Boardgaming: from Stalingrad to ASL

Despite the title, I now consider games such as Beachhead, Chopperstrike, Dogfight and their ilk to be wargames per se, and they are what I cut my gaming teeth on. I only discovered Risk in the early 80s when it became available in NZ for the first time.

I played a couple of games such as Dip, Kingmaker and Decline and Fall when just starting out at the Warlords in the 70s but my real introduction came in my first year at boarding school when some seniors taught me hown to play Stalingrad and once I was familiar with that, they taught me Third Reich. The leap was pretty staggering but the small footprint and setup time compared to miniatures was instrumental in getting me over the hump.

1979: I bought Stalingrad and Third Reich from the departing senior

1980: Back in Wellington one of the club members was importing SPI, AH and 3W games and magazines. I grabbed as many back issues of the General, Moves, S&T and the Wargamer as possible and was hooked. The Generals accompanied me back to school where they were read avidly, and even though I only owned two games, I was always going to buy more.

1981: I took out subs to Moves, General, S&T, and the Wargamer. In the end my sub to S&T and moves expired just as SPI went under and I concentrated in buying AH games.

1982: My brother picked up SL, COI, COD and GI for me from the games shop in North Finchley (getting stuff from the US was a nightmare back then) and I was definitely hooked.

1984-86: While at university I moved into a gaming flat (apartment) where we ended up playing Civ, Dip, Machiavelli, Kingmaker and other Multiplayer games almost every night, and roleplaying on weekends. It was pretty much a most concentrated gaming experience, with total immersion being the rule. as people moved in and out of the flat, so my gaming opponents also moved on. I was lucky enough to be working part time for a games shop in town which meant I was getting my games at cost . I accumulated a serious amount of AH games in this time and when ASL came out, I bought it straight away, even though it cost me a month’s wages for it and BV (I think I ate at the Hari Krishna gatherings for the next month).

1987-90: Despite a very heavy gaming workload I managed to gradually accumulate some degrees and while working for a tiny wee law firm I managed to get some serious ASLing done. Just after West of Alamein came out, John Knowles and I decided to spend Easter playing through every scenario; we came up for air after 4 straight days with John having won every game. One of the other infamous sessions involved playing Hill 621 to completion in 11 hours. It was around this time that ASL achieved total dominance. I also remember having a party in the flat to celebrate the 100th games of Civ and Storm Over Arnhem, and getting told that when it came to choosing nations in Civ, I was always to be last and was never allowed Egypt after too many exploits of the 6th Egyptian Mediterranean Fleet had caused a palace revolt .

1991-1995: Played very little ASL around this time, all my FtF opponents had moved away. Actually played 6 games of PBM ASL which was interesting but not something I’d bother with again. Played mostly multi-player games and continued my streak of Storm Over Arnhem without winning a game.

1996-Now: Discovered CSW, the ASL Mailing list, and VASL. Life hasn’t really been the same. I still play the occasional non-ASL game, but opponents are very difficult to find. I’ve gradually accumulated some simpler treatments of operational WW2 which is my preferred traditional consim game, but the Area Based games are favourites. I’m still looking to win SOA for the first time. As for ASL, I think I managed to get close to 500 games total now, and over 60 of those have been PBeM via VASL with only about 10 being live VASL. If it wasn’t for VASL I’d not be involved with ASL anymore, and these days I’m still wary of burning out. I’ve watched the boardgame industry disintegrate from the PoV of retail and consumer, and I doubt it will ever truly recover. I’ve pretty much cut loose my boardgaming apart from ASL and the Area impulse games now.

A Brief History

Here in a nutshell is the history of my involvement in miniatures:

Miniatures

1971: My first set of Airfix HO/OO figures, American Civil War strangely enough, and the first time I read a wargaming book, Introduction to Battle Gaming by Terry Wise courtesy of Khandallah Public Library. As part of a school library project we each got to choose a book from the Library to keep. I still have it, sans dust cover and with childish scrawl throughout (even then I was tinkering with the rules)

1975: I Picked up my first copy of Military Modelling magazine and was spellbound

1976: Mil Mod published a directory of wargames clubs worldwide and I saw there was a club in Wellington, the Wellington Wargames Section. I contacted one Paul Graham and found that the club had split into two, The Warlords and the Society. I joined the Warlords because they didn’t have naff rules about junior members and they were a really friendly bunch.

1977: The second National Wargames Convention held after some hiccoughs in Kapiti just up the coast from Wellington. By this stage I was using Bruce Quarrie’s World War Two rules in the form of the ubiquitous Airfix magazine guide, a series that introduced me to Ancients, English Civil War, American Civil War (Terry Wise again) and WW2 through commercial and standardised rules sets. I primarily played WW2 but dabbled with WRG’s 4th and 5th Edition Ancients with a great deal of enjoyment and considered myself a *serious* wargamer. Oh how innocent was I.

1980: By this time I was at boarding school, and roleplaying games were in the ascendancy. Ancients had palled with the introduction of 6th Edition, WW2 was ruled by WRG’s 1973 set complete with wall to wall Tigers, and I was more interested in the new scale of 1/300th-6mm heroics and Ros Moderns, helped by what I regard as probably the best laid out and best written set of rules WRG ever published: the 1950-1985 Moderns set. I spent 5 years playing club games and competitions at regional and national level with a great level of enjoyment at the former and steadily increasing frustration attending the latter, courtesy of rules lawyers, cheats and total wankers.

1985: At University now, and Roleplaying was really starting to eat into my miniatures interests as was boardgaming (See later). I was playing Challenger moderns by now, as the WRG lot were comeptitive arseholes par excellence and I’d had enough. As my interest in painting 25mm figures grew (courtesy early Citadel and Grenadier) I was introduced to a very relaxed period, Gush Renaissance in both 25mm and 15mm. I eneded up with 4 25mm arnies and over 15 15mm armies for these rules, the star army being my monstrous Persian Army that allowed me to max out the army list. We tended to play friendlies rather than strict competition rules.

1992: I was roleplaying all the time and had given up on my miniatures as I wasn’t enjoying any of it. I ended up selling every one of my armies, and have regretted it ever since.

1995: Moved to Palmerston North for a change of scene and ended up getting back into 15mm WW2 with a couple of friends. We started out with a definite idea of playing scenarios, mainly as my experience with ASL was so pivotal. Used Barrie Lovell’s Overlord 1944 Company level rules and had a blast. One of the group decided that he couldn’t handle paying $25 for model tanks from England (NZ $ was worth 27p at the time) and started scratchbuilding his own, first from balsa then from Milliput – he’s now the chief sculptor for Battlefront Miniatures and the rest is history.

1995 to now: I’ve revisited and rebuilt my 15mm collections, not to the level of the 80s however but with an improvement in both quality of the figures and presentation. I can’t see myself going away from 15mm except for some skirmish type games and maybe the occasional pretty army – famous last words. I’m dabbling in Ancients, Early medieval, ECW, Napoleonics, ACW and 19th Century Euro wars apart from WW2. The main reason I’m sticking with 15mm is reasons of cost efficiency, I don’t want to have to acquire two different sets of terrain and 15mm works well on a 6 feet by 4 feet table.