"When did you first game WWII miniatures..." Topic

1960s: Marx Battleground set. Also Airfix & similar troops with Roco Minitanks. Ruleset: none – Used Star Trek disc/tracer gun. LOL!

Interlude: The "darkside" – only board wargames

2003 at Historicon: My first "real" minis game with painted figures & rules. A WWII skirmish game using BAPS.

I remember when I was a kid that some national chain department store where we lived had a display case of Roco tanks. It was great seeing them all on display.

Mid 70s and used Angriff! for rules. Used GHQ microarmor.

With rules? 1974 using Airfix, Rocco and the "Battle!" rules.

In 1977 at Fort Hood Texas, we played some WW2 but more Ancients WRG and Napoleonics. Since most of my group were soldiers, we did not play Modern. it was too much like work! LOL.
When I got to Fort Rilet in 1981, most of our games were at the OPFOR simulation training center. Since as the S4 of the MI BN, I had the keys. There we play Tank Charts for WW2 and a set of rules designed by a USMC captain for modern.

Late 50's Marx playset, home-brew rules

Mid-60's Airfix Featherstone's rules

very early 1970's – Tank Charts/Angriff scruby 20mm WWII

Late 50's with green army men. 1960's Airfix. Experience very similar to Mako11 and Martin Goddard.

1975 – Airfix. I played with them. First proper wargaming with miniatures, again Airfix was 1979. No idea what the rules were called but I'd recognise the cover if I saw the book again.

Silly question…

With DanLewisTN… in Nashville!

Joe Collins

1959-60 with plastic green and grey soldiers in the basement and the back yard. No real rules other than throwing dirt clods at each side in the backyard, (not in the house--mom wouldn't tolerate that!)
Real rules early 1970's with Airfix infantry and Rocco tanks using Tractics.

Wow! Joe Collins! Blast from the past. What are you doing gamewise these days?

1970s with green army men, until I discovered 1/72 and Tractics. 1/285 followed.

Anybody remember the kit boxed "German Secret Strongpoint"?

My first official miniatures WWII game as an actual miniatures set of rules would have been my first Gen Con in 1984 (or was it 1983?) in Kenosha, WI. I played Jagdpanther with a group from Chicago using 1/285 GHQ and CinC mininatures. I seem to recall a purple Jagdpanther on the table that the referees dubbed, 'The JagdPanzee.'

I was smitten with the whole idea , but was more interested in what were then Ultramoderns, so I spent my whole spending cash on buying the Leopard II game rules and a set of West German and some Soviet tanks (from CinC on the floor).

My first gaming before that was little green army men and 1/72 soldiers just on the floor of my house 'pew-pewing.'

Admittely, I had played SPI's Soldiers about 3-4 years before my foray to Gen Con, which got me into strategy board games. The pump had been primed before I played my first WWII set.

Battle by Charles Grant.

Airfix & Minitanks. (Yeah I thought the PF was a loader for the PzSK – just realized mistake when someone mentioned it here.)

High School in the early 70's.

Latter Tractics.

TomT

Avoided anything twentieth century since I started gaming right after the first Gulf War…so my first ever WWII game was just last year; February 2015, using Bolt Action…then in March 2015, was introduced to Chain of Command and its been a WWII extravaganza since!

May be the least experienced WWII gamer here…

P.

My dad bought me some ROCO tanks and trucks for my HO Railroad and we went to war. Airfix not painted, Blue and Grey; Elastolin North Afrika figures; Aurora Pershing and Panther and plastic troops; GHQ started in 1968 with Panzer Leader and Panzer Blitz and started to replace the counters with vehicles; Charles Grant and his Table Top Teasers; and Gene McCoy in his Strategy and Tactics and Series 78 army lists.

Mid 70's, Airfix, Nitto kits and figures, Operation Warboard rules

Airfix, late 1969s. First proper rules were Battle.

It is entirely Charles Grants fault that I also thought the panzerfaust figure was the loader fir the panzerschreck.

Early-Mid 1970s with Micro Armor and a couple of different rules sets, one being Tractics.

Mid 70s using Operation Warboard .

Another set we used for Micro Armor was Angriff.

I could not think of the name this morning.

Late 1960's with the plastic army men, but no rules.
First introduction to rules was Panzerblitz around1979.
That same year the store owner recruited us as company commanders for battalion level games using 20mm miniatures. I don't recall the rule system.

My first personal collection was GHQ micro-armor playing Spearhead in the mid-1980s.

Mid 70's GHQ armor Tractics rules.

Late 70s, Operation Warboard, if I remember Airfix Brits and Crusader, Matchbox Germans and PzIII and the Airfix gun emplacement.

A simpler time when the infantry were unpainted and measured in boxes and tanks were green or grey ;-)

As a lad of 11 or 12 in the early 1960's, I made up home rules to play with the plastic flats that I bought through the ads in the back of comic books -- knights, Romans, Revolutionary War soldiers.

