A different approach for a campaign

Last week I wrapped up my French Indian War campaign. The purpose of the campaign was two fold. Firstly to provide a background narrative and context to the games, and secondly to work through my house rule modifications which based upon One-Hour Wargames rules. Sorting out the rules was successful for the most part (more of that later). However, the background and historical context to the games was not as compelling as I had hoped.

Following my post on the campaign and reflections, in stepped Jonathan of Palouse Wargaming Journal with an idea described as a "solo campaign relay". What is that you ask? Rather than repeating the concept I now point you to Jonathan's post here which summarises the idea and how it works.

I think this will be a fascinating wargaming collaboration, presenting me with a variety of battles and a context to games I have no control over. While providing Jonathan with a board game style campaign where tabletop dispatches inform him of a battle's outcome.

A recent game with an attack on a blockhouse (somewhat successful judging by the smoke).

I am planning to post this weekend the rules developed during the last campaign, which I will be using for this campaign. They are presently hand written. The only area of the rules I am contemplating changing is to do with army resolve. I had been playing games where an armies resolve fails when more than half their units are eliminated. At that point they effectively retired from the field of battle.

This can make the end of games a tad predictable. You know, eliminate one more unit and you win. So the alternative I am looking at using is this...

An army has resolve points. These are calculated by multiplying their number of units by 2. So an army of 10 units will have a resolve of 20. During the game whenever a unit is lost a dice is rolled and its score reduces the resolve. When the resolve reaches zero the army retires from the field of battle.

To add a couple of twists to the resolve:

• Whenever elite units (eg grenadiers) are eliminated two dice are rolled and their combined score reduces the resolve.
• If the commander is rated above average, then before the game a dice is rolled and the score added to an army's resolve.
• If the commander is rated below average, then before the game a dice is rolled and the score subtracted from an army's resolve.

I plan to test out this modification over the next few days.

Finally, a few more Sci-Fi skirmish figures are ready to leave the painting table.

Some wild life to introduce into games.