You say po-tay-toe and I say po-tah-toe...

 Wargaming isn't a single hobby.

You could launch many different articles from that one sentence.  It would be easy to show the many disparate elements - figure painting, research, rules design etc etc.  You could easily differentiate between recreational wargaming and professional wargaming for study of real-world conflicts and strategic planning... but let's assume since I mentioned it as a hobby, we're purely focussed on the recreational side.

One point of differentiation that people often fall back on is the difference between Historical and... let's call it Fantastical wargaming, so as to allow for both sword & sorcery and science fiction.  That's... almost what I'm talking about, but not quite.  If you talk about Modern and Old School wargaming, you're equally close, but coming around from another direction.

I tend to think of it as the Commercial hobby and the Independent hobby.

I'm of an age where my introduction to the concept of playing with toy soldiers using rules and dice came from the golden age old guard of post WW2 gamers whose books crept their way onto the local library shelves.  My "first" was "Battle: Practical Wargaming" by Charles Grant (no initial) found on the children's library shelf, but having devoured that starter and hungering for more I'd soon gotten permission from a sympathetic librarian to venture into the big, scary Grown Ups (tm) library where I found and quickly devoured a treasure trove of Featherstone, Wise, and Lawford & Young.   This was a hobby of folks who put together their own games by repurposing toy or model soldiers (and vehicles) and wrote their own rules. For years this was the hobby for me, albeit one viewed from afar in isolation.

When as a teenager I finally discovered the existence of my local wargames club and connected with the wargaming world as it was (rather than my rose-tinted vision of it from books written in the 60s and 70s), wargaming was on the cusp of a change.  The biggest companies producing wargame material were at the cottage industry level at most, with most still being 1 or 2 person operations.  The closest thing to an 800lb gorilla in the UK marketplace was Wargames Research Group, whose 6th Edition ancients rules along with their contemporary Horse & Musket and Modern rulesets were the de-facto standards at the club.

To be honest, I didn't adapt well to this new paradigm.  Mr Barkers rules with their endless tables and calculations seemed a world away from the older rules in those hardback library books.  My heart still belonged to those old Independent wargamers.

But every couple of meetings, these two guys would show up with a bunch of elves and orcs and play Warhammer. 2nd Edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles as it was then.  While I felt more at home with the way that game seemed to play compared to WRG 6th, ironically it would bring about the birth of the Commercial wargame hobby, that would leave me feeling more estranged than ever.

So we all know what happened, Games Workshop exploded in popularity, largely on the back of the science-fantasy game Warhammer 40k.  Production quality shot through the roof, with full colour hardback rulebooks replacing typeset foldover A5 bookets with the ubiquitous coloured card reference sheet.  They also introduced the commercial concept of producing a range of figures hand in hand with a ruleset.  For a while you could reasonably consider the "Games Workshop Hobby" as constituting 99.99% of the Fantastical wargaming hobby, as compared to the Historical wargaming hobby, but that would soon blur.  Games like Flames of War, the Warhammer Historicals and Bolt Action would start applying the GW commercial model to historical periods, with high production glossy rulebooks and multiple supplemts for different armies and theatres of war.  To anyone coming to the hobby this century, *this* is what wargaming was, invented by Games Workshop with the advent of Warhammer 40k 4th edition.  Before there was nothing but a fuzzy prehistory... something about H.G. Wells wasn't it?

Today we have the Commercial wargame hobby as the default. A wargame is produced, usually with an accompanying range of figures which if the company is particularly grabby will be a slightly different scale to the last game covering the same subject so you have to buy new figures for it.  It will have a lifecycle, being heavily promoted initially, having a series of supplemental releases over a fixed period of time until either sales start to waver or the game runs out of subject matter to cover, at which point it will be quietly dropped and become a "dead game" that for some reason nobody wants to play.  If you're lucky it might get a 2nd edition but otherwise it'll be onto the new hot game and either way the whole  cycle starts again.