In high school and college, 1965-1973, I began to collect WW2 and ACW Airfix figures and RoCo Minitanks and made a few crude attempts at designing tabletop rules based on board games.

The first published rules I used were Donald Featherstone's *War Games* and *Advanced War Games*, used through college years. After that, Angriff and Tractics until I discovered Command Decision I. Since than have played all four versions of Command Decision and never looked back. For skirmish level, I'm exploring Arc of Fire.

For ACW, I used and adapted A Nation on Trial until I discovered Johhny Reb. Version 2 is still my favorite. At skirmish level, I prefer Brother Against Brother.

How is CD4 conpared to CD1? Lot of changes?

1986 Command Decision with Microarmor, later 1/72nd.
2005 Blitzkrieg Commander with 10mm
2008 Flames of War with 15mm. Have not seen a reason to changes rules/scale since.

1973 Strategicon, WRG modern rules. Went to play in AH Stalingrad tournament but lost in the semis so had some time to kill. Next weekend I had T-62s minis.

I started out with a collection of Roco Minitanks in 2nd grade. But my first real wargame was at the house of a history teacher in Walnut, Ca. He had home brewed rules. His board was made up of 2' square sections with roads and rivers that mated up in the same spot on the edge. It was a
Blase and I was 16 at the time. That game
Sold me on micro armor.

Dan:

Very active here in Nashville…
Primarily doing ACW and Napoleonics… (Volley & Bayonet)

I've just come off a 5-year run of DBA ( I was part of the 3.0 playtest group).

For WW2… James is running CD4… I am primarily using Rapid Fire!

We are doing Micro Armor Moderns using Modern Spearhead.

Come back and visit sometime!

Joe Collins

Joe, I will do that. My son lives in Nashville. I think he might enjoy gaming with the "old breed". My email address is danlewistn .at. Hotmail. Send me your contact info. Where are you gaming? Home or store? I might come for Nashcon.

I started with Airfix 1:72 figures, using some home brewed rules.

Mine was in the Army right after Desert Storm with Micro Armour and some sergeant's home brewed rules.

In 1969 shooting BB guns at scale models of plastic tanks in an empty lot using realistic hull down rules.

Wolfhag

In the early 1970's it was Tactics 2 from AHGC, followed by Angriff using micro armor. I remember the battle scenes from Tunisia in the movie Patton being a big inspiration to me and my friends when we first started with miniatures.
Panzerblitz came along about this time and we played a lot of it because the work was already done for us and fitted our budgets and time constraints better.

Michael Korns SUTC aka Small Unit Tactical Combat using Roco and Airfix and civilians from HO train sets.
Havent found anything better in all these years too much info in other skirmidh games SUTC requires an umpire and an imaginative GM
It is double blind

I always lost the german a/t gun (squeezebore) and guy sitting down, so the loader went with the panzershrek (sp!). Airfix

Battle rules, then wrg

Oh, and Airfix poly tanks. Lots of Pattons and trucks…

"DanLewisTN 02 Sep 2016 9:14 a.m. PST
How is CD4 compared to CD1? Lot of changes?"

Oh, where to begin? The changes from CD1 to CD4 are numerous but in my opinion have made the game more playable and, for me, more enjoyable – and I was already a big fan! These are some of the highlights of changes from CD1 to CD4. If others want to chime in, they can add to the discussion.

Instead of simultaneous movement, each side rolls a die, and the high roll moves first. Note that the high roll does not allow that side to decide who moves first; priority is mandated by the roll itself.

The infantry rules for firing are no longer a separate system. Infantry, MG, etc. all fire on charts similar to the CD1 artillery/anti-tank charts. The range bands have been reduced to 4 for all weapons: Close, Medium, Long and Extreme. However, infantry and certain others that can conduct close assault have range bands of Contact, Medium, and Long, with no Extreme. There is no separate Close Fire Phase or Close Assault phase; these are now a part of the Opportunity Fire Phase and/or General Fire Phase

The CD4 artillery rules are much simplified from CD1. There is no "Call Fire" order chit; rather, in a given turn an eligible pure or mixed command stand can call fire while also doing something else such as moving, firing, rallying subordinate stands, etc.

Most importantly, the CD4 rules permit artillery to do what it mostly did in WW2, which is to suppress enemy units. It can cause damage, but the suppression role is much more important to the combined-arms play. There is even a Harassment and Interdiction option, which can suppress -- but not damage -- anything within the blast template. H&I is map fire and does not require a stand to spot the target and call in the fire, though a success die must still be rolled (1-3 for it to come in).

There are still several Fire Phases; however, a given stand can only fire in one of them. This speeds up play considerably. There are also two additional Fire Phases in CD4. First thing each turn is the Artillery Phase (including aircraft ground attack). Then, before movement, there is an option for HE weapons to do direct Prep Fire, which suppresses an enemy target stand (and may hit it as well). Again, it's an important feature for combined arms.

