Home › Forums › News, Rumours & General Discussion › "Golden Age of Wargaming"….perhaps not? › Reply To: "Golden Age of Wargaming"….perhaps not?
I only had this very conversation the other day.
The term “Golden Age of Wargaming” I feel does not represent the true nature of the statement. When I started in the hobby back in the early 80s, the hobby was full of very little cottage industries. These were guys who went to clubs and designed figures for a particular game the club wanted to put on.
This then led these people to branch out and offer the figures for general release all be it while still maintaining a full time job. Hay, the Perry’s still design figures for there gaming group first and then release these to the public.
As for rules, well, what can I say, these were normally A5 typed on a typewriter, printed on a dot matrix printer or very cheaply printed at a printers. Oh and the only colour you had was the cover, the rest of the booklet was black and white and with no pictures.
Getting terrain was also difficult as mostly you had to scratch build it yourself, Hovels resin buildings were very nice, but they were the GW of pricing back then.
So, with no internet, you had to rely on shows to see the product you wanted, magazines for addresses of these companies and more importantly the snail mail of the postal services (this hasn’t changed, I don’t know about you, but our postal service in our area is pants).
So let’s recap here, you researched the period you wanted to play, you researched who produced the figures and you researched who made the terrain and produced the rules.
Now fast forward to today. First off the internet has opened our hobby up to the world, making it more accessible to all (which it should be, my wife has beaten me more times than I can remember).
The different terrain companies out there is staggering and I’m sure I’ve not seen them all, but the things I have seen blows my mind, I now very rarely have to scratch build a building.
The quality of rulebooks from the cheap little pamphlet to the full hardback production, all full colour with many pictures of lovely painted minis are truly masterpieces in themselves. Rules also has changed, back in the day rules were over complicated to a point you became bogged down trying to understand the writers intension. Rules today I feel to have mostly have got over this and the writing style makes them a pleasure to read (but not in all cases). But I do still enjoy cracking out some of my old rules for nostalgia sake at times.
As for miniatures, now this has seen the biggest explosion in not only materials being used, but the more complete vast ranges and scales available. Once again the internet has helped this by making these available around the world easily. The big issue here again is perhaps we are spoiled for choice and yes it does seem that if your not gaming in 28mm then all other scales are mostly forgotten about.
So, are we in the golden age of Wargaming? Well if you compare today with the 80s then yes we certainly are. The choice we have now is like comparing a corner shop to a supermarket and this is also a problem, the fact we have this much choice can lead to people getting swamped and not bothering at all. This is something that I have felt for some time now and I feel that this is only going to get worse in the future.
So perhaps the question should be “Is Kickstarter ruining our hobby”.
