The origins of Megablitz

Recently, Tim Gow has been featuring some of his MEGABLITZ units on his website MEGABLITZ AND MORE, and it made me recall to mind how the MEGABLITZ wargame rules evolved (see Note below).


At a Conference of Wargamers (COW) many years ago, Chris Kemp put on a session that involved demonstrating how a Russian Motor Rifle Regiment looked when deployed in a road column that was about to be ambushed by a British armoured reconnaissance platoon. Even though the number of vehicles were represented in a ratio of one 1:300th scale model vehicle per three actual vehicles, the column stretched almost from one end of the room to the other, and the Russian commander – Phil Barker – actually had to sit outside in the garden and command his regiment by shouting orders through the window!

As a result of the subsequent discussion and feedback, Chris developed his ROTORBLITZ wargames rules, which he demonstrated at a subsequent COW. These rules were designed so that it was possible to fight the large-scale battles that would have taken place had the Warsaw Pact and NATO ever had to fight each other. The session was entitled ‘Sci-Fi on the Rhine’ and the rules worked very well indeed.

Spurred on by his success, Chris then developed NOT QUITE MECHANISED (NQM), which was a set of divisional-level rules set in the 1935 – 1945 era. The lowest level unit represented on the tabletop was usually the company, although some types of platoon were also deployed. These rules attracted a lot of attention within Wargame Developments, and several large battles were fought at COW, Chris’s house, and in the warehouse attached to Chris’s shop in Wellingborough.

By this time Chris Willey, Tim Gow and I were very keen on the rules, and felt that they could be developed so that corps-level battles could be fought. After one particular game played in Chris Willey’s basement on a Saturday morning, we began to discuss how we could do this. Over lunch, we decided that the lowest level unit we wanted to represent on the tabletop was a battalion or its equivalent. We also decided that a unit’s or a formation’s ‘state’ should be represented by an order counter, and that this ‘state’ would affect a unit’s movement and its effectiveness in combat. Thus was born the SMART order system. SMART stood for:

• S = Static
• M = Mobile
• A = Attack
• R = Retreat
• T = Transit

A combat matrix – which was similar to the sort of Combat Resolution Tables used in board wargames – was also drawn up. That afternoon we tried our ideas out … and found that they worked!

From this small beginning, Tim Gow began to develop MEGABLITZ, and I well remember the first game we played with them – again at Chris Willey’s house. The scenario – the Battle of Dot Sur La Mappe – is featured in the published rules and on the MEGABLITZ website. The rest, as they say, is history (and a bl**dy good set of wargames rules, even if I say it myself!).

Note: Like all recollections, I may well have got some of the events featured above slightly out of order or have forgotten something important. If I have done, it has not been done deliberately – I plead old age and a failing memory in mitigation – and I am sure that Chris Kemp, Chris Willey, and especially Tim Gow, will correct my mistakes.