Thursday night is Wargames night at 69 Hill Lane, Southampton. Much of the previous weekend is spent preparing a terrain and sorting out troops, unless we are continuing a battle that has been going on for as many as three or four evenings. Between 6 and 6.30, four or five wargamers arrive and when we are fighting a new battle sides are picked. After a preliminary view of the battlefield, the opposing Generals retire to separate rooms to make their plans. The battles themselves take many forms and cover a multiplicity of periods -- maybe a Roman Legion against the Britons, an English Civil War affair, a reproduction of one of the Seven Years War battles, the inevitable Napoleonic disturbance, the French fight the Austrians in Italy, the Russians aid the Afghans against the British in India or a British punitive column goes out against tribesmen of the North-West Frontier. Although we have a modern set up, I can only recall one battle in this period being fought in the last three or four years. Because we have long been fighting these battles together we have settled into an established pattern. We try to be mature, sensible people to whom the game is more important than the victory so that there is a considerable amount of give-and-take. Rules are so ingrained that all we need is a sheet of card tacked at one end of the table, showing the movement distances, morale, firing factors, etc. There is a card for each period. We have now got the thing down to a fine art, not even requiring to write down orders beforehand because we assume that the reaction of the man moving the troops will be the same as that of the men themselves on the actual battlefield. This means that he is allowed to do whatever he wants to do, which is what they would probably here done in real life! We never row, our arguments are friendly and concessions are made by both sides - often a General will voluntarily make a sacrifice because he feels it is in keeping with the spirit of the battle and the times. Our numbers alter with the passing of the years, Nigel Mottram has left town, so has Keith Robinson (he left behind a 7 lb box of winegums with which we still regale ourselves a year later during our battles). Chris Scott comes during questions and visiting wargamers are slotted in invariably to find the transition to our rules quite painless and swift. All this is merely to put on paper what undoubtedly goes on in hundreds of other towns all over the world - wargaming truly is responsible for many friendships and hours of undoubted pleasure. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 122 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1972 by Donald Featherstone. 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