A (very) Miniature Civil War – (Off Topic #20)

Over twenty years ago my brother and I decided to sell off our 15mm ACW armies and replace them with Ros & Heroics 1/300th figures. The thinking behind this was that with the limited playing space we had it would be the only way to play big Corps level games and at the same time do away with unrealistic ‘table edge’ flanks.

So Grant and Lee went micro, collected and painted around 2,000 figures, based 100 or so trees, produced a small City’s worth of buildings and painted several miles of snake fencing. The end result was very pleasing both visually and in the way the games played out with our house rules “Brother Against Brother” (named long before the commercial set of the same name!).

After a break of twelve or so years we played a game with these figures last week and true to form the Yanks (that’s me) lost. The battle was a hypothetical one based loosely on 2nd Manassas and the course of events was recorded in pictures (click here) by a Harper's Weekly artist. Remember when you look at the pictures that the infantry figures stand just 6mm tall and the battle flags are only 5mm square – each one painted without the aid of glasses - sadly now we can’t even see the figures without artificial aids let alone paint them!