I have to be clear, I’m a huge “Johnny Reb” fan. This will be a biased article!  Actually  I’ve been a “Civil War buff”, for as long as I can remember. The house my mother grew up in was built by an ancestor that fought for the Union and another relative fought for the South. I heard the family stories growing up and  I guess you can say it’s in my blood! I was that kid that made his parents drive him to Gettysburg in the 5th grade, who knew all the different types of artillery pieces, and dressed up as a Union officer the same year while trick or treating, just to rile the neighbors (I grew up in Georgia)!  They made Sherman references as they handed over their candy…it was great!

I grew up reading books like “The Army of the Potomac – Glory Road” by Bruce Catton, and the “American Heritage Golden Book of the Civil War”. One things about this later book was that it had excellent paintings that showed the battles being fought “in miniature”. If you have seen this book, and you play historical miniatures you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. To say that it left a permanent impression with me would be an understatement. I combined the illustrations in this book and my collection of 54mm Civil War Britain’s and plastic soldiers and fought out epic battles on the living room floor as a kid. Most of these battles involved me , my brother and friends setting up the figures behind Lincoln log forts and throwing quarters at them. It was our version of “Little Wars”. We were having fun, but we were not playing any formalized rules. One thing that I’ve always remembered is that I liked the way the battles “looked” (and still do).  The appreciation of the “visual appeal” of miniatures and the miniature landscape is the one things that sets miniatures gamers apart from other hobbyists like board gamers, computer gamers and RPG’ers. To us it’s all about the eye candy!

A 25 man unit of Rebs mounted for Johnny Reb.

Well, back in the 1980’s, as a middle school kid, I was exposed to the massively popular Dungeons & Dragons. I played it with my friends and we had a wonderful time. What it also did, was expose me to gaming companies and hobby shops that were selling historical rules and miniatures.  I remember walking into the “Sword of the Phoenix” in Atlanta looking for D&D stuff and seeing fantastic displays of ACW and Napoleonic battles in 15mm and 25mm. Wow, I was blown away! I was hooked. Another interesting side note  is that the creators of D&D were historical board and miniature gamers first. They had written rules like: Tractics (WW2), Chainmail (Medieval), Don’t give up the Ship! (Naval) and Dawn Patrol (WWI air). Just take a look through an old TSR catalog. Obviously D&D became the focus since it proved massively commercially successful. I can’t blame them!

The selection of miniatures wasn’t great back then, and I think I bought a few packs of  1/72 ACW figures, Napoleonic French, a few  25mm Vikings, etc. I just bought whatever looked cool to me. I painted up these figures, put them on display in my room,  and then packed them away during high-school, where most of my time was dedicated to music, and chasing girls. It wasn’t until my first year in college that it all changed. I attended FSU and I remember a friend telling me that some guys played miniatures every Saturday in one of the campus buildings.  So one Saturday morning I got up early and went down there to see what it was all about. Local gamer, Bob Freeman, had set up a great looking 15mm “Dawn at Chickamauga”  Johnny Reb game. Bob only played Johnny Reb 1, even though JR2 had already come out. He was “old school”,  and wasn’t about to change!  I think this was around 1988 or so. I remember meeting the guys, dividing into sides and planning our pre-game strategy. As I recall, all of our planning broke down at the end of the third turn! Well, I got to push around a small Yankee brigade, had a great time and I was hooked. I had smelled the powder and seen the 15mm white elephant!  I went back to my dorm room that night with images of 15mm figures burned into my head from looking at them all day.

Come and get some Johnny Reb!

I was determined to buy some of my own figures and to get started painting. There weren’t any hobby stores in town selling historical figures at that time so I went over to Bob’s house one night, he felt sorry for me, and he sold me some units that he wasn’t planning on painting. I think they were mostly old Heritage figures and a few Minifigs. I was blown away with Bob’s personal collection. He probably had a corps or more  per side, which is a lot of figures in JR1 1:20 scale! He had even painted up all the limbers, wagons, and camps. There was a great gaming group in Tallahassee back in the 80’s and early 90’s and we switched from gaming every Saturday morning to every Tuesday at my friend John Ohlin’s house. John was single and had essentially turned his house into the local gaming club. Some of the regulars included “Professor” , John H., Ken J., Patrick S., Mark S. and Pat T. The guys just knew to come over on Tuesday after work and we would game until 9pm or 10pm. Of course most of the big charges happened at 9:55pm!

