Reply To: "Golden Age of Wargaming"….perhaps not?

[phaidknott 7023xp 1]

I think the key point here is “if you know where to look”. It’s there “if” you know where to look (again not much news coverage these days on ANY non dedicated website for anything not 28mm).

Taking someone new to the hobby down to your local show, they’d probably be surprise to hear that there ARE scales other than 28mm (such is the availability). Yet this dominance has had such an effect on the hobby away from rank and file and mass battles of yore.

But the thing that really has shifted over the years are the rules themselves, they seem to have lost their “independence” of scale.

It used to be the “refight” was a big historical gaming thing with most wargames magazines featuring a map, orbat (order of battle, or army lists) for the battle. These seem to have gone the way of the dodo, with the focus more on items supporting large pages of photos of beautifully painted miniatures (again the eye candy). It used to be the day (in the UK) we would buy Wargames Illustrated for the “eye candy” and Duncan’s amazing photography to inspire us with the painting, but Miniature Wargames for the “meat and potatoes” (as this was the one with few photos, but lots of text), that would give us the battles to be refought using whatever rules you preferred. These were great as they didn’t need to be rules specific, all you needed was the units involved and the strength of the units on the day (the reader converted them to the rules they were using. It’s almost like the “meat and potatoes” has disappeared from the hobby?

Is it that Wargamers have become “lazy”? Not wanting to do any research, or metal calculations at the table? Perhaps it’s us that caused the “market demand” that seems to have well make the hobby rather soulless…

By this I mean there very little difference in “feel” of a game when it’s based at a Skirmish level. You could be playing anything from Biblical to the Middle Ages, or WW1 to Moderns, it all boils down to a man with a ranged weapon and/or “pointy stick”. You get no “feel” for the period as you would in a larger scale (for example the advantages of the Allied logistic networks vs Axis shortages during WW2 skirmish games, yet some of the old 6mm rulesets DID have rules for such).

But that’s just me, I DO tend to ramble on 😀