This year, at Unioncon, there was again only one civil war battle represented (General Sherman would be wiping away a tear- Portly Bloke) – and it was once more the Battle of Monocacy (UnionCon 2025: Monocacy 1864 After Action Report).
So while you may have seen, and I’ve reported on, this one before, It thought I would give a brief recap of the game from Unioncon 2026, which went a little differently than previous iterations!
We were joined in the fun by Scoregoblin, Jeff, Loneauto, Jartren, Cren, and Cosmic Kraken, making is first appearance ever in a historical game! It was great to have a full house of generals.
The Board
Here you can see here how I go about building this board- first I lay down the foam in place, using 2 by 4 sections. I then overlay the mat and overlaid the river and roads. This is one of my ‘build in place boards’, trying to leverage tricks from the historical game community to create contours and add loose scatter and roads. I’d say this one is partially successful, but is nice as it largely uses mats and roads we already had.
Then I added down some loose scatter and terrain. Then I deployed the Armies! The confederates were locked in position to represent their limited deployment moving down the road towards DC.
Our Union generals, Loneauto and Jeff, were then allowed to redeploy their forces. They played aggressively, deploying all their forces across the river and all their guns deployed on the hills. Only one cavalry regiment was held in reserved for the southern flank.
The Rebels launched into action on Turn 1, pushing forward and flanking around the side with a Cavalry brigade to the south. They came under fire from the Union guns, who scored the first casualties! Since the confederate guns were not deployed, they had no counter-battery fire yet!
Over the next two turns, the confederates deployed and pushed forward, mostly in supported lines due to their packed formations. The confederate guns began to silence and damage the exposed Union guns on the hill. A huge scrum erupted at the two bridges as the confederates poured in multiple brigades. The aggressive defense continued as the Union in the north even pushed further west to protect the bridge and buy time!
The Union brigades did eventually get pushed back under the assaults, outnumbered as they were on turn three. Two of the brigades were forced to retire, in good order, across the river.
In the south, the flanking force of cavalry ran into the Union reserve cavalry brigade with their repeater rifles. A second cavalry brigade under General Cren got so close to an objective in the rear … but rolled a tardy order! As the confederate cavalry fell short of their objective, turn three hit and the confederates had not taken a single VP!
We played one more turn, and while the confederates would have eventually ground through, we had to stop for time! This far behind, and despite losing ground, we had a solid Union victory! The Confederates had taken considerably more casualties, and had not yet secured objectives by Turn 4. Early was delayed long enough for reinforcements to make it back and save Washington!
Thanks to all the players, it was a total blast – I will probably run this one last time at Fall-In 2026! After that I’m planning to sunset the Battle of Monocacy and post my rules here. But the nice thing about 10mm ACW gaming is that I’ll jump right into planning the next battle- I’ve got all the armies ready to go! I’m considering doing the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg….
-BS