The unit on the left was one of my first units I painted. The unit on the right is newer.

I can say that my favorite were when Bob ran Johnny Reb. We played all the classic scenarios included with the rules and then moved on to those in “To the Sound of the Guns” (a “must have” scenario book). Bob would always provide the troops and terrain. He was a tough referee and if he felt you moved your figures a 1/16 inch too far he would make you disorder them! Bob had a dynamic way of running the game and had us all whipped into a frenzy during the charge phases. He was superstitious and would make the rebs  roll only a certain color of dice and the Yanks another color, and only in the “random die roller”. . If you screwed up and rolled the wrong dice he would make you reroll. I saw many a grown man cry when they had to reroll their awesome charge impact roll! Bob later caught the sci-fi bug and sold off all his ACW troops to a local gamer, who then moved out-of-town with all the figures. It was a sad day in Tallahassee.

A picture of my 28mm Battle of Williamsburg game at Nashcon last year.

The early JR1 rules were fun and Bob ran them for the beginners in a way so that they weren’t intimidated by all the charts in JR1. Johnny Reb really played the way we felt that ACW battles played out in reality and in the books and first hand accounts that we had read. They had a nitty-gritty tactical feel to them that just felt right. If you are a JR fan and you are reading this then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The game is well researched and the weapons, tactics, ranges, morale, officer casualties, etc. all seemed to make sense. I think the core of the rules is the simultaneous movement and the  order chits and they way the interact with each other. It’s like a sophisticated form of rock, scissors, and paper. If you ordered a “first fire” you just knew that your opponent would charge! It is kind of like playing poker placing those order chits, hoping your opponent wouldn’t call your bluff.  My friend P.J. O’Neill summed it up best when he said, “Although the rules seem complicated, they are also intuitive, and therefore easy to understand and follow. These rules, more than any other, model the flow of battle that matches first hand accounts”.

Well, back to my story…. after painting about a brigade I decided that I wanted to start collecting my own figures so that I could run games and campaigns too. I made some road trips down to Tampa to visit Modeller’s Mart and also started buying a lot of mail order figures.  I was ordering Stone Mountain figures through the mail and buying Heritage, Donnignton, Minifigs, etc. at Modeller’s Mart. My painting was horrible at first but I eventually got the hang of it. The key for me was small daily doses of painting, which I still try to do to this day.  I studied on my bed at college and kept my painting stuff set up on my desk! I definitely had my priorities straight!

From left to right – Johnny Reb 1, GDW’s Johnny Reb 2 and Johnny Reb 3.

I eventually had enough figures to start running my own games. I subscribed to the excellent newsletter “The Zouave” and they printed a great “Shenandoah” campaign that I ran with my friends. We fought a lot of epic campaign battles and I learned that a campaign can be one the most fun and satisfying gaming experiences. It sure makes you think hard about charging an enemy when you know you’ll need those men a month or two down the road. I still think that specific campaign is one of the best campaign systems I’ve ever used. If you can find a copy of it, don’t hesitate to buy it. The original Adventure Games edition of Johnny Reb has some excellent campaign information tucked into the back of the rule book around pages 75-79. It’s well worth purchasing on eBay just for this information.

I switched over to JR2, because that’s all you could buy in the hobby shops at that time. I think Jr1 was a great game, but I really liked the streamlined artillery rules in JR2. JR2 is the set of rules that I always see on the book shelf when I go over to another gamer’s house. The usual response is, “yeah I bought them, but never played them, or maybe once or twice”, which is a shame because it’s such a great game. JR, like many games,  can be a difficult game to get into if you don’t have someone to learn from and play with, like my gaming mentor Bob.

