"Early wargaming memories" Topic

Formal war gaming memories is sitting in the hospital room with my Grandfather as i played Napoleon at Waterloo SPI subscription bonus. My first war game.
My first informal war game was playing in the sand or grass shooting BBS or throwing rocks at hundreds of plastic soldiers.

@Great War Ace – glad you found my tale amusing wish my Dad had. BTW I still have the bottom half of the Britain.

Just turned eleven, the first day at the new School, having a tour of the school library and finding tucked away in a deserted corner, a battered first edition of "Little Wars" by H G Wells. I took one look at the pictures and was enraptured. A lifetime later, I still get a thrill from just looking at them.

Ok, I thought I posted in this thread….
My earlier memories of wargaming….

1. my very fist game.. Wooden Ships & Iron Men… Constitution and Guirrier(sp)..I was 11… it was awesome.

2. shortly afterward.. I was now 12…. I had the flu and was taken by my brother in law to a huge wooden ships game at a friends…. I proceeded to get EVERYONE there very sick…. I wasn't invited back for a while! But my brother in law.. well, he had no choice…. he continued playing games with me…. mostly naval and then he exposed me to Napoleonic…. I have been hooked ever since! The game set was Napoleon's Last battles…. the original ones… SSI? SPI? the ones with those funky boxes. I eventually got the 4 game set from my sister when TSR bought it.

I very quickly graduated into miniatures…. naval of course… wooden ships and then ACW ironclads… On my own I moved to all sorts of skirmish games and battalion sized games.

Man.. that was 36 years ago!!!!

I had always played with toy soldiers – pretty much my earliest memories are of playing with 1/72 and 1/32 soldiers (a set of WW2 US Paratroops link and WW2 Italian Infantry link some 1/32 Napoleonic Infantry link and some 1/32 Medieval Infantry link ). Then a few years later one of my friends brought some 1/300 Heroics & Ros WW2 stuff into school and then I was hooked. I made up quite a lot of simple rules until exposed to my first proper set a few years later.

I started out with the classics of board gaming. SPI, AH, GDW and all the rest in Jr. High. I thought miniature gaming was childish and would not give them a second thought. I joined the Navy. Board gaming was great at sea because they didn't take up much room.

My first introduction to miniature gaming was in the late 1970s after I got out the Navy. My buddies back home took up ACW 15mm using "Rally Round around the Flag". Then it was on to JR2 and then Napoleonics and the rest was literally history.

Fondest memory was my first board game. It was AHs "D-Day". I was the Allies and my experienced friend set his entire defense in Normandy. Not knowing any better I landed in Belgium and Holland. He threw in the towel on the second turn.

Best early miniature memories. Was playing RRTF on a point system I bought quality over quantity. While the Rebs did the opposite. In those rules an elite unit rarely routed. I bought elite Berdan Sharpshooters. They couldn't kill all the Sharpshooters and they beat off every charge.

With JR2 we did Antietam. The entire battle. It was the first big scenario that I researched, wrote and did the map for. It was a massive table. with hundreds and hundreds of figures. There was just four of us playing that massive game. It took two weekends to complete.

Early in the game a Confederate unit charged a prone Union regiment. The prone unit were the 42nd PA with breech loading rifles! A little later in the game a lone CS horse battery on Nicodemus Hill took a long range shot against the 2nd Wisconsin of the Iron Brigade. The gun hit causing one casualty. The Union rolled snake eyes on its morale and routed, then two more regiments rolled snake eyes and eventually the entire Iron Brigade routed on the first turn.

Going way back when I was 7 or 8. I had a Fort Apache set. I would set up the fort, the troops and the Indians. I took a dart gun and played solo by switching sides every turn and firing one dart. I remember the Indians were spread out and harder to hit. But that fort went up like a nuke hit it.

Two of my blog entries touch on this topic:

link

link

Best,
Ed M

As a child born and raised in Mexico, I was limited in what I could get by way of toy soldiers. It was the early 1960's. Sets of flats (Revolutionary War, Romans, and Knights) ordered for $1.98 USD from the back of comic books had to be mailed to a US address and hand-carried by friends or family when they came to visit.

One of my first attempts at gaming with figures: on the tile floor of my bedroom I set up "units" of Revolutionary War soldiers. I would roll a die for casualties when two units faced each other in adjacent tiles. They would fight to annihilation. It was pretty crude.

When I left Mexico for boarding high school in Georgia, I bought some Airfix 1/72 figures and a bag of plastic vehicles. On a big cardboard I traced squares and tried to make some quasi-miniatures-game. It was not a success.

During college I discovered Donald Featherstone's War Games and Advanced War Games and adapted his rules for ACW and WW2. After college I discovered Wargamer's Digest and subscribed to it – even won a year's subscription in a contest, about the only thing I've ever won. I have quite a few issues still.

When I went to graduate school, with the models I already had, I ran games using the Angriff! rules. The Gene McCoy WW2 standard unit system meanwhile prepared me for my next step in WW2 wargaming, which happened as follows.

1988: I walk into Wargames West while on a visit home in Albuquerque. There is a boxed game called Command Decision. "What's this – no board? Oh, it's rules for miniatures. Looks better than Tractics or Angriff."

Since then, my WW2 operational-level rules of choice are Command Decision. I have followed them through all four iterations and I like CD4 (Test of Battle) the best. For tactical level I use Men Under Fire and for skirmish gaming, I'm looking into Arc of Fire. For ACW, I use Johnny Reb (I like version 2 better than 3). And for skirmish ACW, Brother Against Brother.

That's where I am at this point. I put on at least three games a year at the HMGS-East conventions -- so far Command Decision but maybe in the future Johnny Reb.

More recently, with all the great WW1 figures being made by HäT Industrie, I have gotten more involved in Mesopotamia, which first caught my imagination in 1970 with A. J. Barker's book *The B@st@rd War*. (Back in the 70's I had tried to modify Airfix figures to make Turks, Indians, Tommies in khaki shorts, etc. It was not a success, except for the Indians based on WW2 Japanese.)