How did you get into Wargaming?

[Phatguy]

Forgot about risk...Played that a lot in77-79...Not sure if I would classify that as a wargame...At least to me

[philturco]

I vaguely remember playing a civil war game with card board pieces that had scotch tape over them to keep their shape. There was infantry,calvary and gunships on the rivers. I don't remember where the game came from but how I loved playing it with my brother or all by myselg. The next game I remember was AH's D-Day.We used to throw a dice and whoever gat the highest number won the battle...only later did we figure out odds and using a combat results table. And now I still play..several hrs per week on TOAW and Grigsby's east front game. PBEM games are my favorite way to play.

[HansBolter]

In my junior year of high school (1973) I met a guy who turned me on to wargaming and ended up my best friend for life.

My fist game was Kriegspiel (sp?). I graduated from there to Panzer Blitz, Afrika Korps and all the other great games in the Avalon Hill line.

The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich was our bread and butter go-to game for almost 20 years.

I managed to get my name printed in the design credits of Advanced Third Reich as a playtester. [8D]

[andym]

It all started for me at Boarding School,on a saturday after lunch in one of the class rooms the Wargame club took place.It took a while to get the courage to go in.I was intrigued with the sound of rattling dice and arguments over Cataphratcs attacking Peltast etc,which mean nothing to me,once i went in and becam hooked,i started on WW1 Naval then moved to Wild West RPG.This was back in 1973.

[ird]

ORIGINAL: J P Falcon

ORIGINAL: ird

ORIGINAL: J P Falcon





Was it this magazine which was published in 1974? I collected all 96 issues, but unfortunately I only have a handful remaining.

aaahh man - I used to have some of these in the seventies - they were great. Unfortunately I no longer have them. I'd totally forgotten about them until I just saw your post. I remember a Battle of the Atlantic issue and possibly one to do with the Battle of Britain.

The biggest problem with the mag was the font size. It was no larger than the directions on an aspirin bottle label. To try reading one now, I would need a magnifying glass.

I hope the font isn't too bad - I decided to have a look on eBay and have managed to pick up the full set with binders for £12!!!!! Is that a bargain or what?

[Hanal]

Good for you! Yes I am not kidding about the font but if you have very good eyesight, you'll have no problem. Still worth it even with the font issue so enjoy [:)]

[Prince of Eckmühl]

I was visiting a relative one day, bored-stiff, and pulled a book off of a shelf. It was titled  A Soldier's Story, and the author was Omar Bradley. I read the book from cover to cover over the coming days. But, I had trouble, at times, deciphering the maps. I was only eleven, and had no idea what the symbols really meant. Perhaps a month later, I came across a copy of Afrika Korps at a local hobby shop where I was shopping for plastic models to build. The box was adorned with symbols similar to those that I had struggled with in reading Bradley's account of WW2. The rest, as they say, is history.

[ilovestrategy]

Circa 1983, I was at a hobby shop in a mall and saw this big cardboard box with an image of a Constitution Class Cruiser being fired on by a Romulan Warbird, an above the ships were the words "StarFleet Battles". Being a total Star Trek freak, I saved up and bought it. I had no idea at the time that this one act would lead to countless add on manuals, and 3 full rulebooks with smaller manuals to boot, and to this day I still remember all the rules and types of ships from each race.

Good God, what a nail biting game! [&o]

[Duck Doc]

Walking through an ER in Portland, Oregon in 1971 (iirc) & saw some workers playing Avalon Hill Savo Island (iirc the name of the game - it was an AH naval WW2 game). Was smitten right there. Couldn't believe anybody was making anything so cool. Soon thereafter went into a store in Baltimore & bought Stalingrad & I was off. Ancient history.

[Perturabo]

So, most of people here got into wargaming in 70s and started out by playing board wargames? Were board wargames more popular back then?

[british exil]

In the 70's my dad was posted as a british soldier to Germany, I read all the comics I could lay my hands on. (Victor, Warlord etc) I my box of plastic soldiers, every Christmas I got a new box. Managed to lose so many to war campaigns in the garden.

I stopped playing with them as I got older, my dad, after serving his 25 years left the Army. I didn't get a pc until until the Amiga 500 played a few games, bought a Conflict Korea game from SSI. Played it every night. Found a Waterloo game (not sure of the correct title, but would love to play it again) where I could give orders to my troops, couldn't save any of the game, so I had to play it the whole day and night till I was through.
Silent Service II and B17. Plus a few more.

Then a few years passed by with no game playing, stumbled along John Tillers Western Front, after that I was hooked.
Uncommon Valour followed. John Tillers full pack, Western, Eastern and Pacific fronts. Advanced tactics, now AT Gold. WitE.

Thanks to Amazon I can buy the Millitary Books in english over here in Germany. Not easy to find book shops that sell good WWII books. Germany has a "problem" with that period. In fact the Swastika is not allowed on games. Only in history books.

Mat

[redcoat]

I started wargaming as a kid in 1975 when some of my friends started a Wargames Club at our school. At first we played Napoleonic and WW2 games with Airfix plastic soldiers and models. Soon we were playing with metal miniatures. After a couple of years we were playing Avalon Hill and SPI boardgames.

