you'll need to reduce both your ground and figure scale as needed.

Representing regiments when fighting Gettysburg presents a couple of major problems.

One is the practical one of time. There are over 150 Confederate infantry regiments. Are you going to be making decisions and resolving actions for most of these every turn? Even with fast-play rules at, say 15 seconds each (to think, measure, roll dice, move or remove units or markers), that's about half an hour per turn per side. And we haven't even allowed for all the artillery and cavalry yet. With ground and time scales that allow regiments to be represented, how many of those turns will you need for three days of battle? And how many days will it take you to play?

Then there is the problem of not seeing the wood for the trees. If you're so involved with the micro-level of what's happening to individual regiments, it's hard to stand back and see the overall picture, the shape of the battle developing. Real-world commanders operate 'two levels down' and care about sub-units three levels down. At Gettysburg that means as C-in-C you should be maneuvering corps and divisions and caring about the loss of brigades. Individual regiments are a level too far.

As a few others have said above, you could regard individual stands as regiments, but with those stands just being components of a manoeuvre unit (brigade or division). Or, with rulesets using brigade bases, you might have separate groups of 2mm or 6mm figures on a diorama base representing different regiments in the brigade. But that is a cosmetic representation rather than a functional one. I don't think it is practical to represent individual regiments functionally in a game of Gettysburg unless you go down the road some have suggested above and slice it into lots of smaller games.

TMP link

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
groups.io/g/bloodybigbattles

The problem, too (and this is why I am coming to prefer F&F Regimental to JR) is that one regiment might be 800 men, while (in the same battle) another BRIGADE might be composed of a dozen very small regiments which combined gets it up to maybe 1000 or 1500 men. The brigade was the unit of maneuver in battle and needed to be kept up to roughly 1000 to 2000 men, regardless of how many regiments it took. I myself very much enjoy fighting the big battles at regiemntal level in board games (Terrible Swift Sword) and on computers, but on the table top I don't see how that can be done without extraordinary resources of space and time and miniatures and players.

Well there is HFG, Horse, Foot and Gun which are Phil Barker's Big Battle Rules. A sort of DBA. Here the basic unit, a base is a regiment. The command and control system means you will be moving larger groups but the combat resolution will be done by the 'base' and there is the opportunity to move bases individually. They cover a very big period 1701 to 1914 and although they are simple, having to extract the modifiers and references to year your playing can be difficult. Sadly these rules came out towards the end of Phil's creative output and I know nobody who plays them. Years ago I re-fought the first Bull run using them. They gave a good game. A 'search' will list some blogs where they have been played. Perhaps other folks can provide more information.

Another approach would be to use Bob Cordery's book 'The Portable Napoleonic Wargame'. He suggests he how the rules can be adapted for later wars. These rules are very playable. Like Paddy Griffith's Napoleonic wargames for fun. He presents rules for different levels of battles. The Brigade, Division v Division and Corps v Corps. For the later The basic infantry unit (two to four infantry bases with a commander) = an infantry division of two to four regiments/ brigades.'The figure base representing the division are expected to act as one but they may be spread…' OK the rules use a gridded battle field but can work without and at about eleven pages of rules they are easy to learn.

Across A Deadly Field does this. Check out the reviews and see if it is a system that you would enjoy playing.

I find it incredibly frustrating, as a new historical player, that you so often read about "XYZ Regiment" doing something heroic/cowardly/interesting but then for the sake of the game the rules are like ignoring all of that and it's So-and-so's brigade as the normal maneuver unit, and the regiments within don't matter as you just pick one I guess to "represent" the whole brigade (e.g. with flags and such) on the table. I guess due to scale since most people want to fight Gettysburg, not a tiny portion of the battle, so you have to abstract it, but still it seems the choice is always whether you want to accurately represent that this brigade had these three regiments, or do you want to play the larger battle.