A 28mm playtest of “Across A Deadly Field”

I picked up a playtest version of JR3 at a convention. I read over it, and it was good, but it went in a different direction than I was hoping. JR 3 went up in scale, to a more grand tactical game (1:30),  where I was hoping for something at the same scale (1:20) or even more tactical (1:10). I prefer divisional sized games and I think that is the “sweet spot” for JR1 and JR2. I still tend to run games in that sweet spot of about 3 brigades per side with officers and artillery. I find that it gives a great tactical game that you can finish in a reasonable amount of time. I really liked the unit size in JR1 and JR2 of five stands with 3-5 figures per stand. I think that’s just the perfect size and has a lot of eye appeal.

I am planning a mega-JR2 game in the future and will definitely be inviting over some of my old-school friends and newer friends. Wargaming groups are like fraternities, where you make friends for life over a common hobby. I have really enjoyed the great friendships I’ve made at the gaming table and online. One of my favorite things to do is to set up a wargaming weekend at my house and have a big game that plays from Friday afternoon, thru Sunday morning. The down time is also a lot of fun where we grill out, discuss the game, and trash talk strategy! We did have a few mega-JR games back in the good old days, and we would leave them set up on John’s table for a couple of weekly Tuesday night sessions.

A picture of a 1:10 Johnny Reb game I was experimenting with. Maybe when John is done with ADF I can talk him in to working on a 1:10 version of JR!

I have kept playing a variant that is called JR2.5. What that means is that it is basically JR2, but with some of the rules from JR3, and now “Across A Deadly Field”. My friend Dean West has his own version of JR2.5 that he calls appropriately “Billy Yank”. I’ve been twisting his arm to come to Nashcon sometime and run “Billy Yank” and I am hoping he will do so this year or next! I’m curious to see how his version compares to mine. He has set up a great scenario for “Brice’s Crossroads” in 15mm that just looks fantastic. Dean is a master of terrain and if you ever get him cornered over a beer at a convention, make sure to ask him his terrain secrets!

Dean West’s 15mm “Brice’s Crossroad’s” scenario for Billy Yank.

So what is “Across A Dealy Field”? Well, it’s the latest project of John Hill in conjunction with Osprey Publishing. I really love this game, and it’s definitely the way to go for fighting big battles (1:60 figure ratio). It should be out this summer and so far from what I’ve seen it looks fantastic! John Hill keeps innovating the game and pushing it in new and exciting directions. If you are a JR fan you will want to pick up a copy of this game…if you ever wanted to get into the JR family of games but never have…now is the time with this well written new set of rules, and if you just like ACW rules and sexy color pictures of miniatures and terrain….pick up a copy for your collection! I’ve seen bits and pieces of the rules as a playtester and they are gorgeous! John and Osprey have done a tremendous job with these rules.  My plan is to paint lots of 10mm units for ADF so I can fight the BIG battles of the war, and use my 28mm figures for smaller, tactical JR actions. I have written a lot on ADF and here is a link to one those articles: *  – http://www.cigarboxbattle.com/across-a-deadly-field-acw-rules/

I asked Dean West for a few comments on “Across A Deadly Field” and here is what he had to say, “ADF is an elegant game system with simplified game mechanics that still captures the tactical nuances, often seamlessly and without specific rules – it just happens naturally. I have always been an advocate of the JR system of simultaneous movement and order marking, however in this new game the decision-making of the previous system remains, but the movement is phased, and order markers are no longer used. The primary advantage of the change is that the rules are easier to learn and to comprehend. I also like the idea that due to the ground scale, medium and larger battles are possible on a much smaller game surface and the visual effect is quite pleasant”.

A picture of P.J. O’Neill’s “Across A Deadly Field” terrain and 15mm figures.

Well, I know I’ve rambled for a while, but it is easy to write about something that you enjoy. The Johnny Reb / ADF  guys are a great group of friendly gamers. They are the kind of guys that would love to show you how to play in a pick-up game on a small table in the back of a convention hall…. just walk up and say “hi”. If there is a command available you be leading some troops to the sound of the guns in no time!  I know there will be an ADF game or two at Nashcon this year.  Patrick Lebeau will be running John Hill’s “Gettysburg the first day” scenario. I’m really looking forward to it!

For more info on the JR community there  is a lively yahoo groups for Johnny Reb, a Wiki-page, JohnyCon and this blog! Take care and good gaming – Cory R.