"Best rules for Skirmish Campaigns ?" Topic

I found few skirmish campaigns books, and now which rules are best for them ? There are stats for older rules. Maybe any new are more suitable for amount of tanks and infantry as described in scenarios ?

Nuts! from Two Hour Wargames. Has an "RPG" light feel and already includes campaign rules!

Plus, it is a great game.

Remind me to pimp Five Men at Kursk in a week or so, but Nuts operates at almost the exact scale of many of the SKirmish Campaign books. Hard to go wrong with that.

Combat Patrol is a recently released set of innovative skirmish rules by Buck a Surdu that is gaining a lot of positive reviews here on TMP.
You can check out the website here:

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Chain of Command works well with the Skirmish Campaign books. There are some posts in the TooFatLardies forum about using them with the SkirmishCampaigns. The phase/turn sequence in CoC doesn't map to the number of turns specified in scenarios but the suggestions in the forum posts deal with this and seem to work well.

Chris

Bates has a good point and its not specific to CoC either. When adapting scenarios, you usually always have to mess with things like game length, since a "turn" can mean all sorts of things from game to game.

If you're talking about commanding a Platoon or more I'd say Chain of Command or TW&T both by TFL. TW&T was one of my all time favorite games but due to circumstances of life never played a lot. If it's a basic squad or section then my most enjoyable experience was with Weasel's 5Core. Here's a AAR

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I us Battleground which is an older rule system. Has more detail than most.

I've never played them, but _Arc of Fire_ is, I believe, the system they were written for.

Nuts is a great cinematic game with lots of campaign potential. I've never played Arc of Fire but the company Skirmish Campaigns make a lot of scenario books that can be used with any system.

While the Skirmish Campaigns books were primarily PLAY TESTED with Arc of Fire, they are not tied to Arc of Fire. Each Skirmish Campaigns book uses generic descriptions of training, morale, quality, etc. Each book contains a conversion table that describes how to adapt the Skirmish Campaigns generic ratings to those specific to different sets of rules. While the books were written before recently released sets of rules, such as Fireball Forward, Combat Patrol, and Chain of Command, it should be very easy to adapt any of these books to whatever set of skirmish rule you like. I also find that it is easy to scale up these scenarios to larger battles for games like FoW, Spearhead, CD, or LSNC: WWII.

Buck Surdu

I have made extensive use of the Skirmish Campaign books using Disposable Heroes by Iron Ivan and Bolt Action by Warlord games. The scenarios work well with both of those rulesets.

NUTS! it is, there are a number of campaign books available and the system has a campaign generation system built-in as well.

I ran the Rommel's Journey to Verdun WW1 at Battlegroup North at Ellvinton nr York last year using Chris Peers's Corner of Hell rules. They worked perfectly well for most scenarios though needed some adjustment for some scenarios. Best advice is pick a rule set you like and modify it/the scenario to suit.

I believe they started with Battleground WWII and TAC. As others have stated, later books were written as they playtested Arc of Fire. For some rules, like Face of Battle, there are too many units in the scenario. So, to me, the level is just a bit above skirmish for about half the scenarios in any given book. I think a set of rules that has individual tanks and infantry in teams would work the best.

IMO, an overlooked source of great skirmish scenarios is Final Combat. You certainly get your money's worth of scenarios for the cost.

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For example, the Battle of Arnhem pdf book has 75 scenarios for only 20 bucks. Nice.

Mike

Skirmish Campaigns were originally written for Arc of Fire. This leads to two potential problems for you if you're using something else…

First, the lengths of the scenarios are such that often the only way to reach them before the scenario is over would be to run right into machine gun fire… perhaps movement is very quick in AoF.

Secondly, the numbers attackers vs defenders is often something like 2:1 or 3:2 whereas conventional wisdom is that something like 3:1 should give a chance of success.

It might be a good idea to increase the length of the scenarios by 50%, and give the attacker a bit more edge.

On the ratio thing, I find that in most tabletop games, 2-1 or often 3-2 is what gives a game that can go either way.

The 3-1 is what an army WANTS to fight at, to ensure they will most likely win.

Arc of Fire came out after the first few books. I was using Battleground WWII for skirmish. And as the scenarios are actually telescoped down, Battlefront WWII worked really well at Battalion scale. As soon as Arc of Fire came out I started using that – fits perfectly especially if the sides are imbalanced -some rules are not good at modelling this.
Of the more recent rules, I think Nuts may work as long as you tinker with the artillery rules – model them on the Arc of Fire system.

To be clear, SkirmishCampaigns books were not written for Arc of Fire. They are intended to be adapted to any set of rules.