Tell me about wargaming in the 70s

[Cubs]

We did some great miniature painting by candle light- you will often see these 'pro-painted' miniatures on ebay...
...

You had real candles? We had to paint by the sparks generated when we tried walk quickly in flared corduroy trousers.

[SteveBurt]

Started proper wargaming in 69, and played many many great games against my older brother.
Ancients using WRG 4th edition.
WW2 using the old Featherstone rules and the Charles Grant rules in Battles.
ACW using our own rules; we played a complete ACW campaign with a fictional map using the campaign rules form 'The Wargame', which worked very well indeed.
WW2 Naval using 1:1200 models on the floor in the largest room in the house (18" guns had a range of 12 feet)
I painted up some Airfix Napoleonics later in the 70s and we used those too.
And lots of board wargames, too, both historical and Sci Fi (Starship Troopers, Starforce, Alpha Omega, Stellar Conquest)
We avidly read Battle magazine and the Airfix magazine, which had articles on wargames.

[Norm]

The main thing of note in the 70's was that we didn't have the internet!

while that might sound obvious, the effects were significant. Today, one table, one poster, one inspiration can be shared by 1000's in a single day and information is levelled and widely shared.

I found out about wargaming entirely by accident, I just so happened to find a book by Featherstone in a bookshop (in the days when every high street had one). It immediately allowed me to elevate my gaming with toy soldiers from the floor and bring them to the tabletop to do some 'serious' playing!

In those days, if you were a solitaire player, you would play the rules (probably from a book) as YOU interpreted them, in the comfort of your own home, with terrain that could be as basic as your eye accepted and experience limited you to. You were probably the only wargamer in the world.

Discover a club and automatically that small world opens up.

Get Featherstones newsletter (from a hobby shop - that was in a bad part of town, 10 miles and 2 buses away from home, that I jumped on as a kid, unsupervised and without telling folks, mobile phones didn't exists and health and safety and Stranger / Danger messages had yet to put the chains on an enquiring mind ) and feel a bit more joined up.

Buy the new 'Battle' magazine (which I was doing in 1976) and suddenly get exposed to a more national / international scene, but only the centre pages were in colour.

I remember in 1978 walking into a game shop that had a dedicated floor to SPI and Avalon Hill boardgames and I was just wowed, I had always thought boardgames were limited to Cluedo and Monopoly and had no idea that this wonderful world existed.

I think this strange way of the hobby exploding meant that in those days, one could be more amateurish, less sophisticated (trees made out of matchsticks and cotton wool dyed green with thin poster paint) and arguably have more fun and even play more games than we do today.  I had an Airfix gun emplacement that appeared in every game, these days it would be limited to D-Day type appearances. I had an airfix soft plastic Patton tank with loads of Plastercine over the front to make a JagdPanther ..... these days, I would have to have a JagdPanther model. I had loads of really badly painted Napoleonic Airfix French, my pride and joy, in those days I showed them to everyone .... these days I wouldn't. Modern wargaming is amazing, but we have also lost something along the way.

[dadlamassu]

I started out wargaming in the 1960s and really got into it in the 70s.  We played using armies of Airfix WW2, ACW, Sherrif of Nottingham/Robin Hood, Romand/Ancient Britons etc with reinforcements from Miniature Figurines metal 20mm ramges.  We did lots of conversions, wrote our own rules. wrote letters (remember pans, paper and cheap postage?) to other wargamers, read magazines and Wargames Newsletter.  We converted Airfix HMS Victory into fleets to play Napoleonic naval.

I was very lucky to have found a few wargamers with many years experience living locally and we had a dinner table club that becam eventually the South East Scotland Warganes Club.  Many of the armies I still have and use. 

The 60s & 70s probably saw the start of commercial wargames - up until then we were home based enthusiasts using the ideas of Don Featherstone, Charles Grant, Phil Barker, Tony Bath and others (many of whome we met or corresponded with).  We shared everything drom ideas, rules, models, conversion ideas and social activity.

home based enthusiasts

[MediumAl]

Airfix Napoleonics using the Quarrie rules which were published by Patrick Stephens Ltd. They contained the rules, as did the American Civil War wargaming book, but the Ancient wargaming book was really an intro to The Wargames Research Group. At the end of the 70s it was mainly WRG 6th Edition rules using these new-fangled 15mm figures produced by Miniature Figurines in Southampton, or Mike's Models based in Brighton. Peter Laing did 15mm but they were very basic and I never purchased any.
The big 2 70s 25mm manufacturers were Minifigs and Hinchliffe - the latter had strangely elongated left hands and wrists holding the muskets. Casting quality of Hinchliffe was a bit dodgy in some cases, but good on most. Equipment, such as wagons and artillery had a good reputation. Peter Guilder was on of the main sculptors and he produced Connoisseur Miniatures, which were frequently featured in early MW magazines.  Lamming Miniatures had their 25mm adherents - pal of mine had a fair number of medievals, I think. Garrison and Greenwood and Ball were a couple of other less popular makes.
Fantasy figures were mainly focussed on D&D. Asgard and Citadel, the latter becoming GW I think. Minifigs had their Valley of the Four Winds range.
Enjoyed D&D, but dropped out of wargaming for a few years in the mid 80s then got back in via 3rd Edition Warhammer.

