"Kicking off a large campaign" Topic

My gaming group is looking at refighting the entire French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The first campaign is the 1792 Valmy campaign and I'd be interested if anyone has any ideas. Perhaps there is a mapless way to campaign what was a pretty simple situation?

Cheers

Sheldon
miniscampaign.wordpress.com

Might be the simplest way would be a la Kriegspiel, with an umpire who would have explained rules and general philisophy of his ubderstanding of things.
It can kerp things focused, as simple as wished and run like an event campaign with decision taking.

I would not use maps. I would do set piece battles. Fight every historical battle with the appropriate OOB. Keep up with the causalities and subtract them form the OOB. Fight the next historical battle using that OOB and keep up with the casualties and subtract them out of the OOB. Keep it simple. Do it over and over. You can also figure replacements marching to the front. We have done thing like that before but we just did set piece campaigns where there were three battles and each CMC chose what units for each battle. Some units would be able to fight multiple battles but the OOB would reflect casualties from the previous battles.

The CMC will have to decided when it is enough and needs to remove army from the field for the next battle. You have to think ahead for the next battle.

But you'll also have to set up a mechanism for feeding new recruits/draftees into the armies

My approach will be to break the period into "campaigns" and refight each of those individually. At the end of each campaign we'll "reset" to the historical result. That will keep the project recognisably napoleonic.

It also means we can mix up our approach. We can use matrix, mapless, maps as appropriate for each campaign. I can run a map campaign but am not very familiar with the alternatives.

Cheers

Sheldon

miniscampaign.wordpress.com

2 simple approaches:

1 (From Bloody Big Battles) pick an odd number of historical battles from a campaign. Play them and count up wins/losses. With an odd number, one side must win the campaign, unless you allow tactical ties.

2 (from DBA resource page) make a row of boxes, each side has a base at their end of the row. The first battle takes place in the center box. The losing army retreats one box. Capturing the enemy base wins the campaign. The more boxes in the row, the longer the campaign will last.

I read your blog – it seems your players are not too… adventurous. :)

If you are planning to keep score, the question is whether you want the scores to reflect:

1. Tactical ability – i.e. winning a tabletop battle.

2. Operational ability – ability to manoeuvre the opposing army into a position of weakness before engaging it. This means the use of a pre-battle game

3. Strategic ability – Raising and training and mobilising and feeding armies and leading them into the field. Probably requires a full campaign system

Once you have decided what level your players want to compete at, then you can decide what type of campaign to run.

Our club solution at the moment:

Fight every historical battle with the appropriate OOB.

If you go for a complex game in the form of EMPIRES IN ARMS you will soon diverge from history … which is fine if that is what you want.

Good ideas there.
Kriegspiel is what I will use for some of the campaigns. We

The option of fighting battles in an off map framework is a bit restricted for the Valmy campaign as there can be only one :D I will use some variation on the BBB and DBA approaches (with historical OBs) for some of the other campaigns.

@Hagen, instead of fighting each battle with the historical OBs regardless of the outcome of the previous battle, we're fighting each campaign with the historical OBs regardless of the outcome of the previous campaign. That's to avoid diverging from history too much.

Sigh. Missed the edit deadline.

instead of fighting each battle with the historical OBs regardless of the outcome of the previous battle, we're fighting each campaign with the historical OBs regardless of the outcome of the previous campaign. That's to avoid diverging from history too much.

Good idea.

@Pedrobear, I like your scoring categories.

You might want to try Snappy Nappy, which is meant for "Campaign in a Day" style multi-table, multi-player games. Peter just wrapped up a SN Waterloo campaign -- you can grab the OOB and maps, plus read player and umpire reactions (there were 20 players and 3 umpires on 11 tables) at his Blunders on the Danube blog (link) The game lasted 6 real-time hours on April 26.

If you have access to old issues of MWAN, you can read the campaigns I ran in my basement (I was the sole umpire) for anywhere from 8 to 22 players: #78 (Waterloo), #88 (1809 Bavaria), #94 (Fall 1813), #116 (1809 Italy), and #122 (1806 Prussia).

Full Disclosure: I wrote the rules back in the 1990s and it was published in 2009 by On Military Matters.

A great Yahoo group is run by Alan, and you can download the Quick Reference Sheet from there.

Actually Russ, you sent me a copy of the rules before you published them (thanks for that BTW). This was back in 1999-2000 or so (it might have been later) when I was magweb subscriber and asked you about them.

I've since bought a copy. I always thought they were a great idea for the intensive, geographically constrained campaigns.

I'll have a look at the links and thanks.

Turning Point Simulations has just published an operational level game of the campaign with what looks like battalions and squadrons represented.

I'll be using that and fighting on table. I'll let you know how it goes.