Ok, I’ve bounced backwards and forwards using my heat pump Time Machine (hence the unreliability), but this is a brief interlude before I begin work on the ‘big thing’ of ‘83. There might be another one, but this will do for now.
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| I must say I’m still a sucker for the shiny cover and paper. |
To be more accurate, 7 January (because it was the same day The Fourth Arm started on BBC1). Dad was on 6-2 shift and I finished early from college so off we went to Wickes/Aldershot. With my eye on these shiny rules, I popped into Concorde Models and rifled through the large white drawers at the back of the shop. They stocked a useful supply of wargaming stuff, mostly Skytrex and Minifigs from memory, and on this occasion I left with some Skytrex modern tanks and the Osprey Zulu War book (which I still have). You can see how much I had on the go this year.
I soon managed to paint the tanks up and had a couple of test games but cash flow (more cash spread…), and my success with Pony Wars, had me resorting to card strips to fight my mini-campaign. This was the replacement for my second Pony Wars outing and took place in our conservatory (on the same rickety dining table) to the strains of Let’s Dance during the Easter holidays.
The scenario was a small British Battlegroup holding off Red Forces (of the Purple Moon, if you ever read Frontline UK in Bullet) in an unnamed British protectorate. The British were based roughly on what was used in the Falklands (scary to think it was less than a year earlier) and the Reds/Purple Moon were what my Jane’s Armoured Fighting Vehicles book said the Argentines had, so M47s (gorgeous!), Shorlands, LVTP7s etc.
It sort of went OK, and I managed to get a couple of games out of it but I honestly have no idea how anybody ever managed to finish a game with anything more than a reinforced company! Fair enough, I was new to the rules (and a bit thick) but goodie gumdrops it took ages! If only at the time I had a copy of the simplified modern rules that appeared a few months later in Miniature Wargames, things would have been so different.
Anyway, it all went the way of the plucky British and the decidedly oriental-looking foreign hordes were sent packing. No dodgy human rights lawyers around, obviously.*
With that particular boat floated, I parked the rules and my small collection of tanks and set my mind to Newbury rules and cutting card shields for my pipe cleaner Zulus. But that article in the April 1983 Military Modelling on Cowpens looked rather interesting…
*Especially those who have Ukrainian male models setting fire to their old stuff.
Exciting stuff! I remember getting WRG modern at school, and having being taught them at the school club, then never really grasping them. I do remember the reference to 'Red Indian based imagi-nations' using Warsaw Pact stuff - since they were 'red' - oh how i laughed.
ReplyDeleteMy attention for WW3 then was focused on James Rouch's 'Zone' books, and skirmish variations of same (I have memories of Book 5 and the Siege of Hamburg...I was discovered reading this in a study period by an English teacher, who is probably still shocked by the chapter i was reading...something about baby oil).
Though it does remain 'shiny' (the rulebook, not the baby oil).
I am currently developing a set of rules where veterans hunt HR lwyers in the battlespace. 'Lawyers, guns and Money' has a ring to it for the title, unless someone has already used that.
Yes, the ‘Mohicans’! I think I played again at the Staines club but all I can remember is sitting and watching the Soviet player work out his artillery plan. Although compared to Cambrai to Sinai they are one brain cell rules. That was another dull evening at Staines. Mind you, they all are unless you order a sweet sherry in the Dolphin.
DeleteYou can always call those rules ‘Operation Shiner’…