ACW with Fire & Fury

At the weekend I joined in an ACW game held at one of the local school libraries, by one of our two local gaming clubs. The game played using 25/8mm scale figures and using the Fury and Fury rule set.

Steve came up with a scenario where by opposing mounted scouts come across each other and dismount to hold their positions while the two armies follow up to engage.

I played the game on Rebs side with my fledgling unit. Our mounted scouts held a hilltop church and graveyard, whilst the Yankees held the adjacent farm. The Rebs got first turn, and started their advance on to the field, with the Union coming on with a reserve, which heavily weighted their left flank. The bulk of our forces were also on our left flank. This caused a typical rotation of the battle lines about a central crossroads position.

Here's a few pics of the game...

Rebs deployments

The opposing scouts

My fledgling unit takes a circuitous flank march

The Yankees advance on to the field

The Rebs advance and deploy guns on a central hill

Yankees threaten to advance on and overwhelm Rebs in church

A view from Rebs right flank as Yankees advance on church. Scouts mount up and back off.

Battle lines begin to form and meet. And that dreaded single dice roll of a '1'...

Rebs push heavily on the farm forcing off Yankee scouts, whilst their own right flank pulls back to avoid being out flanked. This was just about the final positions, with both advancing flank forces moving slightly further on...

The game looked good, but I have to say for my tastes played poorly.

After 4 hours of play we had advanced into battle lines, with negligible result. Shooting had to this point killed about one stand of an infantry unit from each side. One charge had pushed off one unit from the farm.

The problem for me was all the shooting was doing was causing 'disorder' which petty much had the effect of halving your movement and subsequent shooting. Which resulted in a tedious slow grinding game.

Also the single dice mechanism was also for me a failure in the rules. Its too open to random chance. Whereas when many dice are rolled you get a more likely statistically and predictable average result.

When the Yankees finally amassed enough fire power to seriously damage an enemy unit they rolled a 1 on the single d10 rolled... groan...

I was left feeling that was an afternoon wasted, to be honest.... I would have been better served getting on with figure painting!

I couldn't help but wonder how better this scenario and game would have played using Black Powder as a rule set...

Fire and Fury? Nope.... Smoke and Disorder? Yep!