There is a standard theory of how wars are supposed to work. Two nations, two armies, two sets of interests. One side trains a certain way, deploys a certain kind of soldier, adopts a tactical doctrine shaped by geography and tradition. The other side does the same, differently. The difference is what creates opportunity. A general who understands his opponent's method can exploit its weaknesses, and the gap between the two systems is where battles are won. The theory is neat, and for most of recorded military history, it has held well enough.
Civil wars destroy the theory entirely. When a society turns on itself, the two armies that form are not shaped by different traditions. They are shaped by the same one. They speak the same language, read the same drill manuals, worship at the same regimental shrines, and have often served together. Their officers were trained in the same academies. Their infantry use the same weapons at the same ranges with the same fire discipline. What looks like a war between enemies is, in practice, a war between people who are frighteningly alike.
This creates a problem that no army, in any period, has found a clean solution to. Doctrine cannot do what doctrine is supposed to do. When your opponent knows your methods as well as you do, surprise is harder to generate, tactical asymmetry is harder to sustain, and the standard tools of operational planning - mass here, feint there, exploit the gap you have opened - work less reliably than they do against a foreign enemy. What fills the void is ideology. And ideology, on a battlefield where men are shooting at their former comrades, produces a particular kind of savagery.
Three conflicts sit at the heart of WoFun's civil war collections, separated by two centuries and three continents but connected by the same underlying logic. England's civil wars of 1642 to 1651, America's from 1861 to 1865, and Portugal's Liberal Wars of 1828 to 1834 are each, in their own way, case studies in what happens when a military system is turned against itself: the tactical doctrine degrades, the ideology intensifies, the violence deepens, and the war becomes harder to end. Understanding each as a distinct specimen of the same kind of conflict - rather than as three separate historical episodes - reveals something that reading any one of them in isolation cannot.
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The Mirror-Image Problem
When the English Civil Wars broke out in the summer of 1642, both King Charles and Parliament faced the same immediate challenge: building armies from scratch, using the same pool of available men, trained to the same standard. The wars that followed were, for the most part, conducted by forces of near-identical composition. Both sides fielded regiments of pike-and-shot infantry, wings of cavalry, and light artillery positioned to support the foot. The drill was drawn from the same Continental European manuals that had filtered into English military thinking through veterans of the Thirty Years War, and senior officers on both sides had sometimes served together in the same campaigns.
The practical consequence was what the rules written by Andy Callan for the English Civil War collection describe directly: the opposing armies looked very similar to each other and generally employed the same battlefield tactics, leading to a slow, formalised style of fighting that left little room for brilliant manoeuvre. When armies share a doctrine, the opportunities for tactical surprise narrow. What often happened was that the cavalry on each wing fought its own separate battle, and the winner of that cavalry contest then decided the fate of the infantry in the centre. The battle became a question of endurance and moral cohesion rather than operational cleverness.
The English Civil War Starter Pack 28mm gives both sides exactly this parity. Each player starts with two balanced armies across 48 bases, representing the infantry-heavy, cavalry-supported structure of the 1640s battlefield. The visual uniformity is part of the historical point: Royalist and Parliamentarian regiments are recognisably the same kind of force, distinguished by their regimental colours and coats rather than by any fundamental difference in how they fight. That distinction, between identification and doctrine, is civil war in miniature.
When Ideology Fills the Tactical Void
Shared doctrine creates a tactical stalemate that has to be broken somehow. In civil wars, the answer is almost always ideological intensity, and all three conflicts in WoFun's collections encode this asymmetry directly into their game mechanics.
In the English Civil War, Royalist cavalry were marked by aggression bordering on recklessness. They charged, and if they won, they often pursued too far, leaving the infantry unsupported. The pursuit mechanic in the ECW rules models this precisely: all Horse might be tempted to pursue a beaten enemy, with Royalist cavalry at particular risk of losing control of the charge. Parliamentarian Horse, especially the disciplined regiments of the New Model Army, were less prone to this - the rules give them the option to roll two or three dice and choose, representing the trained restraint that Oliver Cromwell had drilled into his cavalry through repeated action.
