"What Were Your Best Wargaming Years Ever?" Topic

I was reorganizing my game room just now and while going through some very old and battered terrain I made from Usborne cut out models I got kind of nostalgic and wondered if my best wargaming years had passed me by or were they(as I hope) yet to come?

What about you? What were your best wargaming years and do you expect to relive any of them or are you resigned to simply cherish them for what they were?

Or, on the other hand, are you especially jacked this year about the prospects for some great gaming years ahead?

Grade school, high on sugar, staying up all night playing D&D with my friends in 1983. It was a hack and slash style play, which is the only way I liked it. Loved the miniatures. Still do.

Of course, much of the appeal of those days is that it was the last time my life was fairly care free and innocent. After that was a serious of unfortunate incidents.

High school, playing Charge on the weekends with the guys at the university club, 1973-1976

1982-1985 in my 20's. 1983 was the best. Played every Sat night with the same friends. Best years ever for gaming. Family life was a disaster though. So I'd like to go back to the gaming, but not to anything else. Sadly, I got rid of all my games in 1997. That was a mistake!

Actual "wargaming"? I don't know, maybe the present, even though I don't do it as much as I'd like. I used to play several AH boardgames with my father as a kid (Squad Leader, Waterloo, Gettysburg, 1776), and got roundly thrashed at all of them, but it was still fun spending time with Dad. Dabbled a bit with "Knights & Magick" from Heritage for a bit in the 1980s as well, and I still have a soft spot for that game.

Playing several RPGs in the 1980s with my high school friends was great fun. Much like nycjadie we would spend entire evenings, even weekends once or twice, playing D&D, Aftermath, or somesuch game. I'm still close by to several of my old (and still good) friends, but life simply does not allow us to all get together more than once or twice a year for a game.

Dave

For Rpg's it was high school. No commitments, nowhere to be except my basement playing D&D and Call of Cthulhu. For wargaming I'd say right now. I finally have the money to buy and play with any miniatures I want and the choice is amazing!

I had great times at University playing RISK.

After University, playing miniature games with my two best friends who introduced me to the hobby.

Looking forward to sharing this with my two sons, who have been playing more and more complex games over the past couple of years.

I think that my best gaming years are still to come…sharing this wonderful hobby with my sons!!

Well hard to say, I only knew about board wargames in high school and only had one friend who played but we played darn near every AH game available. In college I got introduced to role-playing games and actually had time to play them. Nowadays I have a lot less time but a lot more resources to devote to my hobby and a very active wargaming club to mine for opponents.

Dave

I'd have to say the 70's.

Seemed like we were gaming every other night. Developing my first miniatures gaming (Frappe and then Empire), Machiavelli (weekly with 8 players), Squad Leader, and D&D came out around then. We had quantity and pretty good quality as well. Things have never been like that since (and probably just as well -- I had to grow up a little anyway).

mjc

Rpgs in high school and college, for wargaming it is right now

Highschool, playing Fire and Steel by GDW. We had no points system so me and 5 of my friends collected minifigs in the early 80s at a feverish pace to out do the other side. What huge battles we had. Most took the better part of a weekend!

I was going to say wargaming with my brother and best friend in high school in the eighties (which was pretty darn fun and carefree), but then I read this by Hitman:

I think that my best gaming years are still to come…sharing this wonderful hobby with my sons!!

and I would have to wholeheartedly agree.

…though, of course, my sons, and not his! :)

Nellis AFB, Nevada in 1972-3. My first day on the job my sargeant volunteered me (ha-ha) to help the base historian finished the semi-annual base historical report thereby doing a 5AM to 11PM shift with no meal breaks. By way of consolation I noticed the historian had a print done by an artist I had met through the Washington DC figure collector's club before going to Vietnam. We quickly became great friends playing Jim's ancients rules, AWI and MAW, until I got a discharge. I really felt grateful for that interest and friendship because I would have gone crazy years before since Las Vegas was nd is my idea of the epitome of the most boring and nothing place in the known universe.

Besides one night I got iherrupted while sitting in my underwear painting Scruby Mexican 25mm infantry by the three ranking colonels on my base doing a surprise room inspection. I like to think of it as the priceless moment wen the USAF discovered one of its rank practiced wargaming.

