"Review of Miniature Wargames with Battlegames #393" Topic

Happy New Year, right let's crack on…

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: I do like the cover. 20mm British WW2 desert vehicles, including recovery vehicles, flail tanks and an ambulance grace the magazine in something more akin to a diorama than a wargame.

BRIEFING: Henry explains his like of 1/300 and 1/285 micro-armour. Not my thing (too tiny for my tastes) but as always with Henry his enthusiasm shines through.

WORLD WIDE WARGAMING: Fancy setting up your own Facebook page (not the same as having a personal account), Henry explains how. Also there's a shout out for Phil Steele's blogs, ECW Battles in Miniature and Wargames in the Mechanised Age.

FORWARD OBSERVER: The first half of Neil Shuck's column is more like "Rearward Observer" as he casts his eye back on his picks of 2015; Sword and Spear and To the Strongest top the ancients category (firmly agree with the former, a cracking game), Battlegroup Blitzkrieg and Iron Cross for WW2, Blucher for Napoleonics (I'm still not convinced), The Great War, Planetfall, Otherworld and Frostgrave round out the rest of the top picks. Looking forwards, Neil is enthusiastic about the 2nd edition Sharp Practice, Battlegroup Western Desert and a gangster version of Dead Man's Hand.

MOCK TUDOR: The Widow builds simple, yet effective, tudor houses out of foamcard and balsa. The less angular you make the model, the more realistic it looks…great if you're a cack handed scratchbuilder like me.

FANTASY FACTS: John Treadaway bowled me over in his first paragraph…a new version of SPACE:1889 is soon to be here. This pleases me greatly. It was (and still is) the Daddy of Victorian sci-fi games which was only let down by a clunky and barely acceptable RPG system. The Soldier's Companion was a good set of miniatures rules, the inventing part of the RPG was great, the background terrific and I'm looking forward to a newer and hopefully better system. Oh, and there's reviews of the latest Crooked Dice releases plus the usual Hammer's Slammers gear in 15mm.

THE RETURN OF VON BLUDENGUTZ: If there's one thing MW does with frequency, it's casting an eye back to how wargaming used to be done. Here, Richard Marsh of Rapid Fire fame looks back at the set of WW2 rules created by John Sandars and which were printed in hobby magazines back in the '70s. There are tales of scratch built vehicles in 1/87th scale (to fit in with Rocco minitanks) and a look at how the game played. It is very clunky by today's standards with charts, coloured pin status markers and 800 counters needed. Some ideas sound good: morale and casualties are covered by a "risk status" marker and the artillery template isn't symmetrical. Oh and there were some awful pun names thrown in (long time readers of my reviews will know how much I hate those) to boot. So, is it still playable? The verdict: No.

SEND THREE AND FOURPENCE: Fast becoming my favourite regular feature, here Conrad Kinch discusses how to inject a little surprise into your games without annoying the players. Not just producing some elite re-enforcements late in the game, but using the game mechanics or scenario set up or other approaches to keep the players guessing. Food for thought here.

ADAPTING TO THE STRONGEST: If you've got an existing DBA or Commands and Colours: Ancients army and you want to play To The Strongest, this article explains how you can do this without re-basing. This is nitpicking, but covering a couple of other games to be adapted would have been welcome.

HEX ENCOUNTER: Brad Harmer-Barnes casts his eye over the best board game releases of 2015. He's nominated games in various categories and no prizes for guessing The Great War is up there. Tiger Leader and AVP get gongs as well.

A CHAT WITH SIMON MILLER: The designer of To The Strongest chats with Henry about his gaming ideas in general. It's very informal and doesn't dwell too much on his game, but more on what ideas inspire him.

PAINT YOUR WAGON: A bit of a strange one this, but not in a bad way. On the surface it's about how to build and paint pontoon and supply train wagons for horse and musket era armies but mostly it's a 10 step guide in how to paint horses and carriages with only a little bit on building pontoon wagons. So useful, but not quite exactly what was billed.

ONE RIDGE, TWO BRIDGES: Steve Jones once again shows that history does repeat itself with a battle that can be played across 3 different eras. This scenario is based on the Napoleonic Battle of Landshut with the attackers coming down two roads across a river and attacking defended heights.

JUST WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS:…another set of WW2 rules. Jim Bambra explains about his game, Armour Battles Combat HQ. It's an operational level game with players controlling battalions and brigades instead of companies and platoons. I'm not a fan of operational level WW2 games in miniature (in board games, it's a different matter) usually because they get confused between being battalion level and being skirmish level. For example, Jim Bambra explains how he at first had artillery observers on the table but got rid of them because you don't need actual figures representing that if the basic unit is a company: Observers will be everywhere. The photos of games all look like 1=1 figure and vehicle ratio games but the talk is of more vehicles representing troops or platoons. I think Jim has described how he's gone through a process of representing his level of gaming without getting sidetracked into platoon or squad level minutiae pretty well but if he has made an operational game look and feel like one, then good luck to him.

