Featherstonia: Tony Bath's Medieval Rules

Another packet of gold dust from the Mighty Albannach. Have a look at this lot, then! Originally published by Don Featherstone's Wargamer's Newsletter.

Please enjoy - thanks again, Iain - you're a hero.

Featherstonia: ACW Rules

Once again with sincere thanks to Albannach, today we have Donald Featherstone's American Civil War Rules, as marketed by Wargamer's Newsletter, back when real men carried roundshot bouncesticks.

We're going to slow down the publication rate now - this just to whet the appetite and get things started! Many thanks, Iain - Nobel Prize nomination is being worked on.

***** Late Edit *****

At the end of these rules Don makes reference to the morale effect of having a Fife & Drum band handy on the table (Airfix, converted), to cheer up the troops. This is interesting - you don't suppose Don happened to have such a band available, do you? To set the mood appropriately, here's some Fife & Drum music from the ACW [Google kindly suggested I was looking for Drum & Bass]. 

I'm interested in this aspect of wargaming - I have been known to discomfit visiting players by subjecting them to my mp3 collection of Napoleonic marches and fanfares during games. While I'm on this digression, I keep meaning to get more seriously involved in putting together companion collections for other nations. I think the Austrian and Prussian material is probably available - British music is a problem - most collections of British Napoleonic marches are played by modern military bands, which probably means saxophones [aargh] and other unacceptable anachronisms, and usually means that you get the Dam Busters in there at some point.

If anyone has any clues on this (off-)topic, please get in touch!

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Featherstonia: An Occasional New Series?

I was very pleased with the reaction to the posting of the programme for the 1965 Military Festival at the Duke of York's HQ. As a result of this, Iain (The Mighty Albannach, no less) has offered to make some more of his personal collection of old documents available for sharing in this way, which is not only very generous, but also suits me very well for a number of reasons, since my painting efforts have stalled for the moment, and actual wargames are likely to be few and far between for a while. Thus I am delighted to take him up on his kind offer.

We'll see how this goes, but he has a good collection of wargames rules (by a number of authors) and of historical and wargaming notes, all of which were available as "handbooks" and could be ordered through Donald Featherstone's Wargamer's Newsletter back in the day. It is possible that some of this material has been collected into more modern publications, but at least you can be confident that the original documents posted here will have been proof-read at some time, which is not always the case elsewhere.

First off, then - appropriately enough - is DFF's very own Rules for Napoleonic Wargames. I believe the rules employed at the 1965 Waterloo game were a cut-down version of these. Please enjoy them, and please treat them with the respect they (and Albannach, and I!) are due. Potentially, there are some real goodies in the pipeline!

Thanks again, Iain!