Wednesday, July 3, 2013

A Song of Angry Men: Les Miserables as a Wargame



In addition to my weird science Roman game, I am going to be running at Historicon what may be a first, a game based on a musical, “A Song of Angry Men: Les Miz the Wargame.”


Our family is involved in local theater so we went to see the Les Miserables movie when it came out and really loved it. At one point I realized that I had most of the materials lying around to stage the barricades scene as a game. I also realized that I had some figures that could be easily converted to represent the main characters from the stage play or the movie. Of course, like most of my games, I’m including very silly jokes to make it something of a spoof of the movie/play.

Here’s the table set up:


Here’s an image of the barricade from the movie:


The government forces mass


Here’s an image of some of the troops in attack from the movie.

I got this from a very helpful blog, by Kapiti Fusilier member Arteis, that had some great screen captures of the military images in the movie:

http://arteis.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/do-you-hear-the-people-sing-les-mis/

The attack on the barricades:

Eponine sacrifices herself to save Marius, her fate is to die in the friend zone. (I’ve been having some problems with the focus on my camera so I apologize for the blurry quality of some of the photos.

“Lovely Ladies” provide a distraction:

Jean Valjean confronts Javert:

2 comments:

Mad Guru said...

AMAZING!!!!!

As I already posted on TMP, you are my HERO!!!!!!

My kids wanted me to do exactly this, but unlike you I am not a Napoleonic gamer (I'm mostly into Second Afghan War/NWF colonials and 14th-15th Century Medievals), so I have almost none of the troops & civilians needed for the scenario, so I would have had to build all the terrain AND the armies virtually from scratch. I think your game will save me from that fate, after I show it to them. Wish I could do that in person, and that we could all participate in your game, which has all the makings of a true convention classic!

abdul666 said...

An outstanding idea! Not that we are not accustomed to such from you...