SOMEONE LIKES US! I would like to thank THE COURIER forgiving me many hours of enjoyable readingas well as many great gaming ideas. I admit that I rarely have time to go through your 45 back issues but I always find something of interest in every issue. I guess I would be classified as a gaming fanatic as I game in 25/15mm Ancients, 15mm AWI, Napoleonics, ACW, Indian Mutiny, 19th Century Colonial and the Boxer Rebellion. I am also working on 25mm skirmish games and thinking about trying to set up a siege of Alesia in 6mm. I take our hobby very seriously and try to take the games for what they are, games! I am one of the legion of wargamers who try to stay out of competitive gaming and play multi player historical situations. For example I find WRC 7th Edition Ancients is the best set of rules I have ever played in my life. I can nitpick a few minor problems and historical interpretations, but a very fantastic achievement. I find the major problem with the rules is the people who say "I called Barker and this is what he says the rules are." Unlike the 6th Edition which could have tied up 400 or 500 lawyers for 20 years with no hope of a solution, the 7th Edition is very clear as is. This causes problems (the telephone interpretations) at every convention I have attended. I believe that NASAMW should be the basic sounding board for any problem interpretations that we have here in the US of A. Then we could have a final written interpretation given in each issue of the Spearpoint or better yet in THE COURIER by the NASAMW Chief Umpire. The Chief Umpire could check with Barker for any basic interpretation problems. I see no real use for changing rules in the US except when you have such an outdated set of rules as WRC Renaissance (2nd Ed.). Anyway I surely believe that Americans and British can surely work together to work out some solutions and prevent any current misunderstanding from becoming a feud. You can bet that I will be enjoying playing Ancients no matter what happens between Barker-WRG and the NASAMW. It is the competitive gamers who will be fighting about the rules unless there is some American publication that is easily available to set out the correct rulings. Finally, I want to thank Pendragon Miniatures for making available the extremely beautiful Wargames Foundry Indian Mutiny figures and the very fast service. Last but not least I would like to thank Mr. Hood of Wargames for his very fast service as well as sponsoring many local wargames conventions around the country. A very special thanks to THE COURIER which has only one major problem -- it is not a monthly magazine. - FRANK HALL, Santa Cruz, CA THE COURIER publishing "official"interpretations or addenda of rules made by anyone other than the author would be a "no win"situation. The only question being how large was the readership group that you were alienating this month. - DICK BRYANT ORCS = ROMANS?! While reading J.J. Daub's letter in The Courier VIII-3, I was very pleased to see his section on "Costs of narrow-mindedness", and then shocked with the irony of his following section on "Exclusion of Fantasy Games". I had thought the call for open-mindedness would be followed by a call for an end to the fantasy-bashing attitude which is popular in these pages. I appreciate that the editorial intent of this magazine is to promote historical miniatures gaming; but, I find the constant insistance that fantasy gaming is a completely different hobby to be ludicrous. I am a prolific builder of armies and would like to put forth my credentials as a history maven before responding to J.J. Daub. I did begin my hobby life as a model railroader and consider myself a modeler first and a gamer second. My 15mm armies for Empire are models of the British Reserve and the French I Corps and III Cavalry Corps from the 1815 Campaign, all of the standards are hand painted and include the correct battle honours for each regiment. My HO armies for Command Decision include the 11 Panzer Division and elements from the US 4th Armor Division; every vehicle is painted with correct tactical markings and numbers. And my 25mm Medieval armies are the troops of the Earls of Stafford and Warwick from the Wars of the Roses; the men-at-arms are in correct liveries and the knights bear the arms of the actual retainers of the Earls or are knights from the counties controlled by them. Now, back to the problem of fantasy bashing. I would laugh at anyone who would tell me that I am engaged in a different hobby when I am painting and gaming with historical armies than when I am doing the same with Orcs or Space Marines. Yes, when I paint the fantasy troops I make up my own army organizations and marking schemes, but when I play a game, it's not really different from any other miniatures game. If creating imaginary settings is unrelated to historical gaming, shall we throw the armies from the Hyborian Campaign out into the snow bank too? Or if we have to split hairs, which is more unrealistic, pitting Wars of the Roses armies against Ancient Picts or against Orcs? Aside from the major discrepancy of time, I would say that anybody's army list of Picts or any other culture that did not leave their own written record is a fantasy. I do not believe a miniatures game can be said to accurately reenact an historical event regardless of what miniatures or rules are used. There are too many factors that cannot be presented in one game (and still have a game that's enjoyable to play). For me, gaming recreates some of the feel of what happened, and a good game calls