I am not adversed to 6mm gaming. It's not really my thing. Some years ago my mates talked me into buying a French Napoleonic army, mostly so they could gang up on me. I started painting. About the same time, I was talked into buying a GHQ American army when I already had a Heroics & Ros army. The figures are prettier. Neither have ever made it to a table.
So I kinda gave up on 6mm. So I turned up to the show whilst my mates went on about their stuff. So I sat down, had a brew and I ended up talking to John Treadaway for half an hour. Seems like a decent bloke. Which for me is high praise indeed.
Don't worry, he didn't get round to gnawing his own leg off. I did note he seemed to be with his now almost obligatory stupid hat.
Over the years I have come to see that there are two types of gamers and they are summed up by the two main wargaming magazines, setting aside White Dwarf of course. Wargames Illustrated is about big battles or very expensively painted miniatures or both. This is about people who invest time and resources to make something beautiful. I used to write it off as style over substance but if you are going to put all that effort in, I am sure you want the substance to. It is a magazine for the more serious gamer and I don't see as much fun in amongst the pretty pictures.
Miniature Wargames, John's magazine, has always been more my thing. There is a lot more of the joy of the hobby in its pages. Maybe the games are not as slick but you get the feeling that people are playing a lot of games. More about fun and less about spectacle. Now I think John thinks you can have both and that his magazine is trying to offer that, at least some of the time. It does feel more professional since he took over, I will give him that.
What I am talking about is something a little different. WI seems to offer games that might not have taken a life's work, but maybe just a half a decade or so. For me, I would sooner be able to play ten smaller skirmish games to a good standard than one game of big battalions tons high one. I don't know, maybe I just have a short term memory problem. Er, well, about that....
I think you might be on to something here. I tend to enjoy Wargames Illustrated for the pretty pictures, but then I am a very solitary beast that hardly plays any games, takes an inordinate amount of time to finish a unit by which time the focus has changed completely. As for 6mm, not a hope, I can barely see the hand in front of my face without magnifiers!
ReplyDelete