First off, my experience with V&B is much less than Command Decision: Test of Battle (another fabulous Frank Chadwick ruleset). I have mainly played Napoleonics with Steve Alvin and others of the Springfield IL bunch and Civil War has been what I have a collection for. But I have a penchant for making up professional accessories with Adobe Illustrator etc. These tools greatly improve on what Bob Bledsaw and I had back in 1976 when we started Judges Guild (Bob Jr. & I still have a JG store online). My hope is to help gamers considering V&B and perhaps pass on an occasional helpful idea to the Grognard V&B'ers. My aids have been influenced by the ruleset I had favored; probably because I designed it! It was based on Len Lakofka's rules from the early '70's.

My Ruleset My ruleset, which has had 2 names, Battling Brigades of the Civil War (until V&B came along), then Great Battles of the Civil War, was greatly upscaled from the games common at the time of my teenage years (20 soldiers per figure), with an unheard of each stand equaling a regiment. This was a radical idea back then. We had a lot of fun with it and played out Gettysburg (unimaginable until Volley & Bayonet) in an afternoon. My basic stand was (5) 25mm Der Kriegspielers infantry figures on .75x2.75" brass stand. We were fans of 3" hexgrid stenciled on felt. It probably saved time in movement for new players (although I'm not crazy about it now).

So when V&B came out, I had to admit that it leapfrogged over my set to a truly grand scale. The other huge appeal of V&B was the idea that you could learn a core ruleset that could be tweaked to produce games of numerous other periods. Finally, Frank was great at producing campaign level rules and utilized his great Civil War game, A House Divided.

To facilitate games with V&B but be "backwards compatible" to my own ruleset, I glued each regiment on a 1.5x3" stand, stuck a 3x3" magnet sheet to 3x3" steel stands... then plopped (2) 5-figure stands on the now-brigade stand of V&B. You can see how easy it would be to quickly set up for either ruleset.

Marking Hits Over the years, we've used a variety of hit marking systems:

1. Paper reinforcers. These were dry-gummed when I was a kid (rather than current self-adhesive), cheap & easy to color with magic markers for morale states.
2. O Rings of some sort from the hardware store. These cost more but worked the same way: hang them over the heads, rifles, whatever.
3. Beads on wire nails (stuck point up) on the back of the stand.
4. Labels with sliding ID magnets... and this is my favorite. A lot less garish than the first 3. See picture lower left and pdf below.

First I should give you my prejudices: I like smaller discreet ID labels rather than big and colorful, thin not thick stands, and, avoiding rosters and big fuzzy pipe cleaners etc. where possible. Steel stands are thin but strong; doubly important in that magnets adhere to them!

The ID labels for a given battle can be made up relatively easily, printed on magnetic stock (you'll see a sample below). This presumes you have steel stands (or at least a flexsteel spot) with the hit box label or dabs of paint. The hit boxes are "generic" and will work for any V&B battle or other rule systems.

The procedure with V&B is to place the ID label over the unneeded hit boxes (if the stand is smaller than 6 hits) and slide the magnetic ID label to the left for each hit received. When playing my game, I can cover over all the hit boxes and move the ID label to the right exposing the number of hits received.