CRISIS 2015: Photos of Belgium's premier wargaming show. Nice eye candy.

RECCE: There's a few medals of excellence here…7 Years' War from Wargaming in History, Battle in a Box ACW from the Perry's and Rosemary and Co brushes to name a few but what caught my eye were a race against time sci-fi game called Space Alert which comes with an MP5 CD soundtrack that's crucial to game play and the 4th edition of Napoleon's Battles; a game I've struggled to like over the years (namely it being too pro-French, not that good at recreating Peninsular War battles and being too darned expensive at £75.00 GBP for the 2nd or 3rd edition variants) but I'd like to hear some reports on how it plays in the hope that this time it's a winner (and cheaper).

IN SUMMARY: I enjoyed it overall. Some articles that would be useful for your club games but (and it's a small but) the magazine is frequently evoking a mythic golden age of gaming as the names Featherstone, Grant, Wesencraft, Asquith, Barker and others are mentioned with dewey eyed reverence. I would prefer to call that era "pioneering" rather than a golden age…which we're currently in. The John Sandars article reminds me that we can look back too fondly on the 1970s and 80s in terms of gaming and sometimes we forget that rules were often clunky and impenetrable back then. I often like reading about the history of gaming but perhaps with a more critical eye otherwise it sounds a bit like "in my day things were better".

Nick, can I just make it clear that I have *never* referred to the '60s-'70s era as a 'golden age'. Frankly, you can take your 'dewy eyed reverence' and stick it. I, and I suspect most of my readers actually have a fully-rounded view of those early gamers and I'm perfectly aware of their shortcomings as rules writers, authors and often as people. I help organise the annual Don Featherstone Tribute Weekend and I can tell you, whilst those who attend recognise the man's contribution to the hobby, there are plenty of stories over dinner regarding how he could start an argument in an empty room.

I subscribe to the notion of 'old school' (though of course there was nothing old about it at the time), with all the good and bad connotations that come with that. For a certain generation of wargamer, it has nostalgic value because there was undeniably a certain simplicity to many of the early rules and miniatures which retained a toy soldier charm, as it was a crossover period when people literally started playing with their toys – and after the end of WWII, military toys were suddenly available in abundance.

In fact the Sandars article you refer to here shows that as the hobby moved into the '70s, there was a general descent into 'simulation'. Think of the Quarrie Napoleonic rules, for example, with their different movement rates for every branch of every army, grenadiers moving 10mm faster than fusiliers. And the growth in popularity of the WRG Xth Edition Ancients rules, with their heavy emphasis on arithmetic. "Sandskrieg" is another one of those interesting dead-ends in the history of the hobby, a warning to those who try to cram too much detail into their gaming. I would hardly call Richard Marsh's piece 'reverential'.

The fact is that I'm simply interested in the history of our hobby and occasionally examining the routes by which we arrived where we are today. To my mind, a little bit of 'old school' works as an effective antidote to the constant worship of the new and shiny. The other magazines tend not to do this – or, shall we say probably more correctly, their editors don't get sent the kind of articles that I do. This is, of course, serendipity – contributors make a judgement about which editor is most likely to view their submission sympathetically, whether that's correct or not.

I actually said in my editorial of this issue that I'm tired of constantly being labelled as 'old school' and nothing else. I wasn't kidding. But I started Battlegames magazine because I was fed up with people looking down their nose at the generation that popularised the hobby in the post-WWII era, and who actually came up with most of the ideas that are still being recycled today, and I still feel the same way today.

Henry
MWBG

Well said, Henry!

I remember purchasing Sandars' book and being extremely disappointed that it concentrated so much upon WW2 Desert wargaming and was so complex. It disappeared from my shelves quite quickly, whereas I would never part with my copies of Wells, Featherstone, Grant, Young and Lawford and Morschauser.

Your final sentence reminded me of Isaac Newton's remark that, if he had seen further than other men, it was because he had stood upon the shoulders of giants.

Personally, I applaud the recent trend to employ simple rules that give a playable, enjoyable game rather than the brain-taxing, headache-inducing, snail's pace engagements of the period when wargames tried too hard to be 'simulations'.

Henry, sorry if I have caused any offence in my comments about wargaming in the past. I have mentioned that, overall, I like a lot of the articles that trace the history of the hobby. In the past I have praised the articles on Austrian wargaming and the first wargames convention held in the early Sixties.

Reviews are often a subjective thing, especially reviews of written works and I make no attempt to disguise my reviews as anything but subjective. I try to be fair, and have defended MW w/ BG from what I consider unfair or ill-founded criticism from others. No other magazine on the market covers as many aspects of gaming as MW. However, reviewing all the titles makes me aware of trends in each over a longer period of time and often your contributors do evoke the names of the great pioneers of rules design. There's not a lot wrong with doing that and all I've mentioned is that if there's a potential problem, it's that one can end up in a trap of seeing it too much as a golden age.

