I took a slice of action from the boardgame Salem Church by Decision Games and played it out as a Black Powder game on just a 3' x 3' space.
There is a full article over on my blog. All-in-all, it gave a very enjoyable and quite tight game.
LINK
http://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2019/09/12mm-black-powder-for-salem-church.html
A very nice looking game. I've downloaded your scenario and will give it a try sometime soon.
Nice one, Norm. :)
Cheers - Phil
Great game, Norm, and great idea using the boardgame to set up the tabletop action.
V/R,
Jack
Hi Norm,
I loved your game too and I have downloaded your scenario
Only 380 figures to paint...
More tea vicar..
Good one Norm
Quote from: marie on 27 July 2020, 10:23:08 PM
Hi Norm,
I loved your game too and I have downloaded your scenario
Only 380 figures to paint...
More tea vicar..
Thank you, your post made me go back and do a re-read, which has left me wanting to play that out again, it was a fun scenario, though it would be interesting to see how different rules might play out.
380 figures! why do we do this to ourselves :-)
Well......It helps to pay for horse feed and vets' bills, as far as I'm concerned. :'(
Cheers - Phil ;)
It's paying for the ducks' bills that worries me.
Great game, Norm. So close. Nice terrain / scenery and particularly like your 12mm miniatures. I believe I may have said this before but I have driven past Salem Church along the Plank Road at least half a dozen times in my visits to the Fredericksburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Chancellorsville battlefields. Having only researched the big battles in advance, I was vaguely aware that 'some sort of action' took place there so I always wondered what transpired as I waited at the traffic lights or drove past. If you saw the site today you might be surprised how relatively flat it all looks, possibly in part due to the modern developments of the two 3 lane carriageways on the highway and (even though these are somewhat spread out) all of the commercial and community buildings around. The hill on which the modern church stands is not very large either and so, does not appear to be any kind of obstacle at all. To cap it all, I just looked at the site on Google maps there and I now realise I must have driven past some kind of monument there each time of which I have no memory (ye gods, is this old age? I think I'll put it down to focusing my attention on the traffic situation on the road)! :-[
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@38.2898152,-77.5303555,3a,75y,147.07h,86.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjRKJQhulGIfJSevfc2jQpQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 (https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@38.2898152,-77.5303555,3a,75y,147.07h,86.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjRKJQhulGIfJSevfc2jQpQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)
(the site of old Salem Church is behind the monument)
Really enjoyed reading your scenario and looking at the pictures of your game. Very good. I am going to Take inspiration and adapt your scenario to fit my favourite rules. Thanks for sharing.
🐵
Great intense little action!
I have downloaded the scenario and will probably transplant to somewhere in Flanders during the Franco-Dutch war or LoA, using Pike and Shotte.
Thanks all, while looking online for other peoples games on the subject, I discovered that there is a Salem's Church scenario in the Glory Hallelujah ACW expansion for Black Powder, but I note they don't represent any high ground.
I did find a nice game by fellow blogger (it obviously follows the historical situation) Here
http://slimreidy1.blogspot.com/2017/04/salem-church-1863.html
This is a good looking scenario, will give it a go next week. I like the idea of small tables to give a full battle outcome. One question about the deploying into skirmish order: "Can all ACW troops break into skirmish order in this scenario?" What effects on the unit's shooting and H-t-H capability?
Quote from: Dave Fielder on 30 July 2020, 07:11:37 AM
This is a good looking scenario, will give it a go next week. I like the idea of small tables to give a full battle outcome. One question about the deploying into skirmish order: "Can all ACW troops break into skirmish order in this scenario?" What effects on the unit's shooting and H-t-H capability?
Hi Dave, for Black Powder 2 the woods count as heavy, so the only troops that can move through it (at half rate) are those in skirmish order. BP and Glory Hallelujah limit skirmishing to 'part' of a regiment throwing skirmishers in front of them OR allowing a whole regiment to count as light and to all skirmish, but only 1 regiment per brigade can have this status - so essentially no, formations in this battle cannot 'generally' skirmish as an entire unit, but I had to allow it for those making passage of the wood and so it should be thought of only as a mechanism for traversing the woods.
