Heretical Gaming is my blog about my gaming life, featuring small skirmishes and big battles from many historical periods (and some in the mythic past or the far future too). The focus is on battle reports using a wide variety of rules, with the occasional rules review, book review and odd musing about the gaming and history. Most of the battles use 6mm-sized figures and vehicles, but occasionally 15mm and 28mm figures appear too.

Sunday 2 December 2012

Some Thoughts on Campaigning

The greatest frustrations I have experienced in gaming over the last few years have been in trying to run a solo campaign to give some outside structure to my Napoleonic wargames.  Ever since I got back in to gaming in 2007, I have had the aim in mind of running a Peninsular War campaign, but my attempts to put this into practice have failed.  The reasons for the failures are many, but I think that they include the following:

1.  Difficulties in translating campaign action onto the tabletop, in all aspects of scenario design.

2. Use of board wargames as the structure for the campaign which did not quite fit in with the miniatures rules being used.

3.  Attempts to use rules that I'm not happy to be playing all the time.

4.  Megalomania - trying to do the entire Peninsular War in one go.

5.  Difficulties in limiting the scope of the campaign; in fact, not being clear enough about the campaign's aims.

6. Underestimating the limits of space and time upon my own gaming.

I have at least had a good sit down and think through all these problems and I believe I have come up with the answer...

3 comments:

  1. WE have done a number of campaigns successfully over the years. Solo is especially challenging because you need a way to introduce the Fog of War. I'll be interested to see what you come up with!

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  2. The Fog of War is a particularly thorny problem for solo campaigns, certainly if the campaign action is to be meaningful (as opposed to just a way of generating battles). There is a part of me tempted to go down the PBEM route, but I do worry a little about my solo gaming depending on other people.

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