Series 2 games - Micro Warfare

Ok, gone off the boil recently, work gets in the way of writing... so some '83 stuff to catch up on, there really was a lot going off including; Wargames Illustrated, Challenger, Tercio and mould making, and then I'll get onto whatever was going on in '84, but first I'll finish off the TTG history lessons for awhile, before moving onto more time related stuff...

page one, slightly damaged/aged

The next step for TTG back then in the mid-70's was the Micro Warfare Series, known as the Series 2 games, and if what Bob had done with the Series 1 games was strip the flab from American board games of the period, what he tried to do with the Micro Series games, was in a way even more radical.

Mirco Warfare Series games, Ancient Mediaeval, Napoleonic, Colonial, three Naval games (Napoleonic, WW1 and WW2) as well as a Sci-fi ground warfare game, reduced everything from the traditional wargame, the rules, the playing pieces, the terrain, everything, to the barest minimum necessary for play, turning expensive and difficult to find miniatures and terrain into card counters, and giving you everything necessary to play in an 16 page A5 booklet, with record sheets, and cut-out and keep counters, in a sleeve in the dust jacket.

Once again the rules were all Bob's, although I bet the Nottingham club had helped with the play testing, and Roger Heaton supplied the art work, and both still stand up to closer inspection. Bob had a knack for writing just enough detail into the rules to enable fun, flowing play, and Roger does wonders with 70's-printed black and white line drawings, character and action in such a small production can't have been easy...

I don't know whether Bob would thank me for saying this, or even acknowledge the existence of the word, but what he was doing, and continued to do all his working life, was democratize gaming. He was a great believer in trying to get everyone playing games, and this is what the Series 2 games did best. The rules were pocket money prices,  £1 each, and extra armies even less... you could have bought all 5 extra Napoleonic armies for less than a couple of quid... and the games themselves were pocket sized... micro even... no need for huge table, or massive amounts of toy soldiers. Everyone could play.

Which brings me to a point of contention, whilst I was looking at the Wikipedia page for Micro Games I read that...

"While small scale wargames and board games had existed before they began publishing, Metagaming Concepts first used the term "MicroGame" when they released Ogre, MicroGame #1 in 1977."

...but TTG's Mirco Series pre-dates this release by a couple of years, and it is possible that they would have been on sale, and known to American gamers before 1977 and the Metagaming release, making TableTop Games the first to introduce the word Micro into gaming...

French and British Napoleonic ready for play

So I'm off to edit the Wikipedia, and when I get back, I'll finish off with the 1983 stuff that I mentioned above, and then onto 1984...

Series 1 games

I think Bob's first love was for board games, even into the 80's he would argue that Avalon Hill's Stalingrad was the best game ever made,and I'm sure that at some point in the period between '73 and '81, TTG did in fact produce a board game, called Wild West, but on the whole I think that full-sized, boxed games, were beyond the scope of a small company like TTG at that time.

Cover by Rodger Heaton

So what Bob, and Rodger, did for their first game release was strip away all the flabby excess of the American tactical Board game, the board (!!!), the die-cut counters (players cut-out their own printed ones), and the box, and instead, produced a game in a zip-seal bag, that could be played on any flat-ish surface and packed away into a (duffel) coat pocket.

In what order, Galactic War, MTB, U Boat,and Ballistic Missile were designed and released, I don't know, something makes me want to say that they were all done at the same time in '73/4, which would have been quite an organisational achievement for a small company, but regardless, these four Series 1 games were TTG's first pop at the gaming market.

Series 1 game

MTB (Motor Torpedo Boat) and U-Boat show Bob's Naval fascinations coming to the fore, I suppose its not surprising that as a child of the 40's and 50's, World War II, and  the Navy with all it history and traditions played, such a part in his life. MTB is set in the English Channel in the mid-war period and U-boat under it, but both are very (too) similar games in out look, groups of small craft against each other in encounter battles with weapons and damage recorded on record sheets.

Swoosh-blam!
Fun with nukes '70's style

The only one of these games that I had played before working with Bob was Galactic war, a sci-fi ship combat to ship combat, which I suppose again owed a lot to Bob's interest in Naval gaming. I can't say it particularly grabbed me, the ships on both sides were too same-y and looked like ELO's space ship from the Out of the Blue LP cover, a bit dated in the 80's, but it was a reasonably good game and played out in 45 minutes to an hour...

Image nicked from Noble Knight Games

Ballistic Missile is only one of the four basic games that was a based on Naval warfare, it being a Cold War gone hot, shoot out, with counters, rules and record sheets all yours for the princely sum of 75p.

The thing that strikes me now and has really struck me before about these games is Rodger's art work. His covers, especially MTB and Ballistic Missile have a good deal of 'dash' about them, which can't have been easy to achieve in the two colours that they were printed in.

I am unsure of the current availability of these TTG products, if anyone has pdf copies of them I'd be delighted to see them.

Tabletop Games

Ok, well the previous posts clears the Old School games out of the way, and I can get into the meat of the next stage of this blog.

Tabletop Games, had been a new comer to the wargames scene in the early 70's, Kate told us (new boys) that the company had grown out of Bob's dissatisfaction with the currently available wargames rules for the Napoleonic period that he playing at competitive level at that time.
Quite what his beef was with the sets they were using I never got to the bottom of, ask him and you get a mumbled responses about "riflemen lying down" and the only way you could "kill them, was with Lancers..."  quiet why this got at him I have no idea... but it did, so when in 1973 Bob won the National Napoleonic title, and I assume, as part of team, was invited to host the following years tournament, he threw away the old rule set and wrote his own.

Bob's rules for Napoleonic warfare were used at the 1974 National Championship.At first they were just given away to competitors, but reaction must have been favourable, because shortly after they were being published by the infant Tabletop Games.

Cover by Rodger Heaton

Tabletop in seems was a partnership at its inception, Bob of course wrote the rules, and the other Partner, Rodger Heaton did all the illustrations.
Kate also told a tale about Richard Butler being there at the start of the company, but not becoming a partner in the business at the last moment because of the finance necessary.
Richard would later go on to write his own set of Napoleonic wargames rules used for National Championship games, To the Sound of the Guns, which TTG published, and Bob and He would remain firm friends.
Richard was one of the few people who wouldn't stop when arriving at the shop, he'd hustle on through to the back rooms without stopping, not even noticing the bemused wooden-top shop assistant sitting on the stool, with his speechless mouth open...

When or how the split with Rodger occurred I don't know; all the early games (series 1 & series 2) had an address given as Ruddington, which is a couple of miles outside central Nottingham, which I'm assuming is his, and all these early games, and many of the early rule sets published, used his illustrations as covers, or scattered though-out the text. By the late 70's Rodger seems to have dropped out of TTG leaving Bob and Kate as the sole proprietors, to run the business from the home on Acton Road in Arnold.

OK then, back after a short break, with the early TTG micro-games, and all the other products of the late 70's and early 80's

Interested in reading Bob's Napoleonic rules?
Check them out here on Scribd.