Tuesday, December 21, 2004
The Battle of Gettysburg and Origami Miniatures
ACW, Figures, Paper Figs Terrain
About 15 years ago, I participated in a battle of Gettysburg game that was unique in a couple of ways.
First, the game was huge—the table was 30 or so feet long.
Second, it was designed to show the problems of command, control and communication: the Union and Confederate army commanders were sequestered in nearby rooms with maps and could only get their information about what was going on through written communications. The corps commanders sat on a balcony, where they could see the battlefield, but still had to communicate via written messages with the army commanders and the division and brigade commanders, who were on the floor. The brigade commanders moved the pieces, then discussed their movements with their division commanders. The division commanders sent the messages on to the corps commanders, who sent runners to the army commanders in their rooms. I was a referee, so I had the chance to see the terrible confusion at all levels. The army commanders had maps that, at the end, bore little resemblance to the actual positions of the troops on the field. At the same time, the division and brigade commanders found themselves being ordered to conduct movements that didn’t make a lot of sense ... often because they had acted on their own initiative, which left the army commanders thinking that they were somewhere they were not.
The other unique thing abot the game was that all of the figure were done in origami: blue for the union and grey for the confederates, of course. Groups of students apparently had spent months folding the things. It was absolutely beautiful. If this interests you, you could check out the instructions for 15mm folded paper figures here.
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I know this entry was posted years ago, but I wonder if anyone has printouts of the origami diagrams linked to. The link no longer works.
Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 07/07 at 09:59 AM | #
Sounds like a great war game. I play a lot of Risk and Civilazation on the computer. I like the idea of playing a game on a hugh board. Really getting to see all that is going on at once.
Posted by Gettysburg on 09/11 at 08:10 AM | #
I really am not very good at paper crafts, but this is really cool. It’d be awsome to use these in the 3.5ed campaign I’m running. (Right now I’m just using lego(tm) minifigs.
Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/15 at 06:40 AM | #