freewargamesrules blog

Phil Olley has produced the pilot issue of a new newsletter called Classic Wargames Journal (CWJ). If it is successful he would like it to be a quarterly publication. The pilot issue costs £4.50 in the UK, £6 overseas and £3.00 as a PDF .

Phil was inspired by the old War Game Digest Journals and has modelled the design on the old fashioned style which helps give it the Old school feel.

Contents:

4 tabletop scenarios (Spurlash Down and vanguards Collide)
Fire Raisers by Stephen Caddy
A battle report from the very first issue of WGD back in 1957
plus articles on Tabletop generals’ characterisation, a guide to painting big units; an ACW riverboat project, and Bill Protz gets marooned!

I ordered the PDF version which arrived within 24 hours and if you are in to old school wargaming I can’t recommend it enough.

Between Autumn of 1997 and Summer 1999 I ran a small newsletter for the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers specialising in the Vietnam War period. The newletter was written for those technically minded on an old Amiga computer as PC’s in those days were still out of the reach of us mere mortals. There was also a few of the articles published back on my first website.

I recently has an email requesting a chart for weather in SE Asia produced in one of those newsletters. I re-wrote the article as I do not have electronic copies of the old newsletter and converted to a PDF.

Since I have gone to the trouble of re-producing the chart I thought I might as share it with the rest of the world.

Weather Chart

If like me you follow several blogs it can be very time consuming visiting them all individually. However, Blogs of War consolidates over 600 blogs onto one blog.

…..sadly he hasn’t added this blog yet!

The Nazfiger Collection is designed for the wargamer, this collection is an extensive collection of military history and orders of battle.

These comprehensive lists have been available to purchase directly from George Nafziger. George has now donated all the lists to the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Research Library. It is online and free to the world.

Nafziger Collection

There have been a number of web gaming magazines over the past few years. Wargames Journal was an excellent web magazine and then went commercial into print form. Unfortunately this was the death of the excellent mag.

Fictional Reality was another excellent magazine that lasted for over 38 issues. It was recently announced that it was stopping.

A new magazine was launched in the summer of 2009 called Irregular Magazine. Issue 3 has just been released, take a look. I wish them every success with the future of this magazine.

I have quite a substantial collection of old wargames books from the 60’s and 70’s. I can’t resist popping in a secondhand bookshop to see what treasures they hold. Wargames books in general secondhand bookshops tend to be a lot cheaper than ebay or specialist military bookshops.

Even so there are titles that are still very hard to find. Well John Curry Events Wargames Rules are now reprinting some of the old classics. There are books from Don Featherstone, Charlie Wesencraft and Paddy Griffith to name a few little gems in here.

Some of these reprints are cheaper than the specialist bookshops are charging for the original copy. So go on and treat yourself and see the type of books that inspired old gamers like me.

There has been alot of hype about the 3rd Edition of Space Hulk. Games Workshop has only done a limited run of these games and I hear that it is already sold out. The figures are already going for ridiculous money on Ebay.

I have to say I prefer the 1st Edition rules and teh 2nd Edition terrain graphics.

Anyway CRasterImage has created a tool for creating hulk layouts and allows you to save the result as Images for importation into other packages.

For more details visit the Warseer Forums.