By Ted Kleine
Every Saturday afternoon the tabletop generals who buy little lead armies here gather in the store’s back room, like poker players drawn to a secret game, to replay the Napoleonic wars, Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, or any other conflict where men with weapons got together to kill one another. While I’m failing to reverse the course of the Civil War, a group at the table across the room is fighting a battle in an imaginary medieval world called Arden. It’s part of a months-long campaign in which several factions of noblemen, each represented by a different gamer, get together once a week to fight over the crown. In this particular engagement, the Earl of Falmouth (Larry Wells of Park Ridge) is commanding a group of pikemen and archers, each representing around 25 men who are about to besiege a fortified city held by King Richard III (John Read, also of Park Ridge). “It’s almost like the War of the Roses,” explains Read. The map of Arden is fictional, but all the noblemen are based on real figures in English history.
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Wells’s rules for drawing-room combat were written for armies of tall nursery-type tin soldiers. He even recommended using spring-loaded toy cannons to fire matchsticks at enemy lines. Today’s miniature armies are much smaller–the average soldier is five-eighths of an inch tall–and the rules are much more detailed, covering such esoterica as the effectiveness of different battlefield formations, the accuracy of guns at long distances, the tendency of troops to panic and run under heavy fire, and the defensive advantages of hiding behind a tree. Modern scholars have written military history books that players can use to build battlefields and line up forces exactly as they were at Gettysburg or Waterloo.
There’s an aesthetic, as well as a historical side, to war gaming. All the soldiers must be painted and mounted on stands before they can go into battle, a task that requires a fine eye for detail and color. It’s like building a ship in a bottle, or constructing a scene inside a hollow egg.
Back in the Shenandoah Valley I’ve got one last chance to save Dixie. A real general, with the welfare of flesh-and-blood men on his mind, would have raised a white flag by now. But I’m playing with little lead men. I can either fire on the charging Union cavalry or run for it. I decide to fire.
But the king will return next week. And later that night the Union and Confederate armies will be resurrected for another battle over the same field of honor. It will involve four players–two commanders on each side, including a Lincoln Park paralegal who gets so into his role that he calls his opponents “damn Yankees” and crows “All right! Johnny Rebs!” every time his troops win an engagement.
