The Campaign Paradox

As the regular reader of this blog might have surmised by now, I am something of a fan of campaign games. The ideas of linked battles, the movement on the map, the decisions of strategic import, and so on interest me. Perhaps I am much more of a big-picture wargamer than most others, I am not sure. The Estimable Mrs. P. keeps arguing that I think in the abstract, so maybe the interest in campaigns is a consequence of that.

Still, it is a little hard to find evidence that campaign wargaming is particularly popular among wargamers. I know that some campaigns are played (I could name a few blogs that report them) but, to be honest, most battle reports in the blogosphere, at least the slice of it that I read, are of either historical battles or of scenario games, with Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargames as the source of choice.

Now, to be clear, I do not have the slightest problem with that. Again, the regular reader will be aware that I have indulged in not a few scenario-based games from OHW, as well as a few historical games. But the hankering after campaign games does not, for me, go away. Perhaps, as a solo wargamer, I have imbibed too much of the advice that, to keep the solo interest going, we need to move to campaigns.

There are, of course, campaigns and campaigns. There are sequences of scenarios, where the sequence is fought out step-wise, with results and casualties carried forward. Indeed, OHW suggests taking those scenarios and linking them. Then there are ladder campaigns, where the sequence starts with a middle-ground scenario and the action moves one way or the other until either the top or the bottom of the ladder is reached and the campaign is won and lost.

I suppose somewhere in this my ideas about narrative campaigns, where the detail of the map moving is ignored but the moves are conducted with reference to a map to decide where the next game is to be fought fits somewhere alongside these forms of campaigning.

The next logical step from narrative and ladder-style campaigns is probably to use a proper map, gridded or hexed, and plot out the moves properly. I tried this out with the Jersey Boys campaign and it did work quite nicely, but there is, of course, a bit of a penalty to be paid in terms of preparation. It might be at this point that some wargamers decide that an off-the-shelf scenario game is preferable.

Of course, as in real life, the complexity of campaign games is potentially unlimited. Jersey Boys did have personalities created for the officers, although it has to be admitted that most of the effort expended on this was rather wasted, I feel. It also made use of a proper map, with pins to locate the units, weather, and couriers. These latter bits worked quite nicely, although the invasion had to wait until the weather cleared.

At the most complex end of the spectrum are those imagination games where the action spans continent(s) and decades. These take a lot of work, I think, to set up and, if my own memories serve me correctly, a fair bit of effort to maintain. The gold standard in such campaigns is, of course, Tony Bath’s Hyboria campaign, as documented in Setting Up a Wargame Campaign. I have tried this sort of thing, and much simpler settings, but the sheer size of it tends to overwhelm me.

I am aware, as you might have seen, of most of the wargame books that cover campaigns: Bath, Grant, Featherstone, Hyde. But the fact remains, it seems to me, that campaign games are a thing that is more honoured in the breach than execution. That is, not many people actually carry out campaigns, even though they might like to in principle.

I think there might be a fundamental paradox lurking behind this. The idea of a campaign is to achieve an objective – capture Jersey, for example. The objective for the other side is, of course, a mirror image of this. However, the next idea along is that the objective needs to be achieved with minimal casualties because for each combat you might lose forces you will need shortly. The campaign paradox emerges.

The campaign paradox is that the wargamer wants to fight wargames, fairly obviously. In a campaign game, however, the idea is to fight as little as possible while winning the campaign. The nature of the campaign game, therefore, is to limit the number of wargames to be fought out, while maximising the paperwork. This is not an attractive proposition to many wargamers, I suspect.

Given the popularity of OHW, I was wondering if there was any scope for (and perhaps it already exists) a sort of similar book, packed full of smallish campaigns. A set of easily transferable campaign outlines might work. It would be the sort of thing that OHW does for scenario games, crossed with Featherstone’s actual examples of small campaigns.

Or, maybe, the scope should be bigger. The Featherstone games are, mostly, what could be termed grand tactical rather than strategic games. The introduction of strategy is, naturally, opening a whole extra can of worms, and there would be no telling where it would end. Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that generals of times gone by had strategies, even if they did not use the term (which seems to have got its current meaning sometime in the Eighteenth Century).

So, I open the discussion to the floor, if there is any interest. What would persuade you to get the maps out instead of starting another scenario? Is there anything, or do time constraints preclude such things? I suppose, somewhere in my mind, is the question of whether we have to dash on to the next wargame all the time. Slow wargaming, anyone?