Our BOB campaign ends – Final musings of an umpire

After a year of planning and 3 years of playing, over 24 tabletop battles our BOB campaign has come to an end at the end of turn 10. My aim original aim was to play 12 turns (a year in the game period) but several things conspired against me. One of the players reached their 5 goals in Turn 9 ahead of planned but well done to Piotr and his Polish forces! Diaries becoming increasingly more difficult to co-ordinate for the tabletop battles to achieve my original aim of get a turn completed within 2-3 months so that player interest was kept up. The sheer administrative burden was taking a toll too on my hobby time. Finally on reflection quite a few of the battles were also becoming repetitive with the same players fighting each other in the same areas of the map.

We have seen some players leave and some join the campaign but overall, I am delighted that I have managed to keep around 13 – 15 players engaged in the campaign for three years.

This is first major campaign I have done at the club, and it has been a huge learning curve and without the support of our Club President Phil Sibbald I would have been overwhelmed, especially at the start of the campaign.

With hindsight the scope and complexity of the whole project was too ambitious ( I was warned!) As the campaign progressed so did the administrative burden and as the complexity made each the final turns a mammoth undertaking. However, on the flip side I am sure this complexity was enjoyed by a number of the players.

Below are some of the lessons I have learned as the campaign developed.

The project area is vast as can be seen by the picture of my last master map where I plotted the course of the campaign. The movement of armies, the movement of diseases (Spanish Flu) and who occupied what population centers. There were boundaries imposed in terms of a Northern Theatre (Siberian Front) a Western Theatre (Around Odessa) and southern national borders.  The apparent freedom of movement was great in one aspect so that the players were free to move anywhere on the board. However as alluded to earlier I noticed that with fixed starting points for each player most players only came across 3 -4 other players. This was compounded my decision to limit the ability for players to collaborate a lot as I feared a group of players would work together early to knock out another player too quickly.

If I do another campaign, I will see if I can find a way of getting the players to have a greater ability to interact with each more. Rather than having 13 different playing positions look at ways where perhaps there are 2 sides each with different factions that can ally or work against each other. In addition, also look at having greater freedom to move to other parts of the board. Phil and I have discussed undertaking a campaign based on the Crusades where there are two sides, but where Christian factions fought each other as did the Muslim contingents.

Undoubtedly the period worked very well. The Russian Civil War  / Back of Beyond was not well known by many players to start but the sheer richness in variety of armies, weapons (tanks, armoured cars, planes, artillery, HMGS) and troop types certainly helped players create bespoke armies and almost anything goes especially if you allow some non-historical items such as our infamous ‘Beast Tank’.  I spent quite a bit time on researching the period as I alluded to and created a master tome of over 100 pages of notes on factions and weapons for the campaign.

Watching players get to grips with the period tactically has been a joy to watch and some like many World War 1 commanders at the start of the war coming terms with the lethality of the bolt action rifle, machine gun and artillery pieces whilst still hoping their cavalry perform like cuirassiers of the Napoleonic period.

One of my errors was to allow the players too much money to build armies that became unwieldy to deploy and use on the tabletop. Our initial games started off with 4-5 brigade sized armies but turned into 20 brigade sized armies at the end. Although we have had some spectacular battles over 2 days with over 1,500 models. The sheer size of the battles meant that turns started to take longer to arrange these larger battles needed whole days or weekends to complete, when perhaps it would have been better to have much smaller battles that could be fought in an evening. I should have been braver in this respect. Options I had to tackle this  were to reduce the amount of money players received each turn, make them employ more garrison troops to hold key places and add a natural wastage to troops from desertion/ disease.

The battles have been fought in the main with great spirit and players have been more cautious than the average club game.  Many of the battles have real meaning for the players which has added to their value with players husbanding resources.  I have been impressed how many players collected their own armies and have added to them as the campaign developed.

My homemade tabletop rules have been put through the ultimate test, and we now sit with version 16 soon to go to version 17 after reflecting on the last battles. I believe we have a set of rules that we can play and I feel they produce a fun game with an eye on the historic nature of this conflict. I believe these rules can be adapted to cover the Spanish Civil war and The Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The campaign rules I developed have also given me a solid base to use and adapt for future campaigns.

One aspect of the campaign that I feel has been underused is the use of spies and the fact that one player Neil Harper (Back Of Beyond Security Solutions BOBSS) was there in the campaign to provide additional intelligence services were rarely used. Neil had placed a spy in every commander’s HQ so he knew where each commander was and the size of their army at the end of each turn. Some players did use him for other acts of espionage to some success. A few minor commanders were assassinated and removed from the order of battle. One player’s commander was the target of several failed assassination attempts. It would be interesting to get player feedback to this aspect of the campaign. Did it add to or was it superfluous to play.

Something that was more successful was that each player also received an intelligence update each turn informing them of the results from their spies which also included a ‘Secret Police Report’ which gave some information of any suspicious activity within their controlled areas. Some of this was true and some of it false. One or two players took a glancing interest but some were very sensitive to its contents.  Found it a useful tool to nudge players into a certain direction or add a bit more confusion and friction.

