Wargames To Go 25.4 Wars of Scotland (Conclusion, part 2 plus GMT Weekend at the Warehouse)

Wargames To Go

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[If you aren’t particularly interested in the Wars of Scotland, you may be interested in the wargame open house/convention event known as GMT’s Weekend at the Warehouse. I went last month and spend the first part of the podcast talking about that time & games played. THEN it’s on to my specific historical topic.]

Ok, now I’m really finished with Scotland. Like everything I explore for my wargame podcast, these deep dives take over my gaming for a while. That’s enjoyable, but since I don’t notch wargame opportunities and completions frequently, it means these subjects take me a while. Since I’m eager to explore other topics, too, eventually I have to move along. However, just as with Vietnam, Waterloo, or Market-Garden, I will have learned so much that it will be easier to dabble with similar wargames (or even return to some favorites) in the future.

For this topic, I used my vacation to Scotland last September to prompt a lot of learning about that country’s military history. Though I should say it wasn’t limited to when Scotland was a country—-there’s a lot of history when it was a kingdom, and also earlier when it was tribal territory. Part of the joy was beginning to understand this history in more of its rich complexity than I understood from watching Braveheart alone. ;-) Since I’d already dabbled in the War for Scottish Independence, with William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and a couple King Edwards . . . plus the early history of Roman expansion against the Caledonians, the major chapter in his history that still remained were the Jacobite rebellions. There are movies and wargames about this period, but not as many as might be expected. I’d seen the interesting faux documentary Culloden earlier, and this time I watched Rob Roy. There are a few films and other stories about this legendary+historic figure. The more recent (1990s) film with Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, and Tim Roth does not make for accurate history, but it’s a decent film that can get someone like me reading about the real history of this person. As much as we can untangle, anyway.

What’s next for this podcast? Well, I’m going to take a delicate dive into the challenging topic of anthropological “first contact” in history games. As much as possible, I want to explore what happened when Europeans & the indigenous people of the New World first encountered each other. I don’t really mean the Indian Wars of the plains. Instead, I’m after what happened when the first ships arrived and people “discovered” each other. This is an area where history games and wargames have not made much progress, but that’s also why the subject is interesting. -Mark