"The Day After Tomorrow" Topic

How often do you play a "campaign", that is a wargame that has a defined end state (1 hour, 8 hours, until one side surrenders. etc.) where the end state affects the initial conditions of a future game?

It's kinda hard since we don't have the exact same people every game day. Then again, if you're showing up the initial conditions are the initial conditions, so …

I'm at about 1 in 4 games, ~25%.

It varies according to the scenario we are playing. If we don't finish it then, we comeback later in the week to finish it.

I find that setting a real time end to a game doesn't work well. For instance; we are going to play until 5:00pm. This gives the side that is losing to slow the game down. Take longer with their turns. Find any excuse to waste time.

I may not be understanding your question. Then again I always have a hard deciphering what you mean. No offense intended. It got very well be a problem with me.

Never if I can help it, these days. Think about it: the way you win a campaign is to strive for a situation where the other guy either can't win the next battle, or where nothing he can do in the battle will salvage the campaign. If you're an allied commander in Napoleon's glory years, most of the time the battle is already hopeless before you make your first move.

So someone has to do a lot of book keeping in order to make the battles on the tabletop less exciting. I've done it, but it was a long time ago, and it's not something I'd want to try again.

If your talking about a campaign, I will do one of two things end it at the historical end of the campaign or go on until one side gives up.

I find that the campaign reaches a point were one side is losing, usually badly. When one side gets on a roll things go down hill for the other side quickly. The losing side doesn't admit they have loss. They just quit participating. That is why I quit doing campaign games years ago.

The Too Fat Lardies' Pint-sized campaigns for Chain of Command do this quite well. As well as historical background, lists of forces and available support, the core of each campaign is a series of scenarios. Generally the attacker needs to win each one to progress to the next, though in some cases a scenario might be played once and the result provide a bonus in a later game for the winner. A proportion of battle casualties might be carried over, though reinforcements and replacement platoons are available; in any case relative casualties and success may affect you morale and available support in later games. The campaign is usually limited to a number of turns by which the attacker must complete all the scenarios.
I have played a couple of these; I would like to play more.

One suggestion would be to adjust victory conditions for the next game as well as advantages for having won the previous game.

Congrats on your victory! For the next battle you will get a extra platoon. Oh, and higher command would like for you to take these extra terrain points as well as your primary objective.

I'm a little scared to ask what campaign systems were used where the bookkeeping was onerous and the effects completely nerfed later game outcomes.

At the campaign level, these problems are fundamentally no different that within a game. You have to do some bookkeeping to make the game work. And, yes, you can have a game that is over by the second turn, but you try to avoid that with scenario design. Victory conditions and offsetting advantages (reshaping the battlespace instead of just plussing one side up), as mentioned above, are good approaches.

I am using the solitaire board game Field Commander Napoleon as a campaign vehicle and its working pretty well. You can play through all the Napoleonic eras, but each era is a single campaign.

Instead of using the game's battle resolution mechanism, I use the OOBs for the campaign to set up the miniatures battles when armies collide. I am using a hybrid version of Neil Thomas rules for each battle, and the tactical AI I play against is Adjutant Introuvable, easy to use from Wargames Vault.

The battles are fictional and results carry over – there are supply issues, arrival of reinforcements, decisions about regional movement. The AI works very well, as in most Verssen games. I am in the 1796 Italian campaign now. I am lucky to have dedicated space to leave things set up.