"Best Civil War to game." Topic

American Civil War
English Civil War
Spanish Civil War
Russian Civil War
Chinese Civil War
AWI?
Others?

ACW

Scenario selection = ACW
Painting = AmRev
Gaming = All have interesting attractions.

If you want to game a civil war on the scale of 1 to 1 you might want to consider the Acadian Civil War (1635-1654).

link

link

How about the Swiss civil war in 1848?

ECW, I've found is really especially using Pikemen's Lament.

Russian, Chinese and Spanish are not all that well balanced. I would go with either American or English. I would throw in Mexican Revolution which was also a civil war.

For mass scale how could ACW be beat?

The various Roman Civil Wars— link

Take your pick. They had a lot of ‘em. All would be quite colorful.

My top choices:
Caesar vs. Pompey
The Triumvirate vs. Brutus & Cassius
Octavian vs. Antony (& Cleopatra)
The various "Years of the ___ Caesars" (Pick a number)
Constantine's War

Parzival – you forgot all the Eastern Roman Civil Wars. There were a LOT more after Constantine.

Any of 'em. Civil wars are fascinating.

Perris0707– Yep. Really, I just stopped. The list of possible wars is humongous.
For all we read about the Pax Romana, they fought all the time— they managed roughly 200 years (really only about 120) without much killing of each other. And then Marcus Aurelius died and that pretty much ended that.

USA USA USA! American exceptionalism strikes again.

American Civil War.

When we're done with this, can we argue "best lunch?" Because both are matters of taste almost exclusively.
ECW and ACW are documented in English, and have family and local connections to wargamers of those countries--which would be most historical miniatures gamers, so nearly as I can tell.

Russian, Chinese and Spanish offer a wider variety of "factions" as they are now called, with differences in uniforms, training and equipment, and the possibility for unusual matchups.

Me for the Anglophone civil wars. They're documented in a language I can read fluently, the battles are small enough to go on gaming tables, and enough maps and OOB are available that I can use historical scenarios. But I'm a historical miniatures player. A novelist might take a very different view, and in fact I might go re-read Harris' Light Cavalry Action (RCW) in the near future.

Russian, Chinese and Spanish are not all that well balanced

Any wars that last multiple years are necessarily going to have periods of balance. Otherwise they would be over quickly. I would say that all three of those are easy and fun to game. And the Russian and Spanish ones are heavily gamed.

They all have the massive advantage that the players in a club can collect different armies, which can all fight each other, whereas ACW only really has two sides, for example.

The big issue with the Russian, and even more so the Chinese, civil wars is getting high quality information in your home languages. The Spanish Civil War has a massive advantage here, plus has tanks.

This is why I abandoned my attempts to game the Mexican Civil War -- there is almost no detail. Plus the various sides all fought the centre and had wildly different terrain, so you end up only doing one section of it.

Edit : I see that Robert has made pretty much exactly the same points.

Korean War
Japanese Sengoku Period
Finnish Civil War
Nigerian – Biafran Civil War
War of the Roses

I think a "cleaner" discussion would be to separate the civil wars by period, i.e. ancients, pike and shot, interwar, etc.

That way your not comparing apples to kumquats.

ECW – although I prefer the term British Civil Wars as it was fought in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and involved armies raised in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. And the king who lost his head was king of the dual kingdoms of England and Scotland.

As a term ECW is a bit old hat IMHO (and that of most modern academic historians).

2nd War of the Roses and Sengoku-jedai

As has been said, the saddest thing about Amy civil war is you don't get to kill foreigners!

The ACW for me. The RCW is interesting, and I like the armored trains, but I wish there was more gaming information in English.

The first Civil War I did seriously was SCW. ECW and ACW came later.

The SCW has a lot more tanks and three engined bombers than either of the others, the ACW hardly even has any cavalry and no pikemen at all.

Does anyone still play the VBCW game ?

A fictional civil war with lots of factions.

"[T]he saddest thing about Amy civil war is you don't get to kill foreigners!"

Oh, nonsense! Just sticking with the initial five, no one on the Confederate side would have regarded German and Irish regiments as American--except MAYBE Irish in Confederate service, and the sentiment was fairly common on the Union side as well. ECW gives a good Englishman a chance to kill Irish, Highlanders, Welsh and even the odd Frenchman.

This is even more true for the SCW. Putting to one side Germans, Italian, Soviet and "International" forces, if you're a real Basque or Catalan nationalist, Castilians are foreigners, and I think the sentiment is often reciprocated.

RCW has Balts, Finns, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Ukes, Japanese, Brits, French, US…hard to tell where to stop.

