When Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, most people on both sides expected a short war. Volunteer regiments were raised with the understanding that the whole business would be settled before harvest. Politicians promised their men would be home by Christmas. Four years later, after more than 600,000 dead, the United States emerged from the bloodiest conflict in its history having fought a war that nobody who entered it had been prepared for, and that nobody who survived it could ever quite explain to those who had not been there.
The American Civil War was not the first war to use rifles, railroads, or the telegraph. But it was the first war to use all of them together, at scale, across a continent, with mass armies that dwarfed anything the Western world had seen since Napoleon. The result was a conflict that sat precisely at the hinge between two ages: men who had studied Jomini and drilled on Napoleonic manuals marching into the killing range of rifled muskets, paying in blood for the gap between the doctrine they had learned and the battlefield they had inherited. The armies that laid down their arms at Appomattox in April 1865 were barely recognisable from those that had stumbled into the first battle of Bull Run four summers earlier. In the intervening years, they had invented the future of war.
Few periods in military history reward tabletop wargaming quite like the Civil War, and few scales suit it as well as 10mm. The great battles of the ACW - Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, the Wilderness - were fought by armies numbering in the tens of thousands, across terrain that was itself part of the tactical equation: ridges held and lost, woodlines that swallowed whole brigades, road junctions that determined whether an army could concentrate or be destroyed in detail. At 10mm, all of that becomes visible. A 90cm x 120cm table can hold an entire corps engagement. Regiment upon regiment can take the field. The sweep and scale of the thing can finally be seen.
That is the ambition behind WoFun's 10mm American Civil War collection - illustrated by Peter Dennis, whose eye for the colour, texture, and human detail of historical warfare has defined the WoFun tactical range. This article traces the military story that the collection tells: from the infantry crisis at the war's opening to the transformed armies that closed it.
The Infantry Problem: When Drill Met the Rifle
The tactical orthodoxy of 1861 had been shaped by the Napoleonic Wars. Infantry advanced in dense formations - lines two or three ranks deep, companies packed shoulder-to-shoulder - because the smoothbore muskets they carried were effective only at very short range, perhaps 80 yards under ideal conditions. Closing the distance fast, in formation, with enough mass to deliver a volley and follow it with a bayonet, was how battles were won. The mathematics were brutal but comprehensible.
The Springfield Model 1861 and the British Enfield rifled musket changed that mathematics entirely. A well-trained infantryman with a rifled musket could hit a man at 300 yards. At 500 yards, aimed fire against a formation was still murderous. The dense columns and shoulder-to-shoulder lines that Napoleonic doctrine prescribed now had to cross a killing corridor that was three to five times deeper than any commander's training had prepared them for. In the first two years of the war, those commanders learned this lesson at enormous cost. At Antietam in September 1862, 23,000 men fell in a single day. At Fredericksburg in December, Union troops charged uphill against Confederate infantry sheltered behind a stone wall and were shredded at ranges their smoothbore-era tactics had never needed to account for.
The standard Union infantry regiment of the war - frock-coated, kepi-wearing, armed with the Springfield - is the regiment that fought at all of these engagements and a hundred others. It is represented in Peter Dennis's collection by the Union Infantry sprue, which carries 306 figurines: enough to field multiple regiments across a tabletop battleline, advancing in the two-rank formation that was standard Federal practice throughout the war.
The Confederate infantry is spread across three sprues, each carrying 306 figurines, reflecting the diversity of dress and equipment that characterised Southern forces throughout the conflict. Unlike the Union Army, which moved steadily toward standardised blue uniform and equipment, Confederate infantry in the field wore what they had: grey where it was issued, butternut brown where it was not, civilian coats and hats in the early campaigns, and by the war's end a patchwork that said as much about the Confederacy's industrial limits as it did about the men wearing it. Three Confederate infantry sprues alongside one standard Union infantry sprue captures something historically honest about the two armies.
