Thursday, 6 December 2012

Skirmish Elite: Battles of the Borderlands

The next Skirmish Campaigns booklet I own, chronologically, is The Russo-Polish War 1919: Battle of the Borderlands and, technically speaking, it's actually a Skirmish Elite (although the difference is a little lost on me).

Battle of the Borderlands is a 48 page, black and white, staple bound book in US letter format.  In addition to the introductory material it contains 8 scenarios forming three campaigns set during the Polish Soviet War of 1919-21.

The book starts with a single page introduction to the conflict, a two page history of the borderlands, a further two pages on the campaigns, a theatre of operations map, a single page explanation of the Skirmish Campaigns format,  two further pages covering notes on scale and figures, attachments and victory conditions; a table detailing how to translate the scenarios to various sets of rules and a bibliography before moving into the actual scenarios.

The scenarios are all platoon size or less but a couple require Polish cavalry. The terrain is all relatively straightforward but several of the scenarios require a number of buildings (6-10, including a church) and one requires a locomotive some freight wagons, a couple of abandoned trucks and a railway station.

Unfortunately I haven't actually played any of the scenarios from this book as yet.  I do have figures suitable for the Poles as you can use figures from almost any WW1 army as they fought in most of them.  It's the Soviets I need to pick up some figures for and that's on the list for my Russian Civil War project.

Obviously this book has a much narrower appeal than Rommel's Route to Verdun and with only 8 scenarios (6 if you don't have figures for the Polish Cavalry) I think it's not as good value; however, there is very little material around concerning this conflict and if you are interested it may be worth a look.

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