Pages

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

The portable wargame: Some very good ideas ... and they are not mine!

One of my regular blog readers is arthur1815. He and I have known each other for thirty years, and have wargamed together and exchanged ideas on many occasions. I know that he has been following the development of my portable wargame with considerable interest, and we have been maintaining a regular email correspondence about it.

Today he contacted me with a very interesting idea. Why not use a vinyl chessboard instead of a wooden one? These vinyl chessboards can be bought from various online shops that specialise in supplying chess equipment ... and are available in a variety of colours including ones with green and buff two-inch squares ... which would be ideal for wargaming. What immediately struck me was that, besides being very easy to roll up and carry, a vinyl chessboard could have some of the terrain features I might want on my battlefield drawn on using a water-soluble, non-permanent OHP marker pen.

In addition to this excellent idea, arthur1815 suggested that it would be possible to recreate a large battle using the Frontier/Musket rules I have adapted and developed for my portable wargame from Joseph Morschauser's original rules. This could be achieved by using several of these vinyl chessboards together, with each one representing a separate part of the battlefield.

I was so impressed by these excellent ideas that I immediately ordered several vinyl chessboards from an online supplier that arthur1815 had found.

Well done arthur1815! I owe you a debt of thanks for your encouragement and ideas.

2 comments:

  1. Bob,

    I also made the same suggestion yesterday in commenting on an earlier post.


    -- Jeff

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bluebear Jeff,

    You are absolutely right!

    Arthur1815's email came through just before your comment did, but I did not have time to finish writing my blog entry until after I had answered your comment. In my somewhat confused state (at times I wonder if I am turning into my father!), I got the two ideas jumbled up into having come from one person.

    Sorry!

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. Please note that any comments that are spam or contain phishing messages or that come from Google Accounts that are 'Unknown' will be deleted.