What did you do Dad?

[martin goddard]

In your first year of wargaming what was it like Dad?

1/300 th micro armour. Only tanks. none of that infantry nonsense.
Started playing competition with WRG 4th edition on a 6x4 table.
Used to carry my army about in a cantilever toolbox. Very heavy. Got the toolbox from Kays catalogue at 68p a week for many weeks.
Paint was all enamel.  Got very excited when Authenticolour came out.
Bigger scale WW2 was all mini tanks with early Airfix germans and infantry combat group.  Used Charles Grant's  "Battle rules".
Spears were made of piano wire or florist wire
Bases were made from card.  Textured with Porion.
Troops were painted with a black undercoat and the colours blocked in.
games took a good 3 hours ad were "line them up and go at it"
15mm were either Laing or mini fig strips.
For scenery we had Mod-roc, lichen and cork bark.
For music we had cassette tapes with Simon and Garfunkel or Mike Oldfield.
For charts we used china graph pencils and rubbed them out for re-use.


Good days!

[Leman (Andy)]

1966-67
Two ACW plastic Airfix armies painted with Humbrol enamels.
Terrain was Triang rubber buildings (the ACW in the Cotswolds?), hills were wooden with plasticine to smooth the edges, trees and fences were plastic railway scenery.
The rules were very simple, written by Don Featherstone, typewritten and stapled.
Wargaming news came from Don Featherstone's Wargamers Newsletter and Airfix Magazine.
As I was only 14 and living in Llandudno Wargames Conventions were unheard of.
Despite this I had two schoolfriend regular opponents, one of whom had a sand table in the garage. I had an old table tennis table, but I also had my own wargames room.

[martin goddard]

Do you still have the triang buildings. i have some but thy are crumbling!! They were a brilliant idea.

[Leman (Andy)]

I passed them to my brother - he's over nine years younger than me and started wargaming when I was at university. His first proper armies were Minifigs 15mm ECW.

[martin goddard]

15mm  ecw strips. They were great. a really good range. the only anomaly was the musketeers i lobster pot!

[Leman (Andy)]

And everybody who had a hat also had a mass of feathers on it.

[Leslie BT]

1/300 th micro armour. Only tanks. none of that infantry nonsense. Airfix 1/72 napoleonics and old west. Remember trying to get the horses to stay on their bases? Only metals the beginnings of Hinchliffe and Minifigs. Never like Lamings. The other were 54mm plastic, swoppet, timpo etc.[/size]
Started playing competition with WRG 4th edition on a 6x4 table. Home written napoleonic rules, still got a copy somewhere. Also played using some of the rule ideas published in the early magazines.
Used to carry my army about in a cantilever toolbox. Very heavy. Got the toolbox from Kays catalogue at 68p a week for many weeks. Cannot remember probably a toffee tin. Certainly nothing as sophisticated as a tool box.
Paint was all enamel.  Got very excited when Authenticolour came out.  Paint was humbrol enamils no primer kept flaking of course.
Bigger scale WW2 was all mini tanks with early Airfix germans and infantry combat group.  Used Charles Grant's  "Battle rules".  Had a few Roco tanks but they were an odd scale I think.
Spears were made of piano wire or florist wire Yep the same most figures either came with cast bendy poles, no change there then, some were empty handed and the blue card boxes the figues were indivdually packed in with blue tessue paper and piano wire spaers pikes etc., but often they had been lost.
Bases were made from card.  Textured with Porion. Bases were cearal packets often just paint with green enamel and maybe scattered with some railway modelling scatter.
Troops were painted with a black undercoat and the colours blocked in.  Washed in warm soapy water and then just panited, undercaot thats for cars repairs is it not.
games took a good 3 hours ad were "line them up and go at it" Usual all evening for the napoleonic games on the floor of the garage, we often left them set up and continue the following night.
15mm were either Laing or mini fig strips. Never played with 15mm until the 90's always 1/72, 25mm, 30mm Staddens, 54mm plastic Airfix, Britains, Timpo, Atlantic.
For scenery we had Mod-roc, lichen and cork bark. Scenery we would put books under small locally placed material patches, stones from the garden we did at one point make a real river with water contained in mud banks.
For music we had cassette tapes with Simon and Garfunkel or Mike Oldfield. Music! we were lucky to have electric lights.
For charts we used china graph pencils and rubbed them out for re-use. scraps of paper to record casualties was about all.

And I had to leave home before I started wargaming.

