A Wollongong Wargamer's retrospective on 2019

In some ways 2019 got off to a slow start for some Wollongong Wargamers, but it soon revved up and put down some milestones!

In our first Sunday big game of the year in April we used Fate of A Nation rules to replay the Yom Kippur action around the Suez Canal and Chinese Farm.

Our Firestorm Kursk campaign got underway with a pair of weekend games in May at the Hall of Heroes, followed up with regular smaller Thursday evening games every month until the epic finale on Sunday 1^st December at the uni with our Prokhorovka spectacular.

There was regular World War Two action throughout the year with some impressive Bolt Action games also set on the Eastern front and other theatres including Point du Hoc, Normandy to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day Landings.

In June our annual Team Yankee big game focussed on a Race to the Bridge scenario featuring massed tank action set on an impressive 1980’s German landscape. 

Later in the year we dabbled in an Oil Wars scenario, which also provided a gripping game.

In August El Alamein provided the focus for more WW2 action with a big Flames of War game featuring the action around Operation Supercharge, a particularly exciting game which went right down to the wire.

There was some intensive horse and musket action this year too, with a big alternative Waterloo game played using Blucher rules in October, and regular Thursday evening games trialling a bewildering series of new or revisited Napoleonic and ACW rules, 

at every level of command from skirmish to Corps. 

Also there were long running campaigns set from the SYW, through the AWI and currently  Napoleonic, often in conjunction with the Mittagong Garde du Corps, and at the other end of the scale, the small but intense skirmish games.

However they all shared a consistently high standard of presentation and painting, and it’s refreshing to see rules originating from France and Spain; outside the traditional Anglo-Saxon preserve; getting a fair shake of the sauce bottle.

Perhaps most productively for the wider gaming community, this year we assisted Sam Mustafa to playtest his forthcoming ‘Combined Fleet’ WW2 Naval rules, in which our exhaustive playtests centred on Guadalcanal for the surface actions, and Midway or the Coral Sea for the Carrier Air battles.

This short list skims over a good deal of smaller but no less commendable games pursued at the uni, Islandwala with Black Powder, and the old favourite HOTT, and, literally, big monster games...

DBM, dust racing, and board games.

Looking forward, an interlinked campaign using multiple rulesets and scales following the WW2 North West European campaign from D-Day to the Bulge has raised some interest for the latter half of 2020, possibly preceded by a Sicily/Italy campaign in the first half of the year. We can also confidently predict that the endless quest for the ultimate set of Horse and Musket rules will continue next year, probably interwoven with continued playtesting of Sam Mustafa’s Lasalle rewrite. We also undertake to deliver on a large Austerlitz game using Blucher rules.

The advent of an updated Team Yankee timeline promises to keep followers of that ruleset enthralled. I also predict that the release of the Perry’s plastic early and mid-war French Napoleonics will similarly boost interest in 28mm Napoleonic gaming, and similarly the release of Warlord Games 1:700 plastic men of war is bound to result in an increase in rum soaked naval activity…