Tuesday 14 February 2012

ACW Playtest #1

ACW has always been a favourite period of mine.

However before I start rambling on about it here is some 15mm eye-candy painted by Rodge


A well stocked sutler frequented by the boys in blue


Is someone making a delivery or stocking up?


Something isn't right here


I'll leave it up to you to decide if it's just some good ol' boys making a few dollars US or re-supplying for Lee's next offensive


My camera work doesn't do justice to these lovely vignettes

Anyway after that treat I expect you to sit still and listen to what I have to say

I started collecting the Airfix ACW range back in the 1970s before I knew what wargaming was. I bought Donald Featherstone's Battles with Model Soldiers for my twelfth birthday and used the rules and my Airfix ACW figures to fight my first "proper" wargame.

Since then I've played a lot of ACW replacing my Airfix figures with 15mm figures from virtually every manufacturer under the Sun - Minifigs, Old Glory, Essex, Peter Pig and Peter Laing to name a few.

Finding figures for the ACW has never been a problem for me. However finding rules is a different matter. I've tried a fair selection  - Johnny Reb, Circa 1863, On To Richmond, Newbury, RFCMs Civil War Battles and Fire and Fury. Only the last two, CWB and FnF, came close to giving me the sort of game I was looking for - simple but still full of ACW flavour. They both have some lovely game mechanisms but some annoying bits as well.

Rodge has been recently working on a home-grown ACW rule set and he invited me along to playtest  them.  He was looking for a brigade level game that was simple but required good generalship and incorporated a initial terrain setup game.

I'll describe a playtest in the next post


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