Hi All,

I designed my first sites, (as something to do) back in 2000. These were the original predecessor to this site. It is still up BTW, just not maintained any more. You can still see it here :-

http://www.andy.watkins.dsl.pipex.com/wargames/

Plus a website I did for my wife's new kitten, Custard, which is also still there, and in the process of being revamped, but that's not what you came to this site to see....

Born in 1963, I have played wargames all my life, for most of it I have taken inspiration from commercially available rules, but basically written my own, to play a small team of friends I have known since the end of the 70's. These used to be kept in a very abbreviated form just for my friends and I. Then I hit upon the idea of putting them on the web for others to benefit from or gain inspiration from. The biggest problem with this was a) the sheer size of the resulting site and b) I had to pad out all the rules to make sense for people who had not played them....

As such you will find on this site a number of free rules, do with them as you feel fit so long as it is not for profit. You will also find a great number of photographs. I am amazed how many times i go to manufacturers websites and discover there are no pictures of their products available, or if they are, they are rubbish pics. I have tried to increasingly add descent pics to this site, this has also meant they have become increasingly larger, but then remember when I started the predecessor to this site a 56k modem was the best anyone had, things have moved on from then for most of us.

I have also in more recent years started playing unmodified commercial rules, this is either because they have become much better or I have become much lazier..... As such in most cases I have not got many if any house rules for you, mostly all I can do is put up some great pics of my figures, and give you a little advice on manufacturers figures, books for the subject etc.

One last word of advice if you did not already know this, and you were here because you were looking for information or advice on a specific wargaming topic then I suggest you try both the miniatures page on http://theminiaturespage.com/ who have friendly advice in the forums on just about everything, plus yahoo groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/ these are for specific subjects, but there is at least one for almost everything. Of course you can drop me a line as well if you fancy. My name is Andy Watkins and you can send me an email at that name followed by watkins-family.co.... Apologies I have deliberately disguised the email address. The domain of course ends .co.uk and in fact you can send it to anything @that address as I have a catch all but try Andy@ etc etc

I started revamping this site in 2006, as I had done very little for 5 years and wanted to learn how to use flash for menus. I got started and of course lost interest part way through. April 2007 and i have just about uploaded everything, so back to a complete stable site, now I have just got to bother to update everything with lots of new pics.......

Main activity in the past few years has been WWII. In 2007 it is the only set of rules I am actively updating regularly. Played a WWII russian front game on 19th May, have made some rules tweaks as a result, mostly to anti tank gun penetration.

Yours

 

Andy Watkins