Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy

Wargaming is a big hobby with many diverse factions and perspectives: striking a balance that pleases everyone can be truly challenging! We like to think what sets Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy apart from other historical wargaming magazines is its focus on having fun, no matter what kind of wargamer you are or what your background is. WS&S is a light-hearted publication, that pays particular attention to games themselves and how to play them: it doesn’t get bogged down in lengthy historical expositions or recycle content you can read yourself in any history book. While popular periods like WWII, the Napoleonic era, and the ancient world get frequent coverage, we also try to feature the unexpected, with articles on spies, monsters and gangsters to name but a few.

Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy

Editorial

MINIATURE REVIEWS • A look at some of the newest miniatures, terrain pieces, and more from across the wargaming world.

WARGAMING, THE NEXT GENERATION • There is a myth at the heart of historical wargaming that tells us that our hobby is stable and unchanging; a familiar oasis in an increasingly crazy world. While fashions may come and go, the fundamentals remain unchanged: we paint figures, we push them across a table, roll the dice and talk history. It's a reassuring story of simple continuity. It's also not really true. I'm old enough and ugly enough to take a long view of the hobby. Historical wargaming has never stood still; every generation has taken the hobby and reinvented it, whether they realised it or not. As in life, expectations change.

THE HARD BATTLE • The Swabian War of 1499 pitted the powerful Swabian League against the Swiss Cantons. What started as a dispute over territory between the Three Leagues (an autonomous state in the Holy Roman Empire) and the Habsburgs soon escalated into a full-scale war, as each side called upon their allies to assist.

STATS FOR GAMING SYSTEMS

SULLA RETURNS! • During the latter half of the second century BC the Roman senate was starting to divide into two distinct factions: the Optimates and the Populares. Gaius Marius emerged as a figurehead for the Populares, holding repeated consulships during the Jurgurthine War and helping to defeat the Teutone and Cimbri incursions.

Gaming Sulla with other rule sets

SCENARIO 1 – FORCES

SCENARIO 2 – FORCES

SCENARIO 3 – FORCES

THE LAST WELSH PRINCE • Llewellyn ap Gruffydd is known to the Welsh as ‘ein LLyw Olaf’ or the last prince. The Welsh never used the name King for their supreme leader — as that belonged only to God — but from time to time one man became the primus inter pares of Welsh leaders from the various principalities, and he was the last to do so before English supremacy overtook Wales by the hand of Edward I.

THE WELSH

THE ENGLISH

RUN TO THE HILLS! • In 1868, the US Government and the Lakota Indians (part of the Sioux nation) signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie. This secured an undisturbed reservation for the Lakota in western, modern-day South Dakota. This included the Black Hills, considered sacred land by the Lakota (Sioux and Cheyenne).

DEFENCE IN DEPTH • As Germany retreated in 1944 after the Normandy campaign, bridges were systematically destroyed to prevent the Allied advance. Rivers, such as the tributaries of the Rhine and its complex estuaries, became natural obstacles and redoubts for Germany. There was literal defence in the depth of the water.

THE DRIVE TO MOSELLE • During the Battle for Metz, in November 1944, US 90th division were ordered to cross the River Moselle, about 40km north of the city in the area of the French commune of Cattenom. Getting across the river would help US forces to strike out for the Rhine, but the infamously dire weather of that 1944 winter seemed unlikely to be of much help to...