[sukhe_bator]

I played plenty of games with toy soldiers right through the 70's, just didn't meet anyone who used actual rules until the 80's 
I guess the games I played were "solo rpg-lite" - many a battle fought through the garden rockery, on the dining table or floor...

Sounds like me. I collected a lot of Airfix plastic figs and swapped a load more at secondary school, but sans rules. My first wargames were organised through one of the teachers at an after-school club when I was in the 6th form. By then I had been introduced to the heady delights of Minifigs ancients and WRG by my cousin and had slowly amassed a decent Alexandrian army with a converted Britains Indian elephant as heavy support. I had a few enjoyable games at UNI where I discovered the delights of more portable 15mm and a couple of games of Napoleonics. It was mostly skirmish Sci-Fi and 15mm games there.
After UNI I continued collecting Chronicle, Pal Partha and Grenadier fantasy as an off shoot from my AD&D days. This developed into my long standing 'period' of Middle Earth gaming. I tried using Reaper fantasy rules, then WRG's Lidless Eye and had a couple of brief excursions of Warhammer. However the early to late 80's scale creep and silliness put me off fantasy gaming for many years.
It was my school friend who continued my interest in gaming with WW1 aerial and later 25mm ECW. This was all before the era of mass plastics. It was only later when GWs 5th Ed Bretonnians came out that I got back into Fantasy Gaming as I finally saw a viable range of proxy Gondorians to fight my Orc Hordes...

[Gonsalvo]

I started in the hobby at age 11 or twelve, circa 1967, but really started plying games in HS and beyond. My introduction to the hobby was encountering two books in the public Library in close temporal association: Jopseph Morschauser's "How to play Wargames in Mioniature", and David Chandl;er's "The Campaigns of Napoleon". I was hooked fopr life therafter. My earliest armies were 25mm painted KILIA flats from Alopys Ochel in Kiel, (Wedt) Germany, later replaced by 25mm figures by Jack Scruby.

I have a series on my Blog, "Of Dice and (Tin) Men", which I really ought to extend further into time, whichgives what games IO was playing when. Pertient to the 1970's are:

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2012/12/of-dice-and-tin-men-origins.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2012/12/of-dice-and-tin-men-maps-and-monsters.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2012/12/of-dice-and-tin-men-war-college.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2012/12/of-dice-and-tin-men-something-sweet-for.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2013/01/of-dice-and-tin-men-catapulted-into.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2013/01/of-dice-and-tin-men-legio-quaternarius.html

https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2013/02/of-dice-and-tin-men-thursday-night-group.html

Some of you may find them of interest and/or entertaining!

Peter

[FierceKitty]

It's a toss-up whether the plastic Airfix figures (dear God, those "Romans"!) or the rules was the bigger enemy of fun games.

[SteveBurt]

The Airfix cavalry were always problematic. They would never stay on their bases, no matter what glue you used.

[Norm]

I used a sewing pin, pushed up through the base and into the horses (or camel!) belly. Of course for the most part we didn't have an alternative (I never even knew metals existed and they would have been too expensive for most folk anyway .... the reason why 15mm was created).

[has.been]

My first opponent, at school, had a Carthaginian army which included two units of METAL FIGURES !!!!!
I was green with envy of his 12 Noble cavalry & 20 Citizen spearmen. They were so precious to him he would always follow
Phil Barker's advice, 'keep a strong reserve' i.e. his beloved metal figures (one was a birthday present. the other a Christmas
present) I never stopped him doing that because it meant my 800 pts. of troops fought his 500 pts in every battle, while his
'strong reserve' of 300 pts would sit on a hill & watch. I still never managed to beat him though. Happy days.
If you are still out there Oscar (Steve O'leary) get in touch.

[dadlamassu]

I used a sewing pin, pushed up through the base and into the horses (or camel!) belly.

I used to push the pegs into the bases then "weld" them in place with a pair of pliers holding a pin heated in a candle.  Worked about 95% of the time.

[Cubs]

Ah, those wonderful bendy Airfix horse ankles. The Napoleonic British Hussars were the worst offenders for that. Those were the days before I found the trick of brushing pva over the paint on thin bits to stop it flaking when they bend.

[Harry Faversham]

I've still got my Airfix armies from the sixties and early seventies.

 

[Noverre Man]

Conversions; Waiting eagerly for the latest Airfix figures then working out what to turn them into. The joys of Plasticene and Banana oil, Barbola paste, cardboard, dressmaking pins, Pikes from piano wire that drew real blood,Black and white illustrations with references to obscure colours.
Always waiting for the postman.
Simple pleasures unsullied by kowledge.