The 1st Battle of Manassas Junction

A Civil War Battle

Fought with CWB Rules by Peter Pig

Page 1

This AAR is the results of an experiment with the board game Bobby Lee by Columbia Games (http://www.columbiagames.com/)

 to produce a ACW campaign game with minimal book keeping and easy mechanics. Please have a look at the following web page for explanations of how this game was produced. http://www.scrivenshill.co.uk/HowtoCreateaCWBCampaign.htm.

 

The protagonists were John, Andreas and Jochen for the Union and Jim, Kevin and Kip for the Rebels. The battle started with the Union forces attempting to seize the vital junction of Manassas which would help them keep their strangle hold on the Rebel Army of Virginia which was holed up in Harpers Ferry.

 

The Army of North Virginia was holding the key junction and making their own preparations to re-open the supply lines. They were attacked by forces of the Army of the Potomac stationed just South of  Alexandria.

 

The battle was fought over two days and lasted two days of game time. It was run using the Peter Pig rule set called “Civil War Battles”.  This link gives a detailed description of the rules http://www.peterpig.co.uk/cwb.htm

 

One of the features of the rules is that you have Divisional Commanders who actually control the forces and there is an option for a Corps Commander. With three players a side each game had two Divisional Commanders and a single Corps Commander controlled by the players.

 

The Corps Commander can not directly control any troops but does allow re-roll of dice which helps at key moments. This usually means the Corps Commander is at the side of the Divisional Commander who needs the most help. With this in mind I imposed a rule that the players could not co-ordinate their actions unless they were on table within earshot of one another. So only if the figures representing the commanders were adjacent could the players talk about the game with one another.