New book: Forging the First Fantasy Wargame: A Companion to Tony Bath's Hyborian Campaign

 

Tony Bath’s Hyborian Campaign stands as one of the most ambitious and influential wargaming experiments of the twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, Bath constructed a fully realised, pseudo‑historical world—complete with its own geography, cultures, economies, and military systems—capable of sustaining years of strategic play.

While the mechanics of the campaign are preserved in Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming published in 2021, this volume tells the rest of the story: how a friendly contest between Bath and Don Featherstone grew into a sprawling, international campaign involving pioneers such as Charles Grant and Joe Morshauser, many of whom issued orders by post for years on end.

Hyboria was more than a battlefield. It was a living world where rulers schemed, armies marched, treasuries rose and fell, and characters developed ambitions, rivalries, and consequences. In doing so, Bath helped pioneer the long-form, open-ended style of play that would later define role playing games.

This book charts the rise and eventual end of the legendary campaign and includes, Bath’s earliest medieval rules, his micro‑wargaming system, and an overview of his never‑published World War II project.

The book only took me over ten years to finish. It took a while to go through the thousand plus pages of documentation from Phil and Sue Barker, who took part in the original campaign.  

Jobs in Professional Wargaming

 

Connections USA is the professional wargaming conference. Colonel Matt Caffrey, USAF, was ordered to run a conference to further professional wargaming, and the order was never rescinded. So, since 1993, the great and good of professional wargaming have gathered to discuss their art and craft.

Before the pandemic, I was sitting around a table in a bar during Connections USA. As I bought a round of drinks, I realised that the majority of the active professional wargamers in the world could fit around a single table: Peter Perla, Roger Mason, Ed McGrady, Yuna Wong, Tom Mouat, Tim Price, and a handful of others. Professional wargaming was a tiny world in 2017.

In 2026, professional wargaming is an integral part of military education, training and analysis. Practically every defence company of note now has at least a few staff with some responsibility for wargames. Many people are interested in getting into this world, and some of them ask me how to get a job in professional wargaming. I respond by suggesting how they might become a rounded professional because that's the skill set that will actually get them to an interview.

Know your domain

The first step is to become a master of your professional domain. If you want to run a space wargame, you need to know about satellites. The same goes for cyber, air, submarines, and any other area of modern warfare. You cannot expect a political party to let you umpire a game about a "run on the state currency" unless you can persuade them you understand national economics. It helps, of course, to have a subject matter expert to facilitate the game — but you still need to know more than the basics yourself. When I ran a game about a "run on the pound" some years ago, it helped enormously to have an advisor from the Bank of England on the team, but I still spent a week reading before the initial sponsor meetings. Wargaming is a skill, but it doesn't replace the need to be genuinely knowledgeable about the topic being gamed.

Know your craft

When I talk to professional wargamers, I'm often frustrated by how limited their mental toolbox of techniques can be. Wargamers who say they only use "simulations," or only “digital games”, or only “manual games”, are restricting their expertise to a narrow slice of the field. Some insist that every wargaming problem can be solved with a matrix game (or a board game, or whatever their comfort zone happens to be).

To be a master wargamer, you need to be familiar with a very wide range of games,  professional and hobby alike. You should have designed matrix games, used AI to assist a strategic-level game, and understood military course of action analysis (and why it isn't a wargame). You need to know what a hidden scenario is, what a committee game is, and stay aware of developments in roleplaying. Watching someone run a game of Dungeons & Dragons can be a masterclass in conjuring a scenario and immersing players in a game world. A roleplaying session of Call of Cthulhu can teach you a great deal about putting players under mounting stress. Practically every top-rank professional wargamer I know plays hobby games to some degree. So if you don't know what a megagame (or muggergame) is, or what confrontation analysis is, go and find out.

Getting to the interview

There's a wide range of professional wargaming jobs out there and some jobs in serious games, and even more in hobby wargaming, but to get to an interview you need to know the military domain being gamed to a good standard. You also need a genuinely broad base of wargaming experience, spanning miniatures, Eurogames, cyber, multi-domain operations etc.

When you're on that lifelong journey to becoming a master wargamer, I'll see you at the bar. The round's on me, while you tell me about the trials and tribulations of the professional wargaming world. Is professional wargaming an art or a craft? We have never been able to agree, but perhaps you will be able to tell us.
 

Something strange happened at Charing Cross Underground Station

In May 2026, the main stream media and social media reported that the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) set up a HQ on the platform to a NATO wargame about an invasion of the Baltic States in five years time.

Some people in defence thought it was fake news; the thought of a reported ‘top secret’ exercise held in the public eye seemed ridiculous. Actually, the exercise did take place, but it was not exactly what it seemed. Using an underground station does not protect from NBC attack. It offers some protection from N, but without back up generators, water supply and secure hardened communications channels, the HQ might survive but without communications. A HQ that cannot communicate is useless. Without forced air systems, an underground station offers little protection against B and C.

The ARRC HQ has 400+ staff and they simply would not fit on the platform at Charing Cross. Also the computer monitors were facing the track, so those passing on the trains could photograph what was on the screens.

Practising deploying to an underground carpark out of the public eye would have given the same training benefit to the HQ.

So what was the purpose of the exercise? It seems likely it was to be seen. It is part of an attempt to shift the narrative and prepare the British public for the threat of war affecting the UK homeland.

Actually, councils in the UK are considering civil resilience; issues such as climate change, floods, cyber-attack, food shortages, civil disorder etc. If the UK government mentioned civil defence, such councils would object on ideological grounds. However, everyone agrees that developing local resilience is sound apolitical policy. There is a surge in table top wargames about these topics up and down the UK.