Junction Jeopardy, a Campaign by Henry Hyde

I bought this as an Amazon order for £8.50 plus post. It is also available as a PDF download from Henry’s site for £5.

This is a 22 page, soft backed, A4 sized booklet that describes a campaign setting. Henry has called it a coffee break campaign, which is a nod that you can get this booklet for a price comparable to what you might pay on the high street for a coffee and a pastry in a typical town - I like that.

The booklet was recently reviewed on YouTube (by Ken at Yarkshire Gamer) and I will put a link in the resource section below. That video gives a very good idea of visual layout and content, so I can save some space here by not repeating or showing all of that.

If you look at the front cover of the campaign book (photo above) you will notice a map that is divided into nine partitions - each of those can be thought of as a standard 6’ x 4’ wargame table and so our campaign area is 3 x 3 linked campaign tables.

In the centre is a village called Vallée de Larmes which you will notice is important because it is built upon a crossroads and has a river crossing.

The booklet suggests three types of campaign for play - the encounter, the attack / defence and the retreat by stages and each is explained.

The forces used are a matter for the gamer to decide and obviously you would choose to fit your collection. Henry is thinking initially of platoon to battalion strength when discussing WWII, but really it is up to you.

The heart of the system is the campaign day. Each turn is one hour and in each hour a unit can move a given distance over the campaign area, depending upon unit type and the type of terrain crossed. Movement distance is generally 1 Movement Unit equates to a 6th of the table length, so on a 6’ table 1 movement unit would be 1 foot of movement.

As an example, a foot infantry on difficult ground can travel 1 Movement Unit in a turn, so travelling over constantly difficult terrain for 3 hours (3 campaign turns) a unit would travel 3 feet, in other words, on the campaign plotting maps, halfway down a campaign table.

As the day moves on, visibility increases with better daylight and then it slowly diminishes as we move towards dusk and nightfall. Good visibility might allow artillery on one table to fire on units of another table or spot for artillery fire against that table etc.

As units come into contact with each other on the campaign map (i.e. are present in the same campaign table), action will be transferred to the tabletop and they will fight a normal table top battle, using the rule set of your choice.

The booklet opens from a WWII perspective. It then has ideas for the Horse & Musket period and some notes on modern battlefields, but the essence of the campaign booklet is that it can be used as a template for any period, including fantasy and sci-fi.

It is a light read and not overly prescriptive. The last nine pages are given over to larger plans of each section of battlefield.

Overall, it is a fairly quick read and my immersion left me wishing for a little more by the end of it (a good thing). There are a couple of spare blank pages in the book and I would like to have seen them utilised in some way, but in reality, I am pleased with what I have and on the flip side, the light approach does not overwhelm and probably makes it more likely of getting something to the table. 

The booklet also serves as a bedrock of system / ideas for moving on to develop battlefields of your own, perhaps of favoured locations or parts of bigger battles or even bigger campaign areas - it can all be very much personalised. 

Henry has described the system as relying on trust and that an umpire can be involved plus it can be played solo (good). He also sees it suitable to play as a ‘ladder’ campaign with each table individually being part of that.

I was really pleased to see him give a thumbs up to solo play as this can often be a hurdle for gamers (me) in campaign systems.

It does have an element of the Old School charm which I like. The actions, if kept to smaller forces, may develop something akin to Charles S Grant’s Table Top Teasers or give some skirmish level games such as say Bolt Action, a deeper context due to the interacting nature of the other battlefields and any forces that may be on them.

The player will play with the rule system of their choice and can  adapt the campaign to work hand in hand with the chosen rules. For example I might add in an element of orders transmission between tables.

Anyway, I am really pleased that I bought the book and I plan to start my own campaign for the battle of Vallée de Larmes!

This ready made campaign platform will conveniently kick off my campaigning for 2026. The setting will be 1809 and the forces will be French and Austrian. At the moment I am thinking perhaps of having a divisional sized force per side and doing a meeting engagement (the encounter campaign) with control of the village (also known as table 5) being the objective.

Obviously I will need to change the flavour for my chosen forces and period, so I shall be fighting the battle of Klein Stetteldorf, a small town in southern Austria that has a crossroads and sits on a waterway called Göllersbach.

As I play this out, I will return here to write up an ongoing narrative of the campaign over the course of however long it takes. I will be playing solo and I know that will specifically interest some of the readers that pass by here. I already own Henry’s substantial book ‘Wargaming Campaigns’ (Pen & Sword), but will resist visiting that for any ideas just so the blog reader gets a better sense of what can fall from this, the Junction Jeopardy booklet.

I feel my £8.50 (or surrendering my coffee and a pastry! :-) ) is about to bring me many hours of gaming fun.

[Note - as an aside, the comments section of this blog is being turned back on - also a special thank you to the gamers who have recently signed up to follow this blog and to those veterans that continue to do so].

Resource Section.

Yarkshire Gamer review - LINK

https://youtu.be/x8ZGCI1sdVs?si=WPrlaIoERu1bGzDs

I have another bit of webspace called COMMANDERS that is a bit more magaziney than here and because of that gets updated more often - LINK

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html