#GUTS AND GLORY GAME VEERING HOW TO#

Glory, Hallelujah!is an invaluable resource for those looking to play Black Powder games set in the American Civil War. That way our two umpires can cover a table each and we won’t be taking over the entire store for the weekend! Glory Hallelujah! Our compromise, no doubt much to the relief of the long-suffering Hall of Heroes staff, is that we are going to play Day Two of Gettysburg, on two 12-foot by 6-foot tables, splitting the battlefield lengthways into a northern and southern half.

This too proved to be too complicated to plan and coordinate given the geographical spread of all our key players. Online discussion and polling then veered to instead play three to five games that would recreate specific moments from the historical battle three-day battle, with a number of smaller tables highlighting those areas of the battle rather than having a single huge table that represents the entire battlefield. My original vision had been of a singular long table for the event, as we had done for our previous 28mm game. It was quite an eye-opener!Ī gentlemanly handshake wrapped up the practice game.Īnother outcome from the practice game was confirmation that our final proposal for the format of the Battle of Gettysburg was appropriate. Our rehearsal game was based upon the Battle of Antietam (17 September 1862), and even though only a fraction of the group was able to attend (I didn’t expect people to travel interstate just for a practice game after all), enthusiasm has gone through the roof! For some folk, this was their first glimpse of the possibilities allowed by the Epic Battles scale in a massed project such as ours! Much of this discussion came to a head at this game, when for the first time two separate groups of players, from Wollongong and Campbelltown, first physically came together to a big game using these modified rules.

#GUTS AND GLORY GAME VEERING HOW TO#

Finally, we tinkered with how to amend distances and ranges that might better suit the Epic Battles scale.

I initially also drafted up a set of shortcuts to the core Black Powder rules which I hoped might simplify matters and encourage players to play more strategically, at the cost of losing some focus on the fighting between individual units. The next biggest problem was getting our knowledge of the rules up to speed, which would influence our rate of play to a level where we could get a battle of this scale finished over a single weekend.

Wargamers are just as prone to procrastination and ‘last minuteitus’ as anyone, especially when it comes to painting! But I think those players have been inspired to action by seeing what masses of completed figures looked like at our recent game! Practice and Preparation I needn’t have been so concerned collectively the group have really come to the party on this one – as of a few weeks ago between most of our 22 players we have commitments for the entire orders of battle – phew! To be honest, as you can see from the pictures, some of the models are just undercoated so far. Luckily Warlord do spare Command strips for just such a contingency! But even so, back then, after having drawn up a complete list of units from Gettysburg’s orders of battle (OOB) for both sides I was really worried about the amount of painting involved. We’ve taken a few shortcuts where possible by making our standard-sized units only three bases instead of the five bases you’d get on a sprue, for example.

They may not all be painted, but that many figures on a table still looks fantastic.īy far our biggest issue was the enormous task of painting up around 500 plastic regiments. Let’s recap on what we saw as the main challenges back then, how we’ve addressed them and what progress we’ve made… So, now that we are three-quarters of the way through the project, and with a big dress rehearsal game under our collective belts, it seems as good a time as any to review how we are going and how the project has evolved over the last few months. To briefly summarise our goals we are intending to use Warlord’s Epic Battles: American Civil War plastic figures to represent every single Regiment or battery present on that fabled day! The game will be played out over 144 square feet of tabletop fully loaded with terrain! For a fuller account check out Part One! Ralph: Back in November 2022 we described our vision for us Aussie wargamers to put on an insanely large gaming weekend to celebrate the 160 th Anniversary of the iconic Battle of Gettysburg. This article was written by Ralph Hart, a member of an Australian gaming group set on replicating the Battle of Gettysburg later this year for its 160th anniversary using Black Powder Epic Battles: American Civil War figures…

Guts and glory game veering