Saturday 28 April 2012

Looking for a vintage wargame/Dragonmeet 1979

I received the following e-mail from Karl. Can anyone help him with identifying this game?

Hello. I decided to email you instead of replying to a post on "Vintage Wargaming" because my question is not directly related to any particular post.

Can you or your readers help me?

I am looking for a game I played at a very early Dragonmeet. I am pretty sure I played this at the first Dragonmeet, in 1978, but there is a chance that I am misremembering and this happened at the 1979 Dragonmeet. In those days, Dragonmeet was held at the Chelsea Town Hall.

The game I played was a minis game. The genre was fantasy, with a medieval/barbarian flavor. The gamemaster had set up a wargames table with a village that had interesting things around it. Each player had their own party of adventurers. The GM had pregenerated these parties, and there seems to have been some idea of game balance in the parties, thus my party consisted of a "light cavalryman", a "heavy infantryman" and an "assassin". I remember another player just had one member of his party, a "superhero". But this was unusual, most folks had three or four party members. The idea was that various treasures were hidden around the village, and so the parties were in competition with each other to find the treasures. We would move our minis around the table, and we would find clues or have combat encounters and so on. I think that none of us actually managed to find ANY of the treasures, but it was a lot of fun. And it pretty much made me a gamer for life.

Does anyone have any information about this game, or any idea what system it would have been? It was too early for Warhammer or Cry Havoc (which someone else suggested). Each piece had its own movement rate, which you measured with a ruler. Combat and other things was determined with dice rolls, the only dice used were d6 (if I remember right).

I can remember a few more things about the specific scenario I played, if that would help anyone.

Anyone have any info about that first ever Dragonmeet?

Thursday 12 April 2012

More Pathé - Russell Gammage

Thanks to Paul from Oz, who's tip about this next clip led to my wandering around the British Pathé archive a few days ago and unearthing the Portable Battlefield film.

While not as directly soldier related as Paul's previous find, the Marcus Hinton film, this shows Russell Gammage, the proprietor of Rose Miniatures, at work on a figure rather too large a scale to be classed as wargaming.

WOODEN ARMIES

Monday 9 April 2012

Pottering about before the war

While idly browsing the British Pathé archive I found this litte gem, strangely reminiscent of Michael Bentine's Potty Time. Click on the picture to run VT..

MODEL BATTLEFIELD



Sunday 1 April 2012

Today's the Day



Having failed last year with my attempt to provide something true but strange on April 1st in the hope people would take it for an April Fool, I went a step further this year by forgetting about it completely (too busy stockpiling cold sausage rolls in my garage to heat up later and save the VAT).

So I refer you back to this blog's previous scoop of two years ago regarding the previously unknown wargaming connection between CS Lewis and Brigadier Peter Young.I was quite proud of this at the time.