Not very long ago I was talking to a wargamer from the younger generation about miniatures rules. Some particular topic came up and I remember saying, "Oh yeah. that's just like the rules that Featherstone wrote." "Who's Featherstone?", my young friend asked, "I've never heard of him before." It was then that I realised that I was a victim of a generation gap in miniatures gamers. It got me to thinking about how long ago it was since I had been introduced to Don Featherstone books and rules and what had happened in the meantime. It also got me to wondering just where Don Featherstone is right now, when it appears that we need him so badly. The first exposure that I remember to Featherstone was with his book WARGAMES. I couldn't believe that someone had written a serious book ' about wargaming that was actually being sold in a real bookstore. I had been gaming with miniatures for a couple of years with friends already. We had adapted rules for naval miniatures and some WWII armor as well from various boardgames such as JUTLAND and PANZERBLITZ. We were on the verge of writing some of our own rules to reflect more 'realism' on the gaming table (actually most of our battles were fought out on the floor at this time). I remember that, at the time, Featherstone's book was somewhat of a disappointment to me. There was some excellent introductory type material about getting started in gaming. Unfortunately, I felt that even though it was good stuff , it had come a bit too late to do me any good. I already knew what it took to get started doing WWII armor and naval miniatures, and I really doubted that I would ever get into any of the other, more obscure periods mentioned in the book. So the introductory stuff, which I thought was very well done, was simply not helpful in my particular case. I was still intrigued by the rest of the book regarding rules and other information. it was this prospect that had interested me enough to buy the book in the first place. Now I would be able to how 'real' wargamers played and what they used for rules. The author of the book, I figured, must have the ultimate system for doing this or he probably wouldn't have published the only book an wargaming that I had ever seen. Alas. I was to be disappointed here too. All of the rules and information about gaming provided was all very simple Stuff They were things that we had started doing in the beginning but we had gone on beyond these types of rules very quickly in search of greater realism and the ultimate war-gaming experience. The book seemed pretty useless to me at the time. I was disappointed because it didn't have what I was looking for at the Lime. It seemed like we were already more advanced than this book and yet we knew that we hadn't really come very far ourselves. We knew that our games could be 'better' if they were only more 'realistic' because that seemed to be the ultimate goal of wargaming with miniatures as far as we were concerned. Looking back now, I don't really know how we had arrived at the conclusion that we had to be more realistic and complex in order to have better wargames. It was simply a belief that manifested itself gaming a bunch of high school students who were anxious to show off their individual talents at research and development of rules based on a historical period, namely WWII. We had much time and little money on our hands and there really wasn't much to buy in our area of interest anyway. We contented ourselves with doing research and incorporating every new fact we found into our games to make them better. It was a stage that really didn't last very long, but it was very important to us at the time. There was a day that I remember, after we had been gaming about 4 years that we stepped back and took a look at the game we were playing and tried to figure out what was still missing. We had spent 4 years in playing and research, constantly escalating the scope of the games we were doing and adding to them in detail. We realised, all at once, that it used to be more fun. We remembered the "good old days" when we had just started out and used makeshift rules of any kind just to be able to play. We were beyond all that now, though and much closer to the 'ultimate' wargame that we all sought. And yet, we all admitted, some of the fun had definitely gone out of it. Well I would like to say that we had seen the light and went back to simple games and Donald Featherstone and everyone lived happily ever after, but that's not what happened. At high school and into college there was a great turnover in gamers in our group. We settled on 'intermediately complex' rules and kept on gaming. Very slowly we started to get into other periods of history and we applied our game theory and experience to those as well. By this time there were more Featherstone books out, but they continued to be a disappointment in the way of rules. Our search had not yet ended, even though we had diversified our gaming. The WARGAMERS NEWSLETTER was also around and we started getting some use out of that, though mostly with research and historical background articles. Featherstone was there, we knew of his work and his contribution to the hobby, we just couldn't see his relevance to our group and what we did. It wasn't until the late seventies that things started to change. I guess it was just frustration that made us reach out to some of the old games we had played and give them another try. CHAINMAIL comes to mind as one of the first we went back to. We enjoyed it and some of the simplicity took hold as being fun. The light had finally begun to come through that maybe we had been missing the forest for the trees for quite a while. There might be some things in the old books and rules that weren't so bad after all, as long as they brought back more fun to the gaming table. Then came a new set of rules in a totally new period. It was THE SWORD AND THE FLAME for British Colonials. It would allow us to do the Zulu War just like in the movies. (A film we had rented as a group even before VCR's). The imporatance of SWORD AND THE FLAME itself is the topic of a future column, but suffice it to say that it has been critical in changing the thinking of our, gaming ever since we started with it. It truly showed us the whole forest and kept us from getting lost in the trees as we had before. Here was a simple set of rules that was fun to play. It was all done with 6 sided dice which many of us had just about given up on as being entirely too unpredictable to be able to be used to simulate a battle. When we finally stepped back and took a long hard look at what we had been doing, it was surprising to see how far in the other direction we had been going before SWORD AND THE FLAME turned it around. We had been doing complicated systems for casualties and morale and coming up with the equivalent results to a simple game but with much more clutter and garbage than we wanted or needed. Reduced to its simplest form we were taking the long way around to accomplish the same result. For some reason we felt a lot better about taking 7 different modifiers and terrain effects into account to get a 34 out of 100 chance to do something instead of simply rolling a 5 or 6 on one die to achieve the saw thing. It was THE SWORD & THE FLAME that made us realise this when we did. And it was this realisation that sent me back to Featherstone and his books. I was amazed at what I found. It was like reading those books for the very first time. Suddenly I knew what we had been missing for quite a few years. I could see that Don Featherstone had tried to tell us way back then that simple games were the way to go. The enjoyment comes from other aspects of the game than just the rules themselves. The playing is the thing and this will always be true. It is the actual play of the game that is the social part of gaming. When it works, then all who are involved will have a good time. Individual gamers may enjoy different aspects of their diverse hobby more or less than the average gamer, but it is the game itself that will Make it Or break it for almost all wargamers. And so we have come full circle from the beginning up until now. The simple game systems are once again to the fore among many who had forgotten or forsaken them. They have there champions once again in people like Hal Thinglum of MWAN (a worthy replacement for the old WARGAMERS NEWSLETTER) and Wally Simon with the PW REVIEW. These are the types of games that the experienced gamers will enjoy and the novice gamers will find easy and enjoyable enouah to get involved in. The games like SWORD AND THE FLAME by Larry Brom have out us back on the well travelled road that led so many of us into the hobby in the first place. Now more than ever we can appreciate the contribution made by Donald Featherstone with his books on wargaming. Maybe its time that the new generation of wargamers find out just who Don Featherstone is. Back to MWAN # 24 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1986 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com