About

Well you can find my bio on the English Civil War blog I do (here ….)

As a teenager I played a lot of WWII using Airfix plastics and the Charles Grant and WRG books, but there was always something not quite right.  When I met WD people through the Society of Ancients Conference, and then, in the early 90’s,  moved to Northamptonshire, it became much clearer.  Chris Kemp‘s Not Quite Mechanised, and more recently Tim Gow‘s Megablitz … tanks fixed on bases and some history gone into the game design. Operational level games as well as just tactical.  Something more fluid than blast circles, protractors and armour charts.  To that may be added zonal tactical games like PBI, a whole host of squared/cards based games that I have played with members of WD at the Conference of Wargamers, and clever thinking like Arty Conliffe‘s Crossfire.  Some key features that made 20th Century wargames into something more than just tanks plonked onto a model railway display.

Hopefully this blog will give me a chance to explain some of those issues (like why is the 2oth century game transformed by fixing the vehicles on bases rather than pretending that they look realistic sitting on the miniature terrain?), or address some of those annoying prejudices (why do rules writers think German kit was intrinsically better, or that the 6 million self-loading rifles the Russians issued to their soldiers from 1938 onwards are a myth?) – but mostly it’ll be about figures, vehicles and games – about showing some respect to the history and trying to get it right.