Sunday, October 24, 2021

Gaines's Mill: ACW Brigade Fire & Fury

Was able to play our first "full fledge" ACW game using brigade Fire & Fury.  We decided to tackle the Gaines's Mill scenario from the version 1 Great Eastern Battles scenario book.  I updated the scenario for the 2nd edition of F&F.  This is easily accomplished with the handy tables in the back of the book.

I must admit I didn't really think this one through.  I looked at the map in the book and it looked very manageable.  I didn't consider the additional units that arrive as reinforcements and actually make this game rather larger than expected.  This took are fair portion of the ACW collection.

Below you can see an overview of the 8 foot by 6 foot table setup with initial unit deployments.


Longstreet's division arrives mid way along the right table edge, and remaining Confederate units arrive via the road on the bottom left.  Union reinforcements enter either behind the white building along the top table edge or later via the road to the upper left of the image.

Rather than list out the order of battle normally, I'll just included pictures of the forces involved via the unit tabs.



Both AP Hill's and Longstreet's assault on the Union breastworks - while daunting at first - was repelled by the Union forces.  By the time the initial Confederate assault was wrapping up, DH Hill's division with addition Confederate reinforcements where starting to put overwhelming pressure on the Union right flank.

This was a fun game and one I plan to run at DundraCon locally in February.  My fancy templates for the game arrived from Litko which aided our efforts significantly.

Lots of pictures are below.  Close up pictures using my SLR camera below.






























Mobile phone pictures below ...


































We still have a couple of turns to finish up which we'll be doing on Wednesday evening.  That being said, the tables are turning on the Union defenders quickly and I expect to see them getting to the point of withdrawal - the main question being who has more victory points when that happens.