Planning a future campaign and ECW rules

A recent second-hand purchase arrived this week. I was fortunate enough to be able to buy locally at a reasonable price and avoid the high international postage costs, which seem to cost more than the price of the game itself. The game was in good condition for a used game and came wth all its parts.

Recent purchase - Avalon Hill’s Afrika Korps

Why am I buying this? Later this year, my wargaming will be restricted as we pack up and move house and countries. However, I plan to keep my 6mm Heroics and Ros WW2 Western Desert armies out for a few games and a campaign, as they can be easily packed up last. 

To test the idea of using this board game for the campaign, I will spend the next month, or two, running a mini-campaign of Operation Crusader using the board game pieces and transferring any combat to a small tabletop game. The idea of a mini-campaign came from a link on Boardgame Geek to an article from the  old Avalon Hill General Magazine (November-December 1973 issue).

• Board Game Geek link - here
• General Magazine link - here

It's been a while since I've done much gaming with my 6mm Western Desert armies, other than the odd one off game. The last major outing for these armies was when I played a solo ladder campaign over a 15 month period, from March 2020 to May 2021. This campaign included 11 turns and 27 tabletop games. The first game can be found here and the wrap up here.

This past week, and weekend, I have continued with play testing my English Civil War rules and have finally reached a point where I'm satisfied with them, and have stopped making anymore adjustments. The final amendments involved clarifying the routing rules, which now allow both infantry and cavalry to increase their hit count before routing if they're within 3 inches of two other units of the same type. This encourages units to stay together in there commands and in formation. Additionally, I reduced their base hit count by one to prevent combat from dragging on too long.

The other area of the rules I was flipping and flopping on with different rule mechanisms for commanders. I decided I was making things all too complicated and so settled on the simple and often used approach where commanders improve the odds in combat, but this comes with the risk of mishap.

I am hoping to post the full write up of the rules sometime next week.