TTG Christmas Party!

Yer yer, I know promised you more Old School ramblings about the Fantasy and Sci-fi games I played in school, but the  Christmas rush here at work kicked-in, and I've had little or no time for writing, so all that stuff about D&D, Combat 3000 etc will have to wait until the New Year...

30 years ago today... I know exactly what I was doing....

Christmas Eve that year fell on the Saturday, so although the shop was open and we did get a few customers though the door, we spend most of the day playing Shock of Impact on Bob's old dinning room table in the shop...

not WRG 6th

Shock of Impact were TTG's Ancient Wargames rules, covering warfare from the dawn of recorded time until the end of the 11thC, written by Ian S. Beck, who wrote a lot of what was good about TTG in the late 70's, they had one or two new ideas contained with-in the rule system...
Firstly they used D10 instead of D6, which in Wargames rules was a bit of a leap, and secondly they had a whole figure causality removal system, again based on D10, which stopped too much record keeping.

I'd been playing SoI over the summer and autumn of  '83, it gave good games for smallish units and  I'd been enthused enough to buy a second hand (half finished) Late Roman army from a painter called Ted Pool who would come into the shop, it was mostly Minifigs infantry and TTG cavalry, but it gave me enough smartly painted minis to use at the club on Monday's, and start learning to play.


But on Christmas Eve we didn't use our own armies...
Oh no, too easy...

it does what it says on the tin...

In the week or two previously we'd rolled randomly to see not only, which army we would be using from the 60 or 70 given in the Army List, but also the number and type of troops that each army contained... SoI had a randomisation factor built into the army list which was supposed to stop players fielding only super armies with no dross, in actual fact all the players I played liked to pick their armies rather than take what came on the randomiser, all super troops and no dross was how we rolled, but for Christmas we had proper random armies... and we had to find the minis out of TTG's range, with proxies standing in, where we didn't have the exact minis needed...

I don't really remember which army I rolled, something with lots of Medium Calvary in it, or how the game went (which means I probably lost), but the day stays with me... Kate bringing food and drink in between serving customers, and us four boys, head down over the green baize for the best part of the day...