Backfilling the Portable Wargame

At long last!

Despite being an avid fan of the Portable Wargame series I am embarrassed to say that I have somewhat remiss in engaging with the Compendiums. In short, up until around six months ago I did not own any of them! The first edition I received was kindly donated to me by my old friend Nick Huband and this was a hardback copy of the third compendium.

Fast forward to Father’s Day this year and courtesy of two Amazon gift cards from the offspring, I duly rectified this shortcoming and purchased the original compendium as well as the second.

There is plenty of reading material for me to get my teeth into but I figure that most readers will already know that! As a penance for this oversight I will have to pen a couple of articles for the fourth compendium….

Dead chuffed and getting even more inspired, especially by the 3 x 3 variants!

The Personal Portable Wargame

Remember this? The four double sided maps I have (courtesy of Archduke Piccolo with eternal thanks!) from this series are now laminated so no more ‘paper fold’ ridge lines! These are going to see a fair amount of use over the coming months.

With the plan being to focus on the revised and expanded edition of the Portable Ironclads Wargame you could be forgiven for thinking that I have been distracted away from it already - not so! I should perhaps qualify this though, hence the title of this post.

I think it is fair to say that the Portable Wargame is a popular, well established and supported system that has an ever growing band of devotees that seem to bend and stretch the core mechanics in many different and unimaginable directions! I have said so before and will continue to do so that it is testimony to Bob’s original design that it seems to be able to withstand any amount of tinkering without breaking! In short, it is a tool to be used as required by the individual player or players depending on how they wish to.

I am a huge fan of the system in its various iterations and so plan to make use of it over the course of the coming year with the block armies once again taking to the field. The only limit I have set myself is that I shall only be using the maps I have recently had laminated (the picture above is one of them) and that the armies will be quite small - ranging from 6 to 9 blocks a side. Sadly I do not have any desert style maps so will have to forego these for the time being. No matter - there is more than enough variety in the verdant parts of the globe for me to enjoy!

The decision to use such a small playing area was driven largely by practicality in that I wanted to be able to fight a battle on my lap, rather on a tray on my lap. The map just about fits on a tray (at least the ones we have) but works better on the lid of a 32 litre plastic storage box which has the advantage of being able to take the associated paraphernalia required to fight a battle, dice, notepad, pencils etc.

The big advantage of this is that I can sit on the sofa whilst gaming rather than heading for the man cave to do so. I am also hoping to be able to play any of the solo board games I have in a similar way.

So, a mini portable wargame is the plan - all I need to do now is to plan some games!