In the American Civil War, the Confederate infantry's reliance on aggression, most recognisable through the rebel yell and the frontal assault, is captured in the advanced rules. When Confederate infantry attack in the open, Union troops must pass a special Panic Test before the fight takes place. The assault is not guaranteed to succeed, but it places a psychological burden on the defender that reflects something real about the early years of the war, when Confederate audacity repeatedly unsettled a Union army that was numerically and materially stronger.
The Portuguese Liberal Wars took the same pattern in a different direction. The Liberals, fighting for constitutional government and the rights of a queen, built their cavalry around an innovative new arm - the Lancers, raised by a British colonel named Bacon and used for the first time in Portuguese military history. The rules for the War of Two Brothers give Bacon's Lancers a special re-roll on any miss in their first charge, reflecting the shock effect of a weapon that Miguelite cavalry simply were not prepared for. The Absolutists had tradition, numbers, and the old royal army behind them. The Liberals had novelty, conviction, and a constitutional argument that they believed in absolutely.
In each case, the game system captures the same civil war truth: when doctrine cannot produce a decisive advantage, the side that believes most fervently in its cause finds a way to manufacture one.
The English Civil War: When the Same Army Fights Itself
The English Civil Wars were, more than almost any other conflict of the seventeenth century, a war of ideas about the nature of sovereignty and the rights of Parliament. They were also a war in which the two sides' military forces converged over time, rather than diverging. Early Royalist cavalry had the edge in élan; Parliament countered by building the New Model Army on a foundation of professional discipline and religious conviction. By 1645, the two armies had become more alike, not less, and Parliament's greater industrial base and ability to maintain unit strength had begun to tell.
The ECW rules track this attrition honestly. As the First Civil War progressed, it became increasingly difficult, especially for the Royalists, to keep units at full strength. The advanced rules allow for weak regiments of Horse with as few as two or three bases rather than four, and for Foot regiments reduced to four bases instead of six. The game forces players to calculate what happens when ideology can no longer compensate for dwindling numbers.
The English Civil War Full Pack 28mm places 764 figurines across 20 Plexiglass sprues on 146 bases measuring 40 by 30mm, with regiments spanning the full range of the period: the Royalist Dragoons, the Purplecoat Regiment, the Redcoat and New Model Army infantry, the Yellowcoat Regiment, Covenanter foot from Scotland, Artillery crews, Commanders, and Casualties. The variety matters historically. By the later stages of the war, an English Civil War army was not a coherent ideological bloc but a patchwork of regional loyalties, mercenary contingents, and religious factions with different ideas about what victory should look like. The New Model Army's eventual emergence as the dominant military force was not purely a military achievement. It was an organizational and ideological one: the first army in English history built around a single, unified political and religious programme.
For those wanting the broadest canvas for refighting the period, the 10mm English Civil War Full Pack extends the collection to 4,506 figurines across 23 sprues, suited to the larger engagements of Marston Moor and Naseby where cavalry wings of real consequence determined the day.
Industrial Civil War: The American Case
The American Civil War began as a conflict in which both sides expected it to be short. The military culture of 1861 was shaped by the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 and by an officer class trained at West Point in the tradition of Jominian strategy, heavy on the coordinated offensive and the decisive engagement. Both Union and Confederate armies drilled from the same manuals, organized along the same brigade and division structure, and were initially led by officers who had trained together and in some cases commanded each other in Mexico.
What neither side anticipated was the effect of the rifled musket at scale. Napoleonic tactics depended on the smooth-bore musket's limited range and accuracy to allow infantry to close to decisive fighting distance before suffering prohibitive casualties. The rifle changed that calculation entirely. Effective fire at two hundred yards or more made the frontal assault far more costly than any European campaign had demonstrated. Neither side adapted quickly. The result was four years of battles in which brave men walked into fire that their own tactical doctrine had not accounted for, and in which fieldworks, trenches, and covered positions gradually supplanted the open-order linear battle as the dominant form of combat.
