In the Beginning

My First Gaming Table - actually my model Train table, but it performed double duty.  Bits of wallpaper remains, from improvised rivers, swamps & forests (of all all colours & patterns) still stuck on it, and a hand painted road, with track crossing.  HO scale train, oval track, and a few HO buildings - driving a train around in circles pales in comparison to the excitement of a wargame!
     One its side, with a wood stove in the foreground, it looks more like a martian landscape, then an earthly battlefield.  Rammed into a basement corner, we had to crawl up on it, to get to troops on the far side - but we were young & spry back then.  
     I was quite surprised about 2 winters ago, to find that it had survived all these years, still as a full 4' x 8' sheet of plywood !

 

First Toy Soldiers - I remember waking my parents up rather early one Sunday morning, bugging them for *JUST* one dollar so I could mail order these from the back of a comic book  (in my day they were only $1, not the $1.25 as above).   
     They came a wonderful little cardboard locker box, and the figures were plastic semi-flats in wonderfully inspiring poses.  They travelled with me well and often when I was a kid.

First Wargaming Rules (circa late 70's) - I think this was the first set of proper rules that any of us owned.  Before then, we had done the classic "Plastic Army Men in Lego Forts vs. the Rubber Ball".  

     Christmas 1977, my grandfather gave me a spring loaded model WW1 Howitzer, that you reset the shell, by pushing the spring back with a pencil until it clicked with a place, added a silver plastic bullet on top, rammed it home in the barrel, locked the breech, and was ready to fire!  (sadly it seems to have been lost in time & space).  Little did I know then, that like many others, we had reinvented H.G. Wells's "Little Wars" rules.

     We played a lot of these rules.  Including a massive all weekend game at someones cottage.  Instead of a table, we used a large mattress, with cushions under a blanket for terrain.  We lacked figures, and used cut out pieces of graph paper - with each grid being one soldier - huge armies were cheap & easy to produce.  I recall one specific moment in this massive game, when 2 large units of Pikes had whittled each other down to a single man, and turn after turn, the last standing men were unable to kill the other! (we may have ignored the "un-fun" morale rules back then).

     A rematch would be a great excuse for a reunion!

     Our first game of D&D (red book) was New Years 1978/79.