Bonus Game: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse

Mark H. Walker | September 21, 2004  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

The Game

What grabbed me most about this battle was the courage of the men who fought it. I wanted to show that in the game. Accordingly, I made morale and leadership a key element in the simulation. For example, the British did not smash the North Carolinian’s line because they had superior firepower—in fact the Carolinians outnumbered the British participating in the initial attack—but rather because they had superior training, discipline and morale.

We went with the group activation instead of the igo-ugo tradition for two reasons. It provides more interaction between the players, and it also better simulates the fragmented nature of the battle. So to does our default unit size, the company. This was a fight where small groups of men made a difference, and so did the weapons employed. I wanted to show the difference between the Rifles, muskets, and pistols of the era, and to do this I need to make the scale (both unit and hex size) small enough to allow that.

Last but not least. Play the British aggressively. As Waylon Jennings once sang, "You have a long way to go, and a short time to get there." The American militia, on the other hand, should be handled with kid gloves. Don’t expect too much from them, and they won’t disappoint.

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