Luckily we still have a streak of independence keeping the other hobby alive.  From those wacky boffins at Wargames Developments with their cardboard box tanks and their "What if we modelled the Fall of the Roman Empire using tiddleywinks as the primary mechanic?" games... to the growing trend for miniatures agnostic small-press games. Look at the meteoric success of One Page Rules, who started off on the very shaky legal ground of One Page 40k, a homebrew streamlined reimagining of that game.  Now they have better legal advice, a range of miniatures agnostic games with their own original settings and figures (even if most will want to use them with existing 40k figure collections)

My heart still belongs unapologetically to the Independent wargaming hobby. And with the advent of 3d printing, we can become our own figure manufacturers, just like those old veterans in the 60s and 70s casting their own lead figures in rubber molds. 

At the very least we're in a new Guilded-age of the Indie wargaming hobby.  And I'm here for it.

(Note: I had been planning to discuss the rules I've been looking at and the games I'm interested in playing, but what started out as a necessary introduction turned into a longer philosophical piece I had to get off my chest. Maybe next time.)

Short People Got... No Reason

The Great Work continues apace, though it's still firmly in the "gets worse before it gets better" phase.  The wargames table is still piled high with junk, but now it's junk that's neatly sorted and categorised into Really Useful Boxes of various sizes. While I'm still a way off being able to lay down a battlefield of any size and throw dice it still feels like progress is being made.  I find myself at the mercy of our local council's bin collections

One lesson I would pass on to anyone facing a similar situation is the importance of transparent or open storage boxes.  I'd stored a lot of my figures and terrain in repurposed cardboard boxes which, while economical, meant the only way to see the contents was to open the box.  Out of sight quickly becomes out of mind.  Part of my reorganising process has included finding all such boxes and transferring the contents to either 32l folding crates for large terrain items, or various smaller sizes of Really Useful Boxes for smaller items.  Being able to see all the things you have at your disposal is very inspirational and motivational.

In that vein I've been looking at the various piles of miniatures I have in various states of gameworthiness.  The genesis of my current gaming revival has been the advent of 3d printing and initially I had a strong temptation to just put all my old, mostly white metal miniatures aside and focus on what I can print anew. But over the last few weeks I've come to realize that's wasting a lot of gaming resources and there are a lot of new games that I'm interested in that could be served by my existing minis collection.

And so, the audit...

Complete Project
    28mm Hillbillies

Ah this was a labour of love, and something I can draw a line under as done and dusted.  The Hillbilly collection was made up of suitable redneck minis from a variety of manufacturers brought together originally for a Big Birthday Bash multiplayer game, but have seen light a couple of times since including a couple of crossover Zombie games.  The full setup has laminated character cards for every figure using the Flying Lead rules and if I ever need a quick, lighthearted game to entertain a non-wargamer, everything I need for it sits in just a couple of crates.

32mm
    Heroclix

If you've never heard of them, they're licensed superhero minis from DC, Marvel and others that were sold as "collectibles" in blind lucky-dip boxes.  I've hoovered up a few job lots over the years for use with the Mutants and Masterminds RPG I used to run.  I've got a couple of big boxes full of unmodified figures, and a couple of dozen that were actually modified to represent characters in the game campaign.  For now I'm happy to stick them in a corner for storage, in case superhero gaming ever raises its head again.

28mm
    Grimdark Future/40K

Now these are entirely a child of the new Revival, brought about entirely by the advent of 3d printing.  I'd grown interested in the lore of 40k rather than the actual game itself and got caught up in the current movement of gamers who rather than pay GW's exorbitant prices have started printing their own miniatures at a fraction of the price.  Since I was finding 3d printing a useful form of therapy I quickly amassed about a dozen RUBs of figures and some great plans.  This is definitely a topic that deserves a future post, but suffice it to say this project is ongoing and will have a very different focus and overall character to the game that GW produces.

