Reply To: Reign of the Neckbeards (or why do historical re-fights).

[phaidknott 7023xp 2]

@commodorerob “my view is there are different levels of historical wargaming.
1. Using historical minis creating your own scenario
2. Refighting a historical battle, using the same forces on the similar battle field
3. Refighting with historical deployment
4. Just following turn by turn what happened.
The last is boring but in my gaming group we do a combination of all the other three depending on the mood or what we fancy doing.”

I think I’ve only seen the fourth option once as a “demo” at a wargames show many moons ago (I think there club involved were more concerned with going around the show than running a demo and that option needed the least man power at the table…it wasn’t a hit with the general public and left alone).

2 and 3 were the usual options for us. The “Free Deployment” games were usually for battles where the historical deployment caused problems in doing it as a game, OR partially used to mix things up from the expected (for some battles having re-enforcements coming on from a different direction to stop the other side from having “weird psychic powerz” and knowing what the commanders on the day couldn’t know (and thus refusing the flank the expected relief column was coming from and setting up a defence)). But the 3rd type were the BIG events for us, we usually rented a scout hut (or similar) for a weekend and did some big battles (our biggest was Lutzen with over 5000 15mm figures on the table, not bad as there was only about a dozen of us). Smaller clashes (usually a brigade each side) for club nights, and these were usually a “section” of a bigger battle snipped out to give us the map and ORBAT.