A long, backwards, happenstance journey into tabletop wargaming
I've been "into" tabletop games since oh, say, 2009, when 12 year-old me found the wonderful website juniorgeneral.org, along with its active forum. Juniorgeneral was originally created to encourage tabletop wargaming as a means of teaching history in the classroom. The site offered free paper miniatures and simple wargame scenarios, and a forum was created to allow for community made minis. What grew out of these humble beginnings was a beautiful community of pixel artists, roleplayers, wargamers, and those who just wanted to watch some truly gifted people work. Unfortunately, after more than a decade of existence, the forum strayed too far from the vision of Junior General's creator, and the forums were lost to time in 2018. Internet archive's exist of the forum, but they are incomplete. It is hard to say how much history was lost, but even so, the effect the Junior General forum had on me was massive.
The early years
When I first discovered the forums in '09, I was fascinated with World War II aviation. I found Junior General while looking for printable model fighter planes. JG had a number of simple, foldable Second World War aircraft, and I knew I'd found something special. These models were very simple, but I didn't care. I was able to imagine the air war over the Pacific in my bedroom.
A model similar to the ones I would have printed and cut out as a kid. This one was drawn by Matt Fritz, the creator of Juiniorgeneral.org.
It wasn't long before I was inspired to create my own aircraft. It's fair to say that I had no understanding of pixel art at the time (it would take me years to learn that MS Paint had a zoom tool), but I loved the first aircraft that I drew (a P-40 Warhawk, to be specific). Unfortunately, although the day that I uploaded one of my earliest designs to the JG forum has been archived, that specific forum post was not, and so I do not have access to that first design. But, I can provide one of the first drawings that was actually approved and uploaded.
It's important to note that even this was magnitudes better than the first drawings I attempted to get uploaded onto Junior General. This one actually has straight lines!
Despite my complete lack of understanding of proportion, scale, color palette, etc., the community at Junior General welcomed pre-teen Philip, or at the very least tolerated me long enough for my skills and forum etiquette to mature. Within a couple years, I was able to submit drawings that I am still pretty proud of today. Of course, these were always designed to be printed and used as free wargaming material, so the intention was never to push MS Paint to its limit, but create something that would look nice as minis on a table.
For me, designing was always second to the real reason I loved Junior General: putting minis on a table. Like many who come into this hobby as kids, I didn't have anyone to play a real tabletop wargame against (my dad played lots of Axis & Allies with me, however!), and so I would set up "dioramas" with my paper miniatures. There were still hours of fun for teenage me to imagine the battles my paper armies were pitting against each other. I would print off dozens of free wargame rulebooks both created by the Junior General community and found on great resources such as freewargamesrules. I never truly played any of these games (a few solitaire attempts, but its hard to conduct a battle against yourself). But I always imagined one day that I would.
Yes, those are cut-up zip-lock bags as bases! If I am not mistaken, these figures were designed by Mike Brady (alotef), his gorgeous DeviantArt can be found here.
Getting serious...ish
And so, in my later high school years I took matters into my own hands and wrote my first full set of wargame rules set in the First World War: To End All Wars. You can still even access some of the scenarios I created here.
I was incredibly (and still sort of am) proud of this ruleset. But, there was one small caveat: I have never played it. I put the rules online, advertised them on different forums, and even had email correspondence with a few wargaming groups that were using my ruleset. I now feel terrible, as To End All Wars is an unbalanced mess of a game, but the hours I spent working on the rules and scenarios gave me a love for a hobby that I so far had never actually experienced.
I spent much of my time not playing Counter Strike: Global Offensive working on other rulesets that are still at various levels of completeness. But, it was finally when I went off to college that I started thinking less about paper and more about plastic. I ordered my first boxes of 1/72 World War I miniatures and picked up some paints from the game shop I got most of my Magic the Gathering collection from. I went to Home Depot and picked up some styrofoam, ready to create a completely modular WWI trench board along with two complete British and German armies.
I had no idea what I was doing.
I have to wonder what my first friend I met at college was thinking when he learned my idea of fun was digging up dirt and pouring it onto a bunch of styrofoam squares. It must not have scared him too bad, as he's now been my roommate for four years.
It didn't take too long for me to realize I'd bitten off more than I was ready to chew. Once the spray paint I meant to seal the dirt ended up melting all of the styrofoam, I packed the remains in a box and didn't touch it for the rest of my college years.
Fast forward to late 2018, it's nearing 10 years since I created my account on the Junior General forums and I had still never played a full wargame. When I grabbed my miniatures tote and set to work on them again after three years of collecting dust, I asked myself the question.
What if I don't even like wargaming?
But, there was something about the hobby that kept bringing me back. I was committed to finishing my trench board. And so, I had some extra pink styrofoam with a gray rocky finish my roommate and I had used to hide exposed insulation in our basement, and got to work.
Some dirt to build up the walls of the trench, textured spray paint, and a watered down layer of PVA glue, and I had something that was starting to look like trenches.
But then, after mostly completing these three sections of the board, my progress stopped again. The downstairs table that had been cluttered with cardboard, styrofoam, plastic, glue, and paint was cleaned off and put back in its box. It was still too much for me.
For real, this time
Thankfully, my hiatus was less than three years this time, and just a year later, late 2019, I got back to work.
But, there was a joy missing from the project. Since early college, I had spent hours looking through Sidney Roundwood's beautiful First World War miniatures and terrain boards. It was starting to discourage me. Not because of Sidney's skills, but I was realizing that these little 1/72 plastic minis I was buying 80 for $15 could never show the type of detail that Sidney's could, no matter how good of a painter I became.
But then, it happened.
Our other roommate, one more willing to glue dirt onto styrofoam than my other, had the idea around the same time as me. I asked him about a game I thought we would enjoy. It was going to take some commitment, but with two of us, we could encourage each other to keep going.
The game is Star Wars: Legion, and it's the first tabletop wargame I've truly played.
And you know what? It's pretty fun.
Phil
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