Plans, plans, plans

It's been more or less decided. We are heading off for the Soodan.

I am am member of a loose group of gamers and megalomaniacs who get together twice a year at CanCon and now WinterCon to put on a massive wargame of one sort or another.

We did a large 55 Days game at WinterCon this year and will follow up with it's big brother at CanCon over the Australia Day long weekend.

Next year's CanCon will be set in the Sudan and it looks (not to put too fine a point on it) MASSIVE.

Ideas being kicked around are a three-days' long campaign involving:

The River Column
The Desert Column
The Seige of Khartoum

or

All three!

At the moment, all's to play for but my money's on the "all three" option.

So the preliminary work involves looking at the historical orbats and then juggling figure numbers to get appropriate unit sizes - if you want bit briish Units, you need 4-8 times as many Mahdists and we are wanting 200 or more British and a similar number of Egyptians in Khartoum! 1500 or more Mahdists might do it. Even with some Gilderesque tricks, that's still a formidable number of troops. Oddly though, if enough of us pitch in, our existing collections will take us most of the way there (especially for the British) and well, there are always the Perry Mahdists in plastic...

Then there is the planning. How are we going to put on the game? What sort of game will it be? For myself, I'd like to see a co-operative game with the players all on the one side (which one :^)) with the Mahdists either run by the Umpire or (another Gilder touch) some species of reaction table. Then there are the rules - probably home-baked and based on the 55 Days ruleset we've written. And the terrain...

Where's MS Project when you need it?