A look back at 100 Days Campiagning Nr. 2

battle of Soignes from the first campaign game in 2002

Rather than go into a blow-by-blow account of the games, I thought to share a few of the strategic maps of the first game and one of the tactical battles from the game, to get you a sense of what the players encountered in the play of the game and what running the game from my perspective was like.

For the players, each had their own map of the actions of the field, for comparison I shall also show the map from the perspective of the game-master, me.

For the Prussian player on June 14 (game start) they saw, for enemy troops or allied army there were only flags dropped into the locations where the troops were:

Prussian Player's map at game start.

While as the GM, I was aware of:

Game start as seen by the game master.

On June 17 for this game, two large battles came up at Arete & Soignee:

mid-day of the busy 17 June

For my 'squares' as I call them that I used in building the tabletop maps for battle, I also generated a set of' 'parchment' copies of the maps so that I could put together maps that the players could then lay out plans for their own troops locations and combat situation.

For Soignee this looked like:

a 2' x 3' map would be laid out to match these troop deployments

So the tabletop looked like:

same map now laid out with troops at 08h00

The Players each got to see only the field from the perspective of their respective commanders:

08h00

10h00

12h00 French

14h00

16h00

18h00

20h00

The result was a defeat for the Anglo-Dutch at Soignes.

Meanwhile over at Arete:

battlefield of Arete on 17 June in Campaign game #1 from 2002

Again the map had been presented in the cartographic form the players to make plans ...

the resulting map with troops laid out for battle

Now for the players the battle came out like this:

08h00

10h00

12h00

14h00

14h00 Prussian view

16h00

18h00

20h00

Yes, for those paying attention, the battlefield did get larger at 14h00 and more Prussian forces did arrive - this was supposed to be a surprise to the French player.  It did not work out as the Prussians had hoped.

Indeed that day saw Uxbridge and von Zeithen lost to the allied forces.

The Campaign did not go all for the French either, for after a brilliant defensive action at Ghent the French were forced to retreat and lost the Campaign.

battlefield of Ghent 14h00 19 June

Campaign map at game end

This was my first go round at trying to run a game like this using only email and the camera tools I had at hand.

There are also the 'wraparound' self-extracting postcards that I may get to share via dropbox ... if there is interest in seeing the images?

What sort of long-distance games have you organized or played in?  What were the results like?