For the most part, skirmishers can't charge or at least in this battle there are unlikely to be anything that falls within those things they can charge. If they end up in melee, they fight at a disadvantage, hitting on 5+ rather than 4+. Almost certainly in this scenario, the skirmishers moving through the woods will stay in skirmish formation to allow them to traverse and exit the woods and at that point, they should form up into line.
I'm really pleased that you think the scenario looks interesting enough to have ago.
So I used the ORBAT and scenario and played out the game with another human! Quite weird in this environment. Anyway, it was a close run affair , the Rebels aggression saw the School House fall to Hoke by turn 3 and Eustis was hard pressed with most of his Brigade being pulled apart piecemeal, but Salem Church did hold to turn 7. Semmes and Kershaw took on the three Union brigades, on paper it looked uneven but the Union command kept failing meaning they dropped CR to 7 making any movement difficult. A hard fought firefight with a few moments of bayonets crossing saw the Unions becoming largely spent but at great cost to the Rebels. It was a well balanced scenario with a tactical Rebel victory but the Unions held onto the Church up to nightfall, probably making this a strategic victory because they held the central position with the roads still open. The game took about 2.5 hours to get to a conclusion and is a well recommended scenario. It can be bath-tubbed to fit for ANY ACW ruleset and all figure scales, although the table size might have to be adjusted to fit ground and figure scale.
Dave, Thanks for running and recommending it. I find it interesting to see how scenarios that work can fall out of a situation created from within a boardgame setting, which creates a loose association with the historical encounter. I think the only thing that I wondered about this, was whether Salem Church was too strong under the Black Powder rules.
Great to see you have been able to get some FtF gaming in Dave :).
As for the church Norm, you could give it only a marginal save against musket/rifle fire, but not against artillery. I remember a 'photo on a fellow Bloggers site, with an ACW wooden building absolutely riddled with bullet holes, so not as much protection as one might think.
Steve, that would probably be the best way to go.
Quote from: Steve J on 06 August 2020, 05:40:52 AM
Great to see you have been able to get some FtF gaming in Dave :).
As for the church Norm, you could give it only a marginal save against musket/rifle fire, but not against artillery. I remember a 'photo on a fellow Bloggers site, with an ACW wooden building absolutely riddled with bullet holes, so not as much protection as one might think.
One of my gripes against Black Powder fundamentalists+ are the buildings rules.
As written a +2 save against musketry (and I think +1 against artillery).
This is the sort of protection you might expect fomr a brick and rammed earth fort.
I play Napoleonics where the artillery were well equipped to set buildings ablaze, and in Eastern and Central Europe most rural buildings were wood construction.
A town might feature a solid church and some stone buildings at its centre, but again tended to be a firetrap around its edges (Smolensk, Moscow)..
With the exception of a few very solid buildings (Waterloo), or big cities (Dresden, Leipzeig), troops tended to not garrison chains of BUA, but deployed in a linear manner.
The greatest protection offered by a village was security for shaky troops against cavalry.
The rules are, of course, a toolkit, adapt as you wish.
I recommend seriously nerfing the defensive power of buildings, especially wooden ones.
+ Fundamentalists, those who insist it must be played as written.
BP is a toolset, which is its advantage - my opponent was a 40K devotee who had never played a Horse and Musket game but the mechanisms were familiar enough for him to understand the rules quickly, the QRS was more than enough. Fundamentalists will implode with a such a ruleset, it's too vanilla and needs tweaking with scenarios and specific periods, but frankly who doesn't do that with every set of rules. In the scenario we didn't play the 7th turn so the assault on Salem Church never actually occurred, but we assumed it would have taken at least two turns, 1st turn to weaken the troops with firepower (muskets) and 2nd turn an assault by the whole of Hoke's Brigade - which might not have broken in. The concept of ACW troops being 'Whipped' (i.e Broken but still on the table) and hence cluttering the battlefield with their broken presence played out nicely ... the battlefield remained busy with flotsam and jetsam, with good ordered troops trying to get around them.