Playing favourites

In my blog reading over the past week, I came across a cracking post from the Too Much Lead blog, and then a followup from Steve's Random Musings on favourites: game, period, etc. So I figured, in the interests of keeping an excellent idea going, I'd have a go.

Deep breath, then.... Here goes, with my favourite:

Period

Now that's a tricky one to start with. As I've said in the past, it'd come down to the three periods I played most of with the school wargaming club - WW2, Ancients and Napoleonics. Tough call, but I think if you made me choose, I'd go for the glorious uniforms and large scale sweep of Napoleonics.

Scale

Right now, no contest - I'd definitely say 28mm, not least because I find it easiest to paint. That may change once I've got stuck into vast quantities of 18mm Napoleonics, mind, or quite possibly again when I get an IABSM company or two knocked together in 15mm.

Rules

Again, it's not a contest at the moment. I just love, love, love Operation: Squad - it does what it has to do to replicate the period it's dealing with at the scale it's designed for, then shuts the %^&*() up, gets out of the way, and lets you get on with it.

Board game

Currently, Shadows Over Camelot. I have a thing for co-operative board games, and this is definitely one of the best of the bunch. Oddly, I have a mild dislike for 'perfect information' non-cooperative board games, such as Carcassone: Discovery, mostly because some of the players I play with insist on turning them into 'everyone advises everyone else' games, which annoys the bejesus out of me!

Figure Manufacturer

I'm going to be a little controversial here: Wargames Factory. Their website's still scrappy, their company politics leave me cold, but there have been a few flashes of pure genius in their figure ranges. Sometime in the near future I'm going to fail to resist temptation, and buy an awful lot of boxes of their Spanish Succession troops and maybe their Zulus as well. And that's quite aside from the several packs of Persian cavalry that are going to find their way into my Parthian army.

Opponent

Take a bow, Grahame. Simply for not being afraid to come up with proper scenarios for our semi-regular ECW games. And a tip of the hat to Carl for being around for those as well, and for our WAB and Op: Squad encounters.

Inspiration: Film

Has to be A Bridge Too Far. First movie I was allowed to see on my own at the cinema.

Inspiration: Book

Charles Grant's Battle: Practical Wargaming. I lost count of how many times I had that out of the local library, and it was clearly the inspiration for our club rules at school. Yes it's old school, but Action At Twin Farms is and always will be a classic.

For those who don't know, by the way, it's available free online as PDFs of its serialisation in Meccano Magazine. Not that that will stop me trying to track down a real copy again sometime!

Inspiration: Art

Ok. This one's tricky. I have to say, though, that the pages and pages of colour uniform drawings in my copy of Ugo Pericoli's 1815: The Armies At Waterloo are practically falling apart from the amount of time I spent thumbing through them. Yes, sure, it's a book, but the drawings are works of art - Pericoli was costume consultant on the Waterloo movie, and a professor of historical costume in Italy.

The Interweb


All of it!

But seriously? Inspiration comes from the posts you see over to the right here - the list of blogs I follow, the folks out there doing things that I could only dream of, that produce ranks of figures, terrain boards, battle reports that just make me want to get out there and create. A tip of the hat to all of you.