The Colour of War: Zouaves, the Iron Brigade, and Colored Troops
Not every regiment marched in standard blue or grey. The Civil War is also a story of vivid exceptions - units whose appearance marked them out, and whose battlefield records justified the attention.
The Zouave regiments, on both sides, dressed in uniforms borrowed from the French colonial infantry of North Africa: baggy red or blue trousers, short open jackets, sashes, fezzes or turbans. They were theatrical by design, and many of them were effective by performance. In Peter Dennis's collection, the Red Zouaves and Blue Zouaves each carry 306 figurines, and the visual contrast between them - and between either and the standard infantry formations alongside them - is exactly what the ACW battlefield looked like. At Gettysburg, at Second Bull Run, at the Wilderness, Zouave regiments operated alongside standard line infantry, their distinctive dress marking them immediately on any table as they had been marked immediately on any field.
The Iron Brigade occupies a different kind of distinction. The only all-western brigade in the Army of the Potomac, they were identifiable at a distance by their black hats - the regulation dress hat that most Union infantry had discarded in favour of the kepi, but which the Iron Brigade wore throughout the war. On 1 July 1863, the first day at Gettysburg, they were sent to hold McPherson's Ridge against A.P. Hill's advancing Confederate corps while the rest of the Union army was still arriving on the roads behind them. They held. They lost nearly 65% of their men doing it. The Union Iron Brigade sprue carries 306 figurines - more than enough to place them where their reputation demands, anchoring a ridge line while the battle forms around them.
The Union Colored Infantry sprue, also 306 figurines, represents the 180,000 Black soldiers who served in the United States Colored Troops from 1863 onwards. Their path into the Union Army had been contested - the Emancipation Proclamation authorised their enlistment, but prejudice within the army limited their equipment, pay, and command opportunities for most of the war. What they did with those limited opportunities was decisive. At Battery Wagner in July 1863, the 54th Massachusetts led an assault on a Confederate fortification that cost them nearly half their strength. At the Battle of the Crater in 1864, USCT units fought in some of the most desperate close-quarters combat of the war. By 1865, one in eight Union soldiers was Black. Their presence in Peter Dennis's collection is not a footnote - it is a statement about what the Union Army actually was by the war's end.
Skirmishers and the Slow Death of the Line
The tactical answer to the rifled musket was the skirmisher. Rather than closing the distance in formation, taking fire across hundreds of yards, skirmishers moved in loose extended order: men separated by several paces, using cover, advancing by rushes, keeping the enemy engaged while the main line followed at a safer distance.
Both armies had used skirmishers since the war's opening, but the emphasis grew steadily as casualties from frontal assaults mounted. By 1864, in the grinding campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg, both sides were digging field fortifications the moment they halted - miles of earthworks, abatis, and rifle pits that prefigured the Western Front by fifty years. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia that faced each other across the Petersburg lines in 1864-65 were fighting a recognisably modern war.
The Union Commanders & Skirmishers sprue and the Confederate Commanders & Skirmishers sprue each carry 157 figurines, combining on a single sheet the officers who gave the orders and the light infantry who carried the fight forward. At 10mm, these elements can be deployed exactly as they functioned in the field: skirmish figures advanced ahead of the main line, commanders positioned where their control over the battle was most visible.
Cavalry Transformed
In 1861, cavalry still expected to decide battles with the saber. The great mounted charges of the Napoleonic Wars were recent enough memory that officers on both sides trained for them. By 1864, that expectation had been abandoned.
Confederate cavalry dominated the early war. Stuart's rides around the Army of the Potomac became legend - fast, aggressive, carried out with a flair for the dramatic that reflected the Southern cavalry's genuine superiority in horsemanship during the conflict's first two years. At Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville, Confederate cavalry screened movements, gathered intelligence, and disrupted Federal logistics in ways that shaped the strategic picture.
