Musketry Like Thunder: The Greatest Civil War Battles Never Fought

You get your friends together for an afternoon of moving miniatures around the game table, and you have to decide what battle to play. How many times can you fight the Battle of Gettysburg? How many times can you set up Longstreet's assault on the second day before everybody knows exactly where each regiment begins, how long it takes to move to and capture Devil's Den, and how much time before reinforcements arrive? Not to mention knowing the relative morale and armament of all the units involved. Sounds like fun after the seventh time, doesn't it?

The pick-up game is an old stand-by in the wargaming community. You just throw some roads down on the table, add some woods, sprinkle it with a few farms, and you're done! While that is indeed fun and new, you can simulate limitless variations of terrain, unit type, and deployment combinations while gaming the American Civil War.

This book provides eleven fictional scenarios, from small introductory games to corps level actions. Each provides a unique tactical problem often encountered by the armies fighting the war. These range from command and control issues, surmounting difficult terrain, to combating the weather as well as each other. In addition, each scenario has great replay potential. Federals and Confederates can switch deployment areas, and you can modify the order of battle to represent different years during the war. In fact, you can use the maps and deploy entirely different forces on the table!

While the focus is on regimental level games, the order of battle can easily be adapted to systems where the brigade is the basic maneuver element.

Try something new, where your opponent doesn't know everything about your army's deployment, strengths, and leadership before the game even starts!