Two day campaign battles

The current PBEM Linz campaign continues to provide a good selection of battles to be wargamed.   But they are becoming increasingly complicated.

The ideal is to fight one corps per side and reach a conclusion in one campaign day, or 12 wargame moves.   This would normally give two armies of 8 infantry brigades, 2 cavalry brigades and two artillery batteries per side.   This size battle allows lots of space on the wargames table to manoeuvre and have open flanks.

However this campaign has produced a series of battles which have to be fought over more than one day.   This may be because the battle starts late in the day, and there are not sufficient wargame moves to reach a conclusion.

Or it may be that the battle opens with one division, and the second arrives late in the day.   This will often result in the first division fighting a holding battle until the second arrives.    Again there is not there are not enough moves left to find a winner.

This is not too much of a problem when there is only one battle per campaign day.  

It usually takes Jan and I a week to fight each wargame.  This is the same time frame for one campaign day.   So I can usually keep the campaign moving, and ask the two corps commanders involved in the battle for a quick decision what they want to do next day.

I can then leave the wargames table set up, and just fight a second set of 12 moves for the second day.

However now it looks like I will have two different battles which will both run into two days.

At the end of the first battle I have to change the wargames table for the second battle.   I can fight the second day of the second battle with the same set up, but I have to change it back at the end to fight the second day of the first battle!  

Fortunately I take photographs of each move for the battle report, so I can set the towns up to look like the first day, and I can position the divisions more or less correctly.  Any slight errors can be covered by night time redeployment.