The Battle of Hankley Common - Participation Game at Warfare 2026

At Warfare 2026, Guildford Wargames Club ran a participation game based on the Allied D-Day landings.

In 1943 Canadian troops created a replica of part of the Atlantic Wall for training at Hankley Common in Surrey.

As this is local to Guildford, the club decided to plan, build and run a participation game.

As befits a participation game, the rules were simple and fun.

In the game I played, there were three players, each with a 79th Armoured Division specialist tank:

• A Sherman Crab mine flail
• A Churchill AVRE with Small Box Girder Bridge
• A Churchill AVRE with Fascine

Each player had a pool of thirty dice and could play a hand of five dice per turn, any unspent returned to the pool.

A die succeeds on 2+. A 1 ends your turn.

The 75mm gun on the Sherman required two successes to suppress a bunker, the 230mm Spigot Mortar on the AVRE only required one success.

I was in command of the Sherman.

The game started with the three tanks in the Landing Craft.

My Sherman rolled off the landing craft first (rolling two dice at a time to ensure that it should actually move if I rolled a one), clearing the minefield with its flails.

Having cleared the minefield, I moved to one side to allow the following AVRE to move forward with the bridge to go over the gate. This did make my tank a bit of a bullet magnet, each hit reducing the number of dice in my pool

Having taken a number of hits, I suppressed the left bunker, one of the AVREs suppressed the other.

The AVRE with the fascine moved past the now bridge-less AVRE, dropped the fascine in the anti tank ditch and proceeded across, followed by my Sherman. The bunkers and the Panzerschreck team were suppressed, and the roadblock and a section of Dragon's Teeth removed.

At this point I was down to three dice, my colleagues had six plus, so they rolled forward cross country, ending one square from the exit side. I then rolled for my movement, made all the rolls plus I was on road to exit before them.

View back over the defences.

Thank you to Guildford Wargames Club for a very enjoyable game, and my fellow players.