I stopped wargaming when I left home at 19. Before I left home I cleared out my room and threw away most of my wargaming stuff – including several SPI games. Looking back I realise that was a tragedy. [:(]

I started wargaming again when I bought my first home computer in 2000. I had no idea that there were wargames for computers until that time. I have been an avid Born Again Wargamer ever since.

[Gilmer]

When I was a kid, I got hooked on Conan books that we bought at the used bookstore. From there, I started buying magazine es and finally read about a play by regular mail game for Conan folks where you paid $15 a turn! I could not afford it, but it opened my eyes to what was out there. I bought the board-game FLATTOP! from Avalon Hill and no one would play it with me. So, I fooled around with it for several years on my own.

From there, I started getting interested in computers and I started getting computer gaming magazines, even though we could not actually afford a computer. I read a review about a game about Midway and how the guy kept losing and then he finally snuck the carriers in from behind and won a huge victory.

I ended up getting a nintendo, because I could afford it on my part time salary once I finally could start working. I got Nobunaga's ambition and played it over and over and over.

Once I got a computer, Silent Service 2 was a must get. But, then I bought what I thought was the ultimate game. "West Front" with a watercolor cover of Eisenhower. I played that over and over and over.

[Jeffrey H.]

Toy store back in 1974. I was already into plastic models and such. I saw the Panzer Leader box there, I think it was a Toys-R-Us, and I just knew it had to be cool. I finally got enough cash together and bought it. My best friend and I tried like hell to learn the game and had some fun and learned a heck of a lot. We were 12 years old or so. Been buying them ever since. When I was 19 I left home and later went to college and basically sold off everything I had for food/cig/gas money.

Played a lot of comp games on my friends Apple ][+ then after many years I finally got my own rig in 1993. I went out that same day and bought a copy of Empire Deluxe. Back in the saddle again. Got heavily into MMPOG, (AirWarrior) and the FPS type games, then got tired of them. Went into strategy games once again and essentially now am back into boardgaming.

[Hanal]

Well it's road trip time!

After reading some more of these posts I started to recall that when I was a "wee s**t of a lad" how I would go to game companies home offices to buy their games. I used to go to Millersville PA so I could pick up the new MLB season card set for APBA baseball. I used to travel to a hobby store in Brooklyn NY which had every model you could imagine, and I would go to Manhattan to SPI's offices to buy their games. Finally I would make a weekly sojourn to The Complete Strategist Store which was located in Montclair NJ and Mid-Manahattan. The Montclair store closed many years ago, but I see that the NY store is still thriving!

I must take another trip back there!

http://www.thecompleatstrategist.com/about-us.aspx

[a7v]

I started wargaming in the early seventies with a huge collection of Airfix soldiers, tanks and planes. I still have about 1500 soldiers and a couple of tanks but most of the planes and ships have been burned and shot when I started to be more interested in girls than in toy soldiers.
 
Only later I recognized that this was a kind of wargaming on its own[;)].
 
The first computer wargames I played in the eighties on my C 64. There was one company and one guy who got me hooked, SSI and Gary Grigsby. I spent hundreds of hours with Kampfgruppe, Battles of Napoleon (by David Landrey and Chuck Kroegel), Eastern Front, Wir, Pacwar and later the Steel Panther series. It was a sad day when SSI left the business[:(]
 
 

[rhondabrwn]

My big brother (now a retired Professor of History at UT) was a civil war buff and dragged me and the family along on family vacations to every civil war battlefield east of the Mississippi. Later on an 8th grade field trip to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in 1961 I saw a few copies of AH Gettysburg in the Gift Shop. Some male classmates saw my interest and it turned out they were playing the AH games and told me where I could get them cheap back in Kokomo (at a Haag's Drug Store no less!).

Returned home, went to that drug store and eventually bought the entire initial Avalon Hill line for $2.79 each (I've never understood how all those games ended up in a drug store toy section!). First game purchased was Gettysburg (hex) version. The second was D-Day... and I think Chancellorsville was the 3rd. Later I bought Tactics II, U-Boat, Air Empire, Le Mans, and Dispatcher. Then I had to move to a regular bookstore and pay $4.95 for later titles like Afrika Korps, Waterloo, Bismarck, Midway, Stalingrad and Battle of the Bulge. This was done on a 50 cent a week allowance supplemented by some extra money from doing yard-work for neighbors (for $1 a day, usually). I'm sitting here looking at all those games still on my shelf after all these years.

My first SPI game was "Year of the Rat" after I ordered my first S&T magazine/game combo with a clipped advertisement from a Military History magazine. That was in 1972, I think, after I completed my interesting tour of duty in US Army military intelligence. Tried to use my military history and wargaming experience to get into the CIA or DIA, but had no luck with that so settled on the Insurance Industry instead (BORING!). Wonder how my life would have gone if I had made it into the CIA though.

[Perturabo]

Were wargames cheaper than now back then?

[Hanal]

ORIGINAL: Perturabo

Were wargames cheaper than now back then?

Not really, when you consider that most of us "back then" did not have nearly the same income as now. So comparatively speaking, it was still a pricey hobby.

[Perturabo]

So, they were basically something like Warhammer and similar miniature wargames are now?

Too bad they stopped making Warhammer 40k computer wargames and moved to RTS and TPP action games. I think that a realistic Wh40k wargames (at least something like Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen were for WHFB) would be a nice way to get some new blood into our hobby.