FOW D-Day Global Campaign Kickoff

Playing with a friend at home Blue vs Red is good. Meeting with lots of players at the local club for a tournament or a day-long huge game is even better. Playing a part in a world global campaign is really the next level of our hobby.

Battlefront and OnTableTop (yes, the guys we formerly know as Beasts of War) created the D-Day Global Campaign, a cross-media system to allow any player, any club and any tournament to be part of a six weeks D-Day campaign.

To start, you need to go to this site (), where you’ll find all the details. Basically, the campaign is formed up by a series of phases where you will fight the historical battles from the Normandy beaches to the French inland. Every time you and your clubmates will have a FOW battle, you will be able to upload the result, plus – if you want – a report of the battles and even some photos. You just need to register your alias (here ) and your club (after you registered your personal account).

Also, you need to buy () the D-Day Global Campaign pack, a supplement with all the rules and score posters you need to keep track of the battles and results.

You can add also Blue vs Blue games, in case you play Allied Vs Allied or Axis vs Axis for a massive impact on the global campaign. , if you want to play with your kids some fast no-infantry simply rules battles. And could be a good idea and timing , as Mitch did recently with full success.

Three roads to follow during the six-weeks Global campaign. I’ll go for Caen and Falaise, with my British Army.

Each battle of the Campaign has some special rules: in the Caen battle, you can move one of the objective up to 10 cm. In Falaise, you can choose one of the enemy tanks and have it starting the game as bailed out – just imagine if you do it on a single Tiger platoon and he fails the morale test! Mont Picon was so well defended you can reroll all counter-attack rolls, to simulate the stubborn fights around the area.

And there are prizes, too: if you are playing with your club, you can win a set of rural roads, European houses, the famous Caen Church and also a double-sided map!

Get ready with your Shermans and M10s, Allied Commander! You will find plenty of German armour around Normandy.

Who can explain the Campaign better than Alex from Battlefront? We didn’t miss the opportunity to ask Alex some questions, and he answered with uncommon enthusiasm.

What did spark the idea of a global campaign? 

D-Day and the beginning of Late War are a big deal to us. For a lot of players, Late War is the most exciting period in the game and they want to crack out the big toys and play some really cataclysmic battles. After having run a three month Hobby League aimed at getting now forces ready to fight, the Global Campaign was a perfect way to celebrate the first releases of Late War- especially D-Day: American and German, and give players of both Flames Of War and TANKS something to really get involved with. It’s an excuse to play more games, isn’t it?

Speaking of Global Campaign, can you give us some info on the results of the past Team Yankee events? How many players involved, how many games?

I would direct you .

Before and behind the Global Campaign, we had Hobby League: a great initiative for clubs around the world. How did it go? Are you happy with the result?

It went really well. A great many clubs and stores kicked off their Hobby leagues with a bang and have been playing games, keeping up the momentum, entering the competition, and winning prizes. The result, just in the sheer number of new forces people have been lovingly working on has been rewarding for me to personally see, especially when that work is coming from a new player. Overall, we are all really happy with the Hobby league and it has set people up perfectly for the Global Campaign.

The Hobby League PDF is a free download. Any chance we will see the Global Campaign PDF free as well or do you prefer to have it “physically” sold at the symbolic price of 5 dollars?

The Hobby League PDF was available but all the prizes and extras had to be picked up by buying the Hobby League Kit. Same case with this. You don’t need the campaign kit to get involved with the Campaign, it’s just a good way to focus the campaign in your group. If you aren’t picking up the kit you can still be involved by joining in online for free and logging your games.

How does the collaboration with OnTableTop (former Beasts of War) for the Global Campaign will work? Will they keep track of the results? 

Yes, OnTableTop [is] running the Campaign and will be collecting the results data. We will still be going through it and working on the regular news updates for the Campaign.

The Global Campaign and the Hobby League are two events that go “beyond” the simple FOW game, creating a “meta” community between players and clubs. Do you think they work better than simple tournaments, where maybe the competitive players steal the scene? 

I think the key to the Hobby League and the Global Campaign is that they don’t ask you to get involved in doing something extraordinary or expensive. Both the Hobby League and the Global Campaign are about elevating what we as wargamers already do: paint models and play games. Whether simple tournaments are better or worse isn’t really the question, the question is more of how you get people all over the world to take out two days for a single tournament and to play 8 games in a row.  It seems a lot easier to me to have players earn rewards for taking their normally at-home painting to their club and doing with friends, and then turning their regular weekly game or two into part of a bigger experience.

All this is possible thanks to the Socials like Instagram and FB: I’ve seen Instagram profiles full of Sherman and Tiger photos (like mine, to be totally honest). Have you got any plan to use them wider in the future for the hobby? 

Social media is a way for us to communicate with the community and to share what we’re up to.

Will we see the Tactical Edge Cards in the “normal” game or they will be kept as a special feature for this campaign and the Hobby League?

 Tactical Edge Cards are only for the Campaign, although you don’t literally have to throw them away once you’ve used them, so if you and your opponent agree there’s no stopping you using the ones you picked up from the Hobby League in your casual games.

After making play people from every corner of the world, what is the next step? Which other battles could the next Global Campaign?

Let’s enjoy this Campaign first, and then look forward to what the future holds.

Sure Alex, we are trying to capture Caen right now at our Milan Club, but we hope to have Bastogne campaign soon!