Angus Konstam's Orkney Wargames
The Orkney Blog
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Orkney is one of those truly beautiful places - a green and welcoming archipelago located just off the north tip of Britain. I was brought up there, and while I was at school my buddies and I ran the Orkney Wargames Club which, as memory serves, was housed in a disused wing of someone's unused stable block. I left Orkney to join the Navy when I was 18, and since then I've only been back for a week or two at a time, to visit my parents. Well, my father passed away in '95, but my octogenarian mother still lives up there. Then, in March 2010 she had a stroke, and I've been up there on and off ever since. Even after she's out of hospital I expect to be up here pretty regularly over the coming years. I was sipping a gin and admiring this view from her garden when I had the brainwave...
Why not try to resurrect the Orkney Wargames Club? At least it would give me something to do when I'm up here! This small and occasional blog charts my progress.
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July 2010
Well, so far there are only two of us, but that's a start. I've also forget links with wargamers in nearby Caithness and Shetland, so the plan is to have some sort of inter-county game. We've also had our first game up here - a small Napoleonic fight, the first - we hope - of many. We fought it in my house, which of course is the best possible solution when there's just two of us!
My hopes were raised when I saw a poster for the Kirkwall Wargames Club. Frankly, it was an utter waste of time - a dozen spotty teenagers and a couple of adults, playing some sort of fantasy nonsense, on a table with no scenery apart from a handful of aquatic plants. I might try putting up adverts, and formally resurrecting the Orkney Wargames Club after a hiatus of some 30 years. Then again, we might just continue as we are, and not bother trying to track down other gamers, but let them do the hunting.
April 2010
The first thing you need is other wargamers. While the neighbouring island of Shetland have a wargame club, Orkney has no such thing any more. I set about trying to track down fellow gamers. My first contact was a local deputy headmaster, a friend of a wargaming friend in Edinburgh. He's new to the island, and he hasn't found a wargaming outlet either. So far so good. Better still he likes Napoleonic and Seven Years War, which are two of my favourite periods. All we have to do is to wean him off 15mm, and the 1970's set of rules he uses.
I also have a couple of other leads. A couple of traders I spoke to -East Riding Miniatures and Caliver Books - both have customers in Orkney. Finally, Mike McEwan of the Shetland Wargames Club has offered his support, and said someone from Orkney was in touch a while back, and he'll try to dig out the details. Once I track some of these people down, and have another chat with Mike the teacher, then we might have something to work with. I'll keep you posted...