28mm
    Blake's Seven

   This was a very small project from the very start of the Pandemic that went no-where.  Crooked Dice's range of minis representing the crew of the 80s cult TV show sparked an idea for a game mixing a small skirmish on a planet combined with the Liberator fighting off Federation patrol craft in orbit. A cunning idea which promptly got packed into a storage box and forgotten.  A candidate for selling on to make space except... it's only a small box and a really cool game idea.

28mm
    Post-Apocalypse / Sci Fi

    At least a KR Multicase full, mostly passably painted.  I'm definitely interested in doing some generic sci-fi and post-apoc skirmishing - 5 Parsecs from Home, 5 Klicks from the Zone, Fallout Wasteland Warfare etc.  Definitely going to see some use in the future, no pun intended.

28mm
    Zombies

Everything is better with zombies.  Everything.  The figures I have could be combined with any other 28mm collection for a little bit of survival horror.  I've maybe got 10-15% painted , enough for a typical skirmish game.  If I hit the paint table and brought the rest up to code there'd be enough for some respectable World War Z level games.

28mm
    Modern/Imagi-Nation/Gang War etc

A bit of a catch-all for "modern" figures from a wide selection of ranges such as Vietnam, Ultramodern, Spy-fi, gang warfare etc all bought and some painted for my old modern Imagi-Nation of San Paradiso, which veterans of the Axis may remember was my to explore modern insurgency conflicts without risking upsetting anyone sensitive about real world events.  While once again there's a healthy volume of unpainted metal in these  boxes, there's enough core figures painted and table ready 

28mm
    Pulp

I have a small number of figures, mostly unpainted, bought mainly as cousins to the VSF collection, plus a few die-cast Matchbox & Lledo "Days Gone" vehicles that didn't quite mesh with the more primitive VSF horseless carriages.  But one of the games I'm increasingly interested in is Pulp Alley and while I could play the rules just with Modern or pre-pulp Victorian figures, I've got just enough stuff that I could probably put together a decent pulp-era (1920s-40s) game, so I'm not ruling it out.

28mm
    England Invaded / Edwardian SF / WW1

These were gifted to me entirely by another gamer doing his own clearout  They're mostly painted and VSF-adjacent, but they're different enough to deserve their own category.  Definitely room for expansion

28mm
    19th Century (including VSF/Wild West/Colonial)

This is probably the "period" I have the most table ready for, with loads more sitting at the primer stage or unpainted.  I could do a wide variety of games in this era, from western gunfights to full pitched battles featuring landships and strange contraptions.  Definitely leaning towards the fanciful rather than historical 19th C.

28mm
    Elizabethan / Border Reiver

Now this is a classic example of a failed  project, bought into big time, that went nowhere.  Two full foam cases of figures from the Elizabethan swashbuckling and border reivers era.  None of it painted, none of it seen the light of day in over 15 years.

28mm
    Various D&D / Fantasy

These are really two different collection - old metal figs collected over 40 years including a sizeable dump from a friend who was making room for a baby, and the new collection of resin printed and plastics that I started putting together for the Ultimate D&D setup right at the start of the Pandemic.  I have several rulesets that I want to play with these - Age of Fantasy, Dragon Rampant, Song of Blades and Heroes.

Which neatly leads us on to the land of the Little People...

15mm
    Laserburn Scifi
    Modern / Zombies
    WW1
    19th Century/Colonial

I am going to group these together because I'm coming round to a fundamental change in how I view this scale.  I used to be a big fan of 15mm figures as a straight alternative to 28mms.  Singly based for skirmish gaming, if there was a game designed for 28mm figures that measured in inches, I'd use 15mm figures and measure in cm.  My first wargame, Laserburn, was 15mm, and I have a sizeable collection of minis in various states of paint and disrepair.  When I started doing colonial wargaming, then strictly historical with no VSF elements albeit in the fictional continent of Olistan, while The Sword and The Flame were written for 28mm, I did it all in 15mm.  When 9/11 happened and I started feeling a little uncomfortable playing jokey games about westerners vs Islamic middle-easterners, my first forays into VSF with GASLIGHT were done in 15mm.  