I feel I must clarify something that I mentioned in the Sandars article: The enthusiasm largely stemmed from the assembling of the forces out of cardboard and Rocco spares and the quest to track down the rules, not necessarily in the rules themselves. That's what I meant when I mentioned Richard Marsh's enthusiasm.

I now have my opinions about old school wargaming stuck firmly…well, you know where. I am part of a gaming generation that sits between the pioneering days and the new shiny era so I don't ally myself with either end. I truly regret having caused any offence and I hope we can chat amicably again at a future event.

Yours with respect

Nick

NIck, no offence taken – I should probably have put a smiley thing after the "take your 'dewy eyed reverence' and stick it" comment. I do value your reviews very much, as I know Guy does at WSS, and it's only very occasionally that I feel the need to correct an impression that may have been given about the magazine in general. Heck, you can say what you like about me personally! :-D

Of course, everyone who buys a magazine reacts to it differently – it's simply impossible to be all things to all people all of the time. I also accept that in many ways, Battlegames *was* 'old school' because that was largely its fan base, and therefore the kind of articles I was sent made it very much a throwback to earlier publications like Battle for Wargamers or Practical Wargamer. Another important aspect is that it was bi-monthly…

…Which of course is another distinction between MWBG and a magazine I like and admire, WSS. How I *wish* I had the luxury of a bi-monthly schedule, and the time to tweak everything and commission pieces to make it 'just so'. But the fact of the matter is that I'm cranking out two issues to every one of Guy's, and I receive a much more diverse range of contributions than I ever did for BG. The irony is that I'm constantly puzzled as to why more people don't send me articles about 'ordinary' wargaming and the 'big' periods – dunno, perhaps they're sending them to Dan at WI! :-D

Keep up the good work, Nick. Truly, it's nice to know that *someone* out there is paying attention!

Henry
MWBG

One of these days I'm going to finish cranking out an article on how to adapt Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship to the tabletop. When I do, it'll go to MW first.

I really liked the Sanders article – I used to read his Airfix magazine articles and wonder "does anyone really do this?" – i.e. scratch build vast tank armies in 1/87th from card and plastic scrap. Nice to see that the answer was "yes!".

Whatever else this "dewy eyed nostalgia" might represent it does show a level of commitment to gaming that few can match in this current "Golden Age". Having done a very few, the thought of converting several hundreds or even thousands of Airfix figures with plasticene, banana oil, tissue paper and drawing pins is something I wouldn't even contemplate. Where would I get the time ? Similarly scratch build constructing hundreds of tanks and auxiliary vehicles…I tip my virtual hat to anyone who actually managed to do this!

Thanks for the review Nick, it's always interesting to have someone else's viewpoint. I don't know how Henry manages to get his magazine out every month, I have enough problems getting one out every three months for the SOTCW!

A few minutes ago I sat back and took a moment to marvel at the fact that we even have "a gaming generation that sits between the pioneering days and the new shiny era". Does anyone else find it incredible that this unique hobby has been around long enough to have a generation gap?

Kudos to Henry for keeping the newest generation of wargamers from falling completely out of touch with the roots of the hobby, thus perhaps saving them from the problems that always trouble any jeune ecole: errors of excess, and proclaiming as "new" ideas that had been tried and abandoned by their predecessors.

And thanks once again to ubercommando for another useful and entertaining review. (Oddly, I seem to enjoy more the ones with which I disagree.) I also appreciate Nick's talent for starting a conversation.

…which reminds me, I must re-up my membership of SOTCW.

Thanks for the thumbs up, War Artisan. One of the aims of the reviews is to share with others what's going on and the other is to start conversations…not arguments!

I've been thinking about my nascent gaming since reading a lot about the pioneers of the sixties and seventies. I started in 1981…I think (it could have been 1980 but although I remember the games and the players, I don't remember the exact dates). That era saw the beginning of the over-complicated rules, the monster games and the rivet counters driven by the desire for realism and detail. I had a copy of SPI's Atlantic Wall, I owned Squad Leader and when the decade was out, I'd upgraded to ASL. The wargaming rules of choice were Empire 3rd edition, WRG 6th and 7th and Firefly. This is not an era a lot of people enjoy reminiscing about but the one I was pitched into when I was 13. Even in the 1990s most rules were typewritten and came in single colour cardboard covers and it seemed one man's meat was another man's poison…I remember spending a lot of time in the early 90s rebasing my figures to conform to a particular club's rules of choice. In Doctor Who terms, 1980-1995 (or thereabouts) is akin to Colin Baker, Paul McGann and The War Doctor; the ones we don't like to talk about.

I had a bit of a head start on you, but we've all been through those changes. By the mid-90's, the members of my local group could no longer bring themselves to say "rebase", referring to it instead as "the 'R' word".

While it can a bit uncomfortable to dwell on some of the misadventures of our wargaming youth, they were all stepping stones on the path that got us where we are now. Except maybe Empire V; that was kind of a pointless detour.