Category Archives: General Gaming

Painting and Playing

Wargaming broadly falls into three categories — paper-and-pencil games, board games and miniatures gaming. Dungeons & Dragons is the classic pencil-and-paper game, with games played out largely through verbal role-playing with a lot of note-taking and mapping on paper. Board games are great to pull off a shelf, set up and play, often in one sitting.

Miniatures wargaming is my favorite. The hobby combines two entirely different aspects – painting and playing. Firstly, miniatures wargaming involves obtaining often hundreds of plastic or metal figures in various sizes from just a few millimeters to nearly two inches tall. A fair amount of research usually goes into creating forces of the proper size and and make up. Then there’s a lot of gluing to get poses and equipment together in realistic and historically-accurate configurations. Lastly, a miniatures modeller is faced with hours and hours of painting with tiny brushes, dabbing paint on uniforms, weapons, gear and exposed faces and hands. Even within the same historical era, say WWII or the American Civil War, there are nearly-limitless variations in how miniatures can be painted. Beyond the figures themselves, setting up a wargame usually involves creating terrain including buildings, trees, rivers, roads and hills.

Only after you’ve logged many hours painting up your armies and laying out your terrain can the miniatures wargamer get on to the second half of the hobby — actually playing. Again, miniatures wargaming has a tremendous variety of rulesets available depending on the era, scale and size of a game desired. Some games might involve skirmish-level battles with just a couple dozens figures on a side and other games can be of a grand tactical scale with hundreds (or thousands) of troops filling the field. Rulesets can run from just a few pages to dozens of books, and some gamers choose to write their own “home-brewed” rules. Some companies such as Flames of War or Games Workshop manufacture self-contained systems of miniatures and rules, even offering some starter sets of figures, rules, paints and dice all in one box for new players.

For a glimpse at the intersection of painting and playing wargames, check out the newly-updated pages on my Gaming and Painting page. Whether it’s World War II, the American Civil War or the Anglo-Zulu War, each era and scale brings different variety to what I love about the hobby.

Christmas Toy Soldier Memories

Generations of kids who grew up in the 50s, 60s and 70s looked forward to the holiday gift season and the possiblity of unwrapping a bounty of toy soldiers and playsets. In the post-WWII years, companies like Marx, Airfix, Britains and others churned out millions of plastic soldiers and accessories which would plant the seed for many a future wargamer. These boxes of relatively-inexpensive colorful plastic knights, cowboys and Indians, soldiers, horses, forts, castles, log cabins, wagons and tanks fuelled imaginative play and a collector’s spirit for kids before video games eclipsed playtime beginning in the 1980s.

For you Generation X kids who now have children of your own, toy soldiers are a still a fantastic way to add a little something different into the holdiay season. There’s a truly wonderful company called The Toy Soldier Company with a singular mission of keeping the toy soldier tradition alive, both for us nostalgia-prone grown-ups and for kids just waiting to discover the imaginative creativity and variety that play with little plastic figures brings.

The Toy Soldier Company offers a dizzying selection of plastic and metal figures, playsets and accessories in all scales and price ranges. No matter your era of choice — Ancient Europe, Colonial America, Civil War, The Old West, The World Wars,  Modern or Sci-Fi — the inventory is enormous and ever-growing. One of their most unique offerings is their playsets which seek to recapture the glory days of the 50s-70s when catalogs like the annual Sears Wish Book Christmas catalog offered pages filled with often fantastic depictions of playsets, primarily from Marx (like those shown in a Sears catalog from 1966 at the right). As a kid, you couldn’t help but marvel at the possibilities the often-exaggerated drawings and photos of these playsets. The imagination of young generals reeled from staring at the pages in the catalog and thoughts of future battles to be waged on the living room rug or in the sandbox out back. Lots of kids would eventually take their plastic play and creativity further by spending hours hunched over workbenches with tiny brushes and their first efforts at miniatures painting.

For those of you with children in your life, toy soldiers are still certain to be a hit for the holidays. You can even bridge the eras by getting a kid the latest from the Call of Duty video game franchise, a box of soldiers and maybe some paints. Another idea would be to buy some knights and Robin Hood toys along with a DVD of the classic The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. A book about the American Civil War and some plastic soldiers in blue and grey would make another great package. With toy soldiers then and now, the possibilities are only bound by the imagination for play.

 

“Playing At The World” by Jon Peterson

Since its release in the middle of the year, I’ve been nibbling away at Jon Peterson’s monstrous 720-page history of wargaming, “Playing At The World.” Peterson’s book takes the broadest swipe I’ve yet seen at tackling the true history of games. His opus work covers ancient games in Egypt to the early development of chess, 18th and 19th century Eastern European wargaming, the rise of simulations in the colleges and think tanks of Cold War America and into the birth of Dungeons & Dragons and eventually video games in the latter part of the 20th-century.

The book is daunting, and only for the true scholars of gaming. Whole chapters are devoted to concepts of randomizing results in gameplay, the rise of miniatures wargaming with toy soldiers (with early support by the likes of H.G. Wells and his book “Little Wars”), basic concepts of fantasy character development and the minutiae of gaming mechanics. The latter half of the book focuses on how a small group of gamers in Wisconsin, led by the now-famous Gary Gygax and David Arneson, created the worldwide sensation that became D&D in the late 60s and early 70s.

As both a gamer and historian, my love for this book flows from its slow-building narrative that firmly places the importance of games in worldwide culture. With immense detail, Peterson clearly shows games not to be the often-maligned pastime of nerds and misfits but an important device through which we’ve developed our modern worldwide approaches to military policy, economics, international diplomacy and social interaction.

The book is certainly enough on its own, but Peterson also runs a blog which adds insight into his ongoing research. “Playing At The World” is such an achievement of singular vision, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in how we play beyond the four corners of our gaming tables.

 

“Do you wanna play a game?”

Nearly a year ago I started a new job and was flown from New York to Seattle to spend a week with my new team to plot out our goals for the year. In one of those typical corporate ice-breaker exercises, we each went around the table in turn and stated something unique about ourselves. People talked about how they liked to dance, a funny anecdote from their youth or an exotic trip they once took.

When it was my turn, I said, “I play wargames. I paint hundreds of tiny soldiers and then spend hours refighting historic battles.”

I love games, all sorts of games.

Board games, dice games, card games, strategy games, role playing games, video games, logic games and wargames. For most people I meet, their idea of a game is Monopoly or maybe chess. So, when I start describing my love of games to new acquaintances it usually takes a fair amount of description before they understand.

Brooklyn Wargaming is my new place to talk about games, most probably to an audience who already has an interest but hopefully to other people, too. I’ll post pics on my own gaming adventures, plus some commentary on wider gaming innovation, evolution, theory and applications.

And yes, I would love to play a game.

(photo via Wikimedia Commons)