But when I was starting to look at working on the San Paradiso project, I took a long time deciding on the scale. 15mm would be relatively cheap, have a good selection of vehicles and frontline troops available, and play in a more compact area.  But it would be lacking in characterful figures for skirmish games, which was part of what I wanted to do. 20mm/1:72 is another natural scale for modern games as you have a great availability of figures and vehicles, plus OO model rail scenery.  But 28mm had a major advantage in that I already had crates full of terrain in that scale, many of which could pull double or triple duty in different periods or theatres.  I had a full city layout for GASLIGHT.  Some of those buildings combined with newer style buildings could represent a more modern city.  Mix in some more buildings in a particular style and some distinctive vegetation and you've got a city on a tropical island.

I figured rationalising on a single scale for all battle and skirmish games would let me synergise and mx & match in that way.  I seriously considered the other scales, but the fact that I already had a head start in 28mm tipped the balance.  But not before I'd pre-emptively acquired a kilo or so of zombies and various modern troops and gangsters in 15mm, which were duly bagged, boxed and forgotten.

Now, these would make prime candidates for disposal except... I've long been a massive fan of the ultra-compact, fast-play wargame, such as DBA, HOTT or the Portable Wargame.  Something that can play in a tiny area but feels like a big battle.  I'd dabbled with the Portable Wargame in the past on this blog and while it didn't satisfy every gaming itch, it definitely had potential for scratching some that were beyond 28mm.  

Sooooo as a side project I'm going to earmark the 15mm Victorians and WW1 figs for stripping repainting and rebasing as multi-figure elements, something I've shield away from doing in the past. I've a mind to completely re-envision these as turn-of-the-century Imagi-Nations on a casual basis for whenever I have a two-foot square of empty table space and a desire to roll dice.  The scifi, modern and zombies will be similarly earmarked for group basing, all sized compatibly, to potentially scratch that same itch. There's no point in maintaining two different parallel collections in different scales to play games with the  same feel, but I think this would work.

Now we're getting to the teeny-tiny folk.

6mm
    Scifi
    Modern
    ECW
    Samurai

The sci-fi and modern were collected largely as odds and sods over the years , including bits and lots from Bring n Buys.  They were never cohesive armies and are honestly candidates for disposal (including a selection of vintage Battlemechs)  The exception is that as part of the San Paradiso project I did discover a game called 5-Core Brigade Commander by Nordic Weasel, which used 1 stand = 1 company to play out larger operational level battles.  I'd got as far as permanently basing two brigades for San Paradiso and their fun-loving communist neighbours Culo Raton.  I can definitely see a future where I do more armies in this format, even with new 3d printed vehicles.

(I've also got a decent collection of 1:300 aircraft I'll want to hang on to and use, for the skies over San Paradiso and beyond)

The ECW and Samurai armies were one time projects that just went no-where.  Honestly I don't know if they're even worth anything to anyone in their current state, but honestly I don't have the eyesight or the patience to do anything more than the simplest impressionistic paint job on 6mm, so one way or another out they go.

1/600
    ACW Ironclads

A bring and buy bargain I've never done anything with, but want to.  Maybe a dozen ships in total, and I happen to know there are loads of ships available to print as STLs making a cheap path for expansion if I felt like it.  I've played ironclad era wargames before and it was always good fun, so this is definitely something I want to revisit.

1/2400
    Ironclads

Not ACW these, but based mainly around the battle of Lissa.  I think I might want to get rid of these to a new owner willing to give them the loving restoration they deserve and instead focus on...

