IN THE BEGINNING

In order to see where I am going, it sometimes help to see where I have come from. My introduction to wargaming came around 1971 when I stumbled across a copy of Don Featherstone's Battles with Model Soldiers but after various explorations, copies of Charge! and Littlewars, I really became a serious (sic) wargamer while at the College Militaire Royal de St. Jean when I acquired a copy of WRG 3rd ed ancient rules and Simon MacDowall and I started painting and converting Airfix figures into mighty armies, well ok, into the puny advance guards of mighty armies. As my pay was slowly converted into Minifigs and Garrison miniatures, my armies, despite a gloss of tartan and some gaelic names, took the form that they have tended to follow ever since, shock cavalry supported by horse and foot archers and light infantry with spear and javelin and the occasional chariot or elephant. Those are my Valdurians on the right, the picture was taken somewhere around 1976 at the Old Fort on Ile Ste Helene in Montreal.

(note due to a digital (as in finger) error, the original text was deleted. What follows is vaguely similar...)
The wheels of time turned and fictional armies turned to historical ones, Arthurian (obviously going in small steps but Sword at Sunset has been one of my favorite books since high school and Rosemary Sutcliffe a favorite author), Late Roman (Hincliffe), Late Saxon (more Garrison) and eventually elements of the Valdurian army inclding Garrison Scythian foot archers and Sassinid slingers and javelinmen found themselves the nucleus of a Late Persian army when I added Skytrex hard plastic & Benassi metal hoplites, thracians and Scythians (in those days no respectable Athenoan army was without its contingent of Scythian foot archers!) then started converting RAFM Hellenistic figures. These faced off against Agisilaus and his Spartans until more hoplites and peltasts formed a late Athenian army . Some Republican Romans were painted up for a Legio game at Cangames and then the world turned again and Armati Carthaginian and Medieval Scots (more Valdurians) took the stage. Then came the 54mm WAB Interegnum. (must dig out some pictures of those). Finally about 3 years ago, I dusted off those old Persians and found that I could field a 3,000 pt Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB) army. Just then, thanks to Rob Young, the old Garrison miniatures resurfaced so I added more and started back dating the army.



Note the archers on the hill in the left foreground, look familiar from the 1st picture?

So things are good right? Welllllll first I played some games against Gary McMahon's Assyrians (for example the Tabletop Teaser Getting Away With It) and started thinking about the Rise of the Persian Empire instead of its Decline and Fall. At about the same time I started unpacking old boxes from storage into my new gamesroom. What a mess, partial armies (various figures sold off), different basing, lots of broken stuff and orphans. What to do?


Next post: The analysis and formation of a project plan as I reduce this mess to 2 organized armies that can campaign against each other or proxy as enemies for any takers from 700BC(E) to ad700.