For me, wargaming is a great hobby which brings together my lifelong passion for studying military history with model building and gaming. While I also enjoy PC and console gaming, there’s something especially satisfying about the end to end process of researching, collecting, building, painting and deploying a miniature wargaming force.
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!
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, 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.
PSR didn’t exist in these 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 comics at 30p each. Oh for the hey days of Airfix, ESCI, Matchbox and Revell at £2.25 a box, let alone the anticipation when HaT, Italeri and Zvezda joined the party!
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 also always there looming large. A foray into Warhammer 40K with plastic Space Marines, Rhinos and Predator tanks, didn’t last long.
By the early 2000’s we had approaching 100,000 figures between us 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.
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’m now well and truly hooked on the plastic, and now metal, crack!
A couple of years back in the game, and I’ve decided to capture my return journey into the hobby. Wargame Despatches will be about showing you what I get up to and will cover my modelling, terrain building, research, army building, and of course, wargaming adventures. It’ll be mainly World War Two and mainly 20mm, with the occasional foray elsewhere.
Much of my focus is currently building to a fairly large Sword Beach assault game planned for June 2024, to coincide with the 80th anniversary. Hence the countdown at the bottom of the page and the amount of D-Day themed content. 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!
I hope you enjoy the articles you’ll find in this blog, and please do comment with any helpful tips to help my improvement in modelling, painting and blogging.
All the best, Dave
WARGAME DESPATCHES 