Home Forums General General Did You "Invent" Miniatures Gaming?

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  • #97641
    Avatar photoirishserb
    Participant

    When I was around 10 years of age, playing with plastic army men started to lose some of its sparkle.  I still loved my heap of soldiers, tanks, and various other military toys, but the act of setting them up and knocking them down was losing some luster.  So I came up with this idea of creating some sort of rules for playing war.  I wanted a structured system to decide the outcome of the battle.

    Being that young, I came up with a some really bad ideas, and liked the idea of the game, more than the process itself.  As chance would have it, before I could really better develop the idea of rules for playing war, I became aware that others had already done this, and that there were rules out there for playing war with toy figures.  Four and a half decades later, I still play with toy soldiers.

    I’m guessing that there are probably many of us, who “invented” our hobby to some degree.

    So I ask, did you create rules for a gaming with your toy soldiers, before being introduced to the idea by a pre-existing set of rules?

     

    #97643
    Avatar photokyoteblue
    Participant

    Yes, I did. No, I don’t remember what rules I came up with. It was 50 years ago!!

    #97644
    Avatar photoSteelonsand
    Participant

    Can’t claim the credit myself, but a friend of mine definitely did; a large oblong of hardboard, scored into squares and overprinted in green with a river across the very middle was the “game board”; home made six sided dice marked “LD” – light damage, “HD” – heavy damage, and “D” – destroyed, backed up by a “Repair” die with just a couple of  sides marked “R”…… A ranging stick, and Skytrex/Leicester Micro Tanks 1/300th WW2 as the protagonists.

    To my young eyes, used up til then only to my own serried ranks of Airfix plastics, bowled over haphazardly….. this was the future!

    My introduction to miniature gaming, soon backed up by the discovery of  Charles Grant and Terry Wise books down at the library, but my friend was absolutely the originator!

     

    #97645
    Avatar photoWhirlwind
    Participant

    Yes I did.  I was aware that there were such things as wargaming rules but I didn’t own any or know anyway of getting hold of some.  So I invented some from first principles.  I guess they were like a really simplifed version of early 40K, in some ways…

    #97649
    Avatar photoMike
    Keymaster

    Nope, always did pretend ad-hoc and the rules arrived in my head courtesy of GW.

    #97652
    Avatar photoRhoderic
    Member

    No. Growing up in the 80s and 90s meant I wasn’t that “deprived” of constant stimuli, nor of access to the general established culture to which this hobby belongs. I was a bit late discovering miniatures gaming specifically, because it wasn’t that well-established over here, but until then I was in the thrall of video games, alternative forms of tabletop games (such as CCGs) and the general pageantry of nerd-dom that was already extant in a big and colourful way by the start of the 90s. Not that any of that dulled my urges to create, transform, improvise and experiment – if anything it heightened them – but my creative outlets were mostly computer-related or else to do with general world-building and storytelling.

    I’d have had to have grown up disconnected from that whole, rich, easily accessible world of nerd-dom to even have had a chance improvise my way into miniature gaming all of my own. To me, that’s almost as far-fetched as if a child or teenager today was to be completely unaware of video games, so one day they “invent” it themselves by programming their own text adventure in BASIC, all the while the kids next door are playing Fortnite.

    #97655
    Avatar photodeephorse
    Participant

    So I ask, did you create rules for a gaming with your toy soldiers, before being introduced to the idea by a pre-existing set of rules?

    No.  At the age I was when I first started playing with Airfix soldiers I was far too young to have any real knowledge of warfare.  Consequently I was quite happy to fire matchsticks at ranks of soldiers without worrying about regulating the activity.  Later I bought a Shire publication on wargaming which, IIRC, had some rules in it.  However, without an opponent (my brother was too many years younger than me) I soon graduated to SPI boardgames, the majority of which you could play solo.  It wasn’t until I joined a club that I found out just how many sets of rules existed and started to use them in my gaming.

    Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen

    #97678
    Avatar photoNorm S
    Participant

    So I ask, did you create rules for a gaming with your toy soldiers, before being introduced to the idea by a pre-existing set of rules?

