Kriegsspiel in Kansas

All,
I will be running Kriegsspiel this upcoming Saturday (May 21st) at Fort Leavenworth, KS. We'll start at 10am and go to 6pm; I anticipate 2, possibly 3, sessions throughout the day. The games take place in the upper Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862 with each player commanding a brigade of 3-5 regiments. If interested, please contact me mbdunn@verizon.net.

Mike Dunn

Hope it goes well today, Mike. Unfortunately a small matter of 4,000 miles means I cannot be with you.

By coincidence we have a very similar game next week in the UK.

Martin

Yes I would love to see how you run it and I hope it goes well.

I will be at Histcon in July so if any of your players or you happened to be going I will be running the game again there.

Should be in the show guide PEL as I submitted the entry quite some time ago. If you are going let me know and we can meet up for a beer and compare notes..

MJ

Streetgang6 wrote:All,
I will be running Kriegsspiel this upcoming Saturday (May 21st) at Fort Leavenworth, KS. We'll start at 10am and go to 6pm; I anticipate 2, possibly 3, sessions throughout the day. The games take place in the upper Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862 with each player commanding a brigade of 3-5 regiments. If interested, please contact me mbdunn@verizon.net.

Mike Dunn

So Mike, how did it go?

Our Kriegsspiel in Kansas went rather well for us. We ran two sessions, each about an two hours each. As I like to run a "strict" version of KS (much to James Sterrett's consternation), I had used the 1824 version with modifications to the firepower factors drawn and modified from the 1862 version to reflect for the use of rifled muskets & Minie balls in the ACW. Both sessions were BDE level in size, which allowed for a two player detachment game.

In the first game the situation started with a report that the Union Commander of the Harpers Ferry garrison had for some inexplicable reason (though whiskey was thought to be involved) had decided to board trains in the dead of night and evacuate his forces to Frederick, about 20 miles to the east, thus leaving Harpers Ferry completely open. Thus began the foot race - a BDE of Confederates started out from Charlestown, about 10 miles to the west of Harpers Ferry, while a BDE of Union had earlier departed from Shepardstown, about 12 miles to the northwest of Harpers Ferry. This resulted in a nasty fight at a crossroads about 5 miles outside of Harpers Ferry that the Union player ultimately won.

In the second game, the van guard (again, a BDE) to Robert Lee's army was moving north to secure the fording site across the Potomac as part of yet another incursion into the North! At the same time, two fresh (and green) regiments of Pennsylvania Boys, along with a newly formed battery of Union Regulars 12 pounders, bound for Sheperdstown by train were diverted to Harpers Ferry due to Confederate raider activity that had cut the line into Sheperdstown. So it was off by foot for the remainder of the journey. This resulted in a pitched fight along the road to Sherperdstown which the Union ultimately had won as the Confederate player withdrew in the face of whithering fire (not realizing that he was indeed facing green troops, who themselves were on the verge of breaking and skedaddling back to Harpers Ferry). By sheer coincidence the bulk of the fighting took place right where my parents currently live today!

All in all a great time had by all!

Mike

Thanks for posting that Mike. Sounds like 2 good games.

Did you find the 1862 firepower factors reflect the ACW well? Did you record casualties by regiment (and company?)?

Mark's Historicon scenario will have more players & umpires, and take a bit longer I think.

Martin

Martin wrote:Thanks for posting that Mike. Sounds like 2 good games.

Did you find the 1862 firepower factors reflect the ACW well? Did you record casualties by regiment (and company?)?

Mark's Historicon scenario will have more players & umpires, and take a bit longer I think.

Martin

Short Answer, is yes, I did find the 1862 firepower factors usefull as a jumping off point. As you know, the 1862 rule set assumes Dreyse needle guns. What I had done was compare the 1862 firepower factors to the 1824 firepowere factors and adjusted to a mid point between the two. In my mind, this was "close enough" to reflect the improvements of rifled muskets w/ Minie ball in terms of both effectiveness and range. In short, better than smoothbore muskets of the Napoleonic wars, worse than the breech loading rifles of the Franco-Prussian.

