Thoughts on The Portable Ironclads Wargame

Then and now - a book of two halves. Could it have been written as one? It would have been more compact but probably less digestible!

The Portable Ironclads Wargame and the follow up Developing the Portable Ironclads Wargame: The American Civil War, have taken up the best part of five years from start to where we are now. During that time I have built (and rebuilt) some eighty-odd models, fought a significant number of battles (solo and face-to-face although for the latter I was mainly umpiring), and typed and re typed great swathes of text for the two books you see above as well as for the blog and The Gridded Naval Wargame Facebook group. All of this set against the backdrop of Laurel’s live-changing surgery and the seismic effect this has had on  us - physically and emotionally. It had been, to use just one of any number of emotive cliches, a roller-coaster of a ‘journey!’

I am of course, really delighted to have achieved all this - mainly because my attention span and follow through in terms of projects is notoriously ‘short-winded’. I have proven to myself that I can do it - which is a reward all of its own.

So what is next then?

Whilst I was away on holiday I was able to spend some time thinking about what comes next. As mentioned previously, I plan to pen a couple of campaign specific supplements with the fictional Anglo-Turkish War of 1880 being the first. This is some way off yet as I need to finish the ships first as well as organising the land components from the recently acquired Mike’s Models collection.In the meantime though, I have the capacity for a couple of smaller projects but, and it is a significant but, I am now deep in writing and research mode for my next book which has a year for the manuscript to be ready.

This will mean that projects will need to be modest in scope which points quite handily to Portable Wargame 3 x 3 or Dominion of style set ups. I suspect that I will be in good company pursuing such a modus operandi!