After our recent Chancellorsville game there was a suggestion I might want to have a go at Gettysberg, which is an equally huge multi day engagement. To be honest it is something I'd thought about in the past but shied away from as it is such a a complex and iconic battle I was worried about making a hash of it. I was fortunate enough to play the Bloody Big Battles version of Gettysburg with Chris Pringle himself at Joy of Six a few years ago, so it is certainly manageable on a tabletop, at sufficient level of abstraction.
John B made a helpful suggestion about perhaps just doing the second and third days, and after some thought, I reckoned that was possible with the Neil Thomas rules. As this was a battle to approach with some care, I thought I'd outline some of the steps I go through when designing historical scenarios, mainly the terrain layout for grid terrain.
My bible for ACW scenarios is generally the old Volley and Bayonet ACW scenario book, which very helpfully includes scenarios for all three days of Gettysburg, comprehensive OOBs, reinforcement schedules etc.
This is the map for the 2nd day, I've rotated it as I'll set the table up with this orientation. While it is pretty good for ridges, roads and streams, the layout of 'woods' is pretty hopeless for a grid based layout. Helpfully it also shows the locations of the various Corps, although it includes units which don't arrive until later on the 2nd July and misses out Bufords cavalry altogether.
The map is gridded into 1200 yard squares and is about 7200 x 10,000 but I'll just model the central/southeast portion of the battlefield (6000 x 6000) so I can better model the complex arrangement of ridges and valleys and much of the outlying area is irrelevant once the Union is hemmed in on two sides.
I usually use this 9x9 grid (strictly 9x 8/9) for ACW battles, so in this case each hex will represent around 800m/900 yards as usual. The layout of the ridges and alignment of the Union units fits better with the hex columns running horizontally so we will go with that, although I may flip it 90 degrees to actually run the game as this orientation is a bit wide for my table.
I played around with an initial layout and then revised it. Here is a the second attempt, Seminary Ridge is up on the top right with a bit of MacPhersons Ridge behind it. Cemetery Hill is the three hex cluster bottom centre with Culps Hill just below and Cemetery Ridge running off to the west. Round Top and Little Round Top might need a bit of work - ideally a I need to separate the two rather than being a single three hex cluster but I'm not sure I have enough hills of the right configuration for that.
Some of the gaps between the ridges and hills are exaggerated but it should allow the units to deploy in roughly their historical positions and frontages with a gap between them.
Gettysburg itself is a bit of a compromise, really should run east-west but this is one of the compromises of a hex grid. I'll do my best to make the layout of the buildings look correct at least. I've put trees on top of some of the hills to indicate bad going (Round Top, Little Round Top, Wolf Hill etc), and the ones down in valleys are open woods which just block line of site to represent the odd tree lines the original scenario map has scattered around.
Now the watercourses. Pitzer Run (far west) and Plum Run (just west of Round Top) are pretty straightforward. Rock Creek stretches my creativity a bit as it has to run around the base of Culps Hill and then between Wolf Hill and the ridges on the west of the creek.
You can start to appreciate why Lee was dubious about a frontal attack on Cemetery Hill from the north.
Finally the road network. I wasn't going to model every single road but ended up putting most of them on. The critical ones for reinforcements are the one running off the northwest (top right) as Picketts Division will come down there, the one running off the south behind Cemetery Ridge as that is the route for Union 2nd Corps and finally the Baltimore Pike which leads off east from just south of Wolf Hill across Rock Creek.
That looks pretty good to me, and you can immediately see why it is such a strong position for the Union as they have excellent interior lines while the Confederates are scattered in a wide arc.
Time to put it into MappingBoard. I usually do my maps straight onto the computer, but like the Tunisia game I ran a few years ago, the hill coonfiguration is complicated and I wanted to check I had enough terrain pieces first.
And finally the deployment areas for the various Corps. As this scenario will be 2nd July, I figure both sides have a reasonable idea where the enemy front lines are. Jamming three Union Corps into three hexes will be entertaining. but at one base = 2000 infantry that will work. I'll have a bit more of a think about the Little Round Top, I might use some of my desert hills for those, but generally I think that will be OK with six turns and day for two days and one overnight turn.
Later on when we were chatting, Tim threw a spanner in the works when he mentioned that there was a railway line terminating in Gettysberg itself. It wasn't marked on the VnB map, but it would be easy enough to add and would also be another outing for the 'Cannonball Express'.