1/3000
    Ironclads
    Pre-Dreadnoughts
    WW1

Bought originally to synergize with the colonial games in Olistan and mainly played using GDW's Ironclads & Ether Flyers originally published as a supplement to the Space 1889 RPG along with the Soldier's Companion for ground battles.  With the VSF elements stripped out, both served as quite robust historical wargames.  I had a small fraction of the ships that I'd bought painted and table ready, but this is one I'd love to revisit and maybe with different rules expand into WW1 proper and maybe even WWII.  1/3000 seems to be the one-true-scale of post-sail era naval gaming and the one to rationalise on.

There are a couple of other outliers in my toy cupboards.  Many boxes of diecast cars in the Hotwheels/Matchbox scale, to be fitted with tiny guns and rockets and armour plates to become death machines for games like Gaslands and Car Wars.  Honestly I see them as more as crafting projects than gaming material so there's no thought of getting rid of them

Then there's an eclectic mix of metal spaceships, some dating back to the earliest of vintages, plus a small box of Star Trek micromachines.  Despite the great sentimental value I think I want to dispose of the metal ships and if I ever need spaceships for a future game, print them in much lighter, flying base friendly resin.  The ST ships can stay and if I ever wand to expand on them, again there are loads of freely available STLs to print

Looking back on those, the common theme is that for much of my gaming life I never knuckled down to collecting and painting complete armies.  It was always odds & sods, here and there, totally without focus.  It wasn't until the 2000s that I made a decent effort to have whole armies table ready, with minor success in the early 00s with Olistan and much greater success in the later 00s with the G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. VSF collection.

I'm finding this sort of auditing helpful for me, as it helps my to prioritise and make decisions about what needs to be done next.  I've done a similar audit for the various terrain items and sets I've got.  I think the next post I make to this blog will be to look at the various wargame rules that I want to try and  combined with these audits, try to get an idea of what my new wargaming hobby will look like.

 

I just keep moving, can't stop, won't stop grooving...

 This is going to be a bunch of introspective naval-gazing and philosophy.  Brace yourself or avoid as needed....

Coming back to a hobby can almost be harder than starting entirely from scratch.  Do you wipe the slate clean as if  starting anew, or do you try to leverage what you'd done before to get a head start, but at the risk of finding yourself stuck in a stale loop going nowhere.  And what if the context of the hobby has changed since you were last doing it.  Heaven forbid, what if *you*'ve changed.

So picture the scene: I have a man-cave of gaming stuff - terrain, figures, mismatched junk that I'll find a use for "one day".  That's fallen into chaos and looking like a disaster site, through virtue of being the room that stuff gets piled into "Just for now, till I can find a proper place".  Add a spare room to that which is only marginally better.  Marinade this in a sauce of five+ years of clinical depression and.... look I'm not a horder, OK?  The house may look like one of those you see on the TV in those documentaries, but it's not like I'm keeping 50 years of the TV guide and jars full of empty crisp packets or anything like that.

I'm reasonably sure there are no dead and mummified cats buried under piles of unwashed laun...... just a moment....

(sound of footsteps departing)

...

(sound of footsteps returning)

Yes, definitely no dead cats. Where was I?

But the truth is I'm not at a place where I can just grab a couple of armies, throw a green cloth and terrain down over a table and have a wargame.  I've got a lovely 8x5' table still setup, but it's gradually been repurposed as a painting station, workbench and general place-to-dump-piles-of-stuff-onto.  Boxes  of figures, painted and unpainted, aren't easily accessible and the same goes for terrain.  Long story short, there's a whole load of tidying, reorganizing and general Marie Kondo-ing that needs to be done.

Added to that, I've changed both physically and in terms of tastes.  Having a wargame table downstairs and all my figure, scenery storage etc upstairs wasn't an issue when climbing up and down stairs was a trivial factor.  And packing dozens of crates of terrain into the car to take to a club to run a big multi-player game is... so, so not a thing likely to ever happen again.  Suffice it to say since before the pandemic my mobility has been significantly reduced to the point where a journey to the end of the driveway to put the bins out is an achievement to celebrate.

