One Hour Wargames

I'm sure I'm not the only wargamer who has found his available time for dice rolling and painting shrunk a bit for a few years following the arrival children. For this reason I gratefully received a gift for Fathers day of the above title, One-Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas from Pen & Sword books. My wife is one of the few people that listen to my ramblings about the needs of a wargamer and so also knew that I struggle to find something I can play on the limited size of our dining table that unfolds from a three foot square to a staggering three by six foot rectangle.  The two selling points of this book then, play a game in an hour on a three foot square, jumped out at my wife as perfectly suited for me.

From Ancient and Dark Age, right through to the Machine Age and Second World War, this book presents a simple ruleset that is tweaked for each period to enable the player to play a simple wargame for a desired moment in history. Each chapter starts with a brief explanation of how the fighting styles of the period are represented in the rules and how the unit types are simplified into between two and four types. Obviously we are looking at finishing a game in an hour, so this is a very simplified system, the rules for a unit size just stating the size of the frontage, it is up to the player to decide what scale models they use and how many they squeeze into the unit. All units have the same capacity of damage of 15 hits.

After the rules there are 30 different scenarios, some based on real battles. This is the section of the book I will find the most useful, not just for this rule set, but I can imagine they will be extremely transferrable to Warhammer, Kings of War, Rapid Fire, in fact any gaming system.  Nobody wants to repeatedly just play "pitched battle" over an empty battlefield all the time. The author takes great care to mention where his inspiration for each scenario came from, a real encounter or another author. (The Godfathers of wargaming Charles Grant and Donald Featherstone receive a couple of name checks.)

Of final note, my youngest offspring has already begun to have a keen interest in Daddy's wargaming (He has already begun "Thundercoating" and painting his own toy soldiers) so I have started to think about how to introduce gaming to the boys. This book is the perfect tool. The simplicity of the rules are perfect for them, I don't want to be constantly referring to tables and rulebooks (I myself am terrible at remembering rules and always find wargaming easier when a "third player" is on hand with a rulebook.) small minds wander easily as we know.

There is also that one last use for this book. You know sometimes you just want to get your entire collection for a period on a table, just for the shere magnificience of it. Your club want to demonstrate a massive Napoleonic war game with everyone's models on the table and you havent got a week to play it in. This system I am sure will easily scale up for this purpose. This book is going to get well thumbed.