Expansion

 Having got a small window of time between work and domestic duties, I have made a start on my version of Bob Cordery's Hare & Hounds Campaign set up. 

The setting is an imaginary "Ancients" situation, with the expansionist Republic of Vard seeking to subdue various tribes who have formed a confederacy to resist them. 

The H&H board was created by randomly generating a number of 3x3 Portable Wargame boards. I haven't drawn on the links but they follow the same pattern as described by Bob's illustration.

I'm using a pin board to keep track of the Army movements (8 Euros at Tesco!):

The Vard (Green pins) start with two Legions (numbers II and III) up near the frontier. The tribal armies are near their respective settlements. The composition of the Legions/Tribal Armies has been predetermined using a table similar to the random army tables in Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames. Each Army has 6 units and a General.

Turn 1 sees the Vard cross the frontier. 

On Turn 2 the advancing Legions are opposed....

The First Battle:

 Legion II V The Anacondi Tribe.

 

The initial set up sees the Anacondi to the East (top of the picture) with three Cavalry units and three Infantry. The second Legion of the Vard Republic have three Infantry, 2 Cavalry and one Archer unit.

The Anacondi are aggressive and advance at once.

The Legion push the Anacondi back on the right while the centre holds with their left flank protected by dense forest.

  Pushing forward, the Chief of the Anacondi realizes too late that he has enemies to his rear

 the remaining tribesmen are surrounded, and the tribal force is annihilated! 

The surviving members of Legion II must now recuperate and wait for reinforcements before moving again.

The next game will see Legion III pitched against the Coronithi tribe.

Further to the last post, I have made a change to my conditional formatting to add a wooded hill instead of the second wood/forest grid. Thanks to Jonathan Freitag for suggesting this. I haven't adopted a separate town on a hill option - I may dice for this!

Random

 A recent discussion on Bob Cordery's blog, regarding generating random layouts for Portable Wargame boards, led me back to an idea I had some years ago for using MS Excel's conditional formatting function to do just that. Put simply, when a condition is met by the content of a spreadsheet cell, another cell will automatically be populated, say by a coloured fill. This enables a PW Grid to be randomly populated with colours representing scenery. 

The following demonstrates this using a 6x6 grid, a system I'm currently trying using 3x3PW rules.

Two identical grids are made, one contains a random number generating function, in this case set between 1 and 20, though this can easily be altered. The other has the conditional formatting set in each corresponding cell.

The sheet I have generated will populate the squares using the above values - I put two possible options for wooded/forested squares which I may edit. The hills and woods are universal across all 36 of the grids; the lakes are restricted to the middle two rows, and the Built Up Areas are restricted to the centre 4 squares. This was just a preference for my own purposes. The type of terrain to be generated can be tailored by the settings of the formatting.

Following are a few random examples that were created with the above settings:

Adding other features such as roads or rivers automatically is currently beyond the scope of this spreadsheet, however Lakes need to be fed by a water feature and settlements usually have some sort of track/road going to them, so these can be added as makes some sort of sense.

 

Having generated a number of boards, these can be brought together to be used as ready made battlefields for a Mini-Campaign in the style of Bob's Hare & Hounds game plan.