'Battle' Practical Wargaming by Charles Grant

[bobcockayne 20723xp 0]

Wonder how many of the older BOW/OTTERS out there started with above?

@warzan talking about his and Lloydy’s start in gaming brought back memories .

I remember  finding it up a corner in Beechdale library when I was about 12 , little did I know it would begin a 50 year journey into gaming. Starting of with the mountain of badly built Airfix kits and the soft plastic HO .

About a year later  I was lucky in that Sgt Major at my Army Cadets started one of the 1st wargames club with Wilf Upton who ran the model shop it Wolverhampton St. Walsall where I was intoduced @torros to 1/300th micro tanks and WRG 1925 to 1950 rules, though none of us younger members could afford a full set so we just had a couple of copies of certain pages and we only got those because Wilf was an ex printer and still had friends in the industry . A member from Aldridge worked for Leicester micor models (pre skytrex) and brought down a selection of WW2 tanks at 5p a pop or 10p for Tiggers . Infantry was an interesting concept but we had a fair supply of Artillery , AT guns and various transports.

It was all historical as Sci fi/fantasy  not only was unknown but little more than a distant glimmer in someones eyes. In fact it was about 4 years later that one my current group probably brought the 1st copy of D&D (the 3 little books) in West mids from some little gaming shop in Lichfield or Burntwood. Which was played with Medieval figures mainly as nothing fantasy was available until Citadel miniatures appeared.

Everything was mail order, unless you went to odd show , which meant sending of for a list with a SAE in it for the return. You read list endlessly and hoped it might have  the odd grainy picture (Lloydy you have problems with little pictures on line) ,  with no real idea what was going to turn up at end, some would be good, some would be a vague model of what you’d ordered ,not much more than budgie grit in many cases.

Occasionally a TV show would appear on Wargamming , but generally on at obscure times or on other areas of ITV than I got and was show rather than ATV today, although it did appear in Callan and the movie of it at times.

 

[bobcockayne 20723xp 0]

Oh and before someone mentions it we did lick up Street with tongues and our dads beat us with a stick rapped in barbed wire, but will they believe it?

 

[torros 23816xp 0]

Great book. I started with Battles for model soldiers by Mr D Featherstone

 

[zoidpinhead 12492xp 0]

I also started with Donald Featherstone although it was “Wargames” in my case, from the school library.  I was allowed to buy the very copy I got started with when I left school and I’ve still got it on my shelves.  It has been joined by a few other related tomes over the years.

[athelstaneParticipant 698xp 0]

I think I started with one of those Discover books,  ‘Discovering Wargames’, IIRC, didn’t have any proper rules in it sadly.  Then I think there was another book from the Discover range that had wargames rules without dice.

Featherstone followed, then Napoleonic rules by ‘London Wargames Section’ (anybody remember them?).  Moving hundreds of unbased and unpainted plastic Airfix figures around wouldn’t appeal to me now 🙂

Late 70’s and 80’s was WRG 1950-1975 and Warsaw Pact and NATO.  The latter helped a lot when I joined the army as, funnily enough, I passed out top in training in Soviet Bloc vehicle recognition and organisation 🙂  All those hours as a teenager ‘swatting up’ of vehicle stats etc. weren’t an entire waste of time.

 

[athelstaneParticipant 698xp 0]

These lead to Fantasy

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