Strategic Level Campaigns? Recommendations wanted

[warrenpeace]

It also helps to have a system to generate battlefields. Warfare in the Age of Reason, a venerable set of miniatures rules, had a campaign system which included a way to create the battlefields.

[Warren Abox]

Empires in Arms is a great game - I've never played, but did observe a long-running game at a game shop back in the day.  They had a wall-mounted version with magnetized counters.  The crew met once a week, so every time you walked into the store you could track the progress of armies across the continent.  Good stuff.

Likewise with Warfare in the Age of Reason.  Dale Wood and Tod Kershner were my wargaming mentors back in grad school.  Great guys, and someday I need to put together my own table for AoR as a tribute to them.  For terrain battlefield terrain I'm using a mix of real-world meeting grounds and pre-built terrain mats with the latter informing the former.  Once you see the map of the imagi-nations it should make a lot more sense.  A bit of a kludge, but my own terrain collection has to be part of the equation for deciding how to organize things.

How well do you think the board games you recommended would work for PBeM campaigns? 

In the end, I decided to go old school.  I whipped up a map and threw together a sort of Diplomacy style rules that will make it easy for the players to just email me orders that I can adjudicate.  I'll be tracking everything and informing them of the results of each turn here: http://trossianwar.blogspot.com/

[warrenpeace]

Here's another set of double blind umpired wargame rules that might be worth a look. Read the review here on BoardGameGeek:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1813031/test-time-four-year-old-review-le-vol-de-laigle

[Warren Abox]

Great read.  Thank you for that.  That's what I'm trying to build for my players, but in a much more manageable format.  We're replacing a lot of the technical tracking with event cards and couriers for orders.

I plan to update the central map on a regular basis, with the rationale that words of the results of major battles will travel faster than any courier can.  So the players should find themselves in a situation where they send out orders obviated by a subsequent battle.  They'll have to decide whether to issue countermanding orders at the cost of another courier, or trust to the generals to adapt to the changing situation on their own.

Currently toying with giving each player five personalities to choose their generals from.  Making them choose between a highly motivated general of dubious talent or a tactical genius who always fights to preserve the lives of his men or a well-connected incompetent who will increase morale at the cost of making blunders at the worst time.