Okay, now for the long answer. I had used a 1912 survey map of the area with datum from the 1880s for the game. Not perfect, but again, "close enough" as there really wasn't much change to the area from 1862 to about 1982 (my parents moved there in 1990 and watched first hand the explosion in development - the area now for all intents and purposes is the far edge of suburban Washington D.C.). I was able to blow up the map and zoom in on my battle area (about 4 miles wide by 6 miles long), which gave me a map scale of 1:7800ish. Once again, "close enough."

One of the things I was trying to come up with was what tokens to use for the game. As you know, the map scale would work with the standard KS tokens. Only problem, for me at least, is these tokens reflect half bns of about 450 men in three ranks; The size of the unit was right (most regts in the ACW were about 400 - 500 men in effective strength), but the frontage wasn't (ACW units fought in two ranks, not three). While trying to resolve this in my mind, I thought, why not try my 6mm figures that I use for miniature gaming? Now the figures that I use are based on a 20mm x 5mm strip of 4 figures. Which at 1:7800ish translates into the correct frontage for a ~450 - 500 man regiment deployed into 2 ranks. Token problem solved.

Which actually simplified my problem of how to keep track of casualties and making adjustments to unit firepower factors as the unit accrues losses. As the firepower table assumes a half bn of 480 men per token, I assigned that each figure on the 6mm infantry strips equaled 120 men. I then quarted the fire power factors, rounding to the nearest whole number, which became the firepower factor for each individual figure. Doing so allowed me to just count the number of figures involved in combat and multiply by the correct firepower factor to get the casualty result. As I had already adjuted the tables to reflect what the results equaled to in terms of infantry/cavalry/guns killed, it was just a matter of subtracting the casualty results from the target unit strength.

This allowed me to easily track unit break points. Lose 120 men, 1 figure, you are at 3/4 strength and suffer morale penalties. Lose 240 men, 2 figures, you are at half strength and your "regt" crumbles and is removed. This works well for experienced regts that have "seen the elephant."

For my second game, I had used two freshly raised Union regts, which were at "full" authorized strength of approx 1000 men. Which meant two strips of infantry per regt. As these were green units, I had written in provisions that if one of the two strips were at 3/4 strength, both strips suffer the morale penatly, and if one of the strips was reduced to 1/2, then the entire rgt crumbles. Which would also cause the other regt to suffer moral penalties and possibly break as well. Despite clues I had dropped to the Confederate player (i.e, the enemy uniforms look particular bright and new, they seem to take a bit longer to change formations, etc.), he never figured out that the 4 strips of infantry he faced were actually 2 regt's and not 4. And they were at the verge of breaking when the confederate player had decided to concede the game based on his false assesment of his enemy! I much enjoyed that result as it once again demonstrated the state of mind of the commander does indeed directly affect the outcome of battles. Were he more resolute, he would have won instead of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Bit of a long answer I realise, but you did ask.... :-)

Mike

Thanks for that Mike. Very interesting.

Your comments on 'state of mind' resonate with me. I think it's partly a function of a player's personality, which can manifest itself in other ways too. Such as their general approach to a scenario in terms of how aggressively they will play, what tactics they will use etc. I have found that sometimes these traits are quite ingrained, so it may not work to give a defensive player and attacking role, or vice-versa. No matter how you phrase the briefings, the natural inclinations tend to rise to the surface. Much better to take account of that when allocating roles, I find.

Martin

Hi Mike,

Great summary and would be good to see it in action one day. I have just found out my game is already fully booked up and I will be spending this weekend polishing it before heading off to Washington DC on Friday.

Pity you can not make the event as would have been good to share a beer and see how you do things.

Cheers

MJ

All,
I am running a Kriegsspiel Saturday Nov 3rd in Leavenworth, KS. It will be a traditional detachment KS using the Reissweitz 1824 ruleset. How strict I run it will depend on who and how many show up (i.e., more players = free Kriegsspiel).

If interested, let me know and I'll send the details.

Mike

You would schedule it when I can't come.