Monday 27 June 2016

Shire Publications Rulesets - My First Wargame Rules


My brother (also a wargamer) let me have back my first two wargaming rule books which he'd kindly been looking after in his vast wargame books collection (even bigger than mine) for the last couple of decades.

The books were published in 1969 (reprinted 1971) and 1971. I've written class 1C in the back, so that means 1972, which is about right as I think I had my first wargame in 1970/71 just before leaving primary school. For those not familiar with Shire Publications there usual books were on things like old pub signs and toll houses of Britain, but they did quite a few military books. The books are 60-70 pages and a bit smaller than A5 in size.

Discovering Wargames by John Tunstill is very much an overview, but gives a very good summary of a lot of key wargaming ideas and example rules for Ancient, Medieval and Horse & Musket, and pointers for later periods.

Rules for Wargames by Arthur Taylor is the one I think we used the most. It has rules for ECW, Lace Wars, Napoleonic, ACW, Mechanised, C18 Naval, Modern Naval (really WW2, pre Exocet), and WW1 Aerial.

The rules certainly gave a good game back in the day, and very tempted to give a few of them a try again for old times sake.

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