Summary of 1813 Campaign

 

1813 Campaign map

The campaign started in July 2009. 

The campaign has been reorganised six times since then, either because it ran out of days in the year, or when it changed from a solo campaign to PBEM (play by email).   Within each campaign there are varying numbers of “mini campaigns” or “campaign phases”.   Each campaign phase is a self contained mini campaign consisting of 5 to 10 (usually 6) battles fought as wargames.

There have been 95 campaign phases, each lasting about two months.    This map shows the location of each phase and the colour indicates the winner of the phase.   The campaign has also produced 507 battles which were fought as wargames.   There are a series of blogs covering the whole campaign from July 2009 with a continuous diary and battle reports with photographs of each battle fought.

Sixth Campaign map

The current campaign (The Sixth) started in June 2020.   This was the first campaign to use the new fictional maps of Europe with military regions and districts.   I decided to create a fictional map of Europe having spent 11 years trying to create a map which I could divide into squares which I could then transfer to my wargames table.   Trying to scale down my master map (a road atlas of Europe) to a series of wargame tables proved too difficult (for me anyway).  So I decided to scale up a wargame table to create a fictional map of Europe.   Each square on this map is a military district.   Each district is divided into nine towns, and each town is a wargames table.    Nine districts make up a military region.

 

There have been 21 campaign phases each of which is shown on this map.   These have provided 134 battles to wargame.

Hildesheim Campaign Phase

When I started the Sixth Campaign I fought each campaign phase on a map showing the nine towns of that military district.   However I soon decided it would make more sense to show the area either side of the district border and include the administrative HQ of each army.   In this case the French HQ is Hildesheim and the Prussian HQ is Goslar.   The district border is the purple dotted line in the middle of the map.

There were six battles fought during this campaign phase, and the location of each is shown by a coloured star.   French victories are in blue and Prussian in Grey

When I started the 1813 Campaign in July 2009 I never thought that it would last so long.   I had run quite a few solo campaigns before then, but each were based on an historical campaign, rather than a fictional one designed to provided battles to wargame.  The great advantage of a fictional campaign is that you can develop it as much as you like. 

The objective of the campaign has always been to provide interesting battle for my wife and I to wargame, using to the full our collection of model soldiers and scenery.   In 2009 that included identical armies in 6mm, 18mm and 28mm.   However we soon found that we preferred to use the larger figures, and the 6mm and 18mm were soon gathering dust on the shelves.

The maps and the orders of battle have changed over the years, but the objective has never changed.   Being able to restructure the maps and order of battle has allowed me to created different scales of battle so we never get bored with the actual wargames.   It also allows me to undertake lengthy projects, such as the fictional maps, to add interest to the campaign itself.

When I wrote the original campaign rules I also wrote a set of rules loosely based on  “Le Feu Sacre” Napoleonic rules.    Both have changed drastically over the years, and now bear little resemblance to those used in 2009.   But this also has maintained our interest in Wargaming. 

The beauty of designing campaign and wargame rules for yourself if that you don’t have to justify them to anyone else.   It has certainly worked well for us, and I would strongly recommend it to other wargamers.