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.