"Generic campaign system?" Topic

I'm looking for a basic, generic style system that would allow a campaign to be played, with combat being under another set of rules. Daily movement rates, and possibly supply and command effects are, in my mind, fairly important.

Is there a product out there that would handle this? Perhaps there's even a board game that folks use?

Thanks for any leads!

There's Platoon Forward but it's not a "map" based kinda game with movement,supply and such, it's more character driven.

I think you may have to dig into a board game.

Depending on what scale of game you're looking for Toofatlardies' Chain of Command has a campaign game, At the Sharp End (IRRC), that could be system agnostic with a bit of work I think. But that's for a platoon-per-side sort of game.

Many years ago I dabbled in 10mm ww2 and we went to a friends garage to play . He used a boardgame called world in flames , it was fantastic and we used it to move our forces around . Could try that for starters but it was in the 90's and not sure if it is readily available or perhaps a new edition was done?

PanzerKorps has a campaign module. You could use other rules to fight the battles:

link

Flames of War is still available but that is at a VERY strategic level. France is maybe 12 hexes across?

Bgg has info on it link

The Rules of Engagement ruleset from Great Escape Games has a nice campaign add-on…

link

The original Johnny Reb had a very simple outline for a campaign.

The various block game from Columbia Games should make great campaign systems for tabletop play – I'm thinking of trying out the Shenandoah game for a low level ACW campaign.

The Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (GCACW) system would be a perfect fit for you: link

Contrary to popular belief, board wargames are still very much in production. In a renaissance actually I'd say. In fact, one game from that series ("Stonewall Jackson's Way II) was just released a bit over a year ago. Most of those titles can be picked up off of the boardgamegeek marketplace for between $30 USD-$40 USD.

World in Flames is still very active. ADG, the company that's made it for all of these years, is still producing variants for it and the base game (now called "Final Edition") is still in production and going strong. But that's WWII and as mentioned, grand strategic. In that case, I think that GCACW is what you're looking for. You could maneuver divisions, corps and armies and then fight out specific battles in miniature where there is "conflict" in the boardgame.

Also, "Beyond the River" is designed for use with Red Actions, but could easily be adapted to any period:

link

Best of all it's free….

I second the Columbia Games block games. I've played 1812 several times and it works great. There's also the "point to point" games such as A House Divided for ACW.

Sorry for the delay in responding – real life sometimes rears its ugly head.

Some very interesting ideas and I'll look into them – I'll let you know if I find anything that seems to work best for me!

Thanks for the ideas!

I used to use Civilization II for this. You have to paint your own map using the editor, ideally at the largest possible map size of 10,000 tiles' area. This can be 100 by 100 or any other shape that fits your chosen terrain (you'd want a square for Spain, for example, but probably a rectangle for the Danube.

this then allows you daily granularity in time. You can deem one tile per move to be the shortest permissible move with this being doubled on roads and increased by say 50% for cavalry. It then takes you a campaign month to advance all the way across the map.

If you set all governments to fundamentalist, give each player infinite money and stretch the turn definition out (or use it as-is but ignore the dates) you can then simulate manoeuvre quite well. The drawback is that the terrain is only ever indicative. You could also create several adjoining maps to cover a greater area and simply move to the next map when the terrain requires. This would be an option if you decided to make each map square equivalent to your tabletop area.

The only trouble with this is that Civ 2 doesn't work on a 32 bit machine.

Pretty much any boardgame map can be used (assuming the 'right' scale for your campaign).

You can also, and I recommend this, use Hexographer to create your own maps -- simple to use…really. Just click on a terrain icon and click on a hex and instant terrain. It does have a function to "move" icons (knights, jets, and so on) around the map, but I have not used that as the instructions seem a bit fiddly. Great little product for $25 USD or $30. USD I discovered them online, heard the programmer speak at GenCon a couple years ago, and bought the hexographer, cityographer, and dungeonographer at the show. Have not used the latter two, though, but I expect them to be as easy to use as the original.

If your players are more computer-inclined, we did a short Cyberboard campaign -- make a map, make units, and move the units around a hex grid. The back-end save and open feature was a little funky, but it did function.

As this is on the Modern board, I assume you're looking for a system that goes with modern rules?

How about the campaign system from the "First Battle" series of board-games from GDW? Very simple campaign rules on a couple of pages, covering campaign movement, reinforcement/supply, air support, and table-top battles. The map is a simple double-page nodal type affair.

I know it's in a couple of the modules – can't remember exactly which ones, but I know "The Sands of War" is one of them.