I'd have to say that it was during the mid to late 80s. My opponent and I played several different monster-sized hex-and-counter games like Fire in the East, Terrible Swift Sword, Wellington's Victory and others along with dozens of smaller single map games. Back then we would get together 3 to five times a week and our sessions would run 3-6 hours depending on the day of the week (long sessions on weekends, usually.) Eventually our work schedules got in the way of our frequent sessions (I worked days and he ended up on the second shift), but it sure was fun while it lasted.

I am having some of my best years right now. Weekly games or more at times. A great group of guys with like minded interests.

Right NOW! I am playing better games with better players, my painting is fast and looks as good as I want it to, I can afford whatever minis/scenery that I want, and on top of all that we just finished building me a 450 square foot game room/studio (or vice versa) with a full bath and a wet bar in the back yard.

It's like the song says-- "I'd rather be right here." 8)=

1986 to 1992, and then 1993 to 1995. Gaming once maybe twice a week with a great bunch of guys, many of whom I'm still in touch with though we live on different continents.

1985-1995 BC, Before Children

Looking at the big picture, now's pretty darned good. I play D&D once a week, and fairly often work in some Mordheim and/or board games too. More and nicer miniatures abound, and I can afford to go to an occasional convention. And I have TMP to keep me involved.

For just sheer role-playing (which I do far more than miniatures wargaming), the two best years would probably be my senior year in college, when we first discovered (A)D&D, and the year I spent in England at Birmingham U. (blessings upon the Rotary Club) and made a lot of new friends and spent loooong hours adventuring with them.

During the 90s up until last year when we had weekly games at our place. Cut short by my mother's death and my father being in hospital a great deal last year. The need for daily hospital visits and looking after a pretty much disabled father killed off the weekly games and threw a very large spanner into the works as far as painting goes. I'm sort-off recovering from this situation a year on, but we're now on monthly games spread around various homes and I miss the weekly fix of gaming, taking and appaling humour!

Playing Waddingtons "The Battle of Little Big Horn"
link
Anyone remember it?

Nows pretty good- minis once a week, an average of a board war game session once a month, and enough gaming in the area that I could probably play something every night if I really wanted too.

Of course I look back on my high school gaming days fondly, but we were such an isolated group that looking back it was all relatively same-y and unsophisticated.

Rich

RPG's in college in the early 80's. Board wargames in the late 70's in high school. Minis in the early 90's. Painting figures right now.

It is always tempting to say it was great back in the 70s and 80s when I was at school/college etc and had lots of time for gaming, but frankly we were all really rather immature although we spent a lot of time and energy gaming, I'm not sure the quality was very high. Although we thought we knew a lot, our actual historical knowledge was appalling. The main thing is they produced a lot of memorable moments, as interesting stuff does when you are young, but however amusing Nicks King Tiger painted black with SS runes on the turret were (this was around 1972), it didn't mean we were playing good games at the time.

I have a lot more fun now, playing games which are quick, unburdened with excessive detail, yet capture some aspects of the historical situations they are simulating. Yes, it would be nice to have more time, but there is more to life than wargaming.

My very early years were a blast, but as others have said, playing now means better figures, waaay better paint jobs, waaay waaay better terrain, better researched games, etc.

Plus, I have an even larger number of great gamers to game with. It just gets better every year. I really would not want to go back to how my friends and I gamed in '79….and I know they wouldn't either. ;-)

[playing now means better figures, waaay better paint jobs, waaay waaay better terrain, better researched games, etc.]

My head understands that, but for some reason my heart insists that it was a lot more fun "back then."

Somehow I still have vivid memories of 2nd-edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles games in Frank Buehren's basement, throwing whatever armies and units together on the table, making it up as we went, with half the figures unpainted… 20 years ago. Yet rather few of the games I've played recently have "imprinted" that way.

I suspect that my generation (I'm 42) hit gaming at exactly the right moment. We were there for the beginnings of role-playing, for the first personal computers, for the glory days of SPI and Avalon Hill, and many of the classic miniatures rules. Everything was more DIY in those days, because the limited palette of choices encouraged (or required) more creativity.

Now – despite a plethora of choices – there do not seem to be as many outlets for personal creativity in the hobby. Kids who play fantasy games, paint their figures in strict accordance with the various Codexes that tell them what units they can and can't have, and exactly how they should look. And the people my age now have a lot more money than they have time, so they hire some people in Thailand or Sri Lanka to paint their miniatures for them, and the proliferation of rules-sets on every period presents a smorgasbord that we will rarely have time to sample from.