Rifle-Musket

In the early part of the 19th century, smooth-bore muskets, highly inaccurate beyond 50 yards (46 m), were used by the majority of armies in Europe and North America. In the 1840s–50s, the development of muskets with rifled barrels using ammunition such as Minié balls gave the average soldier much greater accuracy over longer distances. This changed the nature of tactics on the battlefield, where significant damage to the enemy could now be done from much further away, possibly causing the enemy to flee before they could approach close enough to initiate hand-to-hand combat.^[1]

Rifle-Musket — the title refers to the relatively new rifled musket that was used by both sides during the American Civil War — is a two-player wargame in which one player takes the role of Union forces, and the other controls Confederate forces. The units are brigade-sized, and there are a very limited number of counters on the map at any time. In one of the scenarios, there are 21 Confederate counters and 17 Union counters;^[2] another has even fewer — only 18 Confederate counters opposed by 13 Union counters.^[1]

The original game published in Conflict comes with three scenarios:^[2]

1. Battle for Little Round Top, during the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863;
2. Battle for New Berne, North Carolina, 1862
3. Battle of Monocacy, Maryland, 1864

When the game was published as a ziplock bag game, a fourth scenario was added, the Battle of New Market (Virginia, May 1864).^[1]

The game comes with a two-piece isomorphic map — the two 35 cm x 25 cm (14" x 10") pieces can be placed together in three different ways for the three scenarios. Unusually for the time, the map uses a staggered square grid rather than a hex grid.

The game uses a standard "I Go, You Go" system, where one player moves and attacks, followed by the other player. The victory conditions vary by scenario, but usually involve eliminating a certain number of enemy units (or preventing the enemy from reaching their elimination goal).^[1]

Ed McDonald wanted to show how the rifled musket and its longer range changed battle strategies that had been used over the past two centuries. McDonald's goal in creating the game was to keep it simple: "Rather than overburden the wargamer with a massive set of rules studded with exceptions, complicated tables and vague language, [I] instead decided to design a playable game that merely sought to emphasize what [I] believed to be the major factors of Civil War Grand Tactics." Since the game was to be published as a pull-out game in a special Civil War edition of SDC's wargaming magazine Conflict, McDonald designed a small game of tactical skirmishes using a minimum of counters. However, after Rifle-Musket was published in Issue 7 of Conflict (June 1974), and also sold as a ziplock bag game, McDonald disagreed with changes made to his original rules by SDC, claiming the revisions "tended to produce neither simple nor accurate rules."^[1]