The Sharpeville Campaign

The map and units

A new ACW mini-campaign about to begin - we plan to manoeuvre strategically on this map in the hope of getting one or two decent table battles out of it ! It is really a way of testing a new idea for campaign mangement, because concealed movement is always a difficult issue without an umpire. I downloaded a nice (free) map drawing program called 'Mapping Board' and created a jpeg of the map, embedding it in a Word document. The unit markers are simply Word text boxes, containing their own jpeg graphics, which can be easily moved around on top of the map, and more importantly can be rendered invisible by adjusting their 'transparency' option. Instant concealed movement!



Example Union units

Setting the magnification to 300% brings the map and units into glorious high definition. The campaign is totally fictitious but the OOB's are roughly based on 2nd Bull Run ( Lee & Jackson vs Pope) and the map units represent every model we can actually field on the tabletop. The squares used for map movement are also the individual 2' terrain squares that we own, in configurations whereby any 8' by 4' layout can be reproduced accurately. Victory points are won mostly by table battles, with a couple of towns being worth points to the Rebs.

Confederates

We have worked out a brief set of rules for manoeuvring on the map that should hopefully tie in with our tabletop rules, but we may have to play it by ear a bit ! If anyone is interested in watching us play this out from both perspectives, Ian will post some of Pope's movements, plans, tactics and embarrassing blunders on his Road To Appomattox blog and I will post Lee's over on my blog Wilderness Tavern. The action should start soon . . . .