"Charles Wesencraft and Practical Wargaming" Topic

I am looking at 'old school rules' and, although I have Charles' book Practical
Wargaming (published in the early 1970s), I have never played any of his rules. Has anyone used his 18th
century/ACW and Franco Prussian war rules and what is their opinion, say, set
against Don Featherstone's and the Grant/Young style of rules?

Thanks
Peter

Peter

there was also a set of FPW rules, if I remember right, in George Gush's and Andrew Finch's Guide to Wargaming. I can't find my copy just now but it appears to be available on Google books

Clive

Clive,

Yes, well spotted. I do have this book and have had a look at the rules and the example battle. It seems to play out quite well. I wanted to use them to promote our new FPW figures and emailed George Gush direct but got no reply, but they are the sort of rules I like.

Peter

Never played the FPW, but I use them for Naps.

Practical Wargaming were the first set of rules I ever used that used dice (I started with Little Wars and shooting cannon).

I also used them for Napoleonics and remember having a number of great games with them when I was 12-14. We moved on to Bruce Quarries rules which were much more complex and used funny figure ratios.

To answer your question, I think that Wesencraft's rules gave more of a flavour of the period with the different basing for each nationality rather than the more general horse and musket style of Featherstone, etc.

Interestingly, re-reading it recently I realised that he had effectively invented the DBA style game in the early 70s with his cut-down ancients version where one stand is one unit….

Mike