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<p style=”text-align: left;”>I was thinking today about when I actually began wargaming as a proper hobby, as opposed to just playing about with Airfix plastic soldiers, and was able to narrow it down to January 1983, on a wet Saturday in Penzance.</p>
I was waiting for a train with my school friends and popped into WHSmiths, where I bought Issue 2 of Miniature Wargames. This was followed the week after by a copy of the Military Modelling Wargamers Manual in my local newsagent and then a long term loan of Tank Battles in Miniature from the local library.I’m still going thirty seven years later and I still have that copy of Miniature Wargames as well.
How about you?
I remember reading Blood Bath at Orcs Drift in White Dwarf 68 which was August 1985.
Though I don’t think I bought any rules until WFB 3rd edition, which was 1987, not sure on the month, but bought it when it came out.
That if anything would have been when I started wargaming proper.I was into the hobby a bit before that, boardgames and painting models etc.
1965, summertime I think, though I don’t remember the month. After a year of regularly asking staff in the Children’s section to get books from the Adult section of the library for me, this was the one that not only started me on wargaming but also got my 12 year old self an adult ticket to add to my three junior ones.
Cue games on the back lawn with Airfix ships and Fletcher Pratt inspired rules. Halcyon days!
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data
I used to push my Airfx figures around, then I found this:
That would be the early 1970s.
"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke
I used to push my Airfx figures around, then I found this:
That would be the early 1970s.Me too 🙂
Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.
I blame my mother. Or, more properly, I am eternally grateful for her pushing me towards this all engrossing hobby. I was gluing Airfix kits, and my fingers, together at about age 6. All those canopies ruined by glue fingerprints. At age 9 I too was pushing Airfix figures around the carpet. At some point in my very early teens my mum bought me this book, and I discovered that ‘pushing around’ could have regulation applied to it.
For lack of an opponent, my brother was too young for the hobby, I looked around for another way to play wargames and I discovered the hex boardgame courtesy of SPI. After four or five years of playing these games solo I found that there was a wargame club in my town, and I never looked back. So I’ve probably been playing with toy soldiers for well over 50 years now, and I can’t see myself ever giving up. What a great hobby!
Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen
Dicovering Wargames by John Tunstill rules….which we didn’t really understand at 11 years old
That reminds me of my inadvertent misreading of Tank Battles in Miniature, when I thought that each turn representing one minute of real time, meant that you had only sixty actual seconds to resolve each turn per tank.
I eventually got down moving, ranging, traversing, firing, hitting and penetration to about forty seconds, with my alarm clock set to go off after the time was up. Not bad given all the tables involved, neatly copied out onto postcards.
Absolutlely the best tank warfare games I’ve ever played and very seat of your pants.
I was 12 (earlier than ’83!) I already had Airfix figures and I was playing with them (with no rules)… I went to the UK for a trip… and in a bookshop I found this:
It was in a bookshelf between “normal” books about fishing or gardening, this would have been unbelievable in France at the time.
I still have it. …In fact I never played with it, it’s unplayable, but it was fascinating, there are ideas to think about, and it did help me to understand that wargaming could be accepted by “serious” people and not despised as a kid’s game.
http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/Dicovering Wargames by John Tunstill rules….which we didn’t really understand at 11 years old
That reminds me of my inadvertent misreading of Tank Battles in Miniature, when I thought that each turn representing one minute of real time, meant that you had only sixty actual seconds to resolve each turn per tank. I eventually got down moving, ranging, traversing, firing, hitting and penetration to about forty seconds, with my alarm clock set to go off after the time was up. Not bad given all the tables involved, neatly copied out onto postcards. Absolutlely the best tank warfare games I’ve ever played and very seat of your pants.
Fantastic!
Bit late to the party but it was 1979. I had made some new friends at high school and I went round to their place and played a game using 54mm Airfix ww2 figures on a table tennis table (US Vs Germans) and these rules:
Great fun and I was hooked, going to the local wargames club a month later. I have never actually played those rules ever again though.
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