up as much of the feel of an event as possible and is enjoyable to play. Within that definition, the event being played could just as well be based on an historical battle as a fantasy novel or a science fiction movie ora "what if" created by the gamers; and if it creates the right feel then it's a good miniatures game. - BRIAN REDDINCTON-WILDE, Somerville, MA. I cannot accept that the use of magic spells, etc., is on the same level of understanding as rules that are based on written histories of participants and observers of battle -- even when those observations were obscured by the personal opinion of the writer or by fog of war. The "fantasy" of an Egyptian/Swiss pikeman encounter in a WRG game is not the same as the FANTASY of magic elixir to protect against all but magic arrows. The former is based on knowledge and in some cases experiment with the weapons of the period. Have any of you tried magic potions against arrows lately? The effect is pure fantasy. However, I do not denigrate fantasy or science fiction gaming. I do contend that they are different from historical miniature gaming. Why do fantasy adherents take umbrage to that statement? - DICK BRYANT HOLIDAY WEEKENDS CONVENTIONS HAVE LARGER ATTENDANCE? I just finished reading your editorial Vol. 8, No. 4 of The Courier, and I must reply about your comment about holding conventions on holiday weekends. Our conventions are held on President's Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day Weekends. Also, when hosting ORIGINS, we try to schedule it as close to the 4th of July as possible. The reason is simple: When we run ourcons on these weekends, ourattendance is much higher (10%-15%) than it is on a non-holiday weekend. Does his mean that we west coast gamers are different from the east coast gam ers? I think not - we just are more flexible than you are. Hope to see you at L.A. ORIGINS'89. - JEFF ALBANESE, VP Conventions, DTI/3W The point of my editorial was that the attendance of Historical Miniature Gainers would be lower at these holiday times. The younger, usually single devotees to fantasy and role playing games will attend - no problem. I recently received the event schedule for Origins '89 - I note that only 11 events are scheduled as of this printing of the flyer - 2 Harpoon, 5 Mustang and Messerschmitts, and 3 Dragoon vs. Hussar and a 15 mm WRG Ancients Tournament. This is early times as yet, I know, but doesn't this show that it is difficult to get historical miniature game organizers to attend holiday weekend events? - DICK BRYANT A WINNER RECOGNIZED... In Vol. VIII, No. 31 mentioned not having received the information as to who won our Sportsmanship Award at ORIGINS '88. A brief note to correct an oversight on the part of NASAMW. At HMGS, I was awarded The Courier Sportsmanship Award. I am proud of this award and the framed certificate is hung in a place of honor in my wargaming room. I am a subscriber to your fine publication and have a copy of every issue. Keep up the good work. Enclosed is a copy of the certificate. Thank you for your support for our hobby. - LARRY H. STONE, Pittsburgh, PA - Congratulations, Larry. A HUNGARIAN READER LOOKS FOR WARGAMING PEN PALS Dr. Thomas Visegrady; Pecs, Ifjusag Utja 9.B.I.S; 7624, Hungary has written looking for friendly corresponents: This Spring we were lucky enough to get a copy of the English "Military Modeling" magazine, containing your address. As we deal professionally with military history themes, we try to contact you: we'd like to offer a help for in your circle of regular customers with interest toward the hobby. As well as we'd like to ask for a help for us in finding correspondence with people with the same interest. I'd like to askyou to publish our address or to give it to more serious inquirers of military history of Europe, mostly of Medieval or Napoleonic or WWII. There are an amount of result of research - even of ours personally - on this field, maybe valuable but - even over here - hard-to-find facts. For example in the Medieval, Hungarian Kingdom reached the seashore of three seas in the middle European region. It had a rather hard history. Its Medieval warfare, structure, weaponry, tactics, organisations, etc. bear a very strong characteristic of typical Medieval warfare and a lot of informations about them are still hardly obtainable. In the Napoleonic era there were two more important battles against our insurgents (Szer, 1809). Our Hungarian WWII organisations, weapons, etc. could be also interesting. We could offer some finished papers on the military affairs, uniforms, flags or illustrated materials as well as I may kindly offer my own research work for a wished special theme at the local (and at the capitol) archives to gain never published facts on the military history. What I'd like to ask you very much is to give my address to real few people or publish it for a wider public, who'd have correspondence with us. I'd like to have correspondence, collect advices and hints on that exciting hobby which -- sorry has no publishers or editors at all over here. I thank you for your great job in advance in helping me to find people who are fans - and connoisseurs - of the same nice field of interest. - THOMAS VISEGRADY I hope some of our readers will write him. - DICK BRYANT  Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. VIII No. 6 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1989 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles covering military history and related topics are available at http://www.magweb.com