The Highlight of My Wargaming Year

Ours is a wonderful hobby. As odd as it might sound I believe that involvement with it genuinely enhances my life. It provides me with a welcome relief from the stresses and pressures of everyday life. It appeals to my creative side through the collecting and painting of armies or building terrain, while dreaming up scenarios lets loose my imagination. It delivers intellectual stimulation by requiring a well devised plan to defeat an opponent (don’t get me wrong I don’t lack intellectual challenge in my life since every day in my work I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time finding solutions to complex operational problems, but being able to apply the intellect to a realm without external constraints is utterly liberating). Perhaps most importantly it brings together like-minded people from very different social backgrounds where they can engage in a bit of friendly banter and character assassination, experience the elation of victory and the sting of defeat, and all the while do no actual harm to anyone - although undoubtedly one day some PC obsessed group will declare that the hobby is warmongering, harmful to society and must be banned.

I sometimes wonder how people survive without wargames in their lives. How do they fill their head-space when stuck their daily commute without being able to let their minds ponder just what would have happened if in the third turn of the last game they had rolled a three instead of a one for the morale test that caused that dragoon regiment to falter and if they hadn’t faltered would they have ridden over that battery and would it have changed the course of the game? How do they survive at work with all those endless team meetings (or worse still steering committee meetings) without letting their mind drift and consider whether or not to expand the French Napoleonic army by another five battalions while their colleagues are droning on about cost indices and how the latest increase in the price of oil is going to impact on the annual result?  Without working out the scenario for the next game in their head how do they block out the noise of the never-ending HR seminars on how to avoid unintentional bias in the workplace or the Health and Safety lecture on why you shouldn’t walk through the office with an uncovered cup of coffee lest you collide with someone and douse them in near boiling liquid (just how the human race survived for 4 million years of evolution without guidance from health and safety consultants utterly confounds me)? 

I have thought a lot about this in the last week (especially one day when I sat through a risk assessment session where three individuals spouted on about the need for seven levels of system redundancy when just the fourth level was severe enough for the operation to grind to a halt) as I prepare for our annual week of wargaming at Lake Tarawera, near the city of Rotorua in the central North Island of New Zealand. Long term readers will recall that this event has a history of more than 30 years, starting  as just a weekend – arriving on Friday night and departing Sunday afternoon – but has now developed into almost a full week.

Away from work (and until the last couple of years away from cell phone reception), eight blokes gather to play five specially organised games, eat far too much food (without a single piece of tofu or anything else that is specifically “good for you” on the menu) and  drink far too much good wine. In the company of good friends we solve the problems of the world over dinner - maybe members of the G20 should take a leaf out of our book and we would have world peace, prosperity and global economic stability in a single night over a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir.

I think for all of us it is a highly anticipated week. The event was not held last year for a variety of reasons and it was sorely missed.

The unfortunate fact is that we spend so long looking forward to it – writing scenarios, building armies and preparing terrain - but when we do actually get there the days seem to slip by so quickly and before you know it Sunday has arrived and we are packing up to head home.

All that said, right now I am packed and ready to head off tomorrow morning. At around 7:30 AM I will set off hollering "YEE-HA" as I drive down my quiet suburban street, probably much to the concern of my elderly neighbor...but she will get over it. I will probably follow that with my best impression of Willie Nelson singing "On the Road Again"...well the first couple of lines anyway because that is all I know and my fellow suburbanites don’t need to be subjected to my appalling singing.  Four of us will rendezvous at the home of one of our members and pack most of the gear we need into two cars. The logistics can be challenging with many boxes of terrain and literally thousands of figures requiring transport – I have often wondered if the transport of such large volumes of metal figures to and from Rotorua causes a temporary shift of the Earth’s axis and may be the root cause of Global Warming. There are less figures this year because the games are smaller, but the volume of terrain is large. Heading off around 8:30  in the midst of rush hour traffic, tradition dictates that we will stop at Matamata for mid-morning coffee and a pastry. For those unfamiliar with New Zealand geography Matamata is also known as Hobbiton because it is where the Hobbiton village movie set was built, and is still maintained as a tourist attraction, for the "Lord of the Rings" and the "Hobbit" films. The drive then continues to Rotorua where we stop for another tradition, lunch at the Pig and Whistle pub. A trip to the supermarket follows for a bit of food shopping for the week before the final 20 minute drive to the lake. The weather for tomorrow is forecast to be fine, but even on the coldest and wettest of winter days the location is stunningly peaceful. I know that as soon as I arrive and walk out on the deck I am almost instantly relaxed and all of life’s problems will dissipate - of course that could have a lot to do with the fact that the second beer is being consumed as my foot hits the deck. 

As the week progresses I shall try to post some snippets of the various games.

Ours is a truly wonderful hobby.