"Wargames Illustrated #300" Topic

I was flattered to be invited to attend the launch party for WI#300, held yesterday at WI/Battlefront's new premises in Nottingham. After a welcome from genial UK editor Dan, and a quick tour of the new offices (impressive and highly business-like), we got down to eating cake, meeting and greeting a variety of gaming personalities, and looking at the magazine itself.

It's fair to say that it's a monster – at 300 pages, it's half an inch thick (13mm for our metric cousins.) They've printed 18,000 issues, of which some have a limited edition 'retro' cover laid out in the style of WI issue #1, ie black border, old logo and full-page battle photo (these are apparently available to subscribers or as special orders.) For the Battlefront sceptics, there is some publicity near the start for the new FoW starter set, 'Open Fire' (for which, it must be said, the plastic 15mm figures look superb, and the boxed set is surely going to pick up some new gamers), and a caption that made me chuckle: 'V1 Flying Bomb. Open Fire includes an awesome V1 flying bomb and launch rail as a cool centre piece for your table.' :)

Anyway, once that's out of the way, the magazine is chock-full of a very wide variety of wargaming articles. As the theme of the issue is simply 'Last Stands and Against the Odds', there is an even wider range of periods than usual. These are arranged in chronological order ranging from Thermopylae to Somalia 1993, taking in Spartacus, the Roman attack on Anglesey (Mona 60AD, by Rick Priestley), Dark Ages (my refight of Y Gododdin, plus Martin Gibbins' SAGA battleboards for 7th century Arabs, Chris Peers' 'Franks Casket' scenario and Ryan Lavelle's article on Alfred the Great's navy.) The theme then shifts into the second millennium AD with Agincourt, Elizabethan naval warfare (by WI original Andy Callan), 17th century redcoats (eye candy by Barry Hilton), ACW, Wild West, Little Big Horn, Isandlwana (by Ian Knight), Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, Colonial, WW2, Korean War and Black Hawk Down. These are interspersed with articles celebrating the history of wargaming (e.g. a reprint of an Arthur Harman article from WI#1, an homage to Ian Weekley's buildings, a memoir of gaming by David Bickley, a look at 3d printers in gaming by UK editor Dan, and others.) Although it's a hackneyed phrase, I think it's fair to say that there's something here for everyone.
Wargaming has come an awful long way since 1987 when this magazine first appeared, and this issue sums it up beautifully.

Pict17, thanks for the briefing and reminder. I subscribed for years before allowing the sub to lapse. I also have not been enticed to play FOW. This issue has me considering Open Fire and resubscribing.

I am pleased to see WI ordering packs of FOW miniatures again. I hope they will offer some more mainstream boxes since the current lot are not interesting to me as a beginner building up an army.

Thanks for the info. Good to hear that they've not bulked out the extra pages with archive materials – as i feared that may happen.
Does anyone know the publication date, for those of us that buy it on the shelf in WH Smiths (in UK)?
Simon.

i think its sept 22nd

Is there a way to buy a hard copy of just this one issue? I let my sub lapse about 5 years ago, and don't really want to re-sub since I don't do a lot of mini gaming anymore.

Yoakley
Thanks. have just checked on WI website – looks like it'll be week starting 24 September in the shops.
Simon.

Thanks for the tip. I just ordered a copy from "onmilitarymatters.com".

I just got 298 and 299 today at FLGS!

Can't wait for it to show up in the mail box. Hope the post office takes a bit more care with it than they usually do.

IT's on the shelves of WH Smith today (UIK).

Got my copy – looks like a pretty good read. Certainly big enough !

And £6.00 GBP is only 50p more than the new huge (half the size) WD !!!

I was terribly disappointed by issue 300. I think that's probably down to my own preferences though. I can't help but think that it would have been a more of a celebratory publication had there been rather more from the last 300 issues. As it was I feel there was very poor (ie none at all) coverage of some popular periods and in 300 pages I expected a bit more balance. To me it felt like a very ordinary issue writ large.

Anybody want to buy an as new copy!

Admittedly I'm biased because I was one of the invited contributors for issue 300, but I suspect that if the 300th issue had been full of articles reprinted from previous issues, then I'm certain there would have been complaints that it was a rip-off; just a re-hash of old articles!
Just goes to show that you can't please everybody all the time. But thankfully for most of us, magazine editors and publishers continue to try!

We wargamers are hard to please, aren't we?

Bought my copy a couple of weeks ago and am still reading.. This says it all for me.