Most of us are not lucky enough to have a permanent wargame area. In our confederacy [club seems a mite too formal for our level of organization], we use the table provided by PanzerLeader Wargamers Bunkermeister, Mike Creek, in his garage. This normally automotive appendage is devoted to our hobby. Everything in it is devoted to gaming with the exception of the water heater and the washer/dryer. [If we are doing a Vietnam game, however, the dryer does sound like an incoming Huey.] Let's take a look at the basic piece of equipment, the table. Ours is 6 feet by 7 feet [a side table extension is 12 feet by 3 feet]. And it is 40 inches tall. This is taller than the average. It means that we don't spend the entire day bent over coming away with an aching back. I've played from floor level to 40 inches and this is a very comfortable height. I'm just too old to do floor games. One game I played when I was in the Army was Cascade Peak 1. The table was about 12 inches high--a real killer for your back and knees! The width of 7 feet came from cutting 1 foot off the edge of a 4 by 8 sheet of pressed wood. This width allows us to reach the center of the table. If we need to reach over a hill mass or building, we also have stepstools. And the space under the table is not wasted. Counting the floor, we have five shelves for our supplies of vehicles, buildings, and other items. [Troops are stored elsewhere. Much like in the Army, the barracks and the motor pool are separate buildings.] Mike stores his vehicles, etc., in flat, cardboard storage boxes. [I'll mention these again later.] With all the weight under the table, you might think it would need to be fairly sturdy. It will hold at least 650 pounds. When we set up our aircraft suspension system, three of us stood on the table. The garage door is painted a pale sky blue to blend in with the aircraft suspension system. It also provides a good photo background, much less cluttered than the charts and tables that we used to hang on the door. A word about covering. We use green indoor/outdoor carpet, permanently attached to the tabletop with heavy duty staples. This provides a vegetation appearance. It also makes a decent ocean for 1/2400 naval games. My own thought is to use it as a water background for a Vietnam brown-water game in 1/76th scale. We would establish several islands using Geohex terrain, lichen, and various trees, I have not yet figured out bow to make scale mud that will pull the boots off a 20mm 9th Infantry Division soldier. We use the same surface for desert or winter. We don't really do anything special for those terrains. One of our compadres who moved back east sent us some convention pictures of a Battle of the Bulge game he participated in. There white sheets were stretched over a green table like a tablecloth to simulate snow. We have not yet tried this simple expedient ourselves. Every time we finish a major game, we vacuum and iron the carpet on the table. Once we have picked up the battle, the vacuum gets any dirt that may have accumulated during the time the scenario was set up. These campaigns sometimes last for six months. The ironing keeps the carpet's nap down, which helps the troops stand upright. I mentioned under the table storage. Since they have been purchased over the years, there is a fairly wide variety of styles and sizes. The different colors are also coded as to contents. For example, U.S. Army vehicles are stored in brown boxes with blue flowers, while plain brown boxes contain Soviet vehicles and plain blue boxes hold aircraft. Here is one box. It measures 28 inches by 16 inches. It is also labeled on one end. This box holds roughly one M-60A1 tank battalion with supporting vehicles. [We use one to one scale in terms of TO&E] Mike has put down a thin wooden bottom in the box [simple 1/16th inch veneer]. To this he has added a quarter round strip of inexpensive molding to keep the vehicles from rolling off. In each comer is a block of two by four on edge. This produces a uniform height without having to measure each block precisely. We might not always be handy, but we are crafty! On top of these blocks a second tray is placed. The bottom tray holds the maneuver units, while the top tray has the support, e.g., fuel and ammo trucks, bridgers, and the battalion heavy mortars. With the side table and the main table both in use, we have 148 square feet of gaming space available. The tables, through a stroke of good fortune, are exactly one meter apart. We have added velcro to the two by four legs of the tables to support a one by two shelf bracket. These brackets support a bridger of wood one meter wide covered in blue felt. The gap between the two tables thus becomes a river. Two of Atlas's 18 inch chord truss railroad bridges mounted on 5 inch high piers, with two 9 inch approaches make a good Arnhem-type span to capture or defend. Scenic Effects' Remagen Bridge is also excellent. We have used it in a WWII game, most impressive with the tanks rolling across! Both bridges, deployed side by side, provide road and rail access across our gap. When we started gaming, we used square blocks of two by four with wire rods [laundry coat hanger sections] to support our aircraft. This created problems when the block would compete for space with a vehicle. There were systems that use telescoping rods to mount a small plane or space ship to block of wood permitting the gamer to fly at various altitudes. We have done away with the block of wood and use radio antennae with a wire rod at one end and a hook at the other end. These are suspended from the ceiling on a grid of two inch by four inch wire fence mesh. This mesh is anchored into the studs of the house frame and is kept taut by the use of turnbuckles along one side. By using the radio antennae, we can fly a B-17 above the flak, or an Apache at nap of the earth. The rest of our paraphernalia is pretty standard stuff . We have various lengths of range sticks depending on what we are shooting or moving. These are painted the same shade of green as the table covering on one side. This allows them to blend in with the tabletop for photo ops. On the other, they are painted in alternately red and white to resemble artillery ranging stakes. Currently, our system uses two ten-sided dice to qualify a hit and one six-sided die to determine hit location from one to six, top to bottom on either a man or a vehicle. Our ten-sided dice are color-coded in 5% increments. We used to use four six-sided dice, three of one color and one off-color, to do the same thing. One of our friends is experimenting with a single 20-sided die to which all modifiers have been added. To determine artillery effect, we use a template made out of plastic page protectors with a series of circles [usually six to represent a six tube battery] drawn in millimeters. A battery of dime/nickel howitzers [105mm] will have six 105mm black circles. Inside each black circle is a red circle half the diameter of the black. The red circle represents the kill zone for everything, while the black represents the kill zone for troops in the open. We have a number of such templates for various size artillery pieces. We are also in the process of transferring these templates to hard Plexiglas. These should prove more durable. In addition to the artillery templates, we also have templates for automatic weapons. These are leaf-shaped and are derived from those found in U.S. Army machine gun manuals. We use them for all automatic small arms. Data for vehicles and anti-armor weapons is kept on four by six cards. We have several sets of World War II cards. These are kept in the small photo albums that often come from the processor with your pictures. Each album contains vehicles of one nationality. There are also cards for aircraft. These cards are on hard drive, and backed up, so they can be printed as necessary. A soldier's small arms are listed on a chart by generic type, e.g., assault rifle or submachine gun. Each type is treated the same whether, for instance, the sub gun is a Japanese Type 100 or an H&K MP-5. The same friend who is experimenting with the single die is also working on ranges for modem [post- WWII to the present] small arms. He is considering differentiating between the first generation of assault rifles like the M- 14 and the FN FAL and the current weapons like the FAMAS and the L-85 with their smaller caliber and shorter barrels. Hanging in the corner is a clock sign from an office supply store. This of course denotes the time/turn. Our turns cover one hour of game time. The clock card moves with the sun. As you can see most of our mechanics are essentially the same as yours. Our major points of difference are these: 1. a permanently dedicated wargaming area 2. our taller than average table, and 3. our aircraft suspension system. These last two are made possible by the first. Back to MWAN #106 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Hal Thinglum 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