First post!    Rules, rules, rules... my journey

  My first wargames (in the sixties in South Africa) were of course using Airfix models and the sketchiest of rules. WW2 gaming has stuck with me, though I've moved on from pellet guns and firecrackers to die rolls and tables in determining damage.

  Before moving to the U.K in the nineties I'd graduated to WRG rules but despite their excellence in many respects they weren't floating my boat. The battles I read about had bodies of troops manoeuvering, engaging, falling back in ways that never semed to happen in my games. I came to realise that I needed to move to smaller models and more abstracted higher-level rules to capture these things.

  As a cash-poor immigrant I had another reason to sell my extensive 20mm collection and until I was more settled took a break from wargaming, returning to WW2 only after years of playing Ancients (DBM). Now married with kids and house in Staffordshire, I joined the Burton on Trent wargames club and there saw two competing systems: Flames of War (FoW) in 15mm and Blitzkrieg Commander (BKC) in 10mm. I took some time to examine the choice. To me 15mm seemed not very different in bulk from 20mm, so that vehicles looked too close together. 10mm was much better. The club didn't do 6mm and I ruled that out because of the tininess of the infantry; my experience of 6mm games in South Africa was that infantry tended to be forgotten.

  Having observed what went on in FoW games I decided BKC was a better representation of WW2, with the advantage of platoon scale. In FoW a base is a section. The platoon is (with some exceptions) the highest unit to have homogeneous heavy equipment, so as a wargamer you can legitimately field the greatest variety of toys while using historic formations. Many wargames systems allow infantry platoons or companies to be supported by a range of interesting AFV's, batteries of heavy artillery and even aircraft. These days I keep quiet and move on when witnessing such horrors!

  After a couple of years playing BKC the gloss had worn off and I looked forward to BKC2 addressing some of the bigger issues, such as artillery 'drift'. Hollywood sequels tend to be disappointing and I find this applies to wargames rules too. Observed artillery fire landing unpredictably hundreds of yards from the target remains a feature of BKC4. My own experience as a mortar fire controller is that you fire for effect only when the observer tells you your latest ranging shot is on target.

  Since the choice locally was between FoW and BKC, I soldiered on with BKC; both faded a few years back, but the release of BKC4 has got some people playing again. When the pandemic allows wargaming face to face I'll have to put up with its faults to get a game, but hope to persuade others to try something different.

   I missed the Spearhead wave when I was out of wargaming but it remains a good set of rules at my chosen level (platoon scale). It isn't played locally; my only games have been solo. It lacks a company structure, platoons being strength point markers for the battalion. In most players' opinion it favours Germans, but classifications can easily be changed. Many people have substituted D10 for D6 to improve granularity. Martin Rapier, whose views accord with mine, has over many years on The Miniatures Page said good things about Spearhead.

  A recent post (Rommel versus De Gaulle) on thelandofcounterpane blog introduced me to an extinct ruleset, TaC:WW2. Getting hold of a copy was difficult, but it was worth the effort. It is also platoon level, with good attention to command and control, in an 'old shool' literal way: gamers used to quick, slick control will not like the delay in getting platoons to change their actions. The process seems (not having played a game) even slower - more realistic - than Spearhead.  Companies are not ignored and combat is quite simplified apart from the large number of fire phases.

  TaC:WW2 may well form the basis for my own rules, with detail added where I feel it's lacking. Altering existing rules is a lot easier than writing your own from scratch, people tell me!