Instead of four levels of troop quality as in CD1, there are six in CD4 (instituted in CD2): Green, Trained, Regular, Experienced, Veteran, and Elite. Each has a different level of vulnerability and reaction to being hit.

A stand that is hit may (1) suffer No Effect, (2) be Forced Back, or (3) be Eliminated. (Armor stands, by the way, no longer have results of Damaged, Disabled, and Destroyed; they have the same results as any other stand, but taking into account the armor rating versus the penetration of the gun firing at them.)

Instead of accumulating a certain number of hits until a stand automatically goes away, each stand that has been hit is rolled for: of course, Green units are the most likely to be forced back or eliminated, and Elite units are the least likely. But there's a CHANCE (however small) that a Green unit will be unaffected or an Elite unit will be eliminated by one hit. I've had a Trained Italian stand shrug off three successive hits from an Elite Australian stand. It can happen in real life, and now it can happen in a game.

A Force-Back from a hit no longer automatically pins the stand that was forced back. In CD4, a Pin is strictly a morale result, caused by failing a morale check by 1 or 2. A higher level of morale failure results in either Forced Back Shaken or Forced Back Demoralized or Elimination. These results also pin the stand. Shaken or Demoralized markers can only be removed by a Rally order from a higher-ranking command stand that is within six inches. There is no permanent morale reduction in CD4. If a unit is rallied, it has the same morale as before.

If you are talking non-Weird War then 2015. If you include Weird War 2011.

First WW2 game was a microarmor game with Dave Winfree. Loved the game.

Little green army men and rubber bands back in the early 70s. 'Graduated' to Airfix and Rocco with Tractics later in the 70s.

Somewhere in between I read an article in The General (reprint from, um…a small newsletter, I believe) that converted Panzerblitz into a '3D' version with GHQ microarmor tanks and foam core hills cut to the hex grid and glued atop the map. Looked cool, but at the time, one pack of microarmor cost the same as a used boardgame…

In the late 80s, found a miniatures group in my area and played microarmor games. Command Decision was the favorite (and still has a dedicated group that puts on games at Fall In, etc.). Pretty sobering game when a green commander (er, that would be me) runs into the buzzsaw of experience.

Tried a little Flames of War from time to time, Spearhead too, but small tables and 15mm figs resembled more a parking lot. Really enjoyed Crossfire as a 1-on-1 game, but it falls apart with multiple players (which is how I mostly game). Played some Bolt Action, but it seems kinda slow to move along for a 'skirmish-ish' game.

Had quite the run these last couple years with Combat Action Command (1 stand = about a squad), but for full disclosure, I know the author and helped playtest the rules. Had lots of close-run games. Not a simple game, but makes you think about what you're trying to do at that tactical level.

Last WWII game I played was the new Skirmish Action, but the same author as CAC, and yes, I playtested it to help knock some of the quirks out of it. Plays smooth, but the layered Overwatch can get pretty intense if firefights and counter firefights break out across some objective. Pretty soon, like tapping the first domino in a row of upright dominoes, everyone's shooting at everyone else. The author ran several SA games at Fall In, including a good looking Pegasus Bridge attack.

Leaving aside the green plastic Marx soldiers and my friend's Atomic Cannon which could fire a Ping-Pong ball down the length of his apartment hallway, my first "adult" encounter with WW2 miniatures was Tractics at the MIT Strategic Games Society around 1970, then Arnold Hendricks' 1944 Rules at the New England Wargamers Assn, followed by a long run with 1:285 WRG 1925-1950 Armor-Infantry rules (which, in its mature updated form, still stands up IMO as a good set of rules). After a lengthy hiatus, I have been recently attracted by Chain of Command.

B

1998 – Rapid Fire. Hated the game. Got Crossfire. Loved it. The got Battlefront WWII. Loved that as well.

My first WWII game was at a game day in the Jefferson City, MO mall, 1995ish. It was a 20mm Market Garden game, with British paras vs light German armor, using Battalions in Crisis! rules.

I was smitten with the ruined terrain and the excellently paited troops.

1969, using Don Featherstone's rules from 'the Wargame'.
I think we subsequently switched to using the Charles Grant rules in 'Battle'

1980 with the Guns of Navarone Playset

1967, Featherstone.

Like many others of a similar age, I started with Marx play sets and later Airfix (first box was the old Africa Corps) and Rocco minitanks.

While not a miniatures game, I cut my WWII teeth by playing Panzerblitz in the early 1970s. By 1974, I continued with Airfix and added Airfix and other 1/72 and 1/76 scale models and played with Angriff. In the late 1970s I moved to 1/285 and the WRG rules and even collected and played modern micro armor using the pertinent version of the WRG rules.

I was out of WWII for nearly 30 years but it is now a staple for me using Chain of Command, initially in 28mm but I have recently returned to my 20mm roots and am very happy!

Airfix 8th army vs Afrika corp, with a few minitanks. Sherman vs Leopard. rules were something I got out of wargamers digest that I do not remember the name of. After high school moved to micro armor and angrif