Wargaming

How I got involved with war gaming:

• Toy Soldiers: Like most war gamers, I began by playing with a variety of toy soldiers as a kid.
• Little Wars: Early in junior high school my dad bought a copy of the hard-cover reprint of Little Wars. I was so enamoured by it that I saved my little pennies and bought my own copy. Since my dad is a collector of old toy soldiers, particularly those made by Britains Ltd., I had a bunch of the small, firing guns. Soon I had made trees, houses, and hills, and I had stockpiled a supply of cannon ammunition made from small doweling.
• Jack Scruby: One evening while I was in junior high, at the end of the evening news, the network did a human-interest blurb on Jack Scruby and his California group. I remember a view of hundreds of Scruby 25mm figures deployed for a re-fight of Waterloo and how excited I got at the sight.
• Books?: When I was still in junior high school, my grandmother, thinking they were books on the American Civil War, gave to me for my birthday what turned out to be two war games in the Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) Blue and Gray folio series. After a time, I coerced my dad into playing them with me. He had a friend, Walt, who owned a hobby shop, and it was not long before I had purchased a few more of the folio games myself.
• The Wargame: At some point, I got my hands on a copy of The Wargame, edited by Brigadier Peter Young, the most highly decorated British soldier of WWII. This book, a collection of accounts of ten great battles in history, written by various authors who were experts in their periods, was illustrated with war gaming figures. I love this book and have two copies in my library to this day.
• Dungeons and Dragons: In the 8th grade we had a substitute teacher, named Mike Janes, in one of my science classes. We really hit it off, and before long he had hooked me into D&D. (When I started high school, I found that Mike's sister was in Latin class with me.) My buddies, Mike, and I had a great time playing war games and role-playing games. Quickly we changed companies from TSR to Flying Buffalo and started playing Tunnels and Trolls (same idea, superior rules) in preference to D&D. As a freshman in high school, Mike took me to a war gaming convention in Detroit, run by the Metro-Detroit Gamers (MDG). At this first convention, we signed up to play in a Napoleonic miniatures game. I remember some of the adults around the table resenting a kid taking one of their places in the game, which involved a couple dozen gamers. We Prussians thumped the French pretty handily on our side and beginner's luck was with me. I was on cloud nine for weeks.
• Rally Round the Flag: Soon after my first convention, I bought my first war game rules: Rally Round the Flag, by Battleline. Armed with several boxes of Airfix plastic 20mm figures and rules, I built a pretty impressive army in a short time.
• High School: Over time, I recruited several fellow war gamers, many of whom were on the cross-country team with me. Some had played war gamers before, and some had not. We had a great time in high school playing historical miniatures, board games, and about every role-playing game we could get our hands on. While none of our parents were really excited about all this war gaming, it was tolerated -- I suppose because they always knew where we were and that we weren't getting into too much trouble. Of this group, one is a surgeon, one is an electrical engineer, and one is a chemist working for a major university.
• West Point: At West Point, as a plebe, I hooked up with a group of cadets who were playing Napoleonic miniatures with Captain, later Major, now Colonel, Lawson, a professor in the German language department. He had more than enough figures for all the game we played, but it wasn't long before we had each chosen a different nation and started painting a battalion at a time. I never pulled an "all-nighter" for school, but I pulled several trying to get one more battalion ready for the next day's battle. As the only plebe in the group, I got last choice of countries, being stuck with Britain -- the country I would have chosen as my first choice anyway.
• Diverging Interests: I didn't paint much as a new lieutenant, but by my last year in Vicenza, Italy, I interested two fellow lieutenants into painting. Since then, my interests have widened and my armies grown. My wife likes to tell a story of our second date when I brought her back to my apartment to show her my toys. (I wanted to get that over with early so there would be no surprises later.) The rest is history.