Recently I had the all-too-rare opportunity to synchronize my mil- hist reading and wargaming with the battle of Cedar Mountain (August 1862) -- while reading R. K. Krick's "Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain" I played (solo) the two games in my collection portraying the battle, _Cedar_Mountain_ (S&T #86) and _Stonewall_at_Cedar_Mountain_ (Ivy Street Games). The following remarks concern _Cedar_Mountain_. I played _CM_ twice during the reading plus once previously (namely 16 years earlier!). The outcomes were: 1) Union decisive victory 2) Confederate decisive victory 3) Union decisive victory I'm sure that in 40+ years of wargaming I've never seen such a dramatic variation in outcomes. A word about the situation. The inferior Union force (two divisions) deploys near one side of the map while the superior Confederate force (three divisions) enters the opposite side over some ten turns. Points are accumulated through attrition and occupation of four objective hexes (on a per-turn basis) about midway between the opposing sides. In the first game the initial Confederate forces rushed ahead to capture some objective hexes and were clobbered by the concentrated Union forces, which led to Blue troops outflanking Gray artillery and capturing a bunch o' guns. USA decisive victory. In the second game the Confederates advanced more conservatively. After some redeployment of troops the more remote objectives on their right were seized but no fighting occurred for the ones on the left until enough reinforcements had arrived to assure success. CSA decisive victory. In the third game the Union advanced beyond the objectives to attack the enemy before they could coordinate their own attacks. One division was severely damaged and another hurt sufficiently that most of the objectives didn't change hands until late in the game. USA decisive victory. (BTW I don't recall another instance in my experience in which a spoiling attack was so successful.) I should mention that the minimum difference between one side's decisive victory and the other's was 38 points, so it was not a case of unstable victory conditions -- one side really was outscoring the other by a heap of points. -------------------------------------------- | Dave Bieksza | bieksza@erols.com | -------------------------------------------- "The Net is vast and limitless." - Motoko Kusanagi, _Ghost in the Shell_