Old School Rules

Now I have more than a handful of finished figures my thoughts are turning to gaming with them. My first set of Napoleonic wargame rules were bought via an advert in Miniature Warfare magazine. These were the London Wargame Section (LWS) “Rules for NAPOLEONIC Warfare 1813c”. My brother and I bought these because we naively thought they must be “official” as they came from London.

The rules turned out to be a little disappointing (the first of many!) and had some odd things in them like rule 23 “To reharness a horse takes half a move”. However, we took certain mechanisms from them that I still use to this day. The rules used something called “average dice” that were a mystery to us for a while and couldn’t be bought locally. Because we only had regular dice this led to frequent halts during battle while we tried to figure out if a one was really a two or if it was a three.

When I was a little older I briefly joined a local wargame club where the hot new rules of the time were Bruce Quarrie’s published in his book “Napoleons Campaigns in Miniature”. This book is actually a very good reference and I still like leafing through it today but the rules proved just a tad too complex for me with my CSE Maths.

In the end I took to writing my own simple rules on a single sheet of A4 paper with surprisingly good results. I eventually had a set I used with my large army of Airfix figures. Unfortunately these rules have not survived but I do still possess the original copy of the LWS ones dated 1968 and I intend to test them out once again with my new Hinton Hunt forces.