Wednesday 17 October 2012

The Modern Portable Wargame as a Tonic

I have spent the day trawling through recruitment agencies and attending an interview for another contract role - thus far a fruitless but necessary process. I feel drained and with a minor lingering headache (something I suffer from very rarely as a rule) so will be foregoing the club this evening. SWMBO is out for the night so I have the TV at my disposal and a stack of Blue Rays waiting to be watched but I am not sure if I can the enthusiasm together to do so.

One bright spot in all this is that I have had a good opportunity to go over Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame: Modern rules which are available as a download from Here. These are definitely a tonic for a scrambled brain and I fully intend to fight my next action using them - and with the new 'modern' era blocks I have ready.

An idea I intend testing with them is using standard unit sizes - 4 blocks for infantry, 3 for cavalry/vehicles and 2 for support weapons and artillery. The number of blocks in the unit will determine the number of d6 that are rolled for fire or close combat although any retreat result will affect the entire unit, not just an individual block.  I will also introduce the exhaustion level once again - probably set at a base of 33% of the number of blocks a side is fielding, perhaps with a random adjustment based on overall quality or tactical situation.

I am planning a WW2 game but as yet am undecided at to what form it will take. I am veering between the Russian Front or Holland 1944 as both will give me  good attacker/defender match up. Ideally I should like to tackle something from the desert but sadly I do not as yet own any desert terrain although I hope to rectify this soon.

4 comments:

Geordie an Exiled FoG said...

Hmm David you are getting me interested!

Stop it

I sense scale and period scope creep

David Crook said...

Hi Geordie,

These rules have been used quite successfully with the Spanish Civil War and make a good 'toolkit' for tinkering with as required. I hope to get a game in using them over the next couple of days if I can which will of course be reported via the blog.

Simple but very effective.

All the best,

DC

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

"Ideally I should like to tackle something from the desert but sadly I do not as yet own any desert terrain"... Tunisia???

David Crook said...

Hi Steve,

That could be an idea to entertain for sure - and it is one I shall take a closer look at! Thanks for the idea, much appreciated.

All the best,

DC