Campaign and setting up tabletop terrain

This post covers the campaign rules for setting up the tabletop terrain and how the campaign map has an influence. There are some aspects of the terrain cards I have covered off in previous posts, but have repeated them briefly for completeness.

Terrain cards containing: road, road/village, 2 marsh,  2 escarpment, 4 hill, 2 scrub, 3 wadi/rough terrain, 3 open.

The first step is to shuffle and start drawing cards until a square of 9 cards is completed. Some cards which are drawn are discarded based upon terrain features on the campaign map using the following guidelines:

• Marsh cards are ignored if there is no marsh feature in the campaign zone being battled over.
• Cards with roads/tracks are ignored if there is already a card containing a road already drawn.
• Escarpment cards are ignored if there is no escarpment feature in the campaign zone being battled over.
• Open cards are ignored. If there is already an open card selected when there are mountain features in the campaign zone being battled over.

Campaign map

Once the 9 cards are selected:

• The defending player selects their base edge
• The defending player can switch two adjacent terrain cards backwards and forwards (vertically as pictured)
• The attacking player uses the opposite table edge and can switch two adjacent terrain cards sideways (horizontally as pictured)

Here are the cards for the first battle of campaign turn 2.

9 cards are selected. When drawing the cards a 2nd road and a marsh card were ignored.

Allied forces select the base edge.

Allied forces switch any two adjacent cards (vertically)

Axis forces switch any two adjacent cards (horizontally)

Terrain determined and ready to be transferred to the tabletop.

The tabletop I am currently using for this campaign is hex based and is 13 hexes wide by 10 hexes deep.

Tabletop with a battered cardboard backdrop 13 hexes wide by 10 hexes deep

All the terrain fits nicely into 4 plastic draws.

When transferring the cards to the tabletop the following dimension of hexes is used to reflect the cards.

The tabletop is divided into areas

I use the following as a guide for laying features on the tabletop:

• Place roads first and they run from one base edge to the other. All other terrain will fit around the road.
• 3 terrain features per area
• If a feature cannot fit, eg escapements due to a road, I use a short 2 hex escarpment and hill.
• Wadi/Rough terrain must be one feature of 2-3 hexes
• Marsh terrain must be one feature of 2-3 hexes

A completed tabletop

The next post will cover the rules for setting up the forces involved in the game.

During this week I managed to have a Jacobite game using my Paper Soldiers. They are all from the Peter Dennis book and are photocopied to increase their size to 42mm.

Rules written up in zine format.

Scenario 18 from One Hours Wargames is well underway

The Highlander counter attack is well underway