About Tactics and Painting

So this is what I do. For as far back as I can remember I've always liked to make models and I've always liked to play games, wargames in particular. For years I was a traditional hex and counter gamer, I liked my tactical action to take place on maps with counters. On the other hand my models were made to sit on shelves and look nice, my gaming happened in a different space. But now, well now I play wargames with my models. Yeah okay, I play wargames with toy soldiers. There, I said it.

The Second World War has always been my main period of interest. After all, I'm of that generation that grew up in the late 1960s and early 70s in a home where every adult had been touched directly by that war. My father and grandfather had been called up to fight, my mother and grandmother were evacuees from the bombing of Liverpool. My uncle was an RAF pilot and survived the war, but his elder brother, my uncle, died in a Wellington bomber over Benghazi in 1941.  

I was part of the Airfix generation. Re-enacting the warfare we heard about around the dining room table using our little plastic soldiers and tanks was just part of the way we grew up. I have a friend who can recognise a Sherman or a Panther at first glance, not because he's interested in military history, but simply because he made the Airfix kits as a kid.

So I like to make my models but I also want to game something that recreates the feel of command on the battlefields of WWII. It’s not enough for the games to look like WWII just because the models look accurate. That's never going to be enough. The model I'm really interested in is the gaming model that attempts to reflect the way in which the war was fought. How did armies organise soldiers to fight effectively? How do they get them to carry out the commands in the way they wanted? How do you deal with the chaos that is warfare? Rules, systems, simulations, call them what you wish, but I want to find an enjoyable challenge that presents me with a small window into history, so what happens on the tabletop has to be plausible. So that's what this blog is about. Making and painting models of the people and equipment that fought historically, but also looking at the gaming models for recreating it in miniature.