With the impending arrival of our first-born, I have done the decent thing and sacrificed my games room to teddy bear wall-paper and nappies in readiness. Having a limited amount of space available and no doubt shortly a lot less time to play, I reckon I’ll be less likely to set up a game and leave it in situ for a week or so, as I do now. With this in mind, I have not only been drastically ‘rationalising the storage and retention of wargames stocks’ and limiting any future purchases to 6mm, I’ve also been looking at ways of further compacting my games. I was quite taken with the recent ideas on portable wargames and decided to take it one step further and make more use of my computer. I’ve fiddled about before at trying to translate wargames like DBA onto my screen with little success (I own a Mac, which I love, but there are virtually no wargames available - if you know of any, please let me know). Anyway, at Partizan I bought Peter Pig’s Conquerers and Kings, a set of ancient rules played on a table divided into a grid of 1 foot squares. (see LW#122 Form Square for my earlier ideas on this method) and I decided I had the perfect candidate. Basically I’ve used a drawing/word processing package (‘AppleWorks’) to create a plan of the table and draw all the units and hit markers, list the troop qualities etc. Then a simple BASIC program to perform all the dice rolls for me. I play through each turn of the game just as I would on table, moving troops, rolling dice and removing casualties. The beauty is that I can pick up and put down the game whenever I like. As for aesthetics, I know it won’t ever replace lead soldiers and model terrain, but I can go a little way to tarting up the look of the thing, and I get just as effective a game. For further touches, I’m thinking about expanding the BASIC side of things to generate some random events or a ‘decision maker’. Back to Table of Contents -- Lone Warrior #134 Back to Lone Warrior List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Solo Wargamers Association. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com