Wargaming through our ages

Alan Patrick and David Cundill talk about this year’s Salute Hall of Fame game; Gavin Lyall’s Operation Warboard

The plan this year was to have a game that pays homage to wargaming’s pioneers. We realised that a lot of different shoulders had to emerge for wargaming to clamber over them. So before we honour the First Wargamers here is a shout out to those that came before them.

Firstly, the model makers. Most Warlord Oldies started with Airfix and similar plastic figures and models. Unbased and unorganised, our troops and tanks fought over blanket covered books. Most hazardous were the garden campaigns, where we lost figures by the score (literally). There were no rules, but what we all remembered was that we were absorbed for hours and hooked for life.

Secondly, The model railway hobbyists. These are the people that terrain and buildings were originally made for. The initial scale of the mass wargaming hobby – HO/ OO – was a railway modelling scale. A lot of wargame terrain was DIY, so the railway trees, lichen, flock etc. was pressed into service. To this menagerie of manufacturers and magazines, we are forever grateful.

Thirdly, the military modellers and their media. It seems hard to believe, looking at Salute, but military modelling was much bigger than wargaming in Them Days. This market drove demand for military figures and models, and small pots or bottles of paint that had the colours we needed.

The military modellers also drove the market for books on uniforms, along with showing us we must paint models. Some even showed us how to paint the bendy plastic figures we all had, and even how to convert them into other figures (the choice of plastics was quite small).

But most importantly for our hobby, we salute the early wargames rules writers. “Discovering a Rulebook” (often from the library) gave a level of knowledge transcendence most religions would die for. The rulebooks showed you how to move, shoot, fight with a combination of fixed factors and dice to introduce chance. They would give a (rough) idea of how to organise forces, so we started to understand how armies actually operated. They recommended basing the figures, some even suggested multiple figures on a base, and using figure scales! Others matched movement to weapon ranges, and had the revolutionary concept of Morale – plastic troops might run away, not die for your glory. And so, with rules, dice and tape measures we all sallied forth into action.

A game to honour them all

We decided our Salute game, to honour our hobby’s origins, had to hit 3 objectives:

• Be a sort of “lived history” showcase of how our hobby evolved, showing the major stages.

• Show potential newcomers, young and old, that you can start very small, with minimum outlay.

• That it is great fun from the day you start with your first models.

We decided it must be a participation game where players can spend an hour or so pushing models around and just have fun, and that it doesn’t matter if it’s unpainted plastic on a blanket or a gorgeous terrain with marvelously painted armies.

Just play, the pictures in your imagination are always better.

But what to play? In the days of plastic armies choices of troops were very limited. The American Civil War, World War 2, and the Battle of Waterloo were very well supported, everything else far less so

(hence the interest in conversion). But tanks and planes were easily available thanks to the military modellers, and the number of nations and weapon types available made WW2 wargaming a step above the other periods in terms of variety of nations and combination of forces one could field. So for our game that pays homage to the greats, it had to be World War 2.

Operation Warboard – Remembering Gavin Lyall

Who then from the greats of the age would best help us recreate a World War 2 wargame with tanks from the toyshop? Donald Featherstone, whose Battles with Model Tanks could be a good start. Or perhaps Charles Grant, a huge name for us, as were his friends Phil Barker and Tony Bath? How about Bruce Quarrie whose Airfix magazine guidebooks were invaluable source materials? But who could ignore Terry Wise, Brig Peter Young or Stuart Asquith?

The Salute "Operation Warboard" Game

But the inspiration for us came in a short ITV television series hosted by Edward Woodward in the late 70’s including, amongst others, the great Peter Gilder recreating Waterloo and Gettysburg. One episode showed an imaginary game set in Northern France after D-Day. It was fought out between the author Gavin Lyall and his son, Bernard. This was about the time that Lyall had published his own set of wargames rules called “Operation Warboard”, which were used on the show. The game looked great fun. It used models any boy of a certain age owned, or could buy from the local toyshop, and we discovered that the rules were available in most bookstores. In short Gavin Lyall brought affordable tabletop wargaming to the masses; not just to those who could find a specialist wargames store.

Operation Warboard was Gavin Lyall’s only foray into wargames rules writing but we feel this is one of the classics of wargaming literature and its author