And the winner is ...

Yesterday's blog entry may have given the wrong impression that I was upset that I was not eligible to be 'nominated' for the latest award ... but that was not what I was trying to say.

My niggle was that the rules made it impossible for me to nominate any of the excellent blogs that I follow (it is over eighty, by the way) ... although trying to choose just five would have been a Herculean task and I would have ended up offending someone. During the process of thinking about blogs, the Internet, and wargaming I also began to think about the wargaming websites that I still visit on a regular basis ... and decided to 'nominate' them for an 'award' instead.

Funnily enough this was a far easier task than trying to select five blogs ... and here they are, in no particular order except for the first, which is still – in my opinion – far and away the most inspiring wargaming website ever:

Major General Tremorden Rederring's Colonial-era Wargames Page

Although the original website is no longer available, it has been preserved on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

The Universal General

Rudi Geuden's website is currently moribund, but I still love re-visiting it, especially the pages dedicated to his Afriborian Campaign.

Bob Mackenzie's Web Page

Bob Mackenzie regularly updates his website, and his extremely well illustrated battle reports always have me itching to get my World War II figures and tanks out onto the tabletop.

(Photograph © Bob Mackenzie)

Beautiful models on achievable but realistic terrain. What more could one ask for?

Chris Kemp's Not Quite Mechanised

I first met Chris Kemp at the gathering organised by Paddy Griffith that led to the formation of Wargame Developments and COW (Conference of Wargamers). At the first meeting he put on a wargame using 1:300th-scale model tanks that opened my eyes to the prospect of a number of models representing a unit that fought as one and not a group of individual figures or tanks lumped together.

From these early glimmerings he developed NOT QUITE MECHANISED (NQM), a set of wargames rules for fighting battles from 1930 until 1980. These were the forerunner of MEGABLITZ and Chris is still using and developing them today ... as a visit to his blog shows.

Chris has an interesting attitude to modelling that can probably be summed up as being 'it is good enough'. He is a good modeller – and even better cartoonist – but he would rather wargame than spend hours making sure that every vehicle he uses is exactly correct and each soldier is perfectly painted. He has an exuberant attitude to wargaming ... and one that I wish I could emulate at times!