Glorieta
A hex-and-counter wargame in design on the Battle of Glorieta Pass, 1862, the Gettysburg of the West. The research base was built by an AI pipeline with adversarial fact verification.
VASSAL Python SVG
Glorieta Pass, March 28, 1862: the battle that broke the Confederate campaign in New Mexico, sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West. It is a gift of a design problem. The straight fight at Pigeon’s Ranch was a Confederate tactical win, but Chivington’s raid on the supply train at Johnson’s Ranch decided the campaign, which means the victory conditions have to be asymmetric or the game is lying about the history.
The design covers both actions. Open questions in the design notes: ground scale, map extent, and exactly how the supply-train raid should weigh against the frontal battle.
The research base is its own story. Rather than working from two or three secondary sources, I ran a deep-research pipeline against the battle: five search angles across sixteen sources produced seventy-one extracted claims, twenty-five of which went to three-vote adversarial verification. Nineteen were confirmed and six refuted, each tagged with a confidence level, including an honest caveat that terrain data for the pass is weak. The game gets built on the nineteen.
Toolchain: a Python hex-grid generator, Inkscape for the terrain overlay, and VASSAL as the delivery platform.