The Union cavalry caught up through equipment and organisation. The Spencer and Sharps carbines issued to Federal troopers by 1863 and 1864 gave them firepower that smoothbore-armed Confederate cavalry could not easily match. Late-war Union cavalry under Sheridan fought as mobile infantry - dismounting to hold ground with carbine fire, mounting to exploit a breakthrough, performing both roles within the same engagement. The Battle of Yellow Tavern in May 1864, where Sheridan's cavalry killed Jeb Stuart, signalled the shift in balance definitively.
The collection carries the full cavalry picture. Union Cavalry and Confederate Cavalry each hold 186 figurines in the mounted arm. The Dismounted Union Cavalry and Dismounted Confederate Cavalry sprues, each 165 figurines, show the other half of how Civil War cavalry actually fought: horses held to the rear, men in line with their carbines. Having both mounted and dismounted sprues available allows you to show a cavalry regiment mid-transition - one squadron still in the saddle, another already holding the fence line.
The Artillery Revolution
Napoleonic artillery was a powerful but fundamentally short-range weapon. ACW artillery became something qualitatively different. Rifled field guns with ranges exceeding a mile, massed in batteries of four to six guns along commanding ground, could dominate the battlefield in ways that smoothbore cannon never quite managed. Counter-battery fire became a science. The placement of artillery was a primary element of any commander's plan, not an afterthought.
The Union advantage here, as in so much else, was industrial. Northern foundries produced more guns, more ammunition, and a higher proportion of rifled pieces than the Confederate industry could match. Confederate artillery was resourceful, often brilliant in its tactical deployment, but chronically short of the metal and powder that the Union could supply almost without limit by the war's later years.
Union Artillery and Confederate Artillery each carry 48 figurines - gun crews complete with their pieces. At 10mm scale, these can be deployed in the massed batteries that defined the great engagements: the Union guns along Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, maintaining the fire that Longstreet's men had to cross; the Confederate artillery at Fredericksburg, pounding Union infantry on the open plain below Marye's Heights. Artillery placed on high ground and supported by infantry is what a Civil War defensive position looks like, and at 10mm it can be laid out across the table with the spatial accuracy the scale permits.
The Full Pack: Both Armies, Complete
All sixteen sprues come together in the ACW 10mm Full Pack, Peter Dennis's complete 10mm rendering of the American Civil War. The pack holds 3,560 figurines - Union and Confederate infantry, cavalry, dismounted cavalry, artillery, specialist units, commanders, and skirmishers. Both armies. Every arm. Every regiment type that defined how the war was actually fought, from the standard line infantry who bore the heaviest casualties to the Zouaves and Iron Brigade veterans who became its most enduring images.
The figurines are pressed from 1.5mm Plexiglass and slot into their bases without paint or glue - the WoFun system that puts fully illustrated, tactically accurate armies on the table in the time it takes to press them from the sprue. Two base options are available: Standard A, which includes 112 square bases of 43x43mm, and Standard B, which includes 196 rectangular bases of 43x21mm, both cut from 2.5mm MDF and printed in a green grass texture. The bases are pre-slotted for clean, secure assembly.
The 10mm scale does something the larger scales cannot: it makes the Civil War's actual proportions visible. Where 18mm and 28mm invite you to refight a rearguard action or a skirmish engagement, 10mm puts corps-sized formations on a standard gaming table, lets you deploy regiment behind regiment across a ridgeline, and places the entire arc of a battle within reach. The war that invented the future deserves to be seen at full size.
Start Your Campaign
The armies are ready. The ridgelines are waiting. Whether you want to hold Cemetery Hill with the Iron Brigade, send Stuart's cavalry on a wide flanking ride, or mass a Union battery on commanding ground and dare the Confederates to cross the open ground below it, the 10mm American Civil War collection gives you everything you need to put it on the table. Press the figurines from the sprue, slot them into their bases, and the war begins. Pick up the complete ACW 10mm Full Pack and both armies are yours - 3,560 figurines, sixteen sprues, one box.