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

[phaidknott 7023xp 0]

I would agree that the use of 28mm does put “limits” onto doing a lot of re-fights. Alas 28mm lends itself more to skirmish actions and there’s not a lot of historical references around for a “platoon” sized battle (there are a few, but hard to find. They are usually linked to an action where a medal has been awarded for the action to appear on the internet).

Smaller scales open up a lot of options, but again the rules used have to move away from Skirmish actions to where it’s either Regt sized (for blackpowder era games) or Platoon sized units as the “minimum” basic unit for most battles.

But we’ve had gamers who found it impossible to paint scales like 6mm due to eyesight or brush control, but as these battle are usually a communal efforts their minis are painted by others while they do all the basing for everyone else (or they my be more involved with doing terrain for the battle). So all are involved with the prep for the battle.

But its the multiplayer aspect (usually any thing up to five players a side for really BIG games) where the re-fights come into their own. Probably doing it with just two players would be arduous to do (even just playing the game), but by bringing in more players you can even while away the dead time (while you wait for others to complete their turns) by simply chatting away with each other (thus it’s a very social event).

But refights can be anything (not just historical), although its easier to copy a ORBAT and map from a reference book than it is trying to devise a new one from scratch. You can devise a “battle” to be refought but using an historical battle as the building blocks for a 40K game (for example) as we did with an Arnhem map and “trying” to pick squads/units the mirrored the ones used historically. Although this technically isn’t a re-fight, it’s half way there…

But of you find battles/re-fights fun in sci-fi and fantasy games, you might then want to try a more historical game (or even one from the campaign the inspired your custom battle). For us in the UK perhaps battles from the ECW or the Dark Ages might be a draw as a battle might have occurred nearby (or involved units raised in your county) that can form a stimulus for getting interested (same could be said for gamers in the US with the ACW or AWI conflicts). European gamers (not in a island like us in the UK and Ireland) have even more possible “local” aspects for looking at doing a refight (anything from the Roman era up to moderns).

But it all boils down to an ORBAT, a map, and a group of gamers for a re-fight. Once you have those anything can happen, and “if” you’ve never tried this aspect of wargaming…give it a try (you might just enjoy it). And on the knotty “research” issue, you might find something that you never knew before that becomes the “hook” to be you inspired to paint a unit, then an army 😀