Do you still play the first rules you played?

[Ivan Sorensen]

What was the first “proper” wargame rules you played (for whatever definition of proper you care to use) and do you still play that set?

[Mike]

oooh I guess WFB 3rd edition back in 1987, and yes still do.

[Darkest Star Games]

The first TTWG I played more than 1 game of was 40k RT, and though we stopped playing that when 2nd edition came out, we actually pulled it out last year for a one-off nostalgia game.

But even with that, I will say that no I do not play those rules any longer.

(now, if we were counting playing with “green armymen”, crumpled towels for terrain and rubberbands for gunfire, then yes I do still play that every time I see the son of my cousin!  He’ll soon grow out of it though as baseball is taking over his interest)

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Guy Farrish]

Charge! Or How to play Wargames.

No!

Great book, but I don’t field 54 men units any longer, nor want to move each figure individually or remove single casualties.

I do however for some bizarre reason subject various rule sets to the test of the scenarios in the book.

[Who Asked This Joker]

Chainmail (1975) was probably my first set of game rules I ever played.  I have since rewritten it to get rid of the stuff I did not like or did not make sense.  So yeah.  I still play on occasion.  Sort of.

John

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

--Abraham Lincoln

[Mike Headden]

My first proper set was the Fletcher Pratt rules in Don Featherstone’s Naval Wargames.

A shortage of ballrooms/ sports halls/ manicured lawns* coupled with an increasing inability to get down on all fours, let alone get back up again have long since put paid to that nonsense.

Not to mention the faff of getting ship data cards created.

Mike

*our field of battle in times gone by.

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[MartinR]

Charles Grants “Battle”, back in the early 70s. We moved on fairly quickly to micro armour and WRG by the mid 70s, although I still like to read “Battle” as a nostalgic example of how good a book about wargaming can be. I only recently sold my old armies for it though, as part of the great 20mm declutter.

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Yes, but they  all go by different names.  Really wargaming hasn’t evolved all that much.  You’ll find the core mechanics are still there just with some different probabilities worked into the CRT.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Steve Johnson]

No. My first games were a mix of the original D&D, Thane Tosting and Airfix WWII rules. Rules have come on leaps and bounds since then, but I still have a nostalgic affection for them!

[Mr. Average]

For me that would be Ogre Miniatures, and yes I still play it. Simple, verging on simplistic, but a good set of rules is a good set of rules.

[Whirlwind]

I’m not sure I can quite remember which published rules I played first. WRG 1925-50, WRG 1685-1845, Tactical Commander and the Bruce Quarrie Napoleonic rules are all contenders…I still play the first of these.

[OotKust]

Guy Farrish wrote:

Charge! Or How to play Wargames. No!

Great book, but I don’t field 54 men units any longer, nor want to move each figure individually or remove single casualties. I do however for some bizarre reason subject various rule sets to the test of the scenarios in the book.

Echo Guy- although read library copy several times, I was already in Airfix units mode, so never played (unbased) as written; but overall yes a good measure of those times!

We very nearly replayed for our 50th Anniversary games, but the lack of ‘tabular format’ meant too much work in short order. May still create a pdf summary …

Swinging from left to right no matter where the hobby goes!

[Rod Robertson]

Chainmail for Medieval miniatures is no longer played by me as we abandoned it in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Ancients was: http://www.wrg.me.uk/WRG.net/History/OLDWRG/Ancients005.pdf

Now it is DBMM 2.0 and DBA 3.0.

WWII was WRG 1925-1950, then Squad Leader with miniatures. Now it is CoC, IABSM, BGWWII and when desperate, Bolt Action V1. Also we played Firefly and Korps Commander by Table Top Games too for higher level games. I also bought a copy of Command Decision years ago but never actually played it.

Cold War and Modern was WRG, then Challenger I/II, then Corp Commander (OMG), then No End in Sight and then briefly Force on Force.

Naval was Fletcher Pratt’s rules and Wooden Ships and Iron Men played with plastic minis but then Naval miniatures petered out in the 1990s in favour of board games. The one exception was a short flirtation with GDW’s Harpoon and later Sea Strike.

ACW was Johnny Reb, then Brother Against Brother. We also played some ACW naval rules but I can’t recall the name of the rule set. Then I stopped playing but have been thinking of going back to it.

