Skip to main content

Case Blue: Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein MegaGame!


I've done a bit more mapping recently. My friends and sometime game opponents Pete and Matt are running a Megagame on Case Blue in June (see flyer below). I gone done them a map for it. 20km hexes over large swathes of southern Russia.

This one was surprisingly quick, think I've spent about 5 hours and its 80% done. I need to do the Georgia area, and the area east of the Don as these were not covered in the source map I raided. The main challenge was projection. I used a google maps screen shot Pete provided as my base map for getting things in the right place, but given the size of the earth being mapped this leads to some distortion. All maps project a spherical bumpy world on to a 2 dimension flat surface, as such you cannot keep all things in perfect proportion. My map distorts the coast a bit different to say Mark Simonitch's map for the up coming Stalingrad 44 game. Most things look pretty good but If you measured the exact distance between the Don and Volga it might be a little too close together in the north compared with the south. Fortunately most gamers never notice these things as long as it sort of looks ok.

I've gone for a white background to evoke snow, even though most of the campaign is in the autumn/summer, and I've paired it with a deep blue for the waters as it gives a clean visual contrast. In general it looks like a mid 80s style map.

If you are in the UK and want to play a 40 player + simulation of the Case Blue campaign check out Pennine mega games; http://www.penninemegagames.co.uk/case-blue-42.html





Labels:

Comments

  1. Pete.30 April 2018 at 17:04

    It's a cracking map Simon, thanks for all the work you've done on it.

    Cheers,

    Pete.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quick Looks: Cimean War Battles - Tchernaya River

 A quick one today I traded off Across the Narva by Revolution Games (should post something on this) for an oldish (2000) copy of an S&T magazine. The mag came with two battles reprinted from the 1978 Quad game on the Crimean War. The full Quad also contained Inkerman and Balaklava, this magazine version just has Tchernaya River and Alma. Initial setup Early SPI games (and actually GDW and AH come to think of it) of the 70s tend to have lots of rules you already know. I go, U go, movement, fire, melee, rally, and most of the rules are standard. Command and control rules and friction of war arrived a lot later. To couter this I have added a simple house rule. For each division (units are brigates and regiments, about 2-8 per division) roll. On a 1 in 6 movement is halved unless the unit can charge, in which case it must charge the nearest enemy.  A simple easy to apply rule for generating those light brigade charges. You could also easily convert this to a chit pull game by division
2 comments
Read more

Quick Looks; Red Star / White Eagle

I generally hate it when people describe designs or ideas in games as dated, because many of the most innovative games  are older than I am. Equally it implies there is something innately good about new designs, which I don't think there is. Dune is arguably the best multiplayer 'war' boardgame and the 70s basic DnD is in my view still the best RPG. I wasn't born until the late 80s and didn't discover these things to the mid 2000s so this isn't nostalgia doing my thinking, its just that some old ideas are better than new ones, despite our apparent 'progress'. Back when Roger B MacGowan did cool art house covers But having said all this Red Star / White Eagle is a dated game design. And this matters if you are looking at popping £70 on a new reprint of it from Compass Games. I am a wary cheapskate so I picked up a second hand copy with a trashed box of ebay for £20. It was worth it, but only just. Poles have just been creamed on the south we
2 comments
Read more

Wilderness War is probably the best CDG (review)

One attribute of a good war game is that it opens up rather than narrows down the more you play it. Each time you play you see there is more strategic depth than you thought there was. When I first started playing Wilderness War, a card driven wargame design (CDG) on the French Indian War by Volko Runke, I thought it was simply a case of the British building a large kill stack and marching it up the Hudson and the French trying to get enough victory points (vps) from raiding to win before the inevitable. The outcome would likely be decided by card play and who got the reinforcement cards when they needed them. The game is afoot.  Four games later I have realised that this is not the case. Yes the British will sometimes win by marching a big army up the Hudson and sieging out Montreal, but a lot of the time things will play out quite differently. Maybe the French strike first, perhaps the British realise that going up the Hudson is going to be a slog try another route. Ei
3 comments
Read more