"FPW Campaign System" Topic

Looking for a good Blood & Iron campaign system for the FPW? Sometimes you just can't beat doing it old school. My tome for the week.

link

I've gotten burned at least twice by the Dummy Counter on Fortifications trick, BTW.

Colonel Bill
wargamer.com

Map modified version of SPi magazine game does it very well.
Not this one. It has fog of war, politics, and events etc. Quite flexible.

Good review, Bill.

More modern scholarship has revealed that the Prussian dragoons, hussars, and uhlans were used a lot for reconnaissance and screening of the Prussian corps. I don't know how that changes the dynamics of the SPI game.

Jim

Jim, that's what the dummy counters do.

This is a very enticing idea. I have scads of 15mm FPW figures painted and ready to go, but they've only been on the table a few times. A short campaign might be the impetus to get this collection in use.

The OP is about using the SPI game as a campaign system, but the review is just about playing the board game. Have you actually tried playing the battles as miniatures games? I'd be interested to hear how you handled terrain generation and setup.

The size of the battles could make a big difference in the approach to the miniatures games. Looking over the rules, it looks like the maximum theoretical size of battle could involve all the corps and a garrison (so, 30 units…?), but that seems really unlikely. How big (how many corps) is a typical battle in this game? Are battles with more than 2-3 corps per side likely to occur?

- Ix

FWIW, there are two SPI ACW boardgames based on this system, The Wilderness Campaign and Lee Moves North. This overview says they are all slightly different, but the ACW games include cavalry, so perhaps could be mined for rules to get cavalry into the FPW game.

Perhaps a generic unified rifle wars campaign system could be made from the basic concepts in these games. Any volunteers?

It would be nice to be able to get any ACW or mid-19th C. European campaign onto the table with some magnets and a map, and there are more than a few obscure wars and hypothetical campaigns that might be fun to try out. I've read more than one gamer proposing an 1860ish US vs. British campaign in Canada or the upper eastern seaboard, and I still have a need for a system to let me march US troops into Mexico to fight Napoleon III's French in 1866.

- Ix