On the Line with David Heading - Solo Wargaming, A Practitioners Guide

This practitioner's guide to solo wargaming offers comprehensive coverage of the subject, showing how it can be a fascinating complement to social gaming or an entire hobby in its own right. This book integrates ideas from across the hobby to discuss various aspects of gaming alone across all manner of conflicts, whether land, sea or air and in any historical period or imagined setting.

Starting with the fundamental question of why people play solo wargames, David Heading lays out the various advantages and disadvantages. He also considers such questions as whether to ‘play both sides’ or to command one army against an ‘automatic’ opponent, giving various ideas on how to control or program the responses of the opposing force with dice, cards or by other means. There is advice on how to construct challenging and interesting scenarios for one-off engagements, whether these are skirmishes or major battles, historical events or more generic ones, and how to combine these tactical actions into wider campaigns, involving grand strategy, logistics and other factors. Tips on sustaining interest through such activities as recording results, writing campaign diaries and online blogs will help you enrich your hobby. The author has been playing solo wargames for forty years and shares the secrets of happy solo gaming. Packed full of common-sense advice and inspiration, it offers plenty of value to the beginner and the seasoned veteran alike.

David Heading has been wargaming for more than forty years and almost all of that time has wargamed solo. He runs a blog, Polemarch (ancientrules.blogspot.com), which covers his wargaming activities, games, campaigns, and ideas (as well as progress reports on painting). He co-authored the Polemos English Civil War rules and wrote Polemos: SPQR, both published by Baccus6mm. He has also written a number of articles for Miniature Wargames, Lone Warrior, and Arqubusier magazines.

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