LittleWars1913

 I have made an initial sizing sketch in google Sketchup of how I think the layout of Dendermonde will look.

This shows 3 Bastions, 3 Ravelins, 2 Demi-lunes and the Glacis.  Still not quite sure about the shape of the Bastions.  I am basing my designs on the original Dendermonde article rather than any models of actual Vauban forts.  They might need to be a little less pointed.

Ron Miles admiring his city with a bastion in the centre.

The model takes up 60" across from table edge to table edge and is 28" deep which means I might need to reduce the depth of the bastions to make them less pointed and thus less deep.

The Glacis shape also needs to be played with.

But it is a good initial start and once I have played with it a little more I will cut out the shapes from Card and see how it looks on the table top.

 I know people who have never sold a single wargaming figure and who swear that they never will.

I also know people, like my opponent Anthony, who has bought and sold collections with such blinding speed that I have managed just one game with him before they are gone again.

I fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. 

Until I bought Gladiator Miniatures and had to make changes to how the house was organised, and gave up my games room to become a workshop,  I had never sold or given away a book.  But I didn't have the space any more and 800 SF and Fantasy books went to an SF dealer.  Three crates of non-SF went to charity shops and I then had the space to store my military history and uniform books.

When I bought Gladiator, I downsized my income fairly considerably (I used to work in IT) and joined the local Woking Linrary (which is excellent) and hardly ever buy books any more except wargames, uniforms and occasional history.

Over the years I have sold a fair few wargames collections though, as I realised I wasn't playing games with them or I would never get round to painting them - the "ooh shiney" phase had passed I was no longer passionate about the period.

So, over the years I have sold the following painted armies:

15mm ECW
A mix of old Minifigs Strip figures (bought when I was 16) and Mikes Models 15mm bought from Essex in about 1988.  This was part of my clear out of 15mm and I had duplicated the period in 54mm so they had to go.  They sold in Ebay for a reasonable amount and the buyer was very happy with them and the unpainted units I also included.

15mm Napoleonic
Again, I decided to clear out my 15mm and I had duplicated the period in 54mm.  These were a mix of Essex painted by Mili-Art (I bought two painted starter armies when I restarted wargaming at Salute 1995), some AB and some Old Glory.  Most went to fellow members of Guild Wargames Club.

15mm NKE and Hittites
Two fairly large armies - I never really found ancient rules I liked that much for big games - these went to a fellow club member.

15mm Swiss army for Maximillian! Rules
15mm Gladiator figures - these went to Chris at the Guildford Club.

15mm Classical Indian and Arab Conquest
I bought the Arab Conquest painted but never used them - they went to Hinds figures as part of large partial swap for a painted 20mm ACW collection.  The Classical Indian were sold on Ebay.

10mm Warmaster High Elf Army
I hadn't used these in a long time - bought and painted when Warmaster first came out. I had no local opponents and couldn't face painting another army in 10mm.  These were sold to somene in Australia for a fair price.

54mm Vietnam
1/35th scale - bought a long time ago, played a couple of games but never really found rules I liked.  In the end I decided they were too big for the table and I sold them in lots on ebay.  The Dragon kits and the Huey I bought had all at least doubled in price.

32mm DUST Weird War
Got into playing this with Anthony and when he decided to move it on I bought it. Played about 1 game in 5 years and did think of converting it to Konflikt '47 but in the end decided it duplicated my WW2 gaming experience so sold most of  it on facebook.

15mm Marlburian + DBA armies
Gladiator Miniatures - these all went to Ian Hinds as part of the great 20mm ACW swap.

25mm Darkest Africa
I bought these in 2000/2001 and we played a lot of games using GASLIGHT or Chris Peer's rules.  But eventually I realised I hadn't used them for 5 years and that a lot of the games were very similar. Sold off in job lots on ebay.

25mm VSF
Played a lot of GASLIGHT with these but eventually sold them for space as I was concentrating on my 18mm Martian Empires range.

25mm Pirates
I never had any ships for this and eventually decided it really just duplictaed my Three Musketeers collection as they were both stabby/shooty skirmish games.

 Unpainted collections sold off:

28mm WW1
28mm French Indian Wars
10mm Warmaster
10mm Battle of the Five Armies (GW)
Space Hulk 3rd Edition
54mm ECW (25 boxes of them - Anthony has a complete collection so I decided not to duplicate it in the end).

I can't say that I really regret any of the sales. Perhaps if I still had the Darkest Africa stuff I could play Men Who Would be KIngs with it, but I have the 54mm NWF collection for that period.  I have mostly used the money raised by selling off painted figures to buy other figures or some painted figures to extend collections.