    No. At the age I was when I first started playing with Airfix soldiers I was far too young to have any real knowledge of warfare. Consequently I was quite happy to fire matchsticks at ranks of soldiers without worrying about regulating the activity. Later I bought a Shire publication on wargaming which, IIRC, had some rules in it. However, without an opponent (my brother was too many years younger than me) I soon graduated to SPI boardgames, the majority of which you could play solo. It wasn’t until I joined a club that I found out just how many sets of rules existed and started to use them in my gaming.

    I also came in via Shire Publishing – I think it was Discovering Wargames by (John ?) Tunstall, this was closely followed by a Featherstone book and that-was-that, the right buttons had been pressed!

    #97683
    Avatar photohammurabi70
    Participant

    I’m guessing that there are probably many of us, who “invented” our hobby to some degree. So I ask, did you create rules for a gaming with your toy soldiers, before being introduced to the idea by a pre-existing set of rules?

    Yes and no – started with matchstick artillery and then read Featherstone’s War Games as a pre-teen; started writing my own rules as the book rules did not do what I wanted and then discovered there were published rules.

    www.olivercromwell.org; www.battlefieldstrust.com
    6mm wargames group: [email protected]; 2mm wargames group: [email protected]

    #97697
    Avatar photoDeleted User
    Member

    In hindsight it was stupid, so very stupid. It was a naval game, I made ships out of Lego, turned off all the lights and used my watch’s illuminator to gauge visibility. Dice rolling didn’t even occur to me I was throwing ammo at ships if it hit and the ships topple over t sank.

    I think first rule I read was on the internet, a txt file battle bible with epic 40k on it.

    #97701
    Avatar photoAbwehrschlacht
    Participant

    I started by collecting Esci plastic figures and painting them, but not using them for anything other than setting them up in battle scenes. That is until I took them to school for a ‘show and tell’ session in one of the classes. That’s when a new kid in school told me about wargaming that he played at his old school. He explained, basically, the rules and as soon as I got home that night me and another mate set up a couple of boxes of Esci figures. There were no formations, the figures were everywhere and I think the rules went something along these lines (completely made up by me); one figure can move 12″, or 12 figures can move 1″ each, or any combination of figures as long as the 12″ distance was never exceeded, so six figures, 6″, etc. Firing was 6″ and you had to roll over the distance in inches on a dice to hit and although there were 100 figures (two boxes) on the board, only one could fire per turn. That’s about 33 years ago now, so my recollection of the rules is a little hazy… But, yes, I certainly invented my own rules.

    Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/stormofsteelwargaming

    Blog: http://www.stormofsteelwargaming.com

    #97709
    Avatar photoEtranger
    Participant

    Yes, although the first ones written down were actually for a “D & D” style dungeon bash. Before that it was more or less all made up along the way. The most formal were on the bedroom floor, with books under a sand coloured sheet, with the Airfix Fort Sahara atop the largest hill, and FFL and Arabs fighting around it. Quite how the ‘civilians’ from the High Chapparal set got to be involved is anyone’s guess!

    Formally it would have been Tunstall & Featherstone, along with the articles in Airfix Magazine. Gavin Lyall’s Operation Warboard came along a little bit later. The school library actually had a copy of that, although it spent most of its time loaned out to me.

    #97712
    Avatar photoMcKinstry
    Participant

    Yes. I remember creating a ‘resolution system’ for my Airfix/Rocco armies and plastic navy ships to fight but as I recall, it was more deterministic than just dice as in, if a battleship shoots at a cruiser it does X while a cruiser returning fire did Y. I cannot for the life of me remember how the 8th Army went about beating up on the Afrika Korps (but they always won!).

    The tree of Life is self pruning.

    #97725
    Avatar photoDon Glewwe
    Participant

    The 60s were a catch-as-can-catch fun.

    There was no one to tell us what modifier to use when judging whether the Germans detected the tunnelling efforts of the POWs (who were under the pingpong table blindly taping tunnel sections…) but we all agreed on ‘what made sense’ and would apply to their discovery.

