Like many wargamers of a certain age, my first introduction to the proper hobby was via the local library and the books by the likes of Featherstone, Quarrie, Wise etc within. I booked many of these volumes out so often that my memory plays tricks with me and I think I actually owned a copy! One of these was
Tank Battles in Miniature 5 Arab-Israeli Wars 1948 -73, I was convinced the other month I had a copy when on further investigation showed I only have volumes 1, 3 and 4 covering the Desert War, NW Europe and the Med. Fortunately
Amazon was able to provide a second hand copy in no worse condition than the ones I owned for a very reasonable price.
I've been skimming through it in the odd moments of peace today and am impressed with what an excellent piece of work it is, especially the information on the weapons of the various wars as well as unit organisations. Some sections are a bit weird, the ideas around skirmish gaming seem more akin to role-playing than skirmish gaming as we know it today, but overall, an impressive book and well worth getting hold of if you are going to be bitten by the AIW bug when the
FoW supplement comes out.
Gromit of the Day:
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| A Mandrill's Best Friend |
My first miniatures games were with a library copy of the NW Europe book and 1/300 heroics and ros tanks, sometime c1980.
ReplyDeleteI misread the rules and thought each turn was actually 60 seconds, so used a stopwatch to time the movement and fire of each side.
This made for a very hairraising but really fast moving game!
Great books and well worth getting hold of!
Yes, a similar start to micro gaming for me too. there was a copy of the first book on the Western Desert in the Wareham Library one rainy holiday. Lots of reading of that whilst we were stuck in a caravan, then a letter and a postal order sent to Wymeswold on return. My first owned copy was TBM3, I had TBM2 out on almost permanent loan from the school library and over the years I've tracked down and bought copies of them all :)
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