Campaign Games

I am a die-hard, true-fanatic campaign gamer, but not the way many (most?) wargamers think of campaigns. I favor what might be called sequence-of-battle campaigning, in which there is little if any politics, diplomacy, or even economics. Instead, two or more players get together to repeatedly knock heads, in such a fashion that the result of one battle feeds directly into the next. They can make smart (or dumb) strategic and operational decisions, but not the usual "Diplomacy" style game of "Let's gang up on Country X".

The way I like to avoid this is to regulate the campaign with a board game, normall but not always a two-player game.

The rules listed here are a group of largely independent ideas, mainly oriented toward the De Bellis Whatever series.

The campaign games listed below are combinations of board games with miniature games. In each case, the board game is used to play strategy or operations, and the miniature rules are used to play tactics. Instead of rolling dice and consulting a combat results table, miniature games are played to resolve the battles.

To play these campaigns, you must have access to both the board game and the miniatures rules.

Design note: The key thing is to keep counters as "atoms" and not track fractional counters in the board game. In earlier work on Pelopnnesian War, I had thought to keep rosters for each counter, or maybe multiply the number of counters to track the elements individually. This, however, goofs up the board game. On the other hand, if you keep board game counters as the atomic units, then it simplifies bookkeeping, and also has the benefit of allowing trivial or hopelessly lopsided battles to be played quickly using the boardgame rules instead of having to set up and play a miniatures game.

The following campaign system does not involve a separate board game

Piston Campaign (update Jul 7, 2004)