Pat Hirtle was the winner of TOCWOC’s recent After Action Report contest. His winning entry will be featured in this series of blog entries over the next few weeks.
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THE ENQUIRY
Johnny Reb II is the only set of miniatures rules that I have played extensively. The rather elaborate account below is the result of a meeting engagement that I played out last year. I should point out that I don’t play JR as a “true” miniatures game, as I have neither the time nor the patience to paint hundreds of little lead men. Instead, I play with counters (matching the base sizes in the rules), with top-view drawings that I did in PhotoShop:
This allows me to print out and deploy a corps in less time than it takes to paint a single stand of miniatures. The map is similarly 2D, creating in effect a hexless boardgame. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, and find it much more practical and flexible than using real miniatures and 3D terrain.
What I expected to be a well-balanced meeting engagement ended almost as soon as it began, as a result of some truly incredible die rolls - devastatingly good for the Confederates, and catastrophically bad for the Union (including several automatic routs).
This lopsided outcome got me to thinking. Of course as a player I can quite correctly point to the dice as the source of the Union’s misfortune, but my historical counterparts were not allowed this defense. What would have happened to such an unlucky brigadier in the real world of 1862? I decided to conduct an Enquiry to find out.
(Note: Generals Grant and Sherman are of course historical characters, as is Sherman’s adjutant J.H. Hammond. Everyone else is made up, and so are the units involved. I picked random numbers for the regiments, so I hope no Civil War buffs will be offended if I’ve placed their favourite regiment in the wrong theater for July 18th, 1862.)
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