[martin goddard]

A great range though.
Did anyone ever have the shire books on wargaming. The red one by John Tunstall and the green one about the ECW? Both were a   bit random?!  Someone i spoke with a few years ago said they met John Tunstall running B+B in Wales he was staying at.

[Leslie BT]

I had the green one for ECW only got rid of it last year. Still have the Almark ECW book.

[martin goddard]

Yes i had the Almark book too. Mine is falling apart because of the bad binding!

[martin goddard]

Oh Les, sounds like a tough start to the hobby! I agree that airfix cavalry were useless! the worse nightmare would be the British napoleonic artillery limber...yuk! Such great sculpts though!

[Sean Clark]

Other than playing with unpainted the unpainted Airfix Waterloo set that I received one Christmas I really didn't play a wargame until I was 19 or 20 when I found out there was a club in Stoke. We played huge ACW games using computer moderated rules on a Spectrum 128k. They were called Victoriana by a company called Sita ( Software Tactics).

There were usually 8-10 of us crowded around a beautiful table with hand made terrain like a model railway set up using Dixon Miniatures for  which  I still have a real soft spot for (over £1 A figure now!).

It was one members passion who owned the majority of the figures and made all the terrain. He was/Still is a real  ACW officanado, improbably named Jeff Davis!

In my early days when I was still learning the ropes I was entrusted with moving the Ammo Wagon 10 cm per turn (5 turns per night if we were lucky). The first battle I joined in was Reams Station but we fought all of the major battles, refiggitng the 1st day at Gettysburg numerous times. It was great fun and really gave me a love for the ACW that lasts to this day.

Some great characters played those games, two of them now dead but several still friends to this day.

[Duncan]

Back in the very early days it was unpainted 1/72 or 1/32 plastics set up in two opposing lines and marbles rolled  a at them across the garden. Those that  I got knocked down were dead, the person  with last man standing was the winner!

Must have been in the late 1970s, started with 1/300 scale micro armour, like you just tanks, very little infantry. Also at the same time 1/72nd scale WW2, but not so much.

Then nothing for a few years until started playing Runequest and D&D in the early 1980s until Dougie Trader came out when I played that a few times before giving up on the school club for the reasons I have gone through in other threads. Then nothing for about twenty years or more until joining the Weymouth group.

Just years of collecting and painting models.

[pbeccas (Paul)]

My first step into real wargaming was not until 1999.  I saw a copy of Miniature Wargames in the local newsagent.  Bought a copy.  Saw rules advertised in the back so I wrote a letter and posted it to the UK and bought a copy of Rapid Fire and Crossfire.  Did not understand Rapid Fire at all.  But Crossfire took my fancy and I still like it today.  Ordered one pack of 15mm Japanese Infantry and one pack of USMC from Command Decision/Old Glory.  Was perplexed to find each bag had 50 riflemen only.  I would need to buy separate 50 bag packs of LMGs, Command, etc.  Saw a add for Peter Pig in a Wargames Illustrated.  Saw Martin did 8 man bags of the weapon types but at that stage no USMC or Japanese.  So I ordered British and Germans instead.  (My Japanese and USMC Command Decision are still waiting to be painted).  Used Humbrol enamel paint as that's all I could get.  Painted two armies for Crossfire.  That's how I started.         

[Leman (Andy)]

I still have five Shire books relevant to Wargamers:

Discovering Wargames - John Tunstall - 1969 - 4/6d
Rules for Wargaming - Arthur Taylor - 1971 (I have the 1976 edition) - 50p
Discovering British Military Uniforms - Arthur Taylor - 1972 (Have the 1987 edition) - £1.95
Discovering Modelling for Wargamers - D.Teague - 1973 - 30p
Discovering French and German Military Uniforms - Arthur Taylor - 1974 - 40p

At the time, very early in the history of wargaming, Shire were coming out with something relevant almost every year. Two others that were very useful:

Discovering Battlefields in Southern England - John Kinross - no date - 4/-
Discovering Battlefields in Northern England and Scotland - John Kinross - 1968 - 4/6d

Interestingly the one Welsh battle covered, Mortimer's Cross, crops up in volume 2, as do Shrewsbury, Stoke, Newark and Winceby, all firmly in the Midlands. The series also gives an insight into the high rate of inflation at that time with the cost of the books rising almost every year, the 1987 book coming in at nearly £2 compared to the 1967(?) book at the equivalent of 20p.