Campaigns

To change the subject, let's consider why on earth anyone would want to put on a campaign game. And to do that, let's look at the three ways people game:

1. scenarios from a book;
2. equal point battles;
3. set up everything you've got;

The first is a scenario, either from a book of scenarios, from a historical scenario that looks interesting, or from a magazine. Take, for example, the following. A stream with steep banks bisects the width of the table. A road exists from Point A, where your force enters, parallel and close to the stream, down most of the length of the stream, to Point B, where there's a bridge, and then off the far end of the table. The scenario is to cross the stream. It is the American Civil War and you have no pontoons. Nobody knows if the stream is fordable, the other side is too close to let you scout, but the banks are too steep for artillery. The other side holds the far side of the stream in some force; you can see clumps of infantry, and from the occasional shellburst you know there's artillery around somewhere. The road is quite good, but the ground is otherwise broken, uneven and difficult to move over. You have a rumor of a ford some distance off the far end of the table. What do you do?

That's Burnside's Bridge from the Battle of Antietam, exactly as General Burnside saw it. Good luck.

The second is an equal points battle. There is a long rant on the Yahoo Ancient Tactics board about how a Macedonian army is useless in DBM, and how historical tactics don't work. First, that's because people play DBM as a game that happens to use figures that look like ancients. Thus they do things in the game that wouldn't make sense on a real battlefield, but make plenty of sense within the game system. An example is the attack on the enemy's camp that seems to happen in every battle (I know it doesn't happen in every battle, just in every battle of DBM I've ever seen).

My own experience with equal points battles is that they are useless. The whole point of strategy is to bring a superior force to bear on the battlefield. That isn't much fun because both sides like to think they have a chance. But it's the historical reality. I saw this plenty of times one year when playing equal point battles from Dull Thud of Impact, a.k.a. Shock of Impact ('dull thud' is what I call it). Part of that was the group I gamed with, though.

The trouble is, equal point battles produce ahistorical match-ups (my Mauryan Indian Army once had a thin time of it when faced with Crusaders). They produce endless equivocating: do I take three more skirmishers, or do I take an extra heavy cavalryman? And they promote ahistorical tactics (Burgundians don't do well against a Khmer army with its horde of elephants that hold off the gen d'armes in the jungle).

The third type of game is where everyone lines up everything they have and go at it. This usually produces a head-on clash with no tactics. And some people paint faster than others, so somebody could end up with twice as many troops as their opponent. Being one of those people (at one time), I once made an agreement with a friend to limit what we painted to what we could both fit in a certain sized container. We both developed new ways of stacking the troops in the container.

The rationale for a campaign game is to produce battles that have meaning beyond that evening's game. You might send that brigade of heavy cavalry in to smash the enemy, but if you lose a lot of them you won't have the heavy cavalry at a later battle. This makes people a little more cautious. I once refereed the Charoenea Campaign of 338 BC, when Philip of Macedon united Greece by force of arms; the Macedonian commander liked to attack with Philip and Alexander in the front rank to get that extra punch. Both Philip and Alex were killed in the campaign. That prevented a Persian campaign and the spread of Hellenism throughout the Near East.

What do you need for a campaign? Not that much, it turns out. Let's look at the "classical" requirements (the ones experience says are always needed). These are:

• a map movement system including hidden movement;
• scouting;
• a way to handle non-tabletop actions;
• supply;
• setting up a tabletop encounter;
• the aftermath of a battle;

There are three basic map moving systems: area movement (also box-to-box movement, which is merely a variation of that); hex movement (usually played on a map from a boardgame); and measuring movement on a map (infantry and artillery move 1"; heavy cavalry moves 1.5"; light cavalry moves 2"; wagons move 1" but only on roads). This latter requires a grid on the map so you can call out that something is in that particular neck of the woods, but you don't say what it is until they confront each other (naval games are good for this).

Scouting is where you need the possibility of mis-information. One side might enjoy a scouting advantage over the other (they have Jeb Stuart, General Lasalle or Commodore Goodenough). The other side can simply send out so many patrols that they can punch through the screen and get accurate information. A referee is handy for this sort of thing.

There will be times when nobody wants to fight an action that's been generated. This is where a boardgame CRT (Combat Results Table) is handy. Simply input all relevant factors, throw a die, and you get a result. Agreeing on those factors can be a problem, though.

Supply is the least interesting part of a campaign, and one of the most vital. There are ways to simplify supply. People who are interested can contact me about my article "Feeding Your Wargames Army". I came up with a system that works. An alternative system is to abstract things slightly, and when a force isn't in supply they suffer attrition. This is what happens when you use the Frederick the Great system.

Setting up a tabletop encounter means having access to maps. If you're using a hex system, take all of the immediately adjoining hexes and collapse them into the hex where you have context. I did this once in a highly successful King's War game. If you're using area movement/box-to-box, then generate a map using, say Warfare in the Age of Reason. This gives you interesting battlefields without much trouble. And if you're measuring distances on a map just lay down a template centered on the point of contact and you have your battlefield, for good or ill. Then deploy and have at each other, realizing that the strategic context provides the victory conditions (it is surprising how many gamers forget that).

Afterwards, of course, you have troops fleeing the battlefield, losses to account for (figure half of the casualties come back the next day), and so on. The losing side has to retreat, of course, and if the winners are in good enough shape, they'll pursue (they usually don't). The losers might or might not be in shape to recover and fight again for a while (especially if using a boardgame like Frederick the Great mixed, say, with the tactical rules Volley & Bayonet. There disorder is a real concept. And, before anyone asks, I did do that quite successfully.

This overview should be enough to get you interested in trying campaigns. In the future I'll write more, going into more detail about this fascinating part of the gaming hobby.