2026 has been going swimmingly so far in the wargaming department. Besides being sidetracked a bit with unforseen projects (my son recently asked to start playing Bolt Action and so I’ve been furiously buying up 20mm kit to play it with him. Incidentally, if you live in the UK and are experiencing a sudden lack of availability of 20mm figures and vehicles, they’re probably all being shipped to my house in the US :).
Anyways, according to my 2026 schedule, March is “Cold War” Month. (January was WWII focused, and February was Napoleonic focused). This is not a hard and fast rule but more of a prioritization for projects and the like. I’ve decided to focus on my 1/285 microarmor collection and play around with a “serious” wargame – the US Army’s old Dunn-Kempf simulation.
Dunn Kempf was a training simulation designed to test and evaluate Army units in a number of different categories from battle planning and situational awareness, all the way down to crew drills. It was a smash-hit in the Army, with “sets” being delivered to Army commands worldwide (like Kriegspiel years before – Der Wütende Dackel is pleased!)
You can read about Dunn-Kempf here (and there is even a gentleman who has been putting on huge and spectacular, doctrinally-correct DK games at HMGS conventions! Also from my understanding there are still corners of the US Army’s Training & Doctrine Command senior staff schools that occasionally use it) but my plan is to use the rules and bring them a bit more into the 21st century in terms of mechanics. If you want a quick primer, there is an outstanding QRS on Board Game Geek here, and also an amazing article in Wargame Digest (written in 1979 before I was born) that talks about mechanics of the “game”.
The sticky part for Angry Dachshund fans is that DK is meant for multiple players and even full military staffs to work out course-of-action development problems and play with orders-transmission and tactical resource management – issues that are way beyond the scope of my humble abilities. (oh that truck was knocked out? S4 – how does that impact our calculus for resupply and how will it impact capability over the next 24 hours?) Instead, I want to focus on the tactical planning and engagements, and explore the capabilities of the belligerents as the US Army expected them to be in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Okay, full disclosure – I also want to get my microarmor on the table! 🙂
Cold War month will culminate in a large campaign style series of games with the natural bad guys (Soviets or one of their clients) trying to seize key terrain held by the good guys (a NATO force TBD but I have Americans, West Germans and British in their assembly areas, maintaining strict light and radio discipline, and waiting for the word to move out).
After reading through Norm’s outstanding Napoleonic campaign, I think I’ll try out Henry Hyde’s “Junction Jeopardy” to fight a series of Cold War battles to either achieve or deny a Soviet breakthrough. Time permitting, you’ll get to see the results of these battles. Worst-case, you may get a short history of the results. I do plan on playing a very small DK game with the Rules-As-Written to see how they play “out of the box”.
As usual, expect plenty of goodies to be posted as I play around with a new QRS and a more streamlined way to play DK. Stay tuned!
PS – Comments were “opened” to allow commenting without permission (until the bots find me). Hopefully this is easier for those of you who wish to leave a comment.
Der Wütende Dackel 
SUperb!
I was looking for a set of modern rules – was leaning toward FFT3, but I may just jump in with you on DK and try them with a few games…and that is a NICE QRS
Thanks Darren – I somehow knew you’d be liking this post 🙂 stay tuned – more cold war goodness to follow.
I have flicked through (one of John Currys) DK, so I’ll certainly be interested to see your efforts in this area. I’ve played a few military training games which supposedly require entire command staff to run, but as the aim of our recreational games isn’t training units and staff, they are usually quite manageable by one umpire.
Have you got a 10 foot long sand table though?
Hi Martin – unfortunately no 10′ long sand table but I’ll improvise 🙂
I think DK can be run perfectly fine as a standalone wargame but an umpire would greatly help especially because DK required used of a curtain for fog of war (!).
The huge difference with “real” wargames or “serious” wargames is in their intent (IMHO). Command Post Exercises (CPX), Tactical Exercises Without Troops (TEWT) and the like are designed with objective goals to test plans, evaluate skills and generate lessons learned that further feed training objectives. The cool part is, we’re not looking to do any of these things and so we are free to utilize the mechanics of a wargame for our own purposes, interests and historical ends.
DK really grabs me because it contains a compact “To Hit/To Kill” mechanism that was based off real-life projections of its time. So when you read it or play it, you’re playing/experiencing how the US Army felt that a shooting war might unfold in 1979 or 1980.
I’ve got clothes older than you.