Walled Towns

 Walled city of Almarez

One of the main objectives of creating our PBEM campaign was to ensure that we used all of our figures, buildings and scenery.   Over the years I had bought, or made, a lot of scenery which never made an appearance in a single wargame.   We had stone walls, hedges, marsh and broken ground plus a lot of buildings which never managed to get used in actual wargaming.

To overcome this problem I made sure that each campaign map would include at least one of every single scenery item we had on the shelves.   This did not mean that they would necessarily appear on the table, but made it very likely that they would. 

We have no control over where the battles/wargames will be fought, that is up to the campaign commanders.   But with an average of four battles being fought on each campaign map, there was a good chance that everything would be used at least once during each campaign phase.

Some months I replaced our city walls.  They are hand built, and pretty basic.   But I wanted to have the ability to fight sieges in the campaign, so I needed town walls.   Each map will have at least three walled towns out of a maximum of nine towns.  So the walls are designed to be either towns or cities.   Towns are two scenic squares, cities are four scenic squares.

The battle of Almarez, our latest wargame, was to be the first walled city to appear on the wargames table.   The photo above shows what it looks like.   There are four scenic sections, each with free standing buildings.   Each section can hold one infantry brigade.   So it would take a full corps to fully garrison a city.

It’s important that everything on the campaign map can be reproduced on the wargames table.  It’s also important that everything on the wargames table can take part in the wargame.   However walled cities/towns do present a problem.   The walls prevent hand to hand combat, except after a prolonged siege.  I do not want to have to wargame a siege.  It would take too long in real time, and would be very boring.

All of our rules, both campaign and wargame, are designed to be simple and fun.   No complicated charts or lengthy explanations covering all possibilities.    I will now have to write some rules for sieges which reflect this.