Auckland Wargaming Club

The AWC’s roving gamer in the UK, Ben Hill, conducted the following ‘e-interview’ with the Field of Glory writing team at the beginning of December (2010), the answers to the questions are from the whole team of writers who are involved with FoG.

1. Has FoG evolved the way or ways you thought it would when writing it?

Yes very much so. We seem to have a broad following of clubs, social gamers, historical re-enactment players, campaign players and competition players. We wanted to create a set of rules that would appeal to different audiences and that seems to have happened. It has been great to see the quality of the entire FoG series that Slitherine has put together and that together with the Osprey art makes the books a great read.

Postcard from the Derby World Teams FOG Championship - 2 & 3 October 2010 at Derby University - from AWC member Ben Hill.

This was the convention and competition I was looking forward to since arriving in the UK. I was just hoping that my game play would not be distracted by the retail opportunities in the other hall! More on the trade stands in the next postcard.

The tournament in Auckland used the latest draft of the DBMM v1.1 rules. There was a nominal theme (blatantly plagiarised from an event in the UK earlier this year) which asked players to base their armies around a film or TV series. This resulted in some interesting army choices, although a number of the more 'hard core' players paid only lip service to the theme and chose highly geared armies that ensured the rules were given a reasonably thorough workout.

One of the big challenges facing the club today is the debate in Ancients Gaming between DBMM and FOG. As in many other clubs and wargaming groups around the world at present there is a split between gamers who prefer FOG and those who prefer DBMM - luckily the AWC at least has no odd Ostriches still sticking to DBM (of course there is nothing really wrong with that if its your thing, but its a position causing a 3 way rules-set split of gamers in some areas so doesn't help unify the scene)!