    Likewise, the Mexicans at the Alamo faced definable odds, but the bindergun (random casualty generator) served to create a sense of battlefield tension that would not have been possible if one had simple consulted the relevent ‘Should have been’ texts.

     

    The idea that people actually wrote down rules was amazing.

    The fact that other people paid money for them…well, that was just crazy!

    #97740
    Avatar photoPhil Dutré
    Participant

    Play pretend and making up “rules” for your toys is a natural development for any young child. It would be weird if you didn’t.

    It all depends where you want to define the cross-over line between child’s play and a “proper” game.

    #97743
    Avatar photodeephorse
    Participant

    So I ask, did you create rules for a gaming with your toy soldiers, before being introduced to the idea by a pre-existing set of rules?

    No. At the age I was when I first started playing with Airfix soldiers I was far too young to have any real knowledge of warfare. Consequently I was quite happy to fire matchsticks at ranks of soldiers without worrying about regulating the activity. Later I bought a Shire publication on wargaming which, IIRC, had some rules in it. However, without an opponent (my brother was too many years younger than me) I soon graduated to SPI boardgames, the majority of which you could play solo. It wasn’t until I joined a club that I found out just how many sets of rules existed and started to use them in my gaming.

    I also came in via Shire Publishing – I think it was Discovering Wargames by (John ?) Tunstall, this was closely followed by a Featherstone book and that-was-that, the right buttons had been pressed!

     

    That’s the one!  I still have it on a bookshelf in my other house.

    Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen

    #97767
    Avatar photoRhoderic
    Member

    Play pretend and making up “rules” for your toys is a natural development for any young child. It would be weird if you didn’t. It all depends where you want to define the cross-over line between child’s play and a “proper” game.

    I must have been weird and unnatural, then. I honestly never did anything like that.

    The charm of playing with toy soldiers, legos and other things of that sort was precisely the fact that it was freeform. I got my fix of “rules and procedure” from video games instead.

    #97771
    Avatar photoMike
    Keymaster

    I must have been weird and unnatural, then. I honestly never did anything like that.

    Me either.

    #97776
    Avatar photoirishserb
    Participant

    LOL!  I thought I was weird and unnatural for trying to create rules.  None of my friends did, and the two that I shared the idea with, thought it was a goofy idea.

    #97795
    Avatar photoDarkest Star Games
    Participant

    My cousin and i started out with the green and tan army men, shooting rubber bands at them and using bath towels crumpled up as terrain.  We used a big fat rubber band that had to bounce off the ceiling for mortar fire.  Wherever it landed you spread your hand out and that was the blast area.  When we had to move it outside we changed to dice because of the wind.  So, 5+ was a hit in the open, 6 was a hit if in cover, and mortars were lobbed rocks.

    Then my uncle introduced us to the old Blitzkrieg game, and The Russian Campaign, and Victory In The Pacific…

    "I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

    #98053
    Avatar photoJemima Fawr
    Participant

    Yes, I saw the pilot film for the Edward Woodward series ‘Callan’ in about 1982 (aged 11ish) and thought “WOW!”

    I already had stacks of 1/35th Tamiya models and 1/72n Airfix Napoleonics, but we had no information on what wargaming was, no local wargames club and no internet… So I made up my own rules involving a gridded board, dicing to hit and other stuff.

    Then, during a deeply tedious coach-trip with my family to Stratford-Upon-Avon, I found a copy of Miniature Wargames (#45 or thereabouts) in a W H Smith’s newsagent and devoured it for the rest of the day – even reading an article about the Swiss Army of the Cold War was infinitely better than being dragged around Anne Hathaway’s Cottage… The mag included an advert for ‘Charge! Or How To Play Wargames’ by Young & Lawson, so it was soon ordered and my best mate and I spent the next few years trashing my mum’s kitchen and getting 3rd degree burns from Prince August moulds and trying to cast all the troops needed for Waterloo…

    My wargames blog: http://www.jemimafawr.co.uk/

    #98063
    Avatar photoJozisTinMan
    Participant

    Yes I did, modified AD&D combat rules for my plastic army men.  You know, the kind with M-16’s and Bren gunners and bazookas.

    http://jozistinman.blogspot.com/

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