Easy Mini-Campaigns Solo Miniature Wargaming (Part 4)

Campaigns are a good way to add way to add context and interest to wargames. The best ones are long running affairs with maps, histories, personalities and so on but these take a great deal of time, effort, discipline and imagination, more than I can muster to be honest.  My real interest is in playing the games so when I want something more I  play a "linked scenario" campaign by which I mean I play a series of games in which the result of one game has an affect on the next one.

The opening game of last Fall's Celebration Mini-campaign (click).
(There are 11 posts but they appear in reverse order so please scroll down to start at the beginning.

First I pick a setting which basically means deciding which of my collections I'll use. This gives me the pool of units to choose from. A unit which is destroyed in one scenario cannot be reused in that campaign. If you have a large collection there is merit in setting an initial order of battle (ie a pool of available units)  and only those units may be drawn from for a scenario. Most of my collections aren't that big individually so the whole lot are available as a pool of replacement units but of course that sometimes means replacing lost elite units with militia and so on.

Now, the scenarios don't actually need to be in a logical order. Ron and I have played some good mini-campaigns to win 2 games out of 3 but selected the games by using a random generator thingie to pick the next game  from a list of scenarios he had entered on a spreadsheet on his computer. However, I prefer to go a step farther. Usually I like to start with a some form of surprise attack, a river crossing  perhaps or an attack on an outpost but a straight clash of advance guards like Sawmill Village also works. The next battle will usually be a pitched battle. If one side lost the first game, I choose an attack/defence scenario with a smaller defender on a ridge line perhaps, if the first game was a tie then a straight up fight might be in order or a die roll to see who the attacker is. If one side wins the first two games then the last game will be a rear guard action, if both sides have won one of the games then fight another pitched battle, rolling to see if one side has an advantage such as a surprise or flank attack? That game will either decide the campaign or lead me to keep playing until one side wins or I get tired.

Back in 2012 Bluebear Jeff challenged blogging wargamers to  design a linked scenario campaign and post them. I think I entered a suggestion but I know I took Steve the Wargamer's suggestion and greatly enjoyed it. I haven't done any research to confirm this but Jeff's suggestion may be where I got the idea.

Here is a link to Steve the Wargamer's  linked teaser challenge entry and here is a link to my series of battle reports and summary (in reverse order as blogger does).

Last but not least here' the video I made of the first game:

Next posts more on the mini-campaign I am working on now.