In Summary, I'll Summarize...

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing a number of game summaries, including the playtests for Tattered Flags, and Bitter Angels. What I try to do with summaries is to organize all the important game rules and list them in a compact bullet form. Having these summaries makes it easier to review and teach the mechanics of games, because you have all the important rules in one place so you won't forget little bits of things. I usually achieve about 4:1 compression, meaning that a game with 8 pages of rules will result in a summary of about 2 pages.

I've posted over 100 summaries for a wide variety of games from Euros, to board wargames, to miniatures rules. You can see a list of them on this BGG Geeklist:

Bitter Angels (ACW Grand Armée) playtest

I've applied to become a playtester for "Bitter Angels", an attempt to adapt the Napoleonic grand-tactical miniatures rules Grand Armée (GA) to the American Civil War. I've never played GA, but I have played quite a bit of Volley & Bayonet (V&B), an earlier set of grand-tactical black powder rules. Some people that I've gamed with have complained that V&B needs a command and control system, which GA provides. So, it seems reasonable to check out how Bitter Angels works with big ACW battles.

GA uses the same basing as V&B: 1" = 100 yards, and bases are infantry and cavalry brigades each 3" square. V&B was designed so that you can play with figures as large as 54mm (though you have problems fitting 54mm artillery on the 3"x1.5" artillery bases). I prefer to game with smaller scale figures, either 6mm or even 2mm. Many people who play V&B with smaller scale figures opt to increase the ground scale and thus shrink the size of stands and the overall table size. Those gaming with 15mm figures often use 2/3 scale bases (1" = 150 yds.), while those who game with 6mm or 2mm figures opt to use 1/2 scale (1" = 200 yds.) or even centimeter scale (substitute centimeters for inches, so that bases are 3cm square, which gives a ground scale of 1" = 250 yds). Keith McNelly in NZ hosts the V&B web site, and use 1/2 scale 6mm figures.

Typical V&B battles use 6'x8' tables. With half-scale figures, you can run Gettysburg on 3'x4' tables; with centimeter scale, the table becomes 72cm x 96cm or just over 2'x3'.

I've had a long stalled project to re-work my 6mm Heroics and Ros ACW figures. What I've decided to do is to rebase my 6mm figures onto more typical 1" or 3/4" stands and use 2mm figures based in centimeter scale for V&B and similarly based rules. That will allow me to play a variety of ACW games on a variety of scales.