The hypothetical 1938 Balkan conflict (Empire Reborn) now has some parameters.  Maybe not the best, but at least some structure.

My latest efforts focused on victory conditions that, in turn, involved identifying the regions and ethnicities involved.

Balkan Front addresses the latter consideration with a  map outlining the area’s regions.

Unfortunately, I cannot find Map 14A (as well as all my War In The Desert counters – a collateral discovery while searching for maps).  But, I did find a scan of 14A which helped me work with my old Marita-Merker maps.

Decided to simplify matters by using control of a city or cities (shown below in parentheses) as objectives for each country.

Bulgaria’s  territorial objectives are  Northern Macedonia (Skopje) and Southern Dobruja (Varna and Pleven).  The Hungarian objectives are Transylvania (Cluj and Timpsora) and the Backa region (Novi Sad). Both Romania and Yugoslavia must  maintain their current borders.

Late in this process I recognized the maps reflect 1941 national boundaries.  In 1940’s  Treaty of Craiova, Romania’s ceded Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria.  The initial placement of each nation’s forces has to be adjusted accordingly.

The initial placement of units, like the order of battle (OB), is speculative and uses multiple less-than-reliable sources.  The composition and size of each country’s military changed significantly from 1938 to the opening of Barbarossa campaign in 1941 -where reliable OB information can be found.  “Educated Guess Work” is giving the OB process the benefit of the doubt.

Since the whole project is hypothetical and speculative, I decided to flesh out each country’s forces with some specialized units.  The inclusion of limited air, anti-aircraft, armor and engineer assets provides an opportunity to work with a wider variety of the Barbarossa  Unleashed rules. These rules will also be used in the Operation Groza game with Tim.

Additional scenario considerations now include guerilla warfare by disaffected minorities, the use of Balkan Front’s Yugoslavian mobilization guidelines in which certain regions – and the units based there – openly oppose Yugoslavia, and a variable game length  based on the Macedonia War (which helped inspire this entire twisted process) scenario published in Europa Magazine.

Need to get this moving so I can start pushing cardboard.

I’ve dredged up another hypothetical scenario, this time using the Europa system and New  Europa components.

I first started thrashing with this Central European/Balkan scenario several years ago.  Here’s a link to the post explaining this recurring bout of madness.

As emphasized in my earlier post, Europa purists should disregard anything with the “Empire Reborn” tag.

Over the past week I’ve revisited old resources, found (after a hunk and peck household search) the appropriate Europa maps,  and downloaded additional information including limited orders of battle.

Given what I have, it’s safe to say this is not going to be a simulation.

Regardless, it will be fun to push counters for countries that are either victims and/or after-thought cannon fodder allies of the major WW2 powers.

“Red” is the working name for a Bulgaria-Hungary alliance, aided and abetted by Germany, Italy, Albania and the Croat minority in Yugoslavia.

The “Blue” alliance will be Yugoslavia and Romania, with assistance (in some form) from France, Greece, Turkey, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Where the Soviet Union fits into all of this is a damn good question.

The time frame is early 1938, with the assumption(s) that Germany, France, and Poland focused on Czechoslovakia , with German and Italian resources tied up in Spain.  The Austrian Anschluss has occurred, but the incorporation of Austrian forces into the Wehrmacht is still in progress.

One (and there are many) aspect that needs immediate attention is the victory conditions.  Each alliance had specific territorial ambitions.  The problem is to translate these regions/areas from sources and identify them on Europa maps.  Like the rest of this project, “vague” is an operating principle.