Introduction

This is a blog about wargaming, something I am not very good at.

When I say I'm not very good at it, I don't mean technically inept, although it's true, my figure painting and modelling skills are those of the aptronymous hound, lacking opposable thumbs and pie-eyed on pints of Dulux with Vallejo chasers. The quality of my historical research is also highly questionable, as you will no doubt be horrified to discover if you persevere with this blog.

Not wargaming...

No, when I say I'm not very good at wargaming, I mean that despite having been devoted to it from the earliest possible age, I have never done that much of it. I have not assembled armies, thousands strong, all lovingly painted by my own hands. I have played a vanishingly tiny number of games, and the clubs I have belonged to have known me far more as an absence than a presence. For years I made my excuses, pointing out how wargaming required a combination of time, money and space that I had never achieved. But the whining had to stop, eventually. After all, I have spent years as 'a consultant' ('self-unemployed' is how my brother-in-law charmingly describes it) when all I've had is time. Money? I spent 10 years as a bank executive helping myself to a decent portion of other people's hard-earned. Space? I moved to Canada, where there are only four of us for every square kilometre. Our main natural resource is space.

Still not wargaming...

So the time has come to contradict the walrus, quit talking and do. I could bore you with all the stuff I have read about the theory of happiness, the importance of 'flow' and 'adultification' (not as much fun as it sounds), but it all boils down to my realization that the only thing stopping me from doing something I enjoy is staring back at me from the mirror. And a pretty mangy, paint-stained, muzzle it is.

Nope...

So how best to address decades of pent up wargaming demand and put the accumulated detritus of random purchasing and hoarding to good use? Back when I first thought of this plan (more of that later) the fashionable thing to do was set oneself a challenge and then blog about it. Book deals and worldwide fame inevitably followed. That fad passed, but as I doubt fifteen second TikTok videos are going to do it for me, I'll stick with it. (Jeez, we're called historical wargamers for a reason, y'know.) So all I need now is a ridiculously self-indulgent goal, some artificial constraints and a blog.

Not really wargaming...

The idea of playing all the scenarios in Charles S. Grant’s ‘Scenarios for Wargamers’ has actually been a long held ambition. For the reasons alluded to above, much of my wargaming as a child was theoretical in nature, and many happy hours were spent with Grant’s volume (and its sequel ‘Programmed Scenarios for Wargamers’), army lists and manufacturers’ catalogues dreaming up ways to play the scenarios in all sorts of periods and scales. At one stage there was even a spreadsheet which ranked scenarios in order of the number of figures needed, and converted the ‘Horse and Musket’ style force descriptions into suitable terms for a host of other eras. On the rare occasions that I actually got as far as purchasing and painting lead or plastic, the forces I acquired would inevitably be those required to recreate Scenario 42 (no coincidence there), the one requiring the smallest number of figures. Until this project, I had never built a bigger army.

Almost...

The fact that the book contains “one scenario for every week of the year” is the kind of indoor pachyderm even I cannot ignore, though I know that I do not stand a hope in hell of achieving it. Not that I haven't taken plenty of time to contemplate this impossibility. I first had the idea for this project around 2006. I actually got pretty serious about it and drew up detailed plans and drafted blog posts in 2011-12. Then a decade passed in the blink of an eye.

Finally!

You think that's bad? I'm only getting round to implementing this plan because I finally finished a prior, albeit much smaller, project this year. That was my Vietnam mini-campaign based on David Drake's novel 'Rolling Hot'. I bought that book in Montreal (Drake was unavailable in the UK back then) visiting the future Mrs Dog for Christmas 1991, and started building up the relevant forces about the same time. I finally played the first scenario in February 2020 and the last in December 2021. Thirty years and a global pandemic was all it took for me to assemble some skirmish forces and play four whole games.

So, I know my limitations. No one will be impressed by the quality of my modelling or painting. My standards of historical research are laughably poor. So what else can I offer the wargame blog-perusing public, other than the guilty pleasure of watching a slow motion, epic, fail?

Enjoy! I know I will.

The Periods

My Plan