It becomes even more compounded when you don't have like an 8-foot table because now you have to downscale even more and things feel worse, especially when you don't want to do skirmish gaming but actual battles. As an outsider to historical gaming looking in, the biggest frustration seems to be the idea that everyone has a big ass table in a dedicated game room they can use (a lot of the early books e.g. Featherstone's seem to treat this as the norm, maybe it was in the 70s) and there's like nothing out there for people with "normal" sized dining tables and the like without having to do some heavy modifications of scale/size to rules to get them to fit properly. The fact so many game systems just casually are like "This battle needs an 8x5 table" as though that's something most people are gonna have is a bit mind-boggling tbh.

I've been looking at rules and haven't found one that really jumps out to me because they feel TOO abstract.. like in my head, you want to represent the individual regiments in a brigade (probably don't need to go lower than that though) because that's how it actually was, you know? If the Alabama Brigade had 5 regiments in it, even if on the table each of those 5 are one stand to reduce the footprint, why shouldn't you represent the 15th Alabama and the 44th Alabama separately? Why combine the 4th, 15th, 44th, 47th, and 48th Alabama regiments into one generic "Alamaba Brigade"?

Maybe I'm missing something about organization (new to historical remember).

Wayniac, you're not missing a thing – it's all about "scale".

Paddy Griffith, historian and wargamer once stated something to the effect, that the miniature figurines we're fond of modelling, would eventually/always seem to get in the way of the gaming side of the hobby.

It's a constant dilemma imposed onto the miniature battlefield simply from the fact that miniature wargamers want figures or units of figures to shoe-into their historical places we're trying to portray.

The original sin in wargaming comes from an historical enthusiast's first desire to pick some scale of figures that might do justice to these historical, hobby expectations.

So small snippets of the battlefield become skirmish-level game presentations, regimental gaming collections model the more famous actions drawn from a more extended view of the battle, or single brigade bases, even division stands allow a complete battle to transpire……within an afternoon available for playing.

It's all about scale, and what your gaming focus is zoned in on.

Do you want beautiful figures and exacting terrain on the tabletop "at all costs", the downside is the battlefield becomes just a small fight within a larger battle that is occurring – that's perfectly fine, just scale ones expectation down to fit.

Maybe the historical units are the desired focus, and while wanting to move up the chain of command to wargame a section of a larger battlefield space – then physical limitations on gaming space or a collection's scale can often impose needed compromises, example – those single-mounted figures that worked so well for that skirmish encounter above, get expensive to flesh-out into bigger units, and now their original basing flexibility begins to consume more gaming time just being required by having to move individually-mounted miniatures around within a larger game, but now a game scenario wanting to focus on a larger, multi-unit presentation.

Scaling down the figures, and mounting groups of them onto multiple, multi-figure stands to make efficient tabletop units is the obvious solution, but then tactical and visual compromises often will follow – how to make one set of multiple-mounted bases look and able to evolve into multiple "order" formations is one issue, without actually modelling a duplicate set of single-mounted figures for each game unit to be able to reflect skirmish order for example?

The "solutions" of scale, can then start to impose losses of tactical fidelity – rules begin to abstract formation mechanics, or assume units are skirmishing without this actually being a player-decision or game requirement.

Perhaps a player or game group wants more 'context' to their battlefield – say the whole 1st-day at Gettysburg, or the three-days fight is the goal? The same scaling impositions will occur again – space, time, expense, and the rule mechanics needed to efficiently bring off the presentation will be at work – single-mounted brigade-units become an obvious compromising decision.

It is all about scaling ones expectations I think (by the way, we often buy multiple scale collections to game different command levels for the same historical period…..that original sin committed, can lead to lifetime, obsessive behavior). ;)

That makes sense, thanks. I get the idea that you need to scale down something because few people have huge enough tables/rooms to accommodate the larger ones. As I'm reading more on battles, I'm getting more the idea of well, if I wanted to fight X battle as being the actual battle, not a portion of it, I wouldn't have the room or figures to have each stand be a regiment. So the next best thing is to go with a further abstraction, etc. in order to get that whole battle on the table, as personally, I don't like the whole "zoom in on a specific section of a specific battle" in many cases versus actually playing out the large scale, but at the same time table space is very limited for me so I can't have my cake and eat it too lol

Sounds like you're going about reaching your collecting decisions here carefully.