The ACW rules capture this through the premium placed on terrain, cover, and the management of infantry in the open. Fieldworks, walls, and fence-lines all provide meaningful defensive bonuses, with troops behind earthworks rolling their firing dice against defenders with re-rolls on ones in the first round of a fight. The ACW Starter Pack 28mm includes the Union and Confederate armies with 54 bases per side, plus a bonus skirmisher sprue for each faction, representing the flexible, open-order screen of light infantry that became indispensable once the rifled musket had made the old close-order advance so costly. The ACW Full Pack 28mm extends the collection to 1,068 figurines across 27 sprues, providing the cavalry, dismounted cavalry, and specialist troops needed for the larger engagements of the war's later years.
The ACW WoF collection takes a different visual approach to the same conflict. The American Civil War WoF range features figurines designed in-house with characteristically larger heads and distinct facial expressions, suited to closer-range engagement and a more personal scale of storytelling. On a tabletop, the choice between scales and editions reflects the same choice historians have been making for over a century: do you refight the war as a campaign of corps and armies, or as a story of individual men and companies?
Legitimacy Under Arms: The Portuguese Liberal Wars
The War of Two Brothers is the least familiar of the three conflicts in this article, and in some respects the most politically sophisticated. Its origins lie in a dynastic dispute about the Portuguese throne, but beneath the question of which of Dom Pedro's two sons had the right to rule lay a deeper conflict about whether Portugal would modernize - constitutionally, politically, economically - or remain an Absolutist state on the old Ancien Regime model. The Liberals, fighting for Queen Dona Maria II and a constitutional charter, drew on the experience of men who had served in the Peninsular War and absorbed Napoleonic methods of organization and command. The Miguelites commanded the larger force but a less coherent one, an army of the old order that had not fully absorbed the lessons of the previous generation's fighting.
What made the war tactically distinctive was its scale and character. The central campaign pivoted on the Siege of Porto, which lasted from July 1832 to August 1833, with a Liberal garrison of around 8,000 men holding the city against a Miguelite force that at its peak numbered some 80,000. The siege demanded not the open-field engagements of standard Napoleonic doctrine but the messier, more attritional work of urban defence, battery emplacement, sortie and counter-sortie, and the management of guerrilla bands that operated throughout the countryside on both sides. The Sérgio Veludo Coelho adaptation of Andy Callan's rules, written specifically for this collection, treats the siege's demands explicitly: more artillery, less cavalry, walls and barricades as the dominant terrain feature, and the advanced rules' orders mechanics serving as a model for the kind of improvised, conditional obedience that characterised command in a garrison under pressure.
The War of Two Brothers Full Pack 18mm puts 1,656 figurines across 21 Plexiglass sprues on 20 by 30mm bases, covering the full breadth of the Liberal and Miguelite orders of battle. The regiments range from the National Artillery Battalion and the 11th Cavalry Regiment to the 2nd Caçadores light infantry, the Queen's Own Battalion, the Gentlemen Rifle Cadets, and the Academics - the last a unit that speaks to the civil war's ideological dimension as clearly as any piece of military equipment, young men from Portugal's universities taking up arms for a constitutional future that their country did not yet have.
What the Wargame Reveals
The thing that unites all three of these conflicts on the tabletop is a mechanical honesty about the nature of civil war command. In each ruleset, the orders system requires a player to say the order out loud, point to where the unit should go, and then roll a die to discover whether the troops comply. A score of one means they do not move. Orders can be misheard amidst the noise of battle, as the rules put it, in language that recurs identically across all three periods.
The phrase is accurate. But it is also, in the civil war context, something more than a nod to battlefield confusion. In a war where the man giving the order and the man receiving it have spent years fighting for the same flag, and are now uncertain whether the army they serve is really the legitimate one, the failure to move is not always an accident of noise. It is sometimes a failure of conviction. The tactical mechanics of civil war, in these three collections and in the history they represent, are inseparable from the ideological ones. That is what makes civil wars the bitterest kind of fighting, and the most instructive.