Greetings, My name is John, I live in New Zealand, and Wargaming.info is my blog about my passion for my hobby of Wargaming (that’s right, playing with toy soldiers) and learning about Military History! The purpose of my blog is principally to help inspire both new people into, and those who are already in, the hobby, and also to showcase my, and my gaming friends, interests, activities, armies, and terrain – along with a dash of Military History here and there. My focus is on doing what’s fun and enjoyable and gives you or I (the gamers) the most out of our gaming; for me that’s having games that look great, capture the feel of the period being portrayed, and that use rules that create command & real-life like tactical challenges along with a degree of unpredictability and uncertainty. Having your troops not always do what you want or expect, making your game decisions based on real-life tactics or intuition (rather than ‘what works best in these rules’), and getting a final game result that’s a plausible simulation of what might have happened in real life are all key objectives, and success markers, in my games. Fun and Enjoyment are key, Competitiveness and Winning at all costs are not. I hope you find something here at Wargaming.info of interest and/or inspiring, and I appreciate your time spent viewing my humble effort.
More on My Gaming History
I first got the “Wargaming Bug” when I was about 10 years old, in the mid-70’s – I had been interest in Military History from the moment I could read pretty much, and by the time I was 12 I had begun to read many of the New Zealand Official History Volumes from World War II, both Battalion Histories & Divisional ones (I had read everyone of them by the time I was a High School Junior aged 14 or so). Meanwhile at about 10 I had been dabbling in ‘Army Men’ type games and had had Airfix figures for a year or two, and at Primary School a classmate had told me about his older brothers, who played these huge Napoleonic Games, using ‘tiny soldiers’ – I never saw them in the end – I guess they were the very first 1/300th (i.e. 6mm) figures coming out of the UK at the time – but it made me realise our “Army Men” games could have structure and purpose. About the same time my father bought me my first wargaming book “Wargames” (by David Nash), and I discovered the “Battle” series by Charles Grant in my Father’s Meccano Magazines from a few years earlier. By the time I was 12 & 13 I had discovered (in my school library) the books of Charles Grant, Don Featherstone, Peter Young, and Terence Wise – Charles Grant’s “The Wargame” will forever be, for me, be the most inspiring wargaming book ever written, followed closely by “Battle” (see my post on Battle downloadable online), Don Featherstone’s “Wargame Campaigns“, and Terence Wise’s “Introduction to Battle Gaming” (in no particular order). Later I discovered all the rest of what are now know as the “Old School Wargamers“; Tony Bath, Charles Wiesencraft, et al. By age 13 I had joined my local wargaming club for a period and started to build my first organised armies (1/76th scale World War II ones of course).
In the early 1980’s there was a deviation however, as RPGs (Role-Playing Games) took over, yes I was a Dungeons & Dragons geek, for a couple of years or three, along with Traveller (a Sci-Fi RPG) and dabbles in Tunnels & Trolls and Runequest as well (more D&D like Fantasy RPGs). Boardgaming also became very big, games like “Diplomacy“, “Machiavelli“, “Civilisation“, and more beer ‘n pretzels ones like “Shogun“, “Wabbits Wevenge“, “Gamma Marauders“, and well you get the picture. Wargaming continued but very much as a secondary interest, only really getting revived with enthusiasm in 1988 (after attending the New Zealand National Convention held that year in my home town, and attended by Phil Barker of WRG to officially launch his new World War II rules). I rapidly rejoined my local wargaming club, went on to be Secretary of that club for a while, moved cities and clubs, got involved with working with well known rules author Arty Conliffe, subsequently worked on a couple of projects – including co-authoring Modern Spearhead – and in the 2000’s discovered a new found passion for my hobby, which has brought me to what you see here on my blog, Wargaming.info!
More About Wargaming.info
I first created a web-presence back in mid-1995, not long after I first got on the internet early that same year – over the years I dabbled and fiddled and moved and redesigned my site and several others I look after – Some of my very first significant articles are here, having been transitioned from their original existence over the last 15+ years to here (see the WW2 History Category). In 2008 I made the decision to move from a conventional static site to a CMS (Content Management System) & Blog style site as I felt I spent far too much time on site design and coding and such like and not enough on content quality and quantity, so using Joomla I migrated into a dynamic environment, and more recently in 2011 have migrated from Joomla to WordPress acknowledging that the primary function of Wargaming.info now is a Blog then CMS, and the need for static conventional pages is no longer so critical under this new direction.