Role playing was the basic D&D three wee book set but now it’s RuneQuest.

So in short, no, I do not still play any original rules sets which I started off with anymore.

Cheers and good gaming.

Rod Robertson.

[madman]

Started in ’73 with micro armour and Tractics. Out of the hobby from the mid ’90s until almost a decade ago now and my copy of Tractics was returned a few years ago after being lent to a fellow gamer in the early ’90s. Now I prefer my WWII games infantry centric so dug it out to read and frankly the infantry rules suck. Got the new edition a couple years ago but yet to bring it to the table.

First wargame was ’74 and the original Battleline version of Wooden Ships & Iron Men. Played it a couple years ago and it still rocks. Played a more recent title of age of sail and it seemed no great improvement so…

[Punkrabbitt]

It was “A Sandhurst Book Of Wargames” with hex maps and counters. We tried to play it, anyway. We were a little young to really grasp it. But it did lead to dice resolution of combat when we played with our action figures in the backyard. Later, I tried to get some Striker going as a companion to the Traveller campaign, but that fizzled. Then back to maps and counters for Battletech, which I played properly with miniatures a few times over the last few years.

I guess the first game I ever really played properly and to its full potential was Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader (the 1st edition.) That led to Warhammer Fantasy battles 3rd edition, and then I took a side trip into DBA, and then went all over the place.

Now I play Nordic Weasel offerings and Modiphius games that used to be Nordic Weasel games.

Please visit my OSR products for sale at
www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/17194/Punkrabbitt-Publishing

[Shaun Travers]

WRG Infantry Action 1925-1975 with 54mm figures – Germans Vs US on a large table.  It was 1979 at a friends house.  There was four of us and it was great fun.  I have not played them again though.  Shortly after that game I joined the local gaming club and got into WW2 and my second game with figures was Tractics and 20mm figures; played that a lot for the next 5 years.  I have not played Tractics since then either but do get tempted every now and then just to give it a go for nostalgia’s sake.

[Paint it Pink]

The answer would be no, if I could actually remember what the first set of rules I played , which were a set of WW2 rules with tanks (roll 3D6 to achieve a number that took the AV from the DV of a tank).

I then moved onto WRG Ancients because I was besotted with Greek myths and legend and wanted to play games of Jason and the Argonauts, and again no.

The only games I play from way back when are Ogre and BattleTech, and even these I haven’t played since Covid.

I live a sad life.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[John D Salt]

The first rules I ever used, in 1971, were the WW2 ones from Horsham Library’s copy of Don Featherstone’s “Battles with Model Soldiers”. I imagine they are mostly attributable to Tony Bath. These only served me briefly, as I soon acquired the first of my own wargames books, Charles Grant’s “Battle!” Not only was Charles Grant a good and entertaining writer, his book showed — in a way I have hardly ever met elsewhere — how to frame a set of rules based on data taken from real life. No better book on wargaming has ever been written, I reckon.

I don’t play them any more, but 53 years is quite a long time, and it was even longer back then.

All the best,

John.

[Olaf Meys]

Hmmmm.

Chainmail. No, but I still have them.

Battlesystem (the red box one). No, but I still have them.

Then DBA & WRG 7th- again, no, but I still have them.

Battlelust- I still have them, but haven’t played in many years. Perhaps a revisit may be required, as they were quite fun back in the day.

http://mainly28s.com
wargames review site...

[John D Salt]

Paint it Pink wrote:

The answer would be no, if I could actually remember what the first set of rules I played , which were a set of WW2 rules with tanks (roll 3D6 to achieve a number that took the AV from the DV of a tank).

The only 3d6 rules I can think of that match the description would be Lionel Tarr’s rules, popularised by their inclusion in Featherstone’s 1962 “War Games”.

All the best,

John.

[Paint it Pink]

John D Salt wrote:

Paint it Pink wrote:

The answer would be no, if I could actually remember what the first set of rules I played , which were a set of WW2 rules with tanks (roll 3D6 to achieve a number that took the AV from the DV of a tank).

The only 3d6 rules I can think of that match the description would be Lionel Tarr’s rules, popularised by their inclusion in Featherstone’s 1962 “War Games”. All the best, John.

Cheers. Probably them. I don’t know, because it was Tim’s set of rules, and he taught me the game, and I was only into making and painting things/ at that time.

It was what got me into miniature wargaming.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

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