Once again I must offer my most sincere thanks to the mighty Albannach for supplying another instalment of vintage rules, originally available through Wargamer's Newsletter.
These are quite substantial - Old School but detailed. I was particularly interested in the last section, on "Natives versus Disciplined Troops".
I hope you enjoy these - please bear in mind that they are a product of their time, and should be read as such.
Once again, Iain, many thanks for helping keep the blog afloat!
Today,I marvel at the effort required to publish ‘back in the old days.’ Today’s young-uns have no idea of the care needed and tedium endured using a typewriter and carbon paper. Corrections? Begin again! Spellcheck? Look it up!
ReplyDeleteVery true. Even the issue of version control was fraught in the 1970s, as I recall. Some of my earliest impressions of attending a wargaming club were coloured by the fact that the club leader would arrive with a re-write of the house rules every week - especially if he had lost the battle last time out! On any given Wednesday night, there could be any number of different versions of the rules present - and none of the updated pages even had dates on, so the leader's copy was gospel. (Maybe that is still true?)
DeleteI used to have a big (wide-carriage, ex lawyer's office) sit-up-and-beg typewriter, and I became quite expert at typing up tables and all that, but life became ever so much easier when I had sneaky access to my employer's photocopier. The earlier days of "Roneo" stencils for duplication are just a dim memory now, but I regularly came home from school with an important letter that no-one could read!
These look pretty much like the AWI rules from Don’s 1977 book I just read. Except for some references to American militia & riflemen and Indians. Also he used a mix of inches and centimetres in the 77 version.
ReplyDeleteThose old ones you just posted also clarify the saving throw table that I was having trouble with. In the book the format had gone awry. It’s almost as if you typed that but up for him in your version š
Serendipity that we’re both having Featherstonian moments.
Mostly, Featherstone's rules from a particular period (i.e. time in which he was living and playing wargames) have a fair measure of commonality, though there is the occasional kite-flying rule about being near a band (etc), which had obviously resulted from the acquisition of a band (etc). Then, later on, the rules might have changed a bit - it is possible to detect the influence of the WRG in some of his later games, for example, and he even gets to topics like activation.
DeleteNowadays, I only have a few of his books, and it is a rule of thumb that the recent reprints (J Curry) contain transcription typos over and above any original glitches. One reason I was so delighted by Wesencraft's "orange book" when it first appeared was that the whole rule system had been thought right through, and was consistent. I imagine Don's games with his own rules went OK because he told everyone what to do.
Fascinating to see the natives vs troops Rules / problem Donald Featherstone talked about in his first book War Games and his Close Wars appendix version of this fleshed out into a larger rule set as shown / quoted out in my post here https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/close-little-wars-featherstones-simplest-rules/
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
Thanks for the link - good stuff!
DeleteMore generally, it is always such a wonderful glimpse into the hobby's past when we have the chance to read old rules and articles from long ago. Thanks for posting this!
ReplyDeleteBest Regards,
Stokes
My pleasure and privilege - it does put everything into perspective.
DeleteJust don't let The Guardian see the "You Know What" section!
ReplyDeleteHi Matt - hope you are getting back up to form. The section at the end isn't as uncomfortable as I thought it might have been! To be fair to the man, Don's view of "natives" is no more prejudiced than his view of Germans or other foreign chaps. I can't remember which of his books it was (and am certainly not going to check!), but one of them describes a WW2 skirmish game, in which he suggests that the characters be given names, so that his "English" force are named Churchill, Bull, Shakespeare, and so on, while the Germans do get some names, but Don is left feeling sorry for them, since they have such poor, unexciting possibilities to choose from. +1 for being British. Hurrah.
DeleteThanks for this, interesting to see a full version. I had Battles with Model Soldiers as my primer and entry to wargaming and it didn't contain any complete rule sets unlike the earlier Wargames, just snippets and advice on writing your own.
ReplyDeleteIt did include sections on various wargaming periods, including Colonial, and various snippets of the above were included, but just snippets! No mention of saving throws in the book at all, (except in the occasional example to clarify a rule!) so shooting and melee were VERY bloody!
It's very easy to cause offence by saying anything about The Don which could be construed as critical (similarly for P Gilder, I have found), so I shall watch my step here. I'm not sure how DF's career as a write shaped up, but he seems to have a reached a stage where, by publisher pressure or personal career move, there was a need to keep up the flow of new volumes. No problem with that - I happily bought rather a lot of them, but I found a few (notably Solo Wargaming, Advanced Wargaming and Wargame Campaigns) to be catalogues of ideas and suggestions rather than polished games - no bad thing, of course, but a bit of a disappointment (to inexperienced morons like me) after the heady excitement of the Ancient battle with Tony Bath's flats in "War Games".
DeleteI think my wargaming history was held back a good ten to fifteen years by the clunky systems and historical gibberish of Grant and Featherstone's books.
DeleteInteresting. Were you happy and fulfilled during these 10-15 years, or just a slow learner? The things which killed my interest, and encouraged a 15 year sabbatical, were the growth of supposed "realism" in the 1980s and the nightmare rules for lawyers and national competitions (Halsall & Roth was a high point) - games which progressed with bum-numbing, micromanaged slowness towards an uninteresting end-point which rarely arrived. I still wake up sweating, trying to remember the extra points cost for arming my auxiliary lights with javelins. Now I think about it, the National Championship rules were known as "Rissole and Sloth" (and variants) hereabouts. I always thought Charles Grant's books were stimulating, and written with a charm which I still find pleasing. I have to admit that I never used his rules in a game, but traces survive of his influence - the fact that my Napoleonic infantry battalions have mounted colonels is entirely due to how much I liked the colour photos in his Napoleonic book. The SYW period books were, and still are, magical and nostalgic, though, again, I never played the rules!
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