That pandemic though has definitely been a double-edged sword.  Solo gaming has enjoyed a renaissance with a whole slew of games published specifically designed for solo play.  I've been gradually collecting a slew of them that I want to try - Five Parsecs From Home, Rangers of Shadowdeep, Space Station Zero.  They do trend towards the science fiction or fantasy skirmish genres playable on small tables, and that seems like a good modest goal to start with.

So that's sorted then.  Tidy everything up and organise it. Start playing small solo games.  End post....

Heh!  As if!

Things are complicated a bit by the fact that I've developed a liking for creating and crafting things, like terrain.  And worse, I have embraced the 3d printing revolution wholeheartedly.  The thing is, I've found the act of creativity and the tactile processes involved have been great for my mental health.  It started with building and preparing for a hypothetical return to face-to-face RPGs and a desire to put together the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons setup, with monsters and dungeon tiles and everything you could ever want.  That kinda segued into a growing fascination with the background lore to a certain megalithic space-fantasy wargame (Don't judge me!  There's a whole epic post needed to explain that one) and that resulted in about a dozen Really Useful Boxes full of mostly unpainted resin that has only served to exacerbate the existing storage/organizing/space problem.

The problem is that when you have a new technology like 3D printing that opens up the possibility to do... well pretty much anything, you quickly find yourself wanting to do pretty much everything.  I'm finding it a challenge not to get carried away with enthusiasm for the endless possibilities. And yet... it's exactly that enthusiasm that we need more than anything in our hobby.  To make us happy and to keep us sane.  Clearly a balance needs to be struck.  

I'm still wrestling with exactly where that balance point will be, but I'm continuing to work slowly but steadily on the sensible practical stuff that NEEDs to be  done, which is the tidying and organising, while still allowing myself a restricted field of things I might WANT to do.  For the moment that's restricted to making terrain and minis for a potential run of Space Station Zero games.  I could be sensible and insist I should be able to play the game with figures and terrain I already have painted and ready.  That would be absolutely true, but missing the point rather.  It's purely an excuse to allow some outlet for the crafting/creative urges, satisfying the WANT without impacting the NEED stuff too badly.  SSZ is a game on a sub 3ft board with a handful of minis per side, so it's not going to add more than a couple of Really Useful Boxes to the storage issue.

I guess the point I'm fumbling around here is this: Find out what things in your hobby make you happy, then allow yourself to do that thing.  Even if that thing isn't the core act of the hobby (i.e. moving little toy soldiers around a table rolling dice).  Maybe it's hoarding collecting figures, or worse the digital STL files that might bet turned into figures by a 3D printer.  Maybe it's painting, or modelling terrain, or writing erotic fanfic about your space marines. 

And just keep moving.  Even if it's a bit slower these days.

In a Brave New World... With just a handful of men... We'll start all over again.

 This is a story of Redemption.

At least I hope it is... will be.

So...

Where to start?  The beginning is a dull, safe option but I can't bring myself to go that far back in time, so read the About This Blog box for the summary.

Oh and as the kids today say, Content Warning: Mental health, suicidal ideation, general bad stuff.

Ready?

Here we go then...

So in my last post seven years ago I may have hinted that not all was well in my gaming circle.  A combination of people moving on with their lives, moving away, having their own problems that might have made them less fun to be around.  Combined with a new job that turned out not to be as promised that was wearing me down and wearing me out. I had less and less time for gaming, except for a little bit of D&D played remotely over a Virtual Table Top.  I was wilfully ignoring the trauma built up from my parents' passing and pushing myself more and more towards trying to make something positive out of the work situation. 

Meanwhile the Black Dog stalked in the background biding its time.

Things fell apart in February 2020, a combination of physical health and what felt like betrayal at work.  The Black Dog pounced.

I was 49 years old with what felt like no hope.  Plans were made.  I did not intend to ever be 50 years old.

Luckily, that was when the world decided to end.