The Wargaming Compendium Quotes

“exceptional Napoleon’s Campaigns in Miniature, A Wargamer’s guide to the Napoleonic Wars 1796-1815. Packed full of facts and figures concerning not only the battles, but the campaings too and supported by excellent maps and diagrams, this was truly a schoolboy’s dream.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“Quarrie had hit a rich vein: bright boys now entering their mid-teens, eager for all those charts and statistics, and looking back on their Grantian and Featherstonian origins of just a couple of years before as their ‘stone age’.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“I shan’t dwell on The War Game – I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that it is my favourite wargames book, bar none, which left me with an abiding love of the 18th century”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“Here in the UK, however, one of the great names of wargaming began his work. A sports physiotherapist by profession, Don Featherstone had fought with the Royal Tank Regiment in Italy but confesses to having a fascination with toy soldiers since childhood. By the 1960s, he had a fully-formed notion of just how wargames should be played and over the next four decades or so, he became the most prolific wargames writer there has ever been.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“von Reisswitz had uncovered were a number of the key principles that we examined in the previous chapter: the notions of breaking the game down into moves representing a specific time lapse; basing the battlefield on a realistic map, made to scale; representing the opposing troops with markers occupying a scaled-down ‘footprint”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“Then, in 1798, Georg Vinturinus created ‘Neue Kriegsspiel’, featuring a game board of 3,600 squares depicting the ‘cockpit of Europe’ between France and Belgium, and troop lists containing 1,800 units of various arms. The set was completed by a 60-page rule book which also covered subjects such as reinforcements and logistics.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“The King’s Game’ was invented in 1664 by Christopher Weikhmann of Ulm, with 30 pieces per side and 14 distinct moves. It was, in a sense, a variation on chess. This was later developed by Hellwig, Master of the Pages for the Duke of Brunswick, in 1780, whose board contained no less than 1,666 squares, with a variety of terrain, and had units representing infantry, cavalry, and artillery.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium

“these are now commonly available through specialist gaming shops and online. There can be no logical objection to their use, and indeed many sets of wargames rules, and particularly role-playing games, prescribe their use in a variety of circumstances.”
― Henry Hyde, The Wargaming Compendium