Although there were quite tough restrictions on getting heavy weapons (tanks, artillery and aircraft). All of them after the set-up turn needed to be acquired through Noel as a third-party arms dealer. This was deliberately set up to be a frustrating process for the players to add more friction to decision making and was also good way of taking money out of the system. However, I probably allowed too many specialised brigade weapons such as flamethrowers and AT rifles.

One of the key admin burdens were trying to work out which units should be upgraded after fighting a battle. Very few players labelled units and often changed formations making it at times very difficult (if not impossible) to work out which unit fought or did not. This was particularly acute when looking at upgrading class 3 troops to class 2 which needed 3 battles to get their upgrade. On future campaign I need to either drop this or work out a system that tracks units much more easily. Pete Crawshaw and Jonathan get plaudits for their unit labelling.

I believe the Journal was a great success and I received regular contributions to it. Player feedback was positive and although at times very un-PC it did contain some amusing articles (not written by me). I tried to use this to impart information to the players and get them more immersed in the campaign. I would highly recommend doing something similar although time consuming, I would say it was important part of the campaign.

I created a series of characters / minor commanders (Heroes of the Cause) for each army to give the campaign some flavour and narrative, but I am not sure that they added as much character as I would have liked and in many cases, they were just used to absorb hits or improve morale roll.

As mentioned in my earlier blog I was not very well prepared with maps and a scouting system although this developed well, and I got much braver with my tabletop maps. Early maps were very symmetrical to avoid any player being too disadvantaged by taking one side or another. As the campaign developed so did my maps. I now have a book of maps for future battles and campaigns that I can draw on. However, by the end the players had worked out that cavalry was not a battlefield winning tool but was very good for scouting in open terrain. However, the deployment rules came under strain at the end of the campaign as the battles had become so large. In a few instances armies were deployed behind screens to help speed up this process.

Some Observations on the campaign from Phil Sibbald my invaluable c0-umpire

The campaign has, as I expected it would, created more realistic and cautious thinking as to what are acceptable battlefield results.

It has also, for me, drawn out some more personal aspects to each players approach – some of my observations on this –

1. Whilst giving in to his cavalier tendencies with his cavalry, Mal has on occasion shown surprising restraint.
2. Philip`s aggressive (sometimes perhaps stretching the written rules) pursuit of a tactical advantage.
3. Compare this to Trevor`s more discrete and subtle lower key approach to gaining a tactical advantage
4. Richard`s sensible long-term perspective in building up a strong army.
5. Patrick`s propensity to be distracted from his core goals to the dismay of his British government superiors.
6. Mark`s rather fatalist approach to fighting his battles.
7. Despite winning the campaign, Piotr`s apparently timorous battlefield conduct.
8. Alex`s unquenchable enjoyment of the whole thing.
9. Doug`s workmanlike method in planning out and generally securing a favourable result.
10. Brian`s devil may care, sometimes scathing, appreciation of both his allies and opponent’s battlefield efforts.
11. Juan`s desire to protect his elite troops whilst seemingly being unaware of the effect this had on his results, but believing and chasing each apparent anomaly in the rules as being the cause.
12. Pete`s dogged “what the fxxk” resilience.
13. Theo – well what can I say – I am baffled.
14. Jonathan`s slow, steady and competent, but semi-detached approach.
15. And finally, Rob, your blossoming from a hesitant start to an old hand in campaign management

The top three things I can recommend any budding campaign umpire, firstly pick a period that you enjoy, and for the players to either know well or can get really immersed into. This campaign has certainly got many of the club members finding out about and really enjoying a period they did not know well. Secondly as I was warned repeatedly, please try and keep the process as simplified as you can without losing flavour and nuance. Try to find easy ways of processing parts of the turn and respond to what your players are looking for – do they enjoy the planning piece or are they really just looking forward to getting the troops on the table and rolling a few dice. Finally look for ways of keeping up the engagement from all players in the campaign, one of my key pieces here was having mechanisms to avoid players being crushed too early and or for one player to get an unassailable lead too early in the campaign. The other 2 key ways of keeping engagement in my campaign was the Journal and ensuring everyone was able to attend the tabletop battles which culminated with 15 people being involved in the final tabletop battle.

The Campaign may have finished but my love affair with BOB certainly has not, and it will be a regular feature in the games that I will host at the club and indeed the War Room. This will go in two ways for me. One will be to explore a more Pulp / Narrative version of the game with some very non-fictional figures and troop types some of which found its way into the campaign such as the ‘Beast Tank’ thanks to Empress Miniatures and certain Indiana Jones movie. Some pictures below of similar creations that will appear at some time.

The other route which will be do some more historic scenarios thanks to the various scenario books have recently purchased that have been developed under the rules set Setting the East Ablaze series in particular Dunsterforce armed with my converted Corgi Model T Fords.

I am also painting up my Baron Von Sternberg army and his ‘Asiatic’ cavalry division. A quite unbelievable character and story.

 

A Model Version of the Bloody Baron himself.

Overall a great experience but I am relieved it has finished so I can get some painting done. My Vikings for our Pillage campaign are calling!

Last word to Phil Sibbald – A very big thank you for your help and support!