Craig's Wargaming Blog: Dragon Rampant Solo Gaming Campaign

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Dragon Rampant Solo Gaming Campaign

Over the past few years I’ve been slowly chipping away at various armies for my Middle Earth project- which in itself is more of a vague idea of a large scale game using most of the forces I’ve been putting together rather than an actual project, but hey, it’s kept me busy..

So now I’ve got quite a few “building block” forces, which are something I decided quite a while ago to do. Build smallish armies which can be combined for various larger armies. In historics this can be quite easily achieved, the Carthaginians for example are a good building block army as several different nationalities/armies can be combined into a larger force and morphed into all sorts of interesting directions.

Part of my thinking has been building 4-6 unit divisions for Hail Caesar, or smaller forces for Dragon Rampant and using these to combine into larger games. For example, putting Gondor + Rohan together to be able to field larger forces or play large games or for scaling up gaming systems from Dragon Rampant to Hail Caesar. I can have at least one division of each nationalty in a larger Hail Caesar style game and usually have enough fores painted up for two, sometimes three divisions from one nationality. A number of my historics forces can also pull double duty for Middle Earth or more regular fantasy style gaming too.

I find that Dragon Rampant, using fixed base units, is my go to game size way these days, you can get a fun, engaging game with 6-8 units per side without having to paint up too large a forces. My standard armies for Dragon Rampant games are 36 pts per side but can easily enough field twice that many points per side games if I wanted and one day will do so.

Anyway, as you’ve probably noticed actual games have been few and far between in the past few years but I’m kind of getting the gaming itch again. Having moved houses at the end of last year, downsizing into a smaller home after my wife and I decided to live separately and sort some stuff out, we've currently come to a point we we are comfortable living apart, each with our own space and looks like that's the way things will remain and so I am starting to toy with the idea of getting a few more gaming related paintings etc for the walls and giving the place more of a wargamer/historic geek vibe.

Anyway, my new place has lacked room for my gaming gear so I built a garden shed to house my gaming stuff in and have finally got a gaming space organised. Until recently I’ve been living in the internal garage when not down at the bach while my son and a mate of his had the bedrooms in the unit that we’ve bought. I have been toying with the idea of converting the garage into a proper utility room and have insulated one side of it so far, but still need to strip the gib off the other side, insulate it, put some more power plugs in to complete that particular project but am in no hurry to do so- good things take time apparently.

Anyway, our boarder went home to the North island just prior to the Covid-19 lockdown so I’ve been able to move back into the house proper and that frees up the garage/utility room for use as a gaming space. Excellent.

So with that in mind time for a wee bit of solo gaming. I’ve always enjoyed solo gaming. As a teenager I'd often recreate WWII battles on a gaming table in my sleepout, Monte Cassino using a large amount of the shingle of the pathway for rubble of the town of Cassino being one of my favourites and conduct solo games. Often, I’d run little practice scenarios and games and used Donald Featherstone’s Solo Wargaming book for ideas and inspiration.

Solo gaming does not have quite the same of the satisfaction of outsmarting (okay, rolling better dice than) an actual opponent but can be, and is, a pleasant way to while away a bit of free time. So with that in mind I’ve decided to try and run a bit of a solo knock out style campaign over the next few weeks.

I’ve put together eight different forces and over the next few weeks (assuming I don’t get too busy/side tracked with other projects- or with my studies, I’m doing some uni papers extramurally as well this year, I will endeavour to run a small knock out campaign. And, who knows, at the end of it assuming life has returned to normal may get my mate Ian down for a large scale gaming using all the forces on weekend.

So the Campaign rules, not many actually.

36 point Dragon Rampant Armies

The winners of each match up go though to the next round So there should be 7 games in all.

And that’s it really, why complicate things too much I say?

Round One match ups.