CCW has Japanese, Mongolians, White Russians and Tibetans.

I think a lot of us would lose interest in some of these wars if we weren't allowed to use foreigners.

I'm gonna have to go with Russian Civil War for three key reasons that I hope to see in any prospective wargaming conflict:

Uniforms: You've got a staggering vareity of uniforms that range from those with Eastern influences like the cossacks to the very-Western uniform leftovers from the Great War. The uniforms can also be just as fanciful as the Napoleonic Era if you consider the AFSR's Coloured Regiments, other factions like the Ukrainian People's Republic, or even the Bolshevik troops in Turkestan with the brightly-colored leather uniforms.

Troop Types: The Russian Civil War has, in my mind, a Napoleonic-era equivalent of the balance of different branches of arms. The Russian Civil War saw the last great resurgence in cavalry in Europe at the same time armoured cars and sometimes even a few tanks were used! Infantry range from the highly-drilled ex-Imperial Germans, aggressive and motivated Naval Troops, as well as unenthusiastic raw conscripts. Machine guns and artillery were used but balanced out by rarity, contemporary technology, or lack of training/ammunition. Each faction also had access to different troop types that differentiated how they fought. For instance, the Konarmia suffered from a lack of reliable infantry, and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic struggled to field cavalry.

Tactical Doctrine: Each "faction" had their own answers to the unique tactical challenges faced in Eastern Europe. For example, the Whites used, among other tactics, dense cavalry formations; the Konarmia was renowned for tactical flexibility and resilience, the Estonians for their brave infantry and use of armoured trains, etc. This allows for each army to have a distinct "feel"

ACW – hard to beat the number of minis/books/battles

I am doing The Mexican Revolution right now. Strange period marrying Vacaros and Airplanes. Very neat war. with great characters. Maybe not the best but surely interesting.

Spanish Civil War

There's a lot of good variation in engagement size, terrain, and force composition, expecially quite a few militia units. Beyond that, a number of modern (3rd generation) warfare concepts are being figured out, so they are not just a given, but commanders had real challenges implementing them.

To top it off, the "sides" are loose coalitions of different factions. While they have a common cause and common enemy, so they must cooperate to win, within their victory plans is peer compeition to be the "first amoung equals" at the end of the battle. That is a horrible situation to be in, but a great one to wargame.

ACW – for historical gaming the amount of scenario details available gives it the edge.

ECW
ACW
SCW
RCW

In that order :)

Sulla's Civil War [first of the full scale Roman ones].

The one you have some interest in.

Any civil war in your own country, since you will be able to read all the sources, visit some of the battlefields/places that were besieged, and perhaps have some personal family history that connects you to it.
I once worked in a school where the deputy head was a member of the Charles the Martyr Society and attended the annual commemoration at the king's statue. One of my colleagues commented that this was the first school in which he had worked where one's chances of promotion depended upon which side your family would have fought in the Civil War…

Both the English and the American civil wars have given me a great deal of pleasure to re-enact in the past, though as I have been doing it off and on for 36 years now I don't think there'll be too many more!

What Mark Plant said!

While I thoroughly enjoy gaming the Roman civil wars for mass battles, on smaller scale engagements, my vote goes to:
Boshin War.

Great variety of uniforms and tech levels, and sweet scenicking.

And while I also greatly enjoy playing Test of Honour in the Sengoku Jidai, I don't really consider that a civil war game, more of a war of unification. The tail end of centuries of minor warlords fighting it out since the rise of the bakufu.

ACẀ

ECW, but | am biased one of the interesting "characters" was from my towm "sir Thomas Gell" a roughe if ever there was one, figting for the King them Parlimanet, swapping sides due to his corruption. The behaviour of the Russians in the Ukraine war is mirrored in the ECW.

UshCha I'm afraid that isn't quite correct. Gell never fought, or was even commissioned by the King.
At the outbreak of war he was commissioned by Parliament to secure Derbyshire for the Parliament. He finally resigned his commission in 1646, when his influence was waning due to the Newly Modelled Army taking precedence over the armies of the Associations.
Gell was a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, who from 1645 on was more intent on feathering his own nest than fighting for the 'cause'.

Civil wars are fascinating. Usually two (or more) sides of matched strength.

Unfortunately civil wars still carry partisan bias. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms are still very emotive for many with passionate (almost vitriolic) support of one side over another for events that happened fast approaching 400 years ago.

I, which will come as no surprise, am passionate about Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and in particular the First English Civil War because it happened here. Practically on my doorstep, I can easily visit the battlefields, sites of interest and see artefacts in museums. It is tangible.