19th Century Breakdown....Here it comes

 

The Battle of Chancellorsville 1863 as per the Battle Cry scenario using my block armies and Heroscape

 

I spent an enjoyable evening yesterday thumbing through the recently acquired four volumes of Battles and Leaders as well as revisiting the box of Peter Pig ACW ship models I have. I have everything I need for this part of the ACW project – even scenery – so have little or no excuse for not tackling it (and offering up a silent prayer of thanks that I still have them in my collection) but my main focus is the WW2 project. There are even some new rules for the period by the indefatigable Dave Manley that I may take a look at – they are designed to be fast play and there is also a campaign system to boot. There is plenty of scope within the period for some interesting games and with the campaign option as well it is even more attractive. I suspect though that land based games will feature first of all using the block armies and my Heroscape terrain. I can lift scenarios straight from the Battle Cry rulebook in the short term but Battles and Leaders will provide plenty of smaller actions to tackle.  

As I now have some storage on the ground floor I may relocate some of my gaming collection for this – namely the blue and grey blocks, the terrain, some Heroscape tiles and my dice/marker box. I already have a foldaway table of 3ft by 2ft which will be more than sufficient to set up a 13 x 9 Command and Colours playing area using Heroscape tiles. I could even knock up a Portable Wargame board with 2” squares if needed. Either of those options would work well although I will need to represent units with single blocks rather than using the famous 4, 3 and 2 approach. I have done this in the past and marked hits using the counters from a travel version of the game Othello. These are black one side and white the other. The white side represents a single hit and the black is two. An infantry unit with two hits suffered would have two white counters and a third hit would flip one over to its black side so that it would be showing one white and one back counter. Luckily the counters are small enough to sit happily on the blocks. I have used this method before and it looks fine. 

In the short term then my wargames world looks something like this. I am painting WW2 warships for naval gaming but intend fighting land battles set in the ACW using blocks. I have the land side to consider for Rommel/Battlegroup WW2 and then the ships for the ACW. To add to this I have the OGRE miniatures (very self-contained) and also Congo/The Men Who Would be Kings. On the face of it that is a fairly modest list but the big advantage is that there is sufficient variety contained therein to stop me getting bored. 

For me this looks hellishly reasonable and even, dare I say it, relatively achievable.