There is the Enemy!

No, the Plan did not survive contact with the enemy.

Luckily I had another plan in reserve!

Red's advance guard catches up with Blue's rear guard. 

I did manage to get a base coat of green on the bases but duty called and I did not have time to build the new table. By the time I finished  and got back at it, my energy meter was on low. I decided to just strip off the cloth and the expansion board balanced on top of the temporary table and set up a scenario on the painted top. Then I plopped 2 stands of redcoats on the table and some of the new gift boxes houses in the making and looked at the grid and remembered how a single big house twice as wide as a battalion does not look like a village.  Looking at the 2 stand battalion pretending to be 2 units got me thinking about scenarios and my attraction to identifiable, named units with histories and...and... well ok then, back to where I was on Friday. Looks like it is time to build some new terrain after all, might even be able to splice two of those gift boxes to make a 1 square rectangular row house able to hold 2 stands.

So, one 2 stand battalion per scenario unit instead of 2 or 3 single stand ones and one unit per square.  Rules adjusted to the grid but basically  the same. The variable length moves will have to return to the shadows. I had started playing with using a  card deck to track the number of moves played with face cards as chance cards and have pondered using the numbered cards as unit activations. I'll try that before going back to orders dice. Given that most "armies" will only be 6 to 12 units, 18 tops, I'll follow Lawford, Young and Grant, reduce game brigades to 2 or 3 battalions and not worry so much over scale or matching wargame armies to historical ones for these games. Games being the operative word.

As long as I'm shrinking stuff, I decided to pull a scenario from Thomas' One Hour Wargames to see if I can make a 2 hour wargame out of it. (picture above) Tomorrow hopefully.