I still play the odd solo wargames - still along the banks of the Nile or in the Sudan, occasionally in the depths of the jungle. I paint very little now because of time and eyesight (it takes me a long time to finish a 30mm figure) and those I do fiddle with are all 30mm, the scale I have stuck with for years. Most of our wargamers are now in the Nile-Sudan (as Doug Johnson and Ian Cohen, both away at graduate school), World War I or the Napoleonics, although these devotees travel to Indiana for their games which involve several hundreds of figures these days. I have never witnessed one but I imagine the game to be something, taking some three days to play out .... this is a bit much for me! I am still something of a simple wargamer and still use your old rules slightly modified. I manage to get some writing in but nowadays chiefly professional stuff. One of the problems re reviewing military books is that now in this country anything of real interest has been published previously in the U.K., military books originating here seem to be on the Revolution or still on the Civil War (what now can one say about that?) So that for the English readers and most of the Stateside readers you have what I might say would be gilding the lily unless I let loose a blast at some things. Most notably the Almarck books which seem to me to be duplication of duplication in many cases, and now no longer with the advantage of being inexpensive in the paperbound format! For two currencies which have remained fairly stable together (the -round sterling and dollar have fluctuated some 10~ at most since the dollar crisis) the cost of English books seems to have outpaced our own. On a couple of occasions books I have ordered through my U.K. bookseller (Heffer's of Cambridge) have cost more then comparable U.S. editions. In looking over the past year I am of the-opinion that the only area of the general hobby which has not gone hog-wild out of proportion is that of wargaming. The 54mm and larger scale figures are ridiculous in price, and, it seems to me, the only new and really interesting castings are those designed for wargamers in. the smaller scales. It is now the wargamer who maintains the fine, old art of conversion as he fiddles with Airfix while the man who deals with the larger scales does not do much of anything but overpaint the larger commercial castings. Militaria in general is so flooded with fakes - good, bad, indifferent - that area of the hobby will be nil simply because of the fact that those of us able to tell the difference between a genuine article and a fake will be dead! My own small collection of medals has about reached the point where I am d..d lucky to find anything to the 24th (SWB), but I am fortunately of the reputation of being a genuine amateur and expert on things 24th (SWB) and not a speculator (I still say that he who collects simply for the money involved is not a collector per se). Britains, of course, are impossible. I pity any poor boob who wishes to collect these unless he is a millionaire. My own collection has been whittled down to one each of every military type the firm made between founding and the end, plus all the British Cavalry and horse-drawn stuff. Otherwise I am out of Britains except from an academic interest point. One aspect of more than 40 years of collecting ended! Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter #146 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1974 by Donald Featherstone. 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