Some £500 from the DUST/54mm Vietnam sales paid for some raised beds, soil and other bits for my new vegetable garden but most has gone back into the hands of wargaming traders or fellow wargamers...

 I was finally tipped over the edge on starting a new blog by Norm Smith and the post on his Battlefields and Warriors Blog here:

http://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2022/07/too-much-stuff.html

which posed the question - are we using simpler rule because we now collect so many periods we don't have time to absorb complex rules?  I made a few replies in the comments and then realised that I was interested in the discussion and it raised some other questions about decisions I had made over the years about the way I now wargame.

I originally started out in 1974 with H G Wells Little Wars rules as they were the only book on wargaming that my local library had.  For two years I happily fired matchsticks at plastic Airfix 54mm Napoleonics and played on a carpet or a patio.  This is simple wargaming, easy to remember rules, plenty of excitement as you fire matchsticks at long range at the advancing enemy and a melee system where every man kills another man until they are outnumbered 2 to 1.

Then we discovered Practical Wargaming by Charles Wesencraft in the library which revolutionised my wargaming and I used a table and dice.  We still played Napoleonics with 1/72nd scale Airfix and were soon rolling for movement and morale and working out firing ranges, etc.

After that, we wanted to play bigger battles so I bought 5mm Heroics and Ros Napoleonics and we fought larger games using G W Jefferies rules which I seem to remember were fairly complex.

I changed schools and moved into 25mm Minifigs with Bruce Quarrie rules and soon adapted to dividing by 33 for casualties and working out exactly how far a French Guard Grenadier could move.  We never managed to finish a game in the after school wargames club as there simply wasn't time to setup and play more than a few moves before everything had to be packed up again. But we enjoyed ourselves (I think).

After that I discovered Roleplaying games and fell out of wargaming until 1995 when I restarted with 15mm Essex Miniatures Napoleonics and Bruce Quarrie again (as those were the rules my opponent and I had used at school).  This time we had longer to play games and actually finished them - helped by scenarios and a fixed number of turns.

Since then I have played probably over 100 different rule sets across all sorts of periods; either with my own collections or at Guildford Wargames Club.  I have enjoyed some of them, hated others and adopted a few as ones that I return to again and again.

The two big influences on my gaming in recent years have been Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame and the books by Neil Thomas starting with his Wargaming and Introduction book.

It is only in recent years that I have started to realise what it is that I enjoy about wargaming and what I want from a set of rules.  I am not someone who is ultra-competitive. I was never like that at school sports and my second Grammar school ruined sports for me as they were extremely competitive to the extent of teaching the first XV to foul on the blind side of the referee.

I like to win but it doesn't matter to me if I don't.  So, working out how rules work in depth, how to break them or get the best from rule mechanisms isn't something that appeals to me.  I just want to play the game and enjoy it.

To me, wargaming is an opportunity to put painted toy soldiers on a table and push them around while enjoying the company of friends. It is, above all, a social experience rather than a competition.

And this is also why I enjoy "simpler" rules such as Neil Thomas's which are elegant in design and are straightforward.  I don't want to have the game mechanisms intrude on the game in such as way that I feel I am playing the rules rather than playing the game of Toy Soldiers.

This is why I have never really got on with Too Fat Lardies rules, I think, though I know many love them and I have tried several sets.  The mechanisms in games like Chain of Command simply make me feel I am playing a dice game rather than pushing figures around a table.

I think perhaps one reason that I am happy with simpler rules is that I have no pretensions to recreating history. I very rarely play refights of historical battles.  I prefer balanced scenarios that give both sides a chance (rare in actual battles) and that produce an interesting challenge.

I sometimes feel that perhaps I am little old fashioned but I am happy with rules that use Charge/Move/Fire/Melee/Morale and UgoIgo turn sequences.  I struggle with games that have interruptions of the other player's turn as I never know when to interrupt. I do play games that use cards for commands or dice for order checks such as Command and Colours or Black Powder but I don't feel that these intrude on the game as much as other ideas can do.

I am still playing new rule sets at the Guildford club - I played Soldiers of Napoleon the other day and thought that it had some interesting ideas but I am not going to spend £30 on a new ruleset which I will play very occasionally when I am happy with a variation of Neil Thomas.

So, I have come to a point in my wargaming that I have a set of rules I am happy with, which work for me and the people I play with and I really can't see me buying any more "shiny" new rules to replace them.

And I am back playing Little Wars again with my own metal 54mm figures and matchstick firing cannon out on the lawn and occasionally on the table and still enjoying it as much as I did for the first time over 40 years ago in a friend's lounge with the furniture pushed back.