Milestones I

Having spent the weekend playing Charge! instead of working on my freelance proofreading job, figuring that the one could wait and the other was time-limited, I need to get to it...and this post will therefore be incomplete.

I mentioned that my birthday was this past weekend, and that I hit 50, something of a milestone in life.  In gaming, it was also a milestone.  I received, for my 15th birthday, a now somewhat more well-know set of rules for "Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns", which shaped my gaming activities for years afterward.

(Yes, that's my original copy, tattered but complete.  The box also includes Chainmail, all four supplements, and the Swords and Spells miniatures rules.)

I've been considering some way to reconnect my original core group of three players and run a reunion game of some sort. We all still game, at least occasionally.  To the left, two of the former group, my brother Norman and long-time friend Joe Bargowski, play a 25mm fantasy skirmish game with my sons and me in November 2009.

Former group member Steve Doughty was most recently seen with his own sons in tow at the HMGS-East Cold Wars convention a couple of weeks ago.

I'd like to think that gaming has contributed to these long-lasting friendships.

The anniversary of our D&D game has a date, which makes it easy to remember.  But sometime this spring there is an unremembered anniversary of equal importance, without which the D&D game would never have formed in the first place.

One of the other treasures of my childhood is my copy of Terence Wise's Introduction to Battle Gaming.

A 5th grade classmate lent me his copy, sometime in the spring of 1971, which gave me a way to rationalize my play with the collection of Airfix figures I had acquired by then.  (My personal copy of the book was acquired at a slightly later date, probably in 1972 sometime.)  That's a nice round 40 years ago...time flies when you're having fun.