It seems to me that the hobby of wargaming is marked by great anomalies and incongruities as Wargamers go to extreme lengths and spend considerable sums of money to obtain accurately designed and scaled figures which are meticulously painted and tactically manoeuvred in all historically authentic manner. Some wargamers make great efforts to ensure that the table-top battlefield is a realistic miniature representation of actual countryside, embellished with rocks, rivers, bridges, villages, etc., etc. The end result is as near small-seale perfection as it is possible to achieve and competently photographed could well be taken for actual battle films or stills from professionally made war movies. But then, having painstakingly achieved such a degree of perfection, most wargamers permit their beautiful battlefields to become a travesty of real-life by being littered with rule books, tape measures, dice, cigarette packets, ashtrays, glasses, empty beer cans, pencils, and a host of other seemingly essential items that litter the back areas of the field. If you believe I am exaggerating, just wander quietly round scrutinising wargames tables and see if I am not right! At almost every public demonstration I have ever seen, and this particularly applies to external events such as the Model Engineers Exhibition, these cluttered illusion-destroying tables and the presence of dice cause the onlooker to associate wargaming with Monopoly. Because, to a large extent the bystander, unaware of the deep background and thought to the hobby, judges us by appearances which could well be the reason for the long uphill fight the hobby of wargaming has had to establish itself -- it is burdened enough with the label of "playing with toy soldiers" and certainly needs no man-made confusion as a further handicap. What is the point of going to such trouble to achieve authenticity and then allowing a collection of wargaming junk to ruin the effect? It is going to take a whole-hearted campaign, fought almost as hard as the wargame itself, to re-educate wargamers and wean them away from this pernicious and untidy practice. Try and put your own house in order and you will find surprised glances and slightly snotty remarks by your fellow players at any insistence of tidiness by attempting to have extra items kept off the table-top battlefield. Admittedly much of this material is essential to the conduct of the game but it is not difficult to find a relatively easy solution to the problem kind it only needs a smaller side table or a shelf built underneath the wargames table to lind a new and proper home for extraneous impedimenta. Wargaming Ecologists - make yourselves heard and clean up the hobby! It seems that the semi-feud between wargamer Dave Millward and umpire Phil Barker mentioned in our September Editorial came to an unfortunate head at the National Wargames Convention in Hull recently. A neutral witness tells me that before the game Dave Millward took the precaution of clearing with both the game umpire and the tournament referee his interpretation of one aspect of the Wargames Research Rules under which the final was to be fought, subsequently planning his tactics with that knowledge in mind. However, when attempting to implement this interpretation, he was ruled out of order by the game umpire and his appeal to the tournament referee was similarly rejected. In the discussion that followed, my witness tells me that Millward displayed unusual restraint in spite of being personally abused by an official before being disqualified from the Final. This reminds me a bit of the manner in which football referees send players off the field for working off their frustrations by swearing at them and yet allow others to perpetrate fouls and tackles of the most dangerous nature! But if this what top class wargaming has come to then the sooner the heated competitiveness in public contests gives way to peaceful domestic wargaming the better! Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 176 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1976 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