Roots

I have been having trouble finding time for wargaming recently, although I did base up several stands of miscellaneous 40mm Renaissance figures I was given recently, by someone cleaning out some of his false start projects. I am hoping that my sons and I will have time to get a Renaissance game on the table soon, and even a few extra stands will be a help with providing two reasonable forces for a game. (My Renaissance collection was originally designed for Armati at the "Introductory" scale, so each base was intended to be a potential maneuver element...altering the "zoom" level reduces the number of possible maneuver elements considerably.)

While waiting on this game to develop, I decided it was time to have a look at my bookshelves, for some inspirational gaming reading. I ended up with War Games (my copy is a 1973 printing). It's always interesting to look back at our hobby roots, and I find it interesting to see how much of the structure of the way we do things today was already in place in the early days.

War Games provided the model for later books, it appears, with nine chapters starting with an overivew and then covering troops, terrain, maps and campaigns, scenario design, ancients rules, horse and musket rules, modern (i.e. WWII) rules, and solo wargaming. The troop section discusses casting and mold-making, which is probably a little more Old School than most newcomers would be comfortable with today, but which may lead me to my next workbench project: recasting a conversion of Meisterzinn Renaissance trumpeter into a pikeman. The mold-making practice in plaster will probably transfer to RTV, and that'll give me a chance to test things out inexpensively.