Perhaps everyone should stand back

Long ago before there were computers I used to play board games. An at the time popular subset of the genre was war gaming and a subset of the subset was re-enacting historical events.

The publisher of the games we played most often was Avalon Hill. One of the company's first successful games was Gettysburg. I am not sure exactly which version of the game we played but I do know that it got played a lot.

One of the principles of games of this sort was the concept of victory conditions. The games could already be long and if you had no way of determining when and how you had won the possibility existed of the game lasting forever. One of the victory conditions of Gettysburg was that the Confederate side could win by killing General Meade, the Union commander. To do so required the Confederate side to overwhelm the Union army. Killing General Meade meant you had won the battle.

Another of the principles of re-enactment is that you do not necessarily begin the game with all of your pieces. For example, in Gettysburg, the Union would begin the game in the town with enough troops to probably be successful in getting themselves organized into a defensive position. The Confederates begin on the north side of the board with enough troops to probably drive the Union out of town to Cemetery Ridge and the hills just to the south. Reinforcements arrive throughout the game and are entered onto the board according to a reinforcement schedule spelled out in the game rules.

I don't remember which of the three originally dreamed up the idea, whether it was Nagel or Mr. Wold or Doctor John, but one of the the three, in the umpteenth playing of the game, noticed the fact that General Meade, not present on the board at the beginning of the game, arrived early in the morning of day 2, entering the game along Taneytown Road. Furthermore, at the point of his entrance into the game, Meade had virtually no troops actually supporting him. Instead he moves, usually without difficulty, to the Cemetery Ridge location which his army actually occupied in July 1863, and which by this point in the game is crawling with Union army units.

The next time the game was played the Confederate army made no attempt during the first day to engage the Union force, instead doing an end run around the town. This seemed a catastrophic misplay as it seemed likely that allowing the Union to occupy the town AND the hills would result in a defensive position which would be even stronger and more successful than the historical position. The Confederate side seemed doomed. Doomed that is until, too late, the Union side noticed that the Confederate army had deviated from historical re-enactment and had instead massed itself in an offensively and defensively inferior position along Taneytown Road. The underprotected General Meade arrived as scheduled during the night and was more or less immediately slain. Victory for the Confederates.Stay with me here, I promise to tie this all together.