Carpet Wars and a Hint of Nostalgia

Feeling somewhat nostalgic today, I was thinking about how I got into wargaming.

I first started to play wargames in the 1980’s when my brother and I would often re-fight the last war film we watched on the telly. A Bridge Too Far, Bridge at Remagen, Anzio, Waterloo, Spartacus – they all got replayed in miniature!

PLASTIC CRACK

Most weekends we’d hop on the bus into town to visit a veritable emporium of plastic crack, a traditional model shop aptly named Model World. Tucked away in St. Austell’s Market House and run by an older ex-RAF chap called Terry, many a penny of our pocket money was ‘invested’ in our armies of plastic. Every birthday or Christmas list was rightly kit or figures focused, and I well remember my first kits being the classic Airfix 25 pounder with limber and Morris quad, and the Airfix Tiger 1 tank.

PSR didn’t exist in those pre-internet days, so we were always hugely excited to head in and see which new sets of 1/72 figures had been released or to collect the latest issue of War Machine by Orbis and Commando/War Picture Library books at 30p each.

Oh for the hey days of Airfix, ESCI, Hasegawa, Matchbox and Revell at £2.25 a box, let alone the anticipation when HaT, Italeri and Zvezda joined the party!

Pictured above are some of my favourite earlier sets. Revell German WW2 Artillery, Revell Imperial Artillery for the Thirty Years War, and Airfix AWI Grenadiers were on the favourites list too.

Funnily enough two kits I never did get, but have always been on my list, are the Airfix HMS Belfast and the old Matchbox double set of Renault and Char (now rereleased by Revell). Perhaps I should have bought them years ago when the Belfast was £4.50, but I do recall weighing up buying two sets of Revell figures or the Belfast, expanding my army must have taken priority at the time.

CARPET WARS

We’d set up our armies on the dining room table, or our bedroom floor for a properly big ‘carpet war’, and play for hours. During the school holidays we’d often set up huge battles or carpet wars lasting days on end, having a room each as our ‘country’ and the hallway between being the sea.

We collected and built models and grew armies of 1000’s of figures into our 20’s, gravitating to Napoleonics and Ancients, though WW2 was always there looming large. A foray into Warhammer 40K with plastic Space Marines, Rhinos and Predator tanks, didn’t last long.

A 20-YEAR SABBATICAL

By the early 2000’s we had over 50,000 figures in our collections and countless models. I can’t say exactly when we last ‘had a game’ but it’s got to be sometime around 2002/2003. Real life, marriages, families, and careers took over as it does for many of us, and away into lofts and garages went these collections. Slowly but surely over the years our collections were whittled down through online auctions but we kept hold of our favourites. I might have stopped collecting but my fascination with military history remained as strong as ever.

BACK IN THE GAME

As with a lot of returned wargamers and modellers, I got the itch again during the first lockdown. On sorting out our garage my son and I stumbled on box after box of one inch warriors. He was almost as excited as me to dig them out and needless to say I well and truly got hooked on the plastic crack again! What a choice there is now compared to 20 years ago, let alone the tech available with 3D printing.

A couple of years back in the game, and I’ve now moved mostly to metal figures for 20mm. Apart from my fledgling German forces which are made up of PSC Siocast figures, Fighting 20’s, and a few others here and there – including some Revell infantry and artillery from the 90’s.

I’ve even sprung out of the wargaming closet and admitted my miniature based interests to my wife. Needless to say she has been supportive but I don’t think I’ll have help painting or gaming any time soon.

CURRENT AND PLANNED PROJECTS

Much of my focus and hobby time is currently building to a fairly large Sword Beach assault game planned for June 2024 to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Lots of research and painting done and much more to do. Hence the countdown at the bottom of the page and the amount of D-Day themed content.

I’ve also kicked off some smaller projects in 20mm namely WW2 Burma and late war NWE. To skirmish with my son I’ve got a 28mm Hundred Years War project on the go and the beginnings of a 28mm Imperial Roman army.

To top it all, I might dig out some of my old plastics and repaint them up for a Napoleonic battle or two. That will definitely have to wait a couple of years…!

Incidentally my brother has recently seen the full Sword beach set up, I could see the excitement coming back – who knows we might even get a game in?

It’ll have to be on a table now though, no more carpet wars!