"Bathtub Europa" is a pet project of Frank Chadwick which first saw the light of day in the Barbarossa 25 booklet back in 1988. The goal of "Bathtub Europa" is to allow players to game out actions between the various countries of Europa on a realistic and playable scale.
For those not familiar with the concept, the basic idea is to reduce the Armies of WWII Europe by a factor of 25, and to allow players to set up a campaign game using the maps from the Europa game series. Each hex is equal to 1 kilometer, and each month becomes one day of 16 hours.
Too often, one fights a game without any feel for the effect of ones losses. After all, the goal is to win the game, and all else is secondary. Bathtub games, especially when part of a campaign tend to change the players attitude. When one discovers that ones total command of all types of AFV's is less than 30, the loss of any element of it hits home quite quickly. Thus Bathtub Armies allow players to get a better feel for what an Army actually has to work with.
One very important difference between Bathtub Armies and their actual counterparts is that in scaling down the Army of any nation, the exact TO&E of that nation is not always followed. In some cases ad hoc units are organized, especially when a nationally has less than 25 elements of a given type.
An example of this is in the organization given with this issue of the Command Post for the the Belgium Army has been given a motorized battalion. This battalion represents all motorized and motorcycle elements of the Belgium Army, and so has been organized with two truck carried infantry companies, and one motorcycle infantry company.
The Bathtub Europa British Army of 1940 has a single Tank Regiment, with three squadrons of very different equipment. Again, this is not to say that all British Tank Regiments of 1940 have this establishment, but rather army organized for Bathtub Europa needs to follow it. All units organized for Bathtub Europa will be marked with a (BA) to show this fact.
Starting with this issue, we will start running Bathtub Europa Armies A to F. All armies listed are of September 1939.
An Introduction to Bathtub Europa Reduced Armies for Game Play
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© Copyright 1991 by Greg Novak.
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