You could probably 'scratch' any historical gamer in this hobby, that over time wished they had started their period collecting in a different scale or command-level focus. Or, has rebased their collection(s) to different size stands or base layouts.

I'm in the middle of one of those rebasing projects at the moment – 10mm ACW minis on 1" size stands for regimental/tactical-level gaming, now to multi-regiment/brigade/grand-tactical size ones.

IMO, a core essence of wargaming is much about having command decisions to make in-game – those could be focused on tactical decisions to make, or ones made up at the higher levels of command. The process of making decisions is scale agnostic as far as I'm concerned, however, some of the finer points of maneuvering bodies of troops or military units together, and combined-arms coordination, supply, etc., are more often the feature of making decisions at those higher levels of command.

Maybe some new life will come out of these old figures here (example – rebasing to another command level WIP)….

I've wanted the same thing as OldReliable1862 for a very long time.

I've long thought Bruce Weigle's 18xx series of games have the right approach: every battalion is on the table, but maneuver and combat are at the level of the regiment, which is kept in a proper historical formation at all times. If somebody adapts 1871 to the ACW, I want to know about it.

Jeff Knudsen's game Rifle Wars Part 1 has a similar approach to unit depiction (though with very different combat mechanics). It might already be what I'm looking for.

One thing keeping me from trying either is that I can't suspend disbelief well enough to accept a 1" wide stand of three 15mm figures as a "regiment". I need 6mm stands like FlyXWire's above, or sabots to make a single-piece regiment out of 2-3 F&F stands.

- Ix

At Gettysburg that means as C-in-C you should be maneuvering corps and divisions and caring about the loss of brigades. Individual regiments are a level too far.

But at Gettysburg as a corps commander, you should be maneuvering divisions and brigades, and should be worrying about each regiment. Most games of huge ACW battles are multi-player affairs with corps commander players, yet the regiments are invisible in the rules used for these games.

Movement trays can enable one to take advantage of the flexibility of individually based figures, or speed play with any other arrangement that has multiple bases per unit.

That still doesn't change the space and time required for dealing with a large number of units, which is why real-world commanders were not burdened with matters beneath their pay grade.

Otherwise, the first day of a battle might have been the first two or more it takes in some game recreations!

Most board games permit stacking of pieces representing units. That's not feasible with miniatures, which would anyhow defeat the purpose for which we turn to those.

With my 1/72 scale Napoleonics, my basic organization (and painting) is for battalions in the neighborhood of typical field strength, at a 1:30 ratio. I put three or two figures on the same frontage, depending on the number of deployed ranks.

That works out to one base per company for British or later French units, but to more than the number of companies — while not matching actual sub-company platoons — for the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians.

Reflecting the different company strengths could work out when I use the same bases for a regiment at 1:100, but would be slightly less convenient, and would be remarkably more awkward with some other formalisms I like.

Splitting one set into a couple of battalions at 1:60 results in each having only part of the full array of components depicted. I could rectify that by making up more bases of command and flank company figures, but I'm okay with accepting the oddity.

(A 1:60 or 1:50 ratio has been a popular approach, but to me it's rather a compromise that I more rarely find worthwhile.)

The particulars relevant to that period are of course different, but some basic trade-offs when using the same collection with different formalisms are also relevant to the ACW.

One general approach I find worthwhile is not to attach cannon models to bases, and to base crewmen so that I can adjust frontage by how many I place beside (instead of behind) whatever gun base I use.

"Mr. Lincoln's War"

The simplest and best set of regimental rules, IMO. I call it "Johnny Reb" light. We gave up on JR2 and JR3 because the charge sequence is too long and the basing is crazy. Here are some of our MLW games.

link

link

I seem to recall that early in the war the regiment was the maneauver element , by late ‘62 into ‘63 it was the brigade. In ‘64 to the end it moved to the division due to attrition. Consider the Iron Brigade, Great in the early war but after Gettysburg a great name but no longer a mighty force in battle, When I game it depends on the year and each battle, don't think you can game with a generic representation of minis to cover the war. Just my 2cents.