Let me take you back to… July 1983

 Almost 43 years to the day, in fact!

Somehow, we managed to go on holiday again. I’m assuming as college finished early, like Minime’s has, that we were able to tuck an extra one in before the Skool holiday ripoff period started. Whatever and however, we ended up in a rather nice bungalow in Ilfracombe, Devon (Willow Close, to be precise!). My sister was far too old for family holidays and had managed to duck out. Frankly, so was I, but a week with my parents was preferable to a week of sisterly tyranny, so I went with mum & dad. To head off any potential surliness my parents told me I could do what I wanted (within reason) so long as they knew where I was. Which was fair enough, but limiting when I didn’t have my bike! Nevertheless, I spent a pleasant week dossing, sponging, listening to music and figuring out the most impressive game ever.

Recon was the catalyst. It was meant to be D&D in Vietnam (or Africa, as you could be a merc), which I tried on the college club with no success. But it did have legs as a conventional skirmish game, so I married it up with Once Upon a Time in the West (only the casualty calculator - I’m not mad, they were equally unplayable) and tried out a few moves with some card counters. What I had was something approaching a cinematic experience: I could create characters and use the D&D elements to make them achieve feats of derring-do. And I was in the mood for a commando raid…

My dad brought this back from work earlier in the year, after it had been read by most of the engineers in W E Sykes (yes - my father was a toolmaker!). It was about a commando raid on the coast of North Africa just before El Alamein. It is a fabulous book, but I had to reduce it a bit from a battalion-size action to half a platoon. My scenario was based in the Aegean (guess what film I was also inspired by) where the hun was building an advanced radar station which could seriously disrupt supplies to the Yugoslavian Partizans (bet you didn’t guess it was the sequel!). A small force of allied commandos would land by submarine, meet the local resistance, and destroy the station before it became active.

My room became a flurry of activity, as I diced for characters, made maps of the garden - yes, it could only be done with 1/32 figures in the back garden! - and worked out a plan that would never hold water militarily but would create memorable incidents. And the fact I remember so much so clearly over forty years later, when now I can’t remember where I put my glasses 5 minutes ago, shows I succeeded.

 Next time: more pictures, maps and, if my knees allow me up in the loft, figures.

And not forgetting…

Let me take you back to…. January 1983…. And then to April 1983

 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.

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.