WRG
Wargames Rules 1750-1850
I
am not sure when, or how, we discovered WRG rules. Almost certainly from the pages of Don
Featherstone’s “Wargamers Newsletter”.
They were produced in January 1971 and we must have obtained a copy soon
after that.
To
be honest I am not sure what wargame rules we used between 1969 and 1971. I clearly remember reading “Charge”, and I
also remember setting up the basic game to understand the rules. I don’t think we ever moved on to the full
rules.
I
suspect that most of those two years were filled painting my newly acquired
Hinton Hunt and Airfix figures. Our
first wargames were played on the sitting room table, or sometimes on the
floor.
First Wargames Table
We
moved to Germany in 1970, and this is a photo of Jan using our first wargames
table. We already had a fair collection
of figures and scenery. We lived in
Osnabruck in North Germany, and like most German houses, we had our own cellar
room. It was pretty basic, as was our
wargames table. The table was custom
made and could be dismantled to move when we were posted again.
From
memory I would have said that we were using WRG rules then, but that cannot be
so if they were not released until 1971.
Perhaps we were still using “Charge” rules.
But I do remember play testing WRG
1750-1850. We have always found new
rules difficult to master. I could
never grasp them by just reading through the rule book. We always had to play a couple of games to
understand how they worked. The beauty
of WRG was their laminated fast play sheets.
I think it was one page, printed on both sides.
The
attraction of these rules for me was that they covered the Napoleonic Period,
which is what I was really interested in.
At
the time I thought that the long list of plus and minor points which had to be
added to the dice throw added to the realism of the rules, and that the more
plus or minus points the better. It took
me many years to realise that most of those plus and minus points balanced each
other out.
I
have never regarded wargaming to be anything more than a War Game, with the
emphasis on Game. I remember reading in
one of Don Featherstone’s book that he felt the same. Don had fought during WW2, and was very
aware that wargaming bore only a passing resemblance to real war. I served in the British Army for 22 years,
and would entirely agree.
Despite
this I always found wargame rules very frustrating once I had played sufficient
games to fully understand them. It was
not long before something happened in a game which would clearly not happen in
real life. Our answer was always to
roll a dice during the game, and try to amend the rules afterwards. We soon found that doing so resolved the
immediate problem, but often created many more unforeseen problems.
Fortunately
during the 1970s Jan and I usually gamed alone. So we only had to agree between ourselves to
resolve any rule problems.
