Thursday, April 3, 2014

Campaign: from Lenino to Berlin 43-45

To add some flavor to our regular BGK battles we decided to look for a campaign system.
Initially, our vision was to create a complex campaign system ourselves. We thought about including things like earning / loosing points that are used reinforce your army, etc.  However, after long discussions we decided to drop the project, because we felt that there is a really thin line between something great and complete disaster. Unfortunately, creating such system requires lots of play testing = time that we don’t have right now.

Recently, we got a completely different idea. We decided to combine the pleasure of playing tabletop strategy with a little bit of historical research. The idea is to add some historical background to our battles. The theme of the campaign will be the battle route of Peoples' Army of Poland on the Eastern Front (LWP). The army entered combat in October 43 and finished the war in Berlin in 45. This will enable us to go smoothly between different Battlegroup books (Kursk, Overlord, and Fall of the Reich) and record the results of all the battles.

The rules are more than simple. We analyze the battle route of LWP, and, for each major battle, we do a little bit of research to understand:
  • What units that were involved in combat?
  • What equipment did they have?
  • Were there any special conditions / problems, etc.?
  • What terrain features were present?
Based on this information we will try to select a BG scenario that would best represent the battle conditions. We will also try to incorporate the information about the equipment into our rosters (we will still prepare a valid 500-point order of battle for the Battlegroup game). If the battle is a bigger one, we split it into a number of smaller encounters. We don’t want to have exact, historical scenarios, because they would involve very deep research, and at the end, it is hard to find well-balanced encounters that would be fun to play.

Finally, we will play the game; write a short report, and award a victory point to the winner.



4 comments:

  1. Sounds like a great idea! Look forward to reading about it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad you liked the idea. We will see how it works :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. This was my father-in-laws war, he was there from Lenino all the way to Berlin, sustaining a bullet wound in Berlin on the very last day of the war which left him with an arm he has been unable to use ever since. Sadly he is losing his memory rapidly and still does not like to recall the events of this time, it was sheer horror.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you very much for the post. I think it's a shame that the tremendous effort and blood of LWP